The Healer's War (29 page)

William had the Army equivalent of a church key in his pocket. A few hundred yards farther down the ridge we found a stream, shallowlooking and only about fourteen feet wide. We choked down the cold food straight from the can.

'$'Wisht I had my canteen cup and a little c-4," William said. "I could heat this shit."

"What's c-4?" I asked.

"You know, plastic explosive."

We filled the cans with water over and over till our arms ached from dipping and lifting. The morning had been hot and muggy and the water felt wonderful when it splashed me. William waded into the water. "You wanna get wet, lady? Come on ahead, then. We gotta cross this fucker anyway." He waded across without blowing ;mything up.

Ahn looked dubiously at the rushing waters of the stream. I stepped into the bone-chilling water and could see right away that he was going to have a problem. The force of it was enough to knock you off your feet. "Come on, Ahn. Hang on to me." I let Ahn hold on to my shoulder while I dipped down to my knees to get wet and cold all over. The night before, I'd thought I'd never be warm again, but now I couldn't believe how great it felt. Then we sloshed out. William, just a head of us, began ripping off his clothes.

I scarcely had time to wonder what in the hell he was up to when I saw for myself. An inch-long leech was fattening itself on my forearm. I dumped Ahn unceremoniously on the bank and started stripping too. So did he. I started batting at the bloodsuckers, trying to pull them Off.

"Don't do that," William said. "You'll break the head off in there and it make you sick. Break up a salt tablet, put on its back. It'll pull out. Cigarette works better, but mine are long gone."

Ahn, bare as the day he was born, bent over his clothes and pulled a rather soggy pack of Kools out of his pants pocket. He also produced a Zippo, with which he expertly lit the cigarette he gave me. William was already at work on his crop of bloodsuckers with the salt. For his own, Ahn just plucked them out. You aren't supposed to be able to do that, but he did, pinching them up near their heads. It worked, anyway. When we were done, we had a total body count of about forty-eight leeches.

I turned my back on the men while I did a search-and-destroy mission on the leeches in my lingerie. I am really not all that shy, but guys who are not your lovers can be more modest than somebody's grandma, on your behalf as well as theirs. It is often ridiculously difficult to get a male patient to accept a urinal from a female nurse. I waited until I had my fatigue blouse on again to turn back around. Sure enough, William was buttoning up as rapidly as he could. Ahn was sitting in the grass, smoking a Kool with the savoir faire of James Bond.

In a debonair manner, he offered a smoke to me, to William.

"No thanks, kid. I tryin' to quit," William said.

The only thing I hadn't taken off was the amulet, and now it had fallen outside my uniform blouse, flashing back the sun like a mirror. William sat down beside Ahn to pull on his boots. "Uh, Lieutenant?"

"Huh?"

'Bout last night. I still don't recollect much of what happened, but what I reckon's I just sort of went dinky dao from all this duckin' and hidin' shit. You know I don't mean no disrespect to women, and it't got nothin' to do with black or white. I wouldn't want you to am think I-to think-"

I knew what he meant, but then it was so soon after the time when blacks were beaten for using the wrong rest room or riding in the front of the bus, when civil rights workers were being murdered, that it was awfully hard to talk about racial stuff, especially between a man and a woman, especially an enlisted black man and a white woman officer, which is just sort of too parallel to the darky-plantation belle bullshit.

"William, let's not get into that shit, okay?" I said. "I am not nearly as worried about the possibility of having you after my ass as I am about the possibility of getting it shot off. I'm real glad we found each other because I don't know a damn thing about the jungle. But I gotta know: is there some real sure way to snap you out of your sleep, something maybe your mom used to wake you up when you were a little kid?

Because you almost killed both of us last night. I know you didn't mean to, but-"

He shook his head. "I never done nothin' like that in my life before. I never even had no nightmares before I come to this place. Used to sleep like a rock." He handed me the can opener. "Here. Maybe you can jab me with this if I go off again. Only be careful where you stick it, huh?"

