The Chu Lai Jacket
by Allen A Glick
Copyright 1988 AAGlick
Smashwords Edition, License Notes
This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. It remains the copyrighted property of the author, and may not be reproduced, copied or distributed for commercial or non-commercial purposes. If you enjoyed this book, please encourage your friends to download their own copy at Smashwords.com, where they can also discover other works by AA Glick. Thank you for your support.
CHAPTER ONE
Puller had a pot gut. No longer any doubt. He agonized in front of the mirror, in the dim morning light. He moaned at the dip in his skivvies: hitched high over his rump, slipped low under his belly—
“—like a saddle on a fat pony,” he muttered.
Maggie stirred and he hopped quickly from the mirror. Working out, she kept saucy and trim while Puller sprouted love handles. Young guys on campus were flirting with his Maggie!
It was a quarter till six in early dark spring, and the rooster still ruffled in cockerel dreams. Puller slid into coveralls, strapped one shoulder, squeaked onto the bed to lace his boots. The rooster finally crowed—cursed bird!—too pea-brained to know who was boss of the hilltop. Puller should have clipped his spurs long ago. But it was a handsome red-green crossbreed. Macho as hell as it strode about with two inches of horn on each scaly leg.
Foul tempered as the cock was, Maggie hung the washing with caution. Have to shoot that goddamned bird. Puller was drowsily thinking. Promote one of those leghorns that think they’re capons.
He was leaving the bedroom as Kelly padded in, fists to eyes. They collided softly in familiar routine: size thirteen boots poised carefully over tender toes, second grade feet daring fate, curling confidently onto papa’s rough-worn stompers.
He loved to hug his girls in the early morning, sleep still on them like a musky fog. Mists of genesis. Visions of squirmy critters popped out fresh, unsullied, needing their old man—Puller liked to believe—as much as they needed air.
“Dju wake Kate?”
“No, pop.
“French toast?”
“Mmm hmmm.”
He tickled her neck with his mustache, breathed her fawn’s fragrance.
“You crack some eggs, okay? I’ll put coffee on.”
Old joists gave and sprang back, the pine floor bounced, the antique cupboard shook and rattled. They collided in the kitchen. Kelly dropped an egg, the thick-shelled farmyard kind that did not break on the yielding floor. A forgiving floor in a fine old plantation house. Perfect crash deck for toddlers. Unbiased, it had bounced children of all creeds and colors for one hundred and fifty years.
Legend told that Sam Houston had brought an Indian sweetheart to this very house in eighteen and thirty-eight. Perhaps old Sam had appreciated the pliant give that same floor had provided.
Batter-soaked bread was sizzling in a skillet when Kate ambled in like the sun rising, sparkle-eyed, one pink toe jutting from a hole in her snuggly.
“Hon-gy papa!”
“You are, eh?”
“Ummm. Re-eel hongy!” She stretched and reached and Puller snatched her up for a squeeze. She wrinkled button-nosed at the skillet.
“Ummboy! Finch toe! Finch toe, Kelly!”
Kelly looked up from her stool at the island, head propped in hands, elbows on counter, blue eyes drooping shut she yawned to show her boredom. “I know, Kate. It was my idea. I helped papa make them.”
Kate gasped and looked accusing. “Kay ‘elp too!”
“You want to help? Okay. Go in and wake momma with a kiss. Very gently. Tell her breakfast.”
“Hey!” Kelly objected. “I wanted to wake up momma!” But Kate had already squirmed free to dash from the kitchen.
“You soak your head. I mean, soak some bread!”
“Can I cook the whole things, pop?”
“You’ll burn your hands.”
“I promise I won’t.”
Puller glanced at the clock. It was five past six.
“Okay,” he relented. “I’ll pack lunches. Are you brown bagging today?”
The kitchen was solid unpainted pine, batten-boarded and old and yellowed. There was a bulletin board nailed to one wall, papered in drawings and notes, where Puller glanced to read the menu.
“Fish sticks with ketchup,” Puller quoted, “potato tots, broccoli with cheese sauce, rolls, bananas and strawberries, milk... OR, pizza sandwich basket!”
“Yucch! I’ll pack my lunch.” Kelly was at the stove, on a footstool, concentrating in the perfect flip. One, right. Two, right. Third time, toast on the floor. It slapped on the egg-y side, left a slop mark as Kelly hastily snatched it up with the spatula.
“Oops,” she giggled. “That one’s yours, pop.”
“How about a ham and cheese sandwich, hard-boiled egg, an apple and a granola bar?”
“Will you make some chocolate milk?”
“Sure Kelly. If you’ll eat the piece that dropped on the floor.”
Kate steamed in dragging Maggie by the hem of her robe, the little engine that could, merrily tugging its load.
“See!” the child announced. “Momma here!”
Puller winked at his puffy-eyed wife. “Momma wishes she was elsewhere.” And then he caught her when she leaned heavily into his chest. Her breath was sour. He kissed her and didn’t mind.
“Late night?”
“Mmmmm,” she muttered. “Bed at midnight. But I finished those layouts.”
“You’ll make another ‘A’.”
“...damned well better.” Maggie had a lean, high-cheeked face in contrast to her husband’s round one. She had good bones that kept her face from falling with sleep. Puller awoke with a face like melted wax. Fortunately, the girls had their mother’s bones and her wide sensuous mouth: but they had Puller’s deep blue eyes. Yet anything would have pleased him. One freckle that was his. You see! They got that freckle from me!
Puller gulped his breakfast. He slurped his coffee, went to the bathroom to brush his teeth. He didn’t bother to shave.
Back in the kitchen once more:
“Maggie, where the hell is my old family bible?”
His wife arched surprised brows behind her coffee cup.
“You got mad, remember? You threw it in the trash.”
“Yeah, yeah, sure,” he made a rueful face. “But you fished it out again, I know you did.
“Maybe.”
“So where is it?”
“I put it away.”
“Can you un-put it real quick? I need to look something up.”
“What?”
“Tower of Babel.”
Maggie shook her head at his retreating back.
He was in the kitchen again, packing lunches, when she set the old bible on the counter. The black leather was faded and frayed. It zippered shut all around, which suited Puller’s notions. Zip it up tight lest the truth spill out.
