FRANKLIN BACHELOR

1

My second encounter with John Ransom in Vietnam took place while I was trying to readjust myself after an odd and unsettling four-day patrol. I did not understand what had happened—I didn't understand something I'd seen. Actually, two inexplicable things had happened on the last day of the patrol, and when I came across John Ransom, he explained both of them to me.

We were camped in a stand of trees at the edge of a paddy. That day we had lost two men so new that I had already forgotten their names. Damp gray twilight settled around us. We couldn't smoke, and we were not supposed to talk. A black, six-six, two-hundred-and-fifty-pound grunt named Leonard Hamnet fingered a letter he had received months before out of his pocket and squinted at it, trying to read it for the thousandth time while spooning canned peaches into his mouth. By now, the precious letter was a rag held together with tape.

At that moment someone started shooting at us, and the lieutenant yelled, "Shit!" and we dropped our food and returned fire at the invisible people trying to kill us. When they kept shooting back, we had to go through the paddy.

The warm water came up to our chests. At the dikes, we scrambled over and splashed down into the muck on the other side. A boy from Santa Cruz, California, named Thomas Blevins got a round in the back of his neck and dropped dead into the water just short of the first dike, and another boy, named Tyrell Budd, coughed and dropped down right beside him. The F.O. called in an artillery strike. We leaned against the backs of the last two dikes when the big shells came thudding in. The ground shook and the water rippled, and the edge of the forest went up in a series of fireballs. We could hear the monkeys screaming.

One by one we crawled over the last dike onto the solid ground on the other side of the paddy. A little group of thatched huts was visible through the sparse trees. Then the two things I did not understand happened, one after the other. Someone off in the forest fired a mortar round at us—just one. One mortar, one round. I fell down and shoved my face in the muck, and everybody around me did the same. I considered that this might be my last second on earth and greedily inhaled whatever life might be left to me. I experienced that endless moment of pure helplessness in which the soul simultaneously clings to the body and readies itself to leave it. The shell landed on top of the last dike and blew it to bits. Dirt, mud, and water slopped down around us. A shell fragment whizzed overhead, sliced a hamburger-sized wad of bark and wood from a tree, and clanged into Spanky Burrage's helmet with a sound like a brick hitting a garbage can. The fragment fell to the ground. A little smoke drifted up from it.

We picked ourselves up. Spanky looked dead, but he was breathing. Leonard Hamnet picked up Spanky and slung him over his shoulder.

When we walked into the little village in the woods on the other side of the rice paddy, I experienced a kind of foretaste of the misery we were to encounter later in a place called la Thuc. If I can say this without setting off all the Gothic bells, the place seemed intrinsically, inherently wrong—it was too quiet, too still, completely without noise or movement. There were no chickens, dogs, or pigs; no old women came out to look us over, no old men offered conciliatory smiles. The huts were empty—something I had never seen before in Vietnam, and never saw again.

Michael Poole's map said that the place was named Bong To.

Hamnet lowered Spanky into the long grass as soon as we reached the center of the empty village. I bawled out a few words in my poor Vietnamese.

Spanky groaned. He gently touched the sides of his helmet. "I caught a head wound," he said.

"You wouldn't have a head at all, you was only wearing your liner," Hamnet said.

Spanky bit his lips and pushed the helmet up off his head. He groaned. A finger of blood ran down beside his ear. Finally the helmet passed over a lump the size of an apple that rose up from under his hair. Wincing, Spanky fingered this enormous knot. "I see double," he said. "I'll never get that helmet back on."

The medic said, "Take it easy, we'll get you out of here."

Out of here?" Spanky brightened up.

"Back to Crandall," the medic said.

A nasty little wretch named Spitalny sidled up, and Spanky frowned at him. "There ain't nobody here," Spitalny said. "What the fuck is going on?" He took the emptiness of the village as a personal affront.

Leonard Hamnet turned his back and spat. "Spitalny, Tiano," the lieutenant said. "Go into the paddy and get Tyrell and Blevins. Now."

Tattoo Tiano, who was due to die six and a half months later and was Spitalny's only friend, said, "You do it this time, Lieutenant."

Hamnet turned around and began moving toward Tiano and Spitalny. He looked as if he had grown two sizes larger, as if his hands could pick up boulders. I had forgotten how big he was. His head was lowered, and a rim of clear white showed above the irises. I wouldn't have been surprised if he had blown smoke from his nostrils.