As he handed it to me, his aura wavered a little into the brown and his eyes suddenly got wet. "Goddamn, I am just fucking up all over the damn place. First I just roll under the bed and don't warn the men and they all get blown to shit, then I try to kill you-I don't know what the fuck is happening to me."

Ahn tapped him on the arm and offered him a cigarette again.

"Thanks, kid." He lit it this time and took a long drag, then offered it to me.

I don't smoke, but I took a drag too. "Look, man, you don't have the corner on fucking up." The chopper crash flashed across my mind.

I pulled on my trousers and tucked the amulet inside my shirt. William watched me with more relaxed interest now.

"What's that you wearin'? Where's your dog tags?"

"In my pocket. They got to irritating my neck."

"Yeah, well, if I'se you, I'd get shed of that rank sewed onto your collar too. Officers is the first individuals Charlie try to grease."

I cut off the ends of my collar with my bandage scissors. "William, how long do you think those C rat cans had been there? Do you think that unit is still nearby somewhere?"

"Sure. I do. Them and a whole bunch of others. And a whole bunch of VC too. just depend on who we find first. You ain't talkin' to no trusty African guide, bwana. I didn't have much call to learn trackin'

in Cleveland. Damned if I know how old them cans was. You the woman.

You probably know more about canned goods than me."

"Not if I can help it," I said. I've never been the domestic type.

We walked just inside the edge of the jungle, down along the edge of a valley again that day. The valley was full of soft grass and little round fisliponds and the rain blew gently across it, sweeping toward us, carrying a heady, fresh scent that reminded me of spring on Lake of the Ozarks. The jungle smelled more like a cross between the zoo, the alley in back of the A&P the day they tossed out the produce, and the aggressively green, earthy smell of a hothouse. "Can't we walk down there?" I asked William. "It'd be easier walking, especially for Ahn."

"Easier to get blowed away, you mean. See, some of them things hit but they don't explode. Plus the VC likes to set booby traps round that kind of thing. No way, mamasan. This soldier stickin' to high ground."

When he spoke to me, mostly William seemed perfectly okay. He was one of the nicest people who ever tried to strangle me, in fact. But when he was walking point, not looking back, not staying in touch with what was going on with us, his spine would twitch and his head circled and dipped like a snake's, sniffing the wind, looking for signs. We started climbing again, up and up into really thickly interwoven jungle with trees growing out of other trees and vines so thickly twined together that we had to stop and climb over them or separate them to climb through. Ahn and I had a tough time keeping up. The boy's adrenaline was finally wearing off and his little face looked pinched again. He started whining. He wanted to be carried, regressing, the way sick kids do, to an earlier age, where people were supposed to take care of them.

"No can do, babysan. You break my back," I told him.

He screwed up his face as if he was going to cry. "No way. You carry me before."

"Yeah, and I may have to again, but only in an emergency. I'm afraid I'm not strong like your own mama, babysan. No can carry water buffalo on each shoulder and a water jug on my head."

He smiled a little and patted my butt. "No sweat, mamasan. Ahn take care of you."

"Right. We're a great team."

William swung around on us with a look of such truculence that I feared for a moment he'd lost it again. "You people em di," he said, and whirled back around to take a step. Ahn was staring a little ahead of William with his eyes almost as round as mine.

"Dung lai, William," he yelped. "Stop!"

"What the fu-" William began, then abruptly stepped back and knelt down, feeling along a line in front of him.

"What is it?" I asked.

He didn't answer for a moment or two as he traced the thing back into the trees, made some sort of adjustment, and let out a deep sigh.

"Thanks, kid. Mamasan, you better take a look at this."

"William, I wish you wouldn't call me mamasan," I complained as I clawed my way through the leaves and vines that kept smacking me in the face.

"Or Lieutenant for that matter. What's the good of me cutting off my bars if you go announcing it all over the place? My name's Kitty."

"Yes, ma'am, Lieutenant Kitty, ma'am," he said snottily. "Now the private wishes to request, Lieutenant Kitty, ma'am, that you kindly take a look at this here trip wire so's you be able to spot a booby trap next time you be seein' one."