“Don’t tell me you got old time religion in Shreveport?”
Puller winked at her. He scraped the mayonnaise jar.
“A cracker at work keeps quoting the Book to me. He’s getting on my nerves.”
“Easy nerves to get on, baby.”
“Funny thing is, I probably know the bible better than he does.”
There was a rare quiet. The girls were tumbling in a far part of the house. Maggie snuggled beside him for a scratchy-beaded kiss.
“I love you, Puller Hobbs.”
“Oh, yeah? More than those jocks at college?”
“Mm hmm... They’re cute enough. But they just can’t shake it like my old man.”
“I’m getting a belly,” he groaned.
“More to hold onto.”
“Promise you won’t leave me for some hunk?”
“Well,” she smiled, “not for more than a fling.”
The girls found them, of course, like air finds an empty bottle. Quiet is a vacuum that children are required to fill.
There was a horse race to reach the folks. Kelly tripped Kate into a tumbling crash but the three-year-old bounced up with a vengeance to yank Kelly’s hair. There was a yelp and then a fight. A horn honked outside. Puller grabbed his lunch, stole quick tearful kisses from his girls, hugged Maggie, snatched up the Good Book and dashed from the kitchen.
The dining room—like all the rooms except the kitchen—was furnished in antiques that creaked and squeaked as Puller’s big boots heeled across the old Persian rug. The hallways were massive. They intersected at the center of the house, which measured sixty feet on each side. The ceiling reached to thirteen feet... the devil to heat in the winter that lay only a cold nose behind them.
Each crossed hail exited at huge double doors that opened onto steps. The front doors opened onto a pillared porch as wide as the house, which perched on a hilltop in the deep pinewoods of East Texas. So east, in fact, it was nearly Louisiana.
Puller kept tools on a bench in the hallway, by the side doors that opened on the drive. He put on his tool belt and popped on his hard hat. He grabbed his long wooden toolbox, dropped lunch and bible inside, and pushed open the right hand door. Down the steps, past Maggie’s station wagon, beyond his own truck, sat AJ’s old blue pick-up idling in blue fumes. Dusty moved to the middle as Puller set his tools and hat in back. But he took the bible inside. His buddies hooted when they saw it, but with less than their usual irreverence. They were country-bred after all, and the fear of brimstone dies hard.
Puller’s girls came hurrying into the dewy morning—Maggie in a long terry cloth robe, Kelly dressed for school, Kate with her pink toe in the wet grass. Maggie carried his cup and the coffee pot. She joked with AJ and Dusty while she filled their cups. She kissed Puller again. Then they were off, down the plantation hill and onto the country road toward Waskom, the biggest town for miles.
“That’s some woman you got, Puller. Hope you have the good sense to keep her.”
“In other words,” Dusty cracked, “tell AJ if you don’t.”
Puller winked appreciatively. Each of his buddies was divorced. Ex-wives had custody of their kids.
The road wound through heavily forested hills. The soil was a red mixture of sand and clay that reminded all three men of the countryside in Viet Nam. They tried not to talk about that often.
AJ would sometimes ask about Puller’s daughters, drawing little familiarities from him. His ex-wife had remarried in Houston. For a year, he had raced down each weekend to see his children until, one visit, he noticed a bruise on his boy’s cheek where the step-dad had popped him. So he blacked the guy’s eye. Then a judge put a halt to his visits.
Puller told him a funny one about Kate. AJ laughed, then choked on it. His eyes misted. Dusty and Puller glanced away.
“Thank God it’s Friday,” Dusty groaned. As if that served as a rationale, he yanked a pencil-thick joint from a pocket. Dusty’s gray eyes slid sidewise, left and right.
“Get that away from me!” AJ barked.
Puller shook his head. “I don't dare. There’s millwork to set.”
“Pussies,” Dusty accused. “You can do that job in your sleep.”
“Save that till after work, we’ll all have a toke.”
“I got more.” Dusty struck a sulfur match. The smell of burning rope filled the cab.
“You’ll be useless all morning.”
“Look, all I gotta do is dig a ditch.”
“You should’a hired on as a carpenters apprentice.”
“Quit preachin’ that to me! I make more money swinging a pick.” For almost a year, AJ and Puller had worked as journeymen carpenters on a union site. Dusty was hired a few months later; union laborer, nine bucks an hour. Good work for a man with no direction, a job to suit Dusty’s mood of late.
Puller cracked his window an inch. The acrid smoke swirled and shot out in a stream past his nose.
“Won’t do you any good,” Dusty remarked. “You can’t hold your breath all the way to Shreveport.”
“Ahh, but I can keep my thoughts pure.”
“What is that bible for, anyway? You having sudden doubts?”
“It’s for Smitty,” Puller shrugged. “He talks bible but he doesn’t know it.”
“What a guy. Mouth enough for two sets of teeth!”
“Yeah. And the nearer that church gets to completion, the nearer old Smitty gets to heaven.”
“Have you seen him suckin’ up to that preacher? The joke is, once that church is finished they won’t want the likes of Smitty coming through the door.”
The cost of the massive complex—church, auditorium, recreation hall, and more—was five million dollars. It was a disturbing figure to AJ and Dusty, nurtured as they had been by the concept of a poor and humble Jesus, in modest wooden temples. To Puller, who was more worldly, it was simply corrupt. He had tried to sketch it once, had tried to elicit from lines of graphite and charcoal a common dream that had failed, as though an empty silhouette might reflect the lost visions of his kind: the meek who were supposed to inherit it all. But his sketches were incomplete.
Dusty blew smoke in his face. Puller stirred and shook his head at the offered joint. It was a familiar and lulling drive that made it easy to fall into silence. On hilltops and curves, the easterly sun would stab their eyes. In the washes and shadowed vales, it would dim. But near Waskom, they turned onto the interstate, a straight shot east, and the morning glare was full in their faces. Dusty’s smoke hung heavily in the air. Tires hummed on the concrete. They crossed the state line but the terrain was changeless: hilly, spattered with the deep blue-green of pines, lighter green where oaks and hickories brought forth buds. The startling white of dogwood blooms were like eruptions of virgin snow.
