The Very Best of F & SF v1 (44 page)

“Shit,” said the
third man. I didn’t know if it was David’s story or the shot. A fourth man sat
down.

“I risk a light,
and the whole tunnel is covered with spiders, covered like wallpaper, only
worse, two or three bodies thick,” David said. “I’m sitting on them, and the
spiders are already inside my pants and inside my shirt and covering my
arms—and it’s fucking Vietnam, you know; I don’t even know if they’re poisonous
or not. Don’t care, really, because I’m going to die just from having them on
me. I can feel them moving toward my face. So I start to scream, and then this
little guy comes and pulls me back out a ways, and then he sits for maybe half
an hour, calm as can be, picking spiders off me. When I decide to live after
all, I go back out. I tell everybody. ‘That was Victor,’ they say. ‘Had to be
Victor.’ ”

“I know a guy
says Victor pulled him from a hole,” the fourth soldier said. “He falls through
a false floor down maybe twelve straight feet into this tiny little trap with
straight walls all around and no way up, and Victor comes down after him
. Jumps
back out, holding
the guy in his arms. Twelve feet; the guy swears it.”

“Tiny little guy,”
said David. “Even for V.C., this guy’d be tiny.”

“He just looks
tiny,” the second soldier said. “I know a guy saw Victor buried under more than
a ton of dirt. Victor just digs his way out again. No broken bones, no nothing.”

Inexcusably
slow, and I’d been told twice, but I had just figured out that Victor wasn’t
short for V.C. “I’d better inoculate this Victor,” I said. “You think you could
send him in?”

The men stared
at me. “You don’t get it, do you?” said David.

“Victor don’t
report,” the fourth man says.

“No C.O.,” says
the third man. “No unit.”

“He’s got the
uniform,” the second man tells me. “So we don’t know if he’s special forces of
some sort or if he’s AWOL down in the tunnels.”

“Victor lives in
the tunnels,” said David. “Nobody up top has ever seen him.”

I tried to talk
to one of the doctors about it.” Tunnel vision,” he told me. “We get a lot of
that. Forget it.”

In May we got a
report of more rats—some leashed, some in cages—in a tunnel near Ah Nhon Tay
village in the Ho Bo Woods. But no one wanted to go in and get them, because
these rats were alive. And somebody got the idea this was my job, and somebody
else agreed. They would clear the tunnel of V.C. first, they promised me. So I
volunteered.

Let me tell you
about rats. Maybe they’re not responsible for the plague, but they’re still
destructive to every kind of life-form and beneficial to none. They eat
anything that lets them. They breed during all seasons. They kill their own
kind; they can do it singly, but they can also organize and attack in hordes.
The brown rat is currently embroiled in a war of extinction against the black
rat. Most animals behave better than that.

I’m not afraid
of rats. I read somewhere that about the turn of the century, a man in western
Illinois heard a rustling in his fields one night. He got out of bed and went
to the back door, and behind his house he saw a great mass of rats that
stretched all the way to the horizon. I suppose this would have frightened me.
All those naked tails in the moonlight. But I thought I could handle a few rats
in cages, no problem.

It wasn’t hard
to locate them. I was on my hands and knees, but using a flashlight. I thought
there might be some loose rats, too, and that I ought to look at least; and I’d
also heard that there was an abandoned V.C. hospital in the tunnel that I was
curious about. So I left the cages and poked around in the tunnels a bit; and
when I’d had enough, I started back to get the rats, and I hit a water trap.
There hadn’t been a water trap before, so I knew I must have taken a wrong
turn. I went back a bit, took another turn, and then another, and hit the water
trap again. By now I was starting to panic. I couldn’t find anything I’d ever
seen before except the damn water. I went back again, farther without turning,
took a turn, hit the trap.

I must have tried
seven, eight times. I no longer thought the tunnel was cold. I thought the V.C.
had closed the door on my original route so that I wouldn’t find it again. I
thought they were watching every move I made, pretty easy with me waving my
flashlight about. I switched it off. I could hear them in the dark, their
eyelids closing and opening, their hands tightening on their knives. I was
sweating, head to toe, like I was ill, like I had the mysterious English
sweating sickness or the
Suette des
Picards.

And I knew that
to get back to the entrance, I had to go into the water. I sat and thought that
through, and when I finished, I wasn’t the same man I’d been when I began the
thought.

It would have
been bad to have to crawl back through the tunnels with no light. To go into
the water with no light, not knowing how much water there was, not knowing if
one lungful of air would be enough or if there were underwater turns so you
might get lost before you found air again, was something you’d have to be crazy
to do. I had to do it, so I had to be crazy first. It wasn’t as hard as you
might think. It took me only a minute.

I filled my
lungs as full as I could. Emptied them once. Filled them again and dove in.
Someone grabbed me by the ankle and hauled me back out. It frightened me so
much I swallowed water, so I came up coughing and kicking. The hand released me
at once, and I lay there for a bit, dripping water and still sweating, too,
feeling the part of the tunnel that was directly below my body turn to mud,
while I tried to convince myself that no one was touching me.

Then I was crazy
enough to turn my light on. Far down the tunnel, just within range of the
light, knelt a little kid dressed in the uniform of the rats. I tried to get
closer to him. He moved away, just the same amount I had moved, always just in
the light. I followed him down one tunnel, around a turn, down another.
Outside, the sun rose and set. We crawled for days. My right knee began to
bleed.

“Talk to me,” I
asked him. He didn’t.

Finally he stood
up ahead of me. I could see the rat cages, and I knew where the entrance was
behind him. And then he was gone. I tried to follow with my flashlight, but he’d
jumped or something. He was just gone.

“Victor,” Rat
Six told me when I finally came out. “Goddamn Victor.”

Maybe so. If
Victor was the same little boy I put a net over in the high country in
Yosemite.

When I came out,
they told me less than three hours had passed. I didn’t believe them. I told
them about Victor. Most of them didn’t believe me. Nobody outside the tunnels
believed in Victor. “We just sent home one of the rats,” a doctor told me. “He
emptied his whole gun into a tunnel. Claimed there were V.C. all around him,
but that he got them. He shot every one. Only, when we went down to clean it
up, there were no bodies. All his bullets were found in the walls.

“Tunnel vision.
Everyone sees things. It’s the dark. Your eyes no longer impose any limit on
the things you can see.”

I didn’t listen.
I made demands right up the chain of command for records: recruitment, AWOLS,
special projects. I wanted to talk to everyone who’d ever seen Victor. I wrote
Clint to see what he remembered of the drive back from Yosemite. I wrote a
thousand letters to Mercy Hospital, telling them I’d uncovered their little
game. I demanded to speak with the red-haired doctor with glasses whose name I
never knew. I wrote the Curry Company and suggested they conduct a private
investigation into the supposed suicide of Sergeant Redburn. I asked the CIA
what they had done with Paul’s parents. That part was paranoid. I was so
unstrung I thought they’d killed his parents and given him to the coyote to
raise him up for the tunnel wars. When I calmed down, I knew the CIA would
never be so farsighted. I knew they’d just gotten lucky. I didn’t know what
happened to the parents; still don’t.

There were so
many crazy people in Vietnam, it could take them a long time to notice a new
one, but I made a lot of noise. A team of three doctors talked to me for a
total of seven hours. Then they said I was suffering from delayed guilt over
the death of my little dog-boy, and that it surfaced, along with every other
weak link in my personality, in the stress and the darkness of the tunnels.
They sent me home. I missed the moon landing, because I was having a nice
little time in a hospital of my own.

When I was
finally and truly released, I went looking for Caroline Crosby. The Crosbys
still lived