Young Writers Society

A/N: The passages opened and closed by double dashes are flashbacks of Peter's military experience. Speaking of which, lots of Peter in this chapter. (PS: Only two chapters left before the end of the story!)

-- They were staring at him as he walked through.

Their hands were all subdued and still. They were doves with clipped wings, doves in a magician's white-gloved hand. They kept them by their sides and made sure not to make any sudden movements because they that the men walking through the village were easily spooked, like wild horses, and could spit little lead houseflies powered by gunpowder into their heads and end everything. Just because of a fluttering hand.

Uniforms didn't matter to them.

They had learned not to trust any kind of flag.

Peter noticed their eyes, too. Their eyes interested him more then the entire village. They were like fortune cookies; closed up and hard-shelled on the outside, but inside they held little strips of paper with words on them. Family heirloom words that were filled with the fear of three or four generations, filled up and swollen like balloon animals.

He looked down and lit the cigarette he'd been chewing on for the past half hour. It was his last one from home. Soon, he'd have to start buying up the cheap Vietnamese ones like all the other guys, the one's with a heady, sickly sweet smoke that sludged out into the air like mess hall slop. They were little and brown and they made him a little sick. But a drag was a drag, he supposed.

He exhaled a little smoke. It smelled like his father's leather jacket, all veiny and worn. He let the smell take him back for a moment, out of this crummy little village with people clustered together like hair curlers; trembling with fatigue and malnutrition. He let it take him to that one time when Dad and him were working on the beat-up pick up truck with their legs sticking out from under it like stubby finger tips poking out of hobo gloves. Oil everywhere. Dad's swearing and bleeding and the radio's tuned to 101.7, the only channel we got up there. It plays Mexican music. Music that smells like tamales and sweaty bandannas.

A buddy of his came up beside him, jingling with ammunition, and said, You got a light?

Yeah.

Okay.

His buddy pinches one of the Vietnamese cigarettes between his teeth and leans into a match Peter's lit which he cups against the wind; humid and sticky, that was wrapping around them like tourniquets and squeezing all the good, old fashioned American air inside their lungs out of them.

Nodding, his buddy exhaled and smiled and opened his mouth to speak but men ahead of them start yelling and gunfire started up like pebbles from a peashooter clattering against window panes. A grenade detonated and up ahead Peter could see a handful of American soldiers pop up like Mexican jumping beans and felt the blast drill up against his face.

Bastards've got us!

Get down, get down!

Find some cover, Godssakes!

The Vietcong were firing from the little mud and cardboard huts and the villagers were kneeling on the ground covering their ears and their faces were twisted up and yellow, like butterscotch wrappers and Peter could see that this had been an ambush. With thick wedding cigars fingers, he jammed a banana clip into his gun and lifted it up. He could see a man's head in the doorway of one of the huts. The man wore a Vietcong uniform. Peter's ears rang. He could hear channel 101.7 playing in the background and the Vietnamese air was filled with engine grease.

He fired.

The man in the doorway seemed to jerked up like a man hanging onto the back of a bull in a rodeo and fell back. He wasn't any more than a kid. He wasn't nothing more than a boy and now he was losing heat and blood, deflating and shriveling up. Bullets whispered the names of his brothers and sisters and his mother and father into Peter's ears as he dove to the ground and crawled for some cover like the rest of his regiment.

As he scrambled behind a stack of sandbags and looked back at where he had been, he saw his buddy lying flat in the mud with his eyes looking up, up, up with a rice cake face; white and crumbling and his Vietnamese cigarette smoking beside him.--

The lobby of the court fills up with voices that drag around behind me like cat calls following a pretty woman down the street as me and my attorney pushes through a wall of reporters. They shove little recorders at my face and scream questions. That's what the lobby is full of. It's full of questions that make the air thick.

My attorney's hands are flying up and pushing and a court guard is holding my elbow.

It's strange:

all my life I've been trying my best to make myself invisible. But the harder I try, the more people see of me, the more they search for me and touch me and prod me. Tomorrow, I'm sure, a picture of a pillowcase head will be smothered in newsprint and sitting beside every coffee cup in the state.