It was mid-February. Winter might swipe at them again, but it would not deter the waxing of spring. Puller would be forty soon, his own spring long past, his summer passing, the thought of his pot belly a private dishonor.
Puller’s old drill instructor came to mind, as he occasionally did, rock—jawed and flint-eyed, brim of the Smokey Bear pulled low over his brow... Quitting so soon, Hobbs? Falling out? You maggot! You couldn’t hump one hill with a load!
Puller squirmed. He resolved not to eat the granola bar in his lunch. He would lose ten pounds before his birthday, by God, or go to live with the hogs!
Full of resolve when they arrived at work, Puller leaped from the truck like he was hitting the beach, juiced up, eyes slit, mouth set in a challenging line. Then he realized he was stoned, done in by the thick smoke in the cab.
The construction site brought him down: acres of naked rouge clay gouged from a hillside, booms and I-beams like rusted bones. The red brick complex, tall spire of the proud church—copper capped—all glinted crimson in the morning sunlight. Bought with the blood of Jesus. Blood of the lamb. His old sweet grandma rocking Puller, singing in her crackly voice beside the coal stove, sublime in her faith, a better world was coming. Each Sunday she dug deep to tithe what she could not afford.
Puller held the bible in his hand. It had been hers. Grandma’s law. He had thrown it in the trash once, in a dramatic moment, not because he was angry at his sweet grandma, but angry at something else. What could that be? Anger at God required belief, but Puller would not admit to that luxury. He knew people had faith because they needed it, and perhaps that's what had made him mad: their simple need.
He placed the book in his tool box and surveyed the church, safely beyond its reach. It seemed more and more like this each day—that he was working amidst the icons that had driven him from his faith.
Puller’s boots sucked mud as he slogged towards the church. Men climbed from cars and trucks, doors clanged, tools clanked, hardhats slapped legs or rattled atop heads. The crowd converged into a stream, some life in their strides because the eagle shits on Fridays.
“I’m tired of this job.” Dusty had stepped beside him.
“You ain’t even had it a year.”
“It sucks.”
“You’re stoned, Dusty. Mother humper you got me stoned too!”
“AJ’s pissed at me.”
“He’ll get over it.”
Dusty stared at him. The procession of workers was clattering away.
“What the hell are you doing here, Puller? I know about the rest of us. Were getting by. We’re making the best of what we got. But you’re different.”
“I’m no different.”
“You got talent. You’re a damned artist!”
“Shit. I don’t know what art is. Neither do you.”
“Maybe not. But you know, Puller. And you’re afraid of what you got. You duck it.”
“I should be flattered,” Puller smiled ruefully. “But all I do is sketch a little, and putter with stuff. There are thousands who do it better.”
“Maybe so,” Dusty squinted. But I read somewhere about art. Supposed to make you feel somethin’ real, ain’t it? Well, ain’t it?”
“I guess that’s part of it.”
“I rest my case.” Then he smacked Puller’s chest. “Try to get me on an inside job, how ‘bout it?”
“Sure. If Kirkland bothers to ask me. He doesn’t like your attitude lately. I think he plans to keep you in the ditches.”
“Don’t mean nothin’.” Dusty shrugged. “Don’t expect to get rich, anyway. How’s this?” He plopped on his hardhat and marched in place, spattered mud, pumped his elbows and knees.
“I’ll never get rich
by digging a ditch—
I’m in the union now”
They slopped through the clinging mud and joked about the monsoons in Nam.
The old man was taking his time giving out assignments. Most of the men knew their jobs but Kirkland was letting them dog it for a few minutes. Friday. They’d work like hell through lunch, work pretty good till two when the old man handed out the checks, then for two hours most of them wouldn’t be worth a damn.
But the project was on schedule. And the supervisor took a rough satisfaction from mornings like these—from jest and banter, the animation of rugged men who pulled together as a crew. It had taken months to shake them down. To pick and choose. Kirkland was particular hell on his carpenters, having been one himself, and he ran off any who were less than able.
Puller had sketched a scene like this, and it hung in Kirkland’s trailer: a square of cardboard, dashed with layout chalk and the charcoal of a burned wooden stake. A quick silhouette of the crew, action and repose, an eye—blinking and energetic moment.
Kirkland stepped off the pallet into the mud. He waved the men up and a crescent of forty bodies arced around him. A sour breeze stirred the stink of the port-o-cans. Kirkland wrinkled his nose and called out names, checked them from his roster, funny how no one was ever sick on payday.
When he called out assignments, men stepped to the tool shed or trudged into the church.
“Puller Hobbs. Pick a laborer and get on with those cabinets.”
“Yes sir. I’ll take McInnis.”
“Pick someone else.” Kirkland frowned.
Puller shrugged at Dusty, who did not bat an eye.
“Then I’ll take N’Komo,” Puller said.
“Get moving,” the old man nodded.
Puller heard a snicker from behind, caught fragments of “voodoo” and “jungle love”. He turned to glare at Smitty and the smaller, older man gestured innocently. Smitty was a redneck jokester. His buddies were grinning.
“Children of Ham, the bible says,” and Smith held up an instructive forefinger.
Puller lifted his Good Book from the toolbox that lay at his feet. “I have to tell you, Smitty, that you’ve made me question my ways. And I’m going to study this so you and I can have a talk.”
Surprise came into Smitty’s angled face. He smiled with rapture. “Lord be praised! Why anytime at all, Puller. Anytime at all!”
Lifting his toolbox, Puller walked toward his helper, Ham’s descendent.
N’Komo was a Nigerian, very black-skinned, and his face was scarred by smallpox. He kept apart even from the other Black laborers, and he especially avoided Smitty—confounded as the redneck was by a nigger who spoke with an Oxford accent, at work on a master’s degree.
“What tools shall I bring, Puller?” The Nigerian flashed his big white teeth.
Puller always marveled at the crisp educated speech that came from that scarred head. He slapped N’Komo’s muscled shoulder.
“I have everything we need.”
It was as they were walking towards the church that Smitty’s path crossed theirs, deliberately enough it seemed.
“How’s it goin’, Como?”
“Fine, Mr. Smith.”
“Make your morning sacrifice, did you?”