"Hey, I'm gone, I'm already there," Tiano said. He and Spitalny began moving quickly through the sparse trees. Whoever had fired the mortar had packed up and gone. By now it was nearly dark, and the mosquitoes had found us.

Hamnet sat down heavily enough for me to feel the shock in my boots.>

Poole, Hamnet, and I looked around at the village. "Maybe I better take a look," the lieutenant said. He flicked his lighter a couple of times and walked off toward the nearest hut. The rest of us stood around like fools, listening to the mosquitoes and the sounds of Tiano and Spitalny pulling the dead men up over the dikes. Every now and then Spanky groaned and shook his head. Too much time passed.

The lieutenant came hurrying back out of the hut. "Underhill, Poole," he said, "I want you to see this." Poole and I glanced at each other. Poole seemed a couple of psychic inches from either taking a poke at the lieutenant or exploding altogether. In his muddy face his eyes were the size of hen's eggs. He was wound up like a cheap watch. I thought that I probably looked pretty much the same. "What is it, Lieutenant?" he asked.

The lieutenant gestured for us to follow him into the hut and went back inside. Poole looked as if he felt like shooting the lieutenant in the back. I felt like shooting the lieutenant in the back, I realized a second later. I grumbled something and moved toward the hut. Poole followed.

The lieutenant was fingering his sidearm just inside the hut. He frowned at us to let us know we had been slow to obey him, then flicked on his lighter.

"You tell me what it is, Poole."

He marched into the hut, holding up the lighter like a torch.

Inside, he stooped down and tugged at the edges of a wooden panel in the floor. I caught the smell of blood. The Zippo died, and darkness closed down on us. The lieutenant yanked the panel back on its hinges. The smell floated up from whatever was beneath the floor. The lieutenant flicked the Zippo, and his face jumped out of the darkness. "Now. Tell me what this is."

"It's where they hide the kids when people like us show up," I said. "Did you take a look?"

I saw in his tight cheeks and almost lipless mouth that he had not. He wasn't about to go down there and get killed by the Minotaur while his platoon stood around outside.

"Taking a look is your job, Underhill," he said.

For a second we both looked at the ladder, made of peeled branches lashed together with rags, that led down into the pit.

"Give me the lighter," Poole said, and grabbed it away from the lieutenant. He sat on the edge of the hole and leaned over, bringing the flame beneath the level of the floor. He grunted at whatever he saw, and surprised both the lieutenant and me by pushing himself off the ledge into the opening. The light went out. The lieutenant and I looked down into the dark open rectangle in the floor.

The lighter flared again. I could see Poole's extended arm, the jittering little flame, a packed-earth floor. The top of the concealed room was less than an inch above the top of Poole's head. He moved away from the opening.

"What is it? Are there any"—the lieutenant's voice made a creaky sound—"any bodies?"

"Come down here, Tim," Poole called up.

I sat on the floor and swung my legs into the pit. Then I jumped down.

Beneath the floor, the smell of blood was sickeningly strong.

"What do you see?" the lieutenant shouted. He was trying to sound like a leader, and his voice squeaked on the last word.

I saw an empty room shaped like a giant grave. The walls were covered by some kind of thick paper held in place by wooden struts sunk into the earth. Both the thick brown paper and two of the struts showed old bloodstains.

"Hot," Poole said, and closed the lighter.

"Come on, damn it," came the lieutenant's voice. "Get out of there."

"Yes, sir," Poole said. He flicked the lighter back on. Many layers of thick paper formed an absorbent pad between the earth and the room. The topmost, thinnest layer had been covered with vertical lines of Vietnamese writing. The writing looked like the left-hand pages of Kenneth Rexroth's translations of Tu Fu and Li Po.

"Well, well," Poole said, and I turned to see him pointing at what first looked like intricately woven strands of rope fixed to the bloodstained wooden uprights. Poole stepped forward and the weave jumped into sharp relief. About four feet off the ground, iron chains had been screwed to the uprights. The thick pad between the two lengths of chain had been soaked with blood. The three feet of ground between the posts looked rusty. Poole moved the lighter closer to the chains, and we saw dried blood on the metal links.

"I want you guys out of there, and I mean now," whined the lieutenant.

Poole snapped the lighter shut, and we moved back toward the opening. I felt as if I had seen a shrine to an obscene deity. The lieutenant leaned over and stuck out his hand, but of course he did not bend down far enough for us to reach him. We stiff-armed ourselves up out of the hole. The lieutenant stepped back. He had a thin face and a thick, fleshy nose, and his adam's apple danced around in his neck like a jumping bean. "Well, how many?"

