The Very Best of F & SF v1 (43 page)

His discoveries
went unnoticed for another decade or so. On June 27, 1899, the disease came to
San Francisco. The governor of California, acting in protection of business
interests, made it a felony to publicize the presence of the plague. People
died instead of
syphilitic
septicemia.
Because of this deception, thirteen
of the Western states are still designated plague areas.

The state team
went into the high country in early October. Think of us as soldiers. One of
the great mysteries of history is why the plague finally disappeared. The rats
are still here. The fleas are still here. The disease is still here; it shows
up in isolated cases like Caroline’s. Only the epidemic is missing. We’re in
the middle of the fourth assault. The enemy is elusive. The war is unwinnable.
We remain vigilant.

The Vogelsang
Camp had already been closed for the winter. No snow yet, but the days were
chilly and the nights below freezing. If the plague was present, it wasn’t
really going to be a problem until spring. We amused ourselves, poking sticks
into warm burrows looking for dead rodents. We set out some traps. Not many.
You don’t want to decrease the rodent population.

Deprive the
fleas of their natural hosts, and they just look for replacements. They just
bring the war home.

We picked up a
few bodies, but no positives. We could have dusted the place anyway as a
precaution.
Silent Spring
came out in 1962, but I hadn’t read it.

I saw the coyote
on the fourth day. She came out of a hole on the bank of Lewis Creek and stood
for a minute with her nose in the air. She was grayed with age around her
muzzle, possibly a bit arthritic. She shook out one hind leg. She shook out the
other. Then, right as I watched, Caroline’s boy climbed out of the burrow after
the coyote.

I couldn’t see
the boy’s face. There was too much hair in the way. But his body was hairless,
and even though his movements were peculiar and inhuman, I never thought that
he was anything but a boy. Twelve years old or maybe thirteen, I thought,
although small for thirteen. Wild as a wolf, obviously. Raised by coyotes
maybe. But clearly human. Circumcised, if anyone is interested.

I didn’t move. I
forgot about Procopius and stepped into the
National Enquirer
instead. Marilyn was in my
den. Elvis was in my rinse cycle. It was my lucky day. I was amusing myself
when I should have been awed. It was a stupid mistake. I wish now that I’d been
someone different.

The boy yawned
and closed his eyes, then shook himself awake and followed the coyote along the
creek and out of sight. I went back to camp. The next morning we surrounded the
hole and netted them coming out. This is the moment it stopped being such a
lark. This is an uncomfortable memory. The coyote was terrified, and we let her
go. The boy was terrified, and we kept him. He scratched us and bit and
snarled. He cut me, and I thought it was one of his nails, but he turned out to
be holding a can opener. He was covered with fleas, fifty or sixty of them
visible at a time, which jumped from him to us, and they all bit, too. It was
like being attacked by a cloud. We sprayed the burrow and the boy and
ourselves, but we’d all been bitten by then. We took an immediate blood sample.
The boy screamed and rolled his eyes all the way through it. The reading was
negative. By the time we all calmed down, the boy really didn’t like us.

Clint and I tied
him up, and we took turns carrying him down to Tuolumne. His odor was somewhere
between dog and boy, and worse than both. We tried to clean him up in the
showers at the ranger station. Clint and I both had to
strip
to do this, so God knows what he must have thought we were about. He reacted to
the touch of water as if it burned. There was no way to shampoo his hair, and
no one with the strength to cut it. So we settled for washing his face and
hands, put our clothes back on, gave him a sweater that he dropped by the
drain, put him in the backseat of my Rambler, and drove to Sacramento. He cried
most of the way, and when we went around curves he allowed his body to be flung
unresisting from one side of the car to the other, occasionally knocking his
head against the door handle with a loud, painful sound.

I bought him a
ham sandwich when we stopped for gas in Modesto, but he wouldn’t eat it. He was
a nice-looking kid, had a normal face, freckled, with blue eyes, brown hair,
and if he’d had a haircut you could have imagined him in some Sears catalog
modeling raincoats.