Puller watched as N’Komo forced a silly grin.
“Yes, of course. Every day. Right as rain.”
“You have to keep your crocodile gods happy!”
“Yes, of course.”
Smitty’s shoulders shook with glee as he walked away. Weeks past, it had started as a joke, a notion that Smitty had pieced together from old Tarzan movies and segments of Jungle Jim... They sacrificed babies to crocodiles in Nigeria. Hell, everyone knew it! Smitty made the connection into an outworn joke.
Yet was it a joke? How real did it become to Smith? Puller had lived for years in the deep woods, but still he could not fathom the shallows of the redneck mind.
“You oughta' knock his dick in the mud,” Puller spouted.
“I would only lose my job.” N’Komo shrugged. “And he would have the satisfaction of proving me a savage.”
“What religion are you? I’ve never asked.”
“What would you guess, Puller?”
“Uhhh... a Muslim?”
N’Komo smiled. “I am a good Catholic, as is my father and his father.”
Puller laughed as he tossed back his head.
“A fish eater! I’ll be damned. My wife is Irish-Catholic. Least she was till she married me. Big family up north, you know. They all breed like minks but I sure love ‘em.”
“Breed like minks? And what’s that?”
“How many kids in your family, N’Komo?”
“Twelve.”
“That’s what I mean, son. They’re fucking all the time!”
“Maybe that is Mr. Smith’s problem, eh?”
“How’s that?”
“His church commands the fucking be done only one night a month.”
They had just entered the cavernous temple and Puller’s laughter broke against the canyon-like walls. He supposed that the huge space was meant to be humbling, but Puller felt trivial instead, each morning he came through the huge doorway. He was made to feel insignificant.
A screw gun whined, a forklift rumbled. The men fell into routine with a cadence of hammer falls and shrieks of power saws, and the slam shot of lumber dropped on the concrete deck. The vast chamber was dry-walled. Every sound echoed off the ceiling that vaulted to sixty feet. Cabinets and millwork were in a cottage sized stack near one wall. Puller stowed his gear there and spread out the rolled blueprints and millwork key.
There were cabinets for various kitchens, and enough bookshelves for a small town library. There were a score of desks and dozens of vanities for bath and powder rooms. Some of the sets were too short or too long and some had pieces missing. Everything was disassembled, lying in numbered bundles, a huge plywood puzzle to solve.
Puller planned to deposit each set in the appropriate room, and then move from room to room to assemble them.
“We’ll need a flatbed cart, N’Komo.”
The African nodded and hurried to fetch one while Puller lost himself in the intricacies of the blueprint. When he looked up again he noticed the church pastor stroll in. He was a distinguished looking man, appropriately solemn, appropriately affable. But Puller had never spoken to him. He was the only man on the crew who had not.
Puller recognized his prejudice. He knew that it was petty-minded to continually avoid the preacher; yet he also sensed that he was comfortable with his own bias. A mutual understanding had sprung up, over the months—the pastor had ceased trying to approach him, and Puller had kept well out of the man’s way.
This is more than just a church! It’s a damned corporation! was Puller’s rational for rudeness.
He knew of the intrigue that went along with even a poor pulpit. It was bad enough when there were bickering deacons to quell. Add a board of directors and a rich church would be no different than a bank. There would be a bottom line. Ministry measured in the collection plate. Rancor over where best to invest, in God’s name, and all tax-free.
“What a racket—” Puller muttered.
“And what’s that?” N’Komo asked as he pushed up the cart.
“Oh, just commenting on our Savior’s bank account. When He comes back, He’ll be a very rich man.”
N’Komo cocked his bead. “You’re an odd chap, Puller. You make sport of religion, yet you secretly crave something greater than yourself.”
He sometimes drank beer with N’Komo, after work, down the road at a local saloon. They would bend their elbows and talk about Life or Art. Puller envied the man his fine education.
Puller shrugged. “I’m sorry. I don’t mean to put down your faith. I won’t—”
A nasal voice pierced the air.
“HEY REV’REND!”
It was Smitty, climbed high on the scaffold. He paused to wave at the preacher, who returned the gesture self-consciously.
“GLORY BE TO GOD!”
“Amen!” the Reverend called, and quickly strolled on. Puller had to admit that the pastor was an understated man. It’s why he was popular with the crew.
N’Komo was just warming up. He pointed at the carpenter who had climbed aloft. “Take a man like that Smith... He longs for nothing greater than himself. He craves something lesser. That’s why he insults me with racial jokes about sacrifices to crocodiles. His choice of God merely reflects his own need to be superior. A man such as he should not even bother with religion... But you, Puller, are naturally suited to the deeper questions of God. Yet you show nothing but scorn for them.”
Puller gestured about. “What do you see around here that inspires deeper questions? It all seems pretty basic. Drop coins in a plate. Build a stairway to heaven.”
“I know that you would find true believers here,” N’Komo replied. “I think that you are confusing hypocrisy with their display of wealth. Perhaps these are not very expressive people. They do not have Mardi Gras. They have a big expensive building in which to celebrate their God. Nothing so terribly wrong with that. We Catholics like big, cold, and expensive churches. Our passion for them was called the Renaissance!”
“At least that was art,” Puller laughed.
“Once again, my good man, you are trying to define what is art? That would take very much beer and more time than we have.” N’Komo gestured to the distance. “And I see old Kirkland watching us.”
“Oops!” Puller jumped. They began to hustle the numbered stacks onto the cart.
A forklift rumbled past them into the main chamber of the church. It was loaded high with materials, the driver carelessly blind-sided but gunning it a bit, travelling too fast.
Puller thought to yell at him. From the corner of his eye he glimpsed the preacher stepping backwards, looking up as Smith neared the top of the scaffold that reached the ceiling.
The forklift driver shouted too late. He could not stop in time, and the startled preacher could not jump aside quickly enough. Braking and swerving, the driver veered to miss the man. They all heard a teeth-clenching CLANG as one tine struck the scaffold a great jolt.
Then they heard a shriek. Puller saw the redneck Smitty lose his grip and topple, and his plunge came fast and hard—more like an awkward dive—his hands held out in terror, his angled face a flint of fear, his scream short—lived as he met the concrete, head first.