Cameras flash.

They flash like sequins on a dress; scaly and cold.

“Mother of God,” my attorney says. “It's like they never seen a murderer before.”

***

I am ushered into Hall's office again by a security guard. Hall is smoking a cigarette and looking out the window where the sky is pink, like Spam, as the sun trips over the hills: shoe-shined to be black and greasy. It's been a long time since I've had a smoke. And I feel a craving for one pretty bad.

The Indian nods at me as I sit with my legs pinched together tight like a clothespin and stubs out the cigarette on a stack of papers sitting in front of him. I lick my lips (papery) and I watch the smoke peel into the air and he says hello to me.

“So I was thinking,” Hall starts. “I was thinking that maybe it's not that you've lost your voice or anything physical. Maybe you've just lost your faith in words. Maybe you don't trust them anymore just like you don't trust yourself or me or the doctors. And so my main goal in life right now is to restore some basic trust in you. Get you believing in something, even if it's just that the sun's gonna rise tomorrow morning.”

The residual smoke from that cigarette floats around like toothpaste squeezed from a tube in a space shuttle. It mingles with his words, but these words are painful and sharp. They're little rose thorns. And so I turn my attention away from him and the stubbed out cigarette and I look at my scrubs.

“So listen. I was downtown this morning and I decided that you needed some new words. Some good ones. Some words other than mine or the doctor's or your lawyers, OK? I picked up this book, got it right here.”

He reaches under his desk and slides a hardbound book with pages that were yellow around the edges, like sweat marks on a wife beater tank top. It was tired and limp and it sat on Hall's desk all homeless. The Indian nodded at me and I couldn't help reaching out and picking it up. Heavy. Pretty heavy for a skinny, bony little thing. I crack it open and I look at the words all neat and orderly on the pages. It's a book of poetry. I can tell because it's set up in stanzas and verses that are dusty and starched, like wedding dresses hidden in trunks up in the attic.

“I don't know if you like poetry.”

He shrugs.

I close the book and I feel a little afraid.

Because:

faith is a dangerous thing.

-- Everything smelled of disinfectant and blood and urine. The medical tent was doused in it, like some kind of Molotov Cocktail rag soaked in gasoline. It made Peter kind of sick inside. It made his insides all wormy. To him, it was the smell of good men looking over the edge. It was the perfume of Death and the cologne of doctors wiping their latex gloves on their scrubs and shaking their head and checking their watch as the heart monitor flat-lines; whining with tea kettle lips.

He sat by his buddy's bedside with his helmet in his lap.

The poor guy had a face as white as moth balls and the edges of his lips were broken robin's egg shells, blue and parted slightly, hatching little wheezes that Peter could barely hear. The doctor and the chaplain were both looking down at him. Their eyes were dull because they had seen this sort of thing so many times before.

The chaplain was a whittled down man with hair whispy and brown, like smoke from an Indian peace pipe, and he swayed a little as he prayed. The doctor was young and he had this habit of clearing his throat whenever it was quiet. Peter bit his lip. He wondered if it would do his buddy any good if he prayed along with the chaplain. If he swayed along with him, like a pair streetlights in the wind. He didn't know God, but he guessed that the chaplain probably did and that his prayer would be as good as anyone else's.

His buddy wheezed.

The doctor cleared his throat.

Peter bowed his head and mouthed, God, help this man to live. I can't think of a guy who deserves to see his wife again more. He's a good guy.

Peter opened his eyes.

He looked at his buddy's face.

And then the heart monitor started speeding up, squeaking like bats swamping out of church rafters and pulsing red; the bowels of a coal fed train engine, tittering, grating until Peter's buddy's eyelids were fluttering and he was coughing up blood and jerking around on the gurney. And then he stopped. He froze and his breath cooled, cooled way down.

Seven thirty one, the doctor said quietly to a nurse by his side.

The chaplain crossed himself and slid the dead man's eyes closed.

Slowly, Peter made his way outside and looked up at the sky, all smoky and dark, like a bearskin rug and wondered where God was hiding and why he watched the world with such heavy hands.--