Magic Terror. Peter Straub
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body through the raincoat. Albertine moved aside, and they filed through the door to begin their work.
Her father stood up from his desk behind the counter when she descended into the darkened lobby. Beneath the long table, Gaston, the black-and-white dog, stirred in his sleep. ‘Did it go well?’ her father asked. He, too, inspected her for bloodstains.
‘How do you think it went?’ she said. ‘He was almost asleep. By the time he knew what was happening, his chest was wide open.’
The lock on the front door responded to the keypad and clicked open. The two permanent Americans eyed her as they came through the arch. Gaston raised his head, sighed, and went back to sleep. She said, ‘Those idiots in the berets are up there now. How long have you been using Japanese, anyhow?’
‘Maybe six months.’ The one in the tweed jacket spoke in English because he knew English annoyed her, and annoyance was how he flirted. ‘Hey, we love those wild and crazy guys, they’re our little samurai brothers.’
‘Don’t let your stupid brothers miss the briefcase in the closet,’ she said. The ugly one in the running suit leered at her. ‘That man had good clothes. You could try wearing some nice clothes, for a change.’
‘His stuff goes straight into the fire,’ the ugly one said. ‘We don’t even look at it. You know, we’re talking about a real character. Kind of a legend. I heard lots of amazing stories about him.’
‘Thank you, Albertine,’ said her father. He did not want her to hear the amazing stories.
‘You ought to thank me,’ she said. ‘The old rooster made me take a bath. On top of that, I wasted my perfume because he wanted me to smell like a girl in Bora Bora.’
Both of the Americans stared at the floor.
‘What does it mean to say,’ she asked, and in her heavily accented English said, ‘I wish I had that swing in my backyard?’
The permanent Americans glanced at each other. The one in the tweed jacket clapped his hands over his eyes. The ugly one said, ‘Albertine, you’re the ideal woman. Everybody worships you.’
‘Good, then I should get more money.’ She wheeled around to go downstairs, and the ugly one sang out, ‘Izz-unt it roman-tic?’ Beneath his sweet false tremulous tenor came the rumble of the disposal truck as it backed toward the entrance.
1
In Vietnam I knew a man who went quietly and purposefully crazy because his wife wrote him that his son had been sexually abused – ‘messed with’ – by the leader of their church choir. This man was a black six-foot-six grunt named Leonard Hamnet, from a small town in Tennessee named Archibald. Before writing, his wife had waited until she had endured the entire business of going to the police, talking to other parents, returning to the police with another accusation, and finally succeeding in having the man charged. He was up for trial in two months. Leonard Hamnet was no happier about that than he was about the original injury.
‘I got to murder him, you know, but I’m seriously thinking on murdering her too,’ he said. He still held the letter in his hands, and he was speaking to Spanky Burrage, Michael Poole, Conor Linklater, SP4 Cotton, Calvin Hill, Tina Pumo, the magnificent M. O. Dengler, and myself. ‘All this is going on, my boy needs help, this here Mr Brewster needs to be dismantled, needs to be racked and stacked, and she don’t tell me! Makes me want to put her down, man. Take her damn head off and put it up on a stake in the yard, man. With a sign saying: Here is one stupid woman.’
We were in the unofficial part of Camp Crandall known as No Man’s Land, located between the wire perimeter and a shack, also unofficial, where a cunning little weasel named Wilson Manly sold contraband beer and liquor. No Man’s Land, so called because the CO pretended it did not exist, contained a mound of old tires, a piss tube, and a lot of dusty red ground. Leonard Hamnet gave the letter in his hand a dispirited look, folded it into the pocket of his fatigues, and began to roam around the heap of tires, aiming kicks at the ones that stuck out farthest. ‘One stupid woman,’ he repeated. Dust exploded up from a burst, worn-down wheel of rubber.
I wanted to make sure Hamnet knew he was angry with Mr Brewster, not his wife, and said, ‘She was trying –’
Hamnet’s great glistening bull’s head turned toward me.
‘Look at what the woman did. She nailed that bastard. She got other people to admit that he messed with their kids too. That must be almost impossible. And she had the guy arrested. He’s going to be put away for a long time.’
‘I’ll put that bitch away, too,’ Hamnet said, and kicked an old gray tire hard enough to push it nearly a foot back into the heap. All the other tires shuddered and moved. For a second it seemed that the entire mound might collapse.
‘This is my boy I’m talking about here,’ Hamnet said. ‘This shit has gone far enough.’
‘The important thing,’ Dengler said, ‘is to take care of your boy. You have to see he gets help.’
‘How’m I gonna do that from here?’ Hamnet shouted.
‘Write him a letter,’ Dengler said. ‘Tell him you love him. Tell him he did right to go to his mother. Tell him you think about him all the time.’
Hamnet took the letter from his pocket and stared at it. It was already stained and wrinkled. I did not think it could survive many more of Hamnet’s readings. His face seemed to get heavier, no easy trick with a face like Hamnet’s. ‘I got to get home,’ he said. ‘I got to get back home and take care of these people.’
Hamnet began putting in requests for compassionate leave relentlessly – one request a day. When we were out on patrol, sometimes I saw him unfold the tattered sheet of notepaper from his shirt pocket and read it two or three times, concentrating intensely. When the letter began to shred along the folds, Hamnet taped it together.
We were going out on four- and five-day patrols during that period, taking a lot of casualties. Hamnet performed well in the field, but he had retreated so far within himself that he spoke in monosyllables. He wore a dull, glazed look, and moved like a man who had just eaten a heavy dinner. I thought he looked like a man who had given up, and when people gave up they did not last long – they were already very close to death, and other people avoided them.
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. We had to eat cold C rations because heating them with C-4 would have been like putting up billboards and arc lights. We couldn’t smoke, and we were not supposed to talk. Hamnet’s C rations consisted of an old can of Spam that dated from an earlier war and a can of peaches. He saw Spanky staring at the peaches and tossed him the can. Then he dropped the Spam between his legs. Death was almost visible around him. He fingered the note out of his pocket and tried to read it in the damp gray twilight.
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 FO 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 damp but solid ground on the other side