Smitty struck with such force that one eyeball was knocked cleanly from its socket. It arced through the air a dozen feet and smacked the open—mouthed pastor on his clean white shirt. Then the eyeball landed, plop, on the floor trailing a bloody vein.
In a swoon, the preacher fainted dead away.
There was a moment of numb silence from the startled crew. Old Kirkland was closest. He stepped quickly toward the preacher and then stooped with a red bandana to scoop up Smitty’s eyeball. Then the hubbub suddenly arose. Everyone started to shout at once, and there was the jumbled rush of many feet.
Puller stood rooted to where he was. He saw old Kirkland kneel by the body and without blinking—as if to correct some indecency—shoved the eyeball adroitly back into its socket, backwards, the vein hanging out as if Smitty had sucked spaghetti through his eye.
The crescendo of voices seemed a garble of many tongues. The crew gaped at one another as their mouths worked, but no one appeared to understand a single word.
It struck Puller like a vision, his Tower of Babel.
He turned to N’Komo, who also stood as if rooted.
“Maybe he pissed off the Crocodile God,” was all that Puller could think to say.
CHAPTER TWO
What can be done with thirty eggs a day, every day, as sure as the sun might rise? How to use two gallons of raw milk, twice a day, seven days a week for much of the year? Where do you keep a bumper crop of spinach that threatens to overflow on your kitchen floor?
These were some of the questions that filled Maggie’s day. Not to be confused with the less mundane questions of academics, the how and when of graduating from college while keeping her family on track.
Her soft days were on Tuesdays and Thursdays, devoted to studies and a small-time advertising job. She went to class on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays and toted Kate along to the campus daycare. Weekends she was Ma Kettle on the farm. At all times, she was wife, mother, lover and part-time vet who could doctor critters with aplomb.
On this particular Saturday morning, she was the egg inspector, giving the old bucket-of-water test to a hidden cache of eggs that Kelly had found. There were some outlaw hens who never laid in the henhouse. Sometimes the nests would lay hidden till a batch of eggs would explode. But that was in the scorching summer. In the spring, like as not, they ended up as feast for some spotted king snake.
The king snakes were okay. They kept copperheads and rattlers away. But it stopped your heart to reach in a dark nesting box and grab one.
“Oooh, Momma!” Kelly pointed into the bucket. “That one’s bobbing in the water!”
“Mmmm. Sure is. It looks to be about a half-charge.” And Kelly laughed. It was papa’s slang for the explosive potential of a rotten egg. A full charge was one that floated all the way to the top. Momma wouldn’t even let Kelly touch one of those.
Kelly reached daringly into the bucket to grasp the mini-bomb.
“You be careful. If you drop that we’ll stink for a week.”
The girl held the egg up cautiously, dripping, and tried to see what forces stirred inside as light through the window cut a beam across the table. Kate was itching to grab the thing and Maggie had to restrain her.
“Pop says it‘s sulfur gas, Kate And other yukky stuff—” She glanced at her mother. “Maybe Pop will let me throw it against the barn.”
That was Puller’s measure of explosive scale. Once he had thrown an egg that exploded so loud one of their hogs had burst through the pen. That was a full-charge that had never been equaled. He told his girls that, someday, he hoped to explode one so deafening that the cow’s milk would turn sour. He was certain that would be the rottenest egg of all time. And Kelly agreed.
But it would have to wait until Clover was fresh, and they were milking her again.
“Put it in the bowl and leave it on the back porch, Kelly. Then we’ll box the rest of these eggs.”
The child walked uneasily away with the tiny grenade, Kate at her heels, and Maggie held her breath for fear the three-year-old was in the mood for a flying tackle.
But nothing ensued. The girls came un-bickering back to the table to help with crating.
There were two days collections of eggs, plus the maverick nest that Kelly had found, about seventy-five eggs in all. They washed the poop and hay from each in a mild disinfectant—Kate would sometimes drop a couple as she dried them—but that was of little consequence. Maggie would fry the broken eggs, shells and all, and feed them to the hogs. She did these chores automatically, giving them no particular thought. The charm of the homespun life had long worn off.
For almost a decade she had stayed in the deep woods with her husband—and her talents had been channeled and somewhat bridled—and she was eager for a change. Puller did not need such isolation anymore. She could no longer be content to let her husband live from day-to-day with no long-range dictates besides a milking schedule and when to plant by the moon. And Maggie was weary of playing pioneer girl in an ante-bellum fairy castle that couldn’t even be decently heated.
So Maggie was ready to take control. But the idea made her legs a trifle weak.
She glanced at the letter that lay opened on the counter. It was from her old friend, Sonia, and it offered a job in Dallas as soon as Maggie could graduate.
The two women—college chums and business partners—had drifted apart when Maggie married Puller. And Sonia had gone on to an executive career while Maggie had stood by her man.
Now it was time for that man to stand by her. And damn his thick head if he would not!
“That was awful, wasn’t it Momma? What Pop told us about the man who fell?”
“Yes, it was awful, honey.”
“Aren’t you glad it wasn’t Pop?”
“Of course I’m glad.”
“Pop can’t climb as good as me,” Kelly pronounced.
“As well as I, Kelly. Please think about your speech.”
“But Momma! I talk as good as the other kids.”
Maggie held her tongue. That was a problem, of course, the backwoods dialect that crept into Kelly’s speech: don’t want none, ain’t got nothin’, niggers ain’t no good. The last thing Maggie wanted was to raise a little redneck. She’d just as soon keep any such brat on a leash.
Once already, Puller had to storm aboard the school bus to lay down the law to some bully of a cedar chopper’s son who was harassing Kelly. It was supposed to be Maggie’s generation, the old hippies, who were aghast at spanking their kids. But that was not proving true. It was the good ol’ boys—the iron workers and oil field hands, the ones who never deigned to crack a book on child care—who were laziest about reddening an unruly bottom. Particularly their sons. What resulted in these woods was a chain of arrogance left unbroken, from generation to generation, and she shuddered to think her daughters might be linked to it.
Time to go, a voice would sometimes say. Time to move on.