"How many what?" I asked.

"How many are there?" He wanted to go back to Camp Crandall with a good body count.

"There weren't exactly any bodies, Lieutenant," said Poole, trying to let him down easily. He described what we had seen.

"Well, what's that good for?" He meant, How is that going to help me?

"Interrogations, probably," Poole said. "If you questioned someone down there, no one outside the hut would hear anything. At night, you could just drag the body into the woods."

"Field Interrogation Post," said the lieutenant, trying out the phrase. "Torture, Use Of, highly indicated." He nodded again. "Right?"

"Highly," Poole said.

"Shows you what kind of enemy we're dealing with in this conflict."

I could no longer stand being in the same three square feet of space with the lieutenant, and I took a step toward the door of the hut. I did not know what Poole and I had seen, but I knew it was not a Field Interrogation Post, Torture, Use Of, highly indicated, unless the Vietnamese had begun to interrogate monkeys. It occurred to me that the writing on the wall might have been names instead of poetry—I thought that we had stumbled into a mystery that had nothing to do with the war, a Vietnamese mystery.

For a second, music from my old life, music too beautiful to be endurable, started playing in my head. Finally I recognized it: "The Walk to the Paradise Gardens," from A Village Romeo and Juliet by Frederick Delius. Back in Berkeley, I had listened to it hundreds of times.

If nothing else had happened, I think I could have replayed the whole piece in my head. Tears filled my eyes, and I stepped toward the door of the hut. Then I stopped moving. A boy of seven or eight was regarding me with great seriousness from the far corner of the hut. I knew he was not there—I knew he was a spirit. I had no belief in spirits, but that's what he was. Some part of my mind as detached as a crime reporter reminded me that "The Walk to the Paradise Gardens" was about two children who were about to die and that in a sense the music was their death. I wiped my eyes with my hand, and when I lowered my arm, the boy was still there. I took in his fair hair and round dark eyes, the worn plaid shirt and dungarees that made him look like someone I might have known in my childhood in Pigtown. Then he vanished all at once, like the flickering light of the Zippo. I nearly groaned aloud.

I said something to the other two men and went through the door into the growing darkness. I was very dimly aware of the lieutenant asking Poole to repeat his description of the uprights and the bloody chain. Hamnet and Burrage and Calvin Hill were sitting down and leaning against a tree. Victor Spitalny was wiping his hands on his filthy shirt. White smoke curled up from Hill's cigarette, and Tina Pumo exhaled a long white stream of vapor. The unhinged thought came to me with absolute conviction that this was the Paradise Gardens. The men lounging in the darkness; the pattern of the cigarette smoke, and the patterns they made, sitting or standing; the in-drawing darkness, as physical as a blanket; the frame of the trees and the flat gray-green background of the paddy.

My soul had come back to life.

Then I became aware of something wrong about the men arranged before me, and again it took a moment for my intelligence to catch up to my intuition. I had registered that two men too many were in front of me. Instead of seven, there were nine, and the two men that made up the nine of us left were still behind me in the hut. A wonderful soldier named M. O. Dengler was looking at me with growing curiosity, and I thought he knew exactly what I was thinking. A sick chill went through me. I saw Tom Blevins and Tyrell Budd standing together at the far right of the platoon, a little muddier than the others but otherwise different from the rest only in that, like Dengler, they were looking directly at me.

Hill tossed his cigarette away in an arc of light, Poole and Lieutenant Joys came out of the hut behind me. Leonard Hamnet patted his pocket to reassure himself that he still had his mysterious letter. I looked back at the right of the group, and the two dead men were gone.

"Let's saddle up," the lieutenant said. "We aren't doing jack shit around here."

"Tim?" Dengler asked. He had not taken his eyes off me since I had come out of the hut. I shook my head.

"Well, what was it?" asked Tina Pumo. "Was it juicy?"

Spanky and Calvin Hill laughed and slapped hands.

"Aren't we gonna torch this place?" asked Spitalny.

The lieutenant ignored him. "Juicy enough, Pumo. Interrogation Post. Field Interrogation Post."

"No shit," said Pumo.

"These people are into torture, Pumo. It's just another indication."

"Gotcha." Pumo glanced at me and his eyes grew curious. Dengler moved closer.

"I was just remembering something," I said. "Something from the world."