One of life’s
little ironies. It was October 14. We rescue a wild boy from isolation and
deprivation and winter in the mountains. We bring him civilization and human
contact. We bring him straight into the Cuban Missile Crisis.

Maybe that’s why
you don’t remember reading about him in the paper. We turned him over to the
state of California, which had other things on its mind.

The state put
him in Mercy Hospital and assigned maybe a hundred doctors to the case. I was
sent back to Yosemite to continue looking for fleas. The next time I saw the
boy, about a week had passed. He’d been cleaned up, of course. Scoured of
parasites, inside and out. Measured. He was just over four feet tall and
weighed seventy-five pounds. His head was all but shaved so as not to interfere
with the various neurological tests, which had turned out normal and were being
redone. He had been observed rocking in a seated position, left to right and
back to front, mouth closed, chin up, eyes staring at nothing. Occasionally he
had small spasms, convulsive movements, which suggested abnormalities in the
nervous system. His teeth needed extensive work. He was sleeping under his bed.
He wouldn’t touch his Hawaiian Delight. He liked us even less than before.

About this time
I had a brief conversation with a doctor whose name I didn’t notice. I was
never able to find him again. Red-haired doctor with glasses. Maybe thirty,
thirty-two years old. “He’s got some unusual musculature,” this red-haired
doctor told me. “Quite singular. Especially the development of the legs. He’s
shown us some really surprising capabilities.” The boy started to howl, an
unpleasant, inhuman sound that started in his throat and ended in yours. It was
so unhappy. It made me so unhappy to hear it. I never followed up on what the
doctor had said.

I felt peculiar
about the boy, responsible for him. He had such a
boyish
face. I visited
several times, and I took him little presents, a Dodgers baseball cap and an
illustrated
Goldilocks and
the Three Bears
with the words printed big.
Pretty silly, I suppose, but what would you have gotten? I drove to Fresno and
asked Manuel Rodriguez if he could identify the can opener. “Not with any
assurance,” he said. I talked personally to Sergeant Redburn, the man from
Missing Persons. When he told me about the Beckers, I went to the state library
and read the newspaper articles for myself. Sergeant Redburn thought the boy
might be just about the same age as Paul Becker, and I thought so, too. And I
know the sergeant went to talk to Anna Becker’s mother about it, because he
told me she was going to come and try to identify the boy.

By now it’s
November. Suddenly I get a call sending me back to Yosemite. In Sacramento they
claim the team has reported a positive, but when I arrive in Yosemite, the
whole team denies it. Fleas are astounding creatures. They can be frozen for a
year or more and then revived to full activity. But November in the mountains
is a stupid time to be out looking for them. It’s already snowed once, and it
snows again, so that I can’t get my team back out. We spend three weeks in the
ranger station at Vogelsang huddled around our camp stoves while they air-drop
supplies to us. And when I get back, a doctor I’ve never seen before, a Dr.
Frank Li, tells me the boy, who was not Paul Becker, died suddenly of a seizure
while he slept. I have to work hard to put away the sense that it was my fault,
that I should have left the boy where he belonged.

And then I hear
Sergeant Redburn has jumped off the Golden Gate Bridge.

Non
Gratum Anus Rodentum.
Not worth a rat’s ass.
This was the unofficial motto of the tunnel rats. We’re leaping ahead here. Now
it’s 1967. Vietnam. Does the name Cu Chi mean anything to you? If not, why not?
The district of Cu Chi is the most bombed, shelled, gassed, strafed,
defoliated, and destroyed piece of earth in the history of warfare. And beneath
Cu Chi runs the most complex part of a network of tunnels that connects Saigon
all the way to the Cambodian border.