Maggie heeded that voice. Even Puller sensed that it was time for change. They’d gotten no closer to real farming than the bit of homesteading they did. They could never raise the cash to become full-time farmers. Yet Puller dreaded the thought of moving to the city. He’d needed the deep woods once, to soften his despair over the war. But two daughters had long-since knocked the rough edges from him. His yearning for isolation had become habit, a dulling one that would smother him. Puller had a secret fire inside that Maggie dreaded to see snuffed out.
One time, when Kelly told some friends that her father was an artist, Puller had been so embarrassed that he asked the girl not to say that again. Young Kelly had been bewildered. Maggie was just plain mad. She had no patience sometimes with the way Puller held Art on high, like some unachievable grail. But Maggie was a hearth-woman, and she had always worked with her hands, and the mystery of craft seemed a man’s fabrication. Something to stand in the way, to make art a struggle.
“Pop’s been in the shop all morning. We want him to play with us.”
“He’s working, Kelly. He needs to be alone right now.” Maggie closed the last of the cartons and let the girls put them away. Their homestead abundance required a second refrigerator on the back porch. Before the weekend was gone, every egg would be sold and there would be orders for more. The bags of spinach would disappear. When Clover was fresh they sold milk and cream and butter. People would drive through the gate and up the hill—sometimes total strangers—who’d heard a rumor that raw milk was for sale.
Such traffic was good for the girls, who had few neighbors: no kids to run to next door, no place for Kelly to ride a bike, no sidewalk to skate on. Every direction from the old house was downhill. There was a more or less lawn which bordered on pasture, with huge old trees that, one by one, were climbed by a far too-daring Kelly. Behind the house towered twin Holly trees, the biggest in the county, and their branches splayed to the ground to form a dim, secretive lair that was Kate’s favorite outdoor place. But the branches were a beckoning ladder. Maggie had found the child at least ten feet up the tree once, and she’d held her breath while she coaxed Kate down.
Country things. Inventiveness to make up for their solitude. But they were both such social children that Maggie would sigh at what she thought her girls were missing. She poured a cup of coffee and lit her first cigarette of the day. It was ten o’clock. There was a mild, chill still in the kitchen. She’d let the fire die down in the wood stove. So Maggie sat in the warming sunlight that speared through the window, and she tried to plan her day.
She had homework and studies. She had an ad to lay out for a local dress shop. She wanted Puller to take the girls off her hands. But Puller was in an odd mood. The death he’d witnessed had set him off. He’d been restless all night, and at first light he was up rattling a fire in the cast-iron stove. He‘d come in for coffee once, agitated in an affable way—not grumpy—but something had clearly taken hold of him.
Maggie knew the signs. He was working on a piece, and it had something to do with that accident.
Maggie shuddered that it might have happened to him. Kelly was right. She could climb better than her dad. But then, so might a three-legged dog.
Puller had been a momma’s boy, or grand-ma’s boy, depending on which woman he was around at the time. He was a big dreamy kid who approached six feet when he was only twelve.
He could not fight and he was not aggressive in sports. Smaller, tougher kids were always quick to figure him out. A pattern emerged as he would make new friends—first they would pick on him only to learn he was harmless, then they would take him on as a sidekick. Puller liked being a sidekick, liked being on the anonymous edge of the action. A boy’s trappings will change, of course, as he grows to manhood; but a few traits Puller kept as he matured. One was his longing to keep to the sidelines, and it suited his marriage. Maggie was center-stage—not in a vain way at all—she simply drew people to herself. She was Puller’s other constant and through her, the children. Puller had family. He had passion for true Art. He was a skeptic about everything else.
He’d been a deeply religious youth; and in innocence he’d taken too much to heart too soon. Such naive faiths fall easy victims in battle. Perhaps a man should grovel in sin and suffering first, then find God. Traumatized young combat vets—keyed for self-defense in all the physical ways – sometimes have little defense against an assault upon their faith.
It might seem a contradiction that Puller was seeking a symbol, having rejected each and every one. Yet symbolism is the common ground of art and religion—the abstract come to terms with what mortal man can grasp. In Puller’s mind religion was art, or it was nothing.
He was groping for a means that chill spring morning. Smitty’s death had been an act of gravity, a simple expression of vector and mass. Puller knew that. Yet it was heavy with meaning in a disturbing way and he wanted to capture it.
His workshop was a century-old carriage house, dirt-floored, and it reeked a rough-hewn history. Many hands had labored there. Puller felt part of a historical chain and it usually soothed him. But this day he was pacing in irritation, kicking little puffs of dust that collided with sunbeams and danced like the tiny angels his grand-ma had told him they were.
He‘d worked for hours trying to portray Smitty’s fall: the arc, the twisted posture, the claw-fingered grope of a panicked hand flung out to ward off death, the skeleton-like gape of Maker-meeting. The infinite surprise.
What he’d finally created was a somewhat Picasso-like torso that smacked of terror, primitive in a way that pleased him.
But it wasn’t enough.
Puller wanted a simple scene, a primal picture to set in stained glass, the obvious medium to depict an epic death in the house of God.
But which? Jehovah or the Crocodile God? Weren’t they one and the same? Smitty’s slander of one was sacrilege to the other. And so it seemed that a pagan god had reached out to extract vengeance.
An image teased Puller. He could almost see it, the fall from grace, Tower of Babel.
But Kelly began to shriek in a fearful way, a high-pitched, no-joke scream that had Puller barreling out the shop even before he could will his feet to move.
Snake! his mind blurted. Mad dog!
Kelly screamed again, little Kate wailed, Puller’s heart was in his throat when he spotted them backed into the corner of the chicken pen by that nasty Shanghai rooster. Kelly had a stick out before her, flailing it, and Kate clung to her big sister’s side.
Puller’s big boots pounded the turf. He shouted hoarsely. He saw the rooster glare at his girls, saw it crouch and bob and then strike out viciously with its spurs. A red gash was sliced on Kelly’s arm and she shrieked again, but she held onto the stick bravely and tried to beat the creature off.
Puller went mad with rage. There was no time to run all the way around the pen to the gate. Puller threw himself against the coop, bounced back, hurled himself again and crashed through in a tangle of limbs and wire and, caught helplessly for a moment, he was set upon by the rooster.