"You better forget about the world while you're over here, Underhill," the lieutenant told me. "I'm trying to keep you alive, in case you hadn't noticed, but you have to cooperate with me." His adam's apple jumped like a begging puppy.

The next night we had showers, real food, cots to sleep in. Sheets and pillows. Two new guys replaced Tyrell Budd and Thomas Blevins, whose names were never mentioned again, at least by me, until long after the war was over and Poole, Linklater, Pumo, and I looked them up, along with the rest of our dead, on the Wall in Washington. I wanted to forget the patrol, especially what I had seen and experienced inside the hut.

I remember that it was raining. I remember the steam lifting off the ground, and the condensation dripping down the metal poles in the tents. Moisture shone on the faces around me. I was sitting in the brothers' tent, listening to the music Spanky Burrage played on the big reel-to-reel recorder he had bought on R&R in Taipei. Spanky Burrage never played Delius, but what he played was paradisical: great jazz from Armstrong to Coltrane, on reels recorded for him by his friends back in Little Rock and which he knew so well he could find individual tracks and performances without bothering to look at the counter. Spanky liked to play disc jockey during these long sessions, changing reels and speeding past thousands of feet of tape to play the same songs by different musicians, even the same song hiding under different names—"Cherokee" and "KoKo,"

"Indiana" and "Donna Lee"—or long series of songs connected by titles that used the same words—"I Thought About You" (Art Tatum), "You and the Night and the Music" (Sonny Rollins), "I Love You" (Bill Evans), "If I Could Be with You" (Ike Quebec), "You Leave Me Breathless" (Milt Jackson), even, for the sake of the joke, "Thou Swell," by Glenroy Breakstone. In his single-artist mode on this day, Spanky was ranging through the work of a great trumpet player named Clifford Brown.

On this sweltering, rainy day, Clifford Brown was walking to the Paradise Gardens. Listening to him was like watching a smiling man shouldering open an enormous door to let in great dazzling rays of light. The world we were in transcended pain and loss, and imagination had banished fear. Even SP4 Cotton and Calvin Hill, who preferred James Brown to Clifford Brown, lay on their bunks listening as Spanky followed his instincts from one track to another.

After he had played disc jockey for something like two hours, Spanky rewound the long tape and said, "Enough." The end of the tape slapped against the reel. I looked at Dengler, who seemed dazed, as if awakening from a long sleep. The memory of the music was still all around us: light still poured in through the crack in the great door.

"I'm gonna have a smoke and a drink," Cotton announced, and pushed himself up off his cot. He walked to the door of the tent and pulled the flap aside to expose the green wet drizzle. That dazzling light, the light from another world, began to fade. Cotton sighed, plopped a wide-brimmed hat on his head, and slipped outside. Before the stiff flap fell shut, I saw him jumping through the puddles on the way to Wilson Manly's shack. I felt as though I had returned from a long journey.

Spanky finished putting the Clifford Brown reel back into its cardboard box. Someone in the rear of the tent switched on Armed Forces radio. Spanky looked at me and shrugged. Leonard Hamnet took his letter out of his pocket, unfolded it, and read it through very slowly.

Dengler looked at me and smiled. "What do you think is going to happen? To us, I mean. Do you think it'll just go on like this day after day, or do you think it's going to get stranger and stranger?" He did not wait for me to answer. "I think it'll always sort of look the same, but it won't be—I think the edges are starting to melt. I think that's what happens when you're out here long enough. The edges melt."

"Your edges melted a long time ago, Dengler," Spanky said, and applauded his own joke.

Dengler was still staring at me. He always resembled a serious, dark-haired child, he never looked as though he belonged in uniform. "Here's what I mean, kind of," he said. "When we were listening to that trumpet player—"

"Brownie, Clifford Brown," Spanky whispered.

"—I could see the notes in the air. Like they were written out on a long scroll. And after he played them, they stayed in the air for a long time."

"Sweetie-pie," Spanky said softly. "You pretty hip, for a little ofay square."

"When we were back in that village," Dengler said. "Tell me about that."

I said that he had been there too.

"But something happened to you. Something special."

I shook my head.

"All right," Dengler said. "But it's happening, isn't it? Things are changing."

I could not speak. I could not tell Dengler in front of Spanky Burrage that I had imagined seeing the ghosts of Blevins, Budd, and an American child. I smiled and shook my head. It came to me with a great and secret thrill that someday I would be able to write about all this, and that the child had come searching for me out of a book I had yet to write.