I want you to
imagine, for a moment, a battle fought entirely in the dark. Imagine that you
are in a hole that is too hot and too small. You cannot stand up; you must move
on your hands and knees by touch and hearing alone through a terrain you can’t
see toward an enemy you can’t see. At any moment you might trip a mine, put
your hand on a snake, put your face on a decaying corpse. You know people who
have done all three of these things. At any moment the air you breathe might
turn to gas, the tunnel become so small you can’t get back out; you could fall
into a well of water and drown; you could be buried alive. If you are lucky,
you will put your knife into an enemy you may never see before he puts his
knife into you. In Cu Chi the Vietnamese and the Americans created, inch by
inch, body part by body part, an entirely new type of warfare.

Among the
Vietnamese who survived are soldiers who lived in the tiny underground tunnels
without surfacing for five solid years. Their eyesight was permanently damaged.
They suffered constant malnutrition, felt lucky when they could eat spoiled
rice and rats. Self-deprivation was their weapon; they used it to force the
soldiers of the most technically advanced army in the world to face them with
knives, one on one, underground, in the dark.

On the American
side, the tunnel rats were all volunteers. You can’t force a man to do what he
cannot do. Most Americans hyperventilated, had attacks of claustrophobia, were
too big. The tunnel rats could be no bigger than the Vietnamese, or they wouldn’t
fit through the tunnels. Most of the tunnel rats were Hispanics and Puerto
Ricans. They stopped wearing after-shave so the Vietcong wouldn’t smell them.
They stopped chewing gum, smoking, and eating candy because it impaired their
ability to sense the enemy. They had to develop the sonar of bats. They had, in
their own words, to become animals. What they did in the tunnels, they said,
was unnatural.

In 1967 I was
attached to the 521st Medical Detachment. I was an old man by Vietnamese
standards, but then, I hadn’t come to fight in the Vietnam War. Remember that
the fourth pandemic began in China. Just before he died, Chinese poet Shih
Tao-nan wrote:

Few days following the death of the rats,

Men pass away like falling walls.

Between 1965 and
1970, 24,848 cases of the plague were reported in Vietnam.

War is the
perfect breeding ground for disease. They always go together, the trinity: war,
disease, and cruelty. Disease was my war. I’d been sent to Vietnam to keep my
war from interfering with everybody else’s war.

In March we
received by special courier a package containing three dead rats. The rats had
been found—already dead, but leashed—inside a tunnel in Hau Nghia province.
Also found—but not sent to us—were a syringe, a phial containing yellow fluid,
and several cages. I did the test myself. One of the dead rats carried the
plague.

There has been
speculation that the Vietcong were trying to use plague rats as weapons. It’s
also possible they were merely testing the rats prior to eating them
themselves. In the end, it makes little difference. The plague was there in the
tunnels whether the Vietcong used it or not.

I set up a tent
outside Cu Chi town to give boosters to the tunnel rats. One of the men I
inoculated was David Rivera. “David has been into the tunnels so many times, he’s
a legend,” his companions told me.

“Yeah,” said
David. “Right. Me and Victor.”

“Victor Charlie?”
I said. I was just making conversation. I could see David, whatever his record
in the tunnels, was afraid of the needle. He held out one stiff arm. I was
trying to get him to relax.

“No. Not hardly.
Victor is the one.” He took his shot, put his shirt back on, gave up his place
to the next man in line.

“Victor can see
in the dark,” the next man told me.

“Victor Charlie?”
I asked again.

“No,” the man
said impatiently.

“You want to
know about Victor?” David said. “Let me tell you about Victor. Victor’s the one
who comes when someone goes down and doesn’t come back out.”

“Victor can go
faster on his hands and knees than most men can run,” the other man said. I
pressed cotton on his arm after I withdrew the needle; he got up from the
table. A third man sat down and took off his shirt.

David still
stood next to me. “I go into this tunnel. I’m not too scared, because I think
it’s cold; I’m not
feeling
anybody else there, and I’m maybe a quarter of a mile in, on my
hands and knees, when I can almost see a hole in front of me, blacker than
anything else in the tunnel, which is all black, you know. So I go into the
hole, feeling my way, and I have this funny sense like I’m not moving into the
hole; the hole is moving over to me. I put out my hands, and the ground moves
under them.”