The battle that ensued was like a vaudeville skit: the big lumbering man against the six-pound rooster, big hands slapping and flailing, fowl feet slashing and stabbing, a blur of flesh and feathers.
Puller landed a right cross that sent the bird sailing. It charged back rapier-like with its whetted spurs. Its eyes flashed hatred, glinted malice, when will this human learn!
Then in a desperate lunge, as the bird leaped for his face, Puller caught it in his hands and shouted in grisly triumph. He began to break the creature like a toy: first the neck snapped, then the back cracked, then the wings and legs splintered and crackled and a quivering mass of feathers was dropped on the ground, twisted out of shape like some woman’s trampled hat.
Maggie had dashed from the house with the shotgun, her eyes on fire. She was determined this time by God—if her husband balked—to put an end to that foul chicken! When she saw the broken rooster she glared at it victoriously, and propped the shotgun against the coop. Both girls scurried tearfully toward her. Kelly’s wound trickled blood on her mother’s apron.
I TOLD YOU SO, Maggie’s glance seemed to say, and Puller looked glumly at his boots. He nudged the rooster with his foot, prepared to stomp it to mush if one breath of life remained. But it was quite dead. Hens of all colors waddled about the yard, gawking but indifferent to the fate of their lord. The younger cocks actually seemed relieved.
Puller went to his girls and hugged them. He wanted to dispel their fear... wouldn’t do for his country girls to be afraid of a lousy chicken.
Faking an Uncle Remus accent, quite a bad one, Maggie thought, Puller made up a game.
“De devil in dat chicken. Gotta dance de devil away.”
He took their hands.
“Hop on one foot!”
They hopped uncertainly, sniffling and teary-eyed.
“Now hop on de udder!”
Fewer sniffles, heartier hopping.
“Gotta do de chicken walk ‘round de devil rooster.” Puller clucked and squawked and stretched his neck. He tucked hands in armpits and flapped his elbows. He did a most ungraceful step toward the rooster and the girls, giggling by then, followed along.
“De Juju Man say, bury de devil wit spit ‘n blood! Git de shovel, girl.”
Puller kept a rusty spade leaning in the yard, for old hens that died during the damp nights. Kelly fetched it gleefully while Kate cavorted about the bird. The earth was soft. In half a minute Puller had dug an adequate hole.
He dropped the spade and took their hands. “De Juju Man say, gotta pick up dat chicken.” And he tugged their hands toward it.
They wavered. Kelly’s mouth quivered. Kate looked like she might cry again.
“De devil don’ mess wit fearless girls. Gotta bury dem bad dreams... You don’ want bad dreams, don’t ya?”
Puller took the limp bird and folded one scaly claw into each soft hand.
“Now dance around de hole... Go on. Dance de devil away!”
They giggled round and round the hole, like damsels at a Maypole, the rooster clutched between them head down, tongue protruded, it dripped blood from its beak.
“Now drop dat bird. Quick!”
It plopped into the hole with finality.
“Now spit!”
But they were laughing too hard.
“De Juju Man say spit! Gotta spit in de hole!”
Kelly managed a light spray. Kate dribbled drool down her chin. “Now for de blood. Who got some bloo-od!”
“I got blood,” Kelly volunteered, and she held up her arm. “But it’s all dried now, Papa.”
“Don’ matter none.” Puller licked his tongue along a dried streak, eyed Maggie, saw her make a face at his antic. Then he spit pink in the hole.
“Cover de devil, girls. Kick in de dirt.”
They made great sport of it: kicking dirt, jumping on the mound, strutting their new-found courage.
“Now give me a hug, you two, and let Momma clean you up.” He trembled a little as he held them, imagining the worst. That goddamned rooster might have plucked out their eyes!
The girls raced pell-mell into the house. Somewhat shame-faced, Puller walked to his wife.
“Spit and blood?” Maggie arched her brows. “You’re a savage at heart.”
“A savage at heart will… ravage a tart.”
“The next time I tell you to get rid of a rooster, you’d damn well better do it.” Tough words but her eyes were amused.
Puller stepped closer and, reaching, pressed his hand to the small of her back. Maggie had that languid way of moving which some women acquire with ease. It always thrilled Puller, the way she would arch into him. Proud, not submissive, with just the right touch of come hither.
“Now that we’re alone, maybe I should make an appointment.”
“You’re the busy lady with too much to do. We’ll have even less time in Dallas.”
“Oh, cut it out. You talk like I’m going to be gobbled up by a career.”
“Just sparring. I got my blood up.”
“You got it all over. You smell like murdered chicken,”
“I’m a defender of righteousness—” Puller drew himself up, “—I come from the trials of battle. Let me show you something in the barn?”
Maggie laughed and pushed away. “No thanks, hero. Feathers make me sneeze.” Her eyes teased as she picked up the shotgun. “Ask me again tonight.” And she was off with a wink to the house.
Puller lingered to eye the carnage. Now he’d have to repair the damned coop. Small price to pay for inspiration. He knew then with certainty what Tower of Babel lacked: the pagan symbol. Superstition without pretense. He’d still go to church if he could dance before a golden calf, Someone had stolen all the fun from religion.
“Must‘ve been an accountant—” Puller muttered. For luck, he spat on the rooster’s grave.
CHAPTER THREE
Puller’s flair for such drama—his big man’s expansiveness—belied a confidence which was not quite his own. Staring at him from the mirror was a strong, steady sort of guy who’d been in combat. He’d bar room brawled. This guy looked as if he should be tough, so Puller assumed a certain posture for him. A limited self-assurance, restricted to the confines of Puller’s life: his trade, his family and friends, his plantation lifestyle. To some degree Puller could influence these. But he shied from much of the outside world.
Puller had a talent for making things. He would piddle with doo-dads, bric-a-brac for flea market sales, clever pieces in brass or glass or wood. But, he felt, they had not much heart. His own art, his real art he told himself, would not be clever. But he could not yet take himself seriously. Art was his last illusion and he could not bear to fail. It was safer not to try.
Until Tower of Babel, that is, which was a calling he could not refuse. It stole his evening hours and left him fretful at the construction site. Puller’s laid-back life suddenly became urgent; he had no time to worry that he might fail. It was heady stuff that he savored.