"Don't be a pain in the ass," I grumbled, but I took a look. It was a nasty apparatus-a dead log with a lot of pungi sticks set at angles that would make a porcupine out of anyone who tripped its mechanism. The whittled bamboo sticks with the excrement on the tips were more chillingly malicious than a grenade would have been. I had already seen the infections and damage they could cause-a man could lose his limb or life as surely to this sort of trap as to high explosives or gunfire.

"Right there is how these people be lookin' out for themselves," he told me. There was no anger in his voice. In fact, it was becoming increasingly remote and flat. The old wine color crept back into his aura, along with a grieving umber, and I knew he was seeing himself impaled on that device, feeling that maybe he should have been.

We climbed for two more days, through knots of gnarled root and twisted undergrowth that surely was usually handled with machetes. We were constantly climbing, tripping, trying to thread our way through it like darning needles through finely meshed silk. I feared I was going to grab hold sometime of a fat snake instead of a fat vine, and the thought of that slowed me down even more as I doublechecked the aura of the growth in front of me to make sure the long things were uniformly plant-green. A little watery daylight filtered through from those towering top trees, splashing onto the broad flat leaves of the trees that grew to about half their height, and down through the undergrowth bristling above our heads, to sluice down the backs of our necks or splat into our faces. By that time the rain was no longer cool and refreshing but warm as sweat. As it evaporated, shivers ran down my spine without relieving the sensation of being slowly steamed.

Ahn started sneezing that afternoon, and his stump seeped pus and trickled smears of blood through the rough bandages I tried to keep over it. I was one big ache. My head throbbed from the constant glow of the jungle and my muscles burned. Every one of them, when asked to lift a body part over another clump of roots cannibalizing another giant log, felt as if heated lead slabs had been specially implanted in it. I had to think about how to position my fingers every time I grabbed another sticky, bug-infested vine, I was that exhausted.

In the dense forest we rarely saw the birds or monkeys. We heard them, like ghosts in old houses scuttling through the upper stories of the jungle, but they were almost always just out of sight, except for the flash of bright feathers or the suggestion of a tail. So much greenery lay above us that I saw animal auras only occasionally, like slightly bigger Christmas lights among the tiny glows of insects and reptiles.

Much of the time all I could see of William was a glimmer of his aura, a flicker of wine or blue bobbing like a will-o'-the-wisp in the sea of green surrounding us. Except for the help of the amulet, there were several times when we might have become separated because Ahn and I slowed more as the day wore on.

Toward evening the watery green light diffused even more, until you got the feeling of being deep under the sea, surrounded by seaweed, a feeling enhanced by being continually soaked and with the smell of wet greenery always in our nostrils.

Ground fog swirled up from the forest floor, and soon all I could see of Ahn was a grimy teal pool of light. William doubled back for us, his legs lost in the fog. He'd put on his fatigue shirt, but now and then he shook his shoulders like a dog having a bad dream and the goose bumps rose on my own arms. Ahn had a sneezing fit that wouldn't stop, and William glared at us and disappeared into the jungle again.

We couldn't even hear each other well because the sound of the rain blotted out everything but the shrillest cries from the creatures in the treetops. The beat of the rain thudded and splatted but was never regular, so that you couldn't get used to it or discount it. I was glad for it in some ways. It kept me from being hypnotized by the monotony of struggling through the shrubbery. Since I couldn't be sure I was following exactly in William's footsteps, I was constantly scanning the growth at shin level, looking for more booby traps. Once I nearly ran into trouble looking too low. I started to pass a tree vine, and a spadeshaped face surrounded by a tomato-red glow met me almost nose to nose. I fell backward so quickly I knocked Ahn into a fan-shaped fern.

The snake slithered away until the last flick of red was obscured by the jungle's green glow. Mom always claimed snakes were more afraid of people than vice versa, and I was glad she was right.

After the snake, I slowed down even more, which was a good thing. We were barely moving when, a short distance ahead, a claycolored triangular glow popped up from the ground and into the milky, roiling fog. It wavered for a moment and bent toward the ground, then with a scrabbling noise that sounded no louder than a mouse might make gradually elongated into an oval the size of a small person.