One night, after Smitty’s bizarre demise, he stood back to admire the piece that events had evoked. Puller was quietly pleased. At last here was something from the heart.
Tower of Babel was a stained glass mosaic. To give the illusion of depth it relied upon contrasts of colors and silhouettes. No details were painted, as many Classical pieces had been.
A falling man was at the center of the work: elongated, contorted as if in floating dance, deeply blue. Behind this figure, a crimson grid work thrust itself heavenward: part scaffold, part parapet, an edifice to anchor the scene of the ill-fated Tower, jagged and crumbled, just as Man’s gift of understanding had crumbled, when the Tower was cast down.
Puller’s most tedious handiwork was the back-dropped sky that knitted together the various elements. It was a blend of fragments that began in soft blues and greens and drew one’s gaze to the yellows and reds of a sullenly setting sun. Sun like an eyeball trailing blood. Pagan whimsy.
Puller paced round and round in the brightly lit carriage house. Babel was framed in oak. He had hung it from a rafter and, viewing it then, he knew a curious regret.
Where was the new vision that would take its place?
His own question went begging. Puller knew where his heart would stray, set loose to wander. He stared at the mosaic, he gazed through it and beyond, he saw Vietnam.
“Corporal. Hobbs!”
“Yo!”
“Gunny wants you! FDC bunker!”
“Right!”
When Puller sat up on the cot, his head entered the trapped air zone. With the sides of the tent rolled high, cooler air wafted through. Three feet above the deck, though, it was one hundred and thirty degrees.
His helmet lay beside the cot. It was stuffed with gook money and a list. Puller put on his shirt and around that his cartridge belt.
“Anybody else?” he called.
“Don’t get the clap, killer.”
“If I do, Lewis, I’ll give it to you next time we stand guard.”
“Please, no, man! You’ll ruin the best gums north of Subic Bay!”
“Fuck you.” Lewis griped.
“Hey Puller! Don’t get any booze with a fake American label.”
“Is that it? Don’t anybody wanna’ kiss me good-bye?”
“About face, corporal! Forward fucking march!”
“I might hit a mine.”
“Never mind your own ass. Protect our money with your life!”
Puller stuffed the paper in his pockets. He plopped on his helmet, snatched up his M-14 and stooped as he slipped through the tent flap.
Picture him twenty years younger and twenty pounds slimmer. Picture a world of white sand—almost snow white—bejeweled in the distance by palms and green gardens and rice paddies. Picture a large oval in this exotic scene, an oval about the size of a football field where the sand had been banked six feet high all around, and barbed wire set beyond. Picture machine gun bunkers and large dusty tents and at one end, on the side that faced the mountains, picture six large cannons on wheels with shell casings and other accouterments of war.
There was always a stink from the shitters. It blended harmoniously with the paddy smell. At high noon there was no shade and barely a breath of breeze. Even the foot-long lizards lay hidden from the sun.
The Gunny stood for a moment at the entrance to the bunker. He whistled Puller inside. It was damp there and relatively cool, a dim place save for the stabs of light around the radios and maps.
The Gunny handed him a wad of bills and another list.
“Get the best prices you can, Hobbs.”
“Sure, Gunny.”
“Take your time. Enjoy yourself. The Major’s real pleased with the ambush the other night.”
In that very bunker, three nights past, the young corporal had taken issue with a staff sergeant over the placement of an ambush. Puller had convinced the Major, and then he had led the rifle squad into the night, to his chosen locale.
Puller was smugly pleased with himself. They’d caught a platoon of VC regulars flat-footed—regulars, by Christ—with uniforms and every-thing! In the explosion of rifle fire that had prematurely erupted, none were injured on either side. But the enemy had stumbled headlong into another ambush half a mile away. And though the grunts made the kills and got the credit, it was acknowledged whose good judgment had set off that chain of events.
Besides, if you’re a cannoncocker you’re not inclined to be impressed with the infantry. Yet Puller wasn’t even an artilleryman. He was a radio tech. But he was a by God for real squad leader now, and he patrolled ten square miles each morning and he got to sneak around in the boonies almost every night.
It didn’t matter that no one else wanted the job. Puller was ecstatic.
“Take the jeep parked outside. The mark one-ten. Be back by nineteen hundred hours.”
“Thanks, Gunny.”
“You made the sergeant’s list, kid.”
“No shit?” Puller grinned big.
“You’re kind of boot. But I’m rooting for you... Now get outta here. And don’t catch the clap!”
“Naw. Trung’s girls are clean. Clap is bad for business.”
“One of these days that gook’ll cut your throat while he’s shaving you.”
“No chance, Gunny. He’s my pal!”
“We ain’t got any pal’s over here!”
But Puller was out the bunker and the gunnery sergeant‘s warning fell on exiting ears. The jeep cranked over smartly. One of the new ones, it could spurt to sixty on the flats. A real ambush buster. At least that’s what Levin had said, before he flipped one over in a ditch. Now Levin was out of the war with a broken leg.
Poor sucker, Puller thought.
He was driving out the gate when the howitzers went off, six at once in simultaneous fire. There was an earth-shaking BL-BLAM! Puller hardly flinched. Routine. The old salts could sleep through it. With his imagination fired, Puller was concerned about the ambush that might wait anywhere down the road.. a brief fantasy flared, his last stand by the jeep, blazing away as he went down... once out the gate, he jacked a round into the chamber of his rifle and checked that the safety was on. Then he cruised away.
Just outside the firebase lay Route 1, the only north to south highway in Vietnam. Near the cities it was haphazardly paved. Elsewhere it was a dirt track like the boonie roads in Texas.
Puller drove south. The plain of snow-white coastal sand laid mainly to his left, though fingers of sand thrust west of the road here and there. Kilo Battery firebase lay in one such rivulet. But most of the land west of the road was red dirt. Farmland, huddled over by the foothills and just behind them, the Annamese Cordillera, the mountains, majestic in the bright sun. They held great mystique for Puller, whose morning patrols took him just to the edge of the foothills. Beyond those hills it was a free fire zone: anything that moved could get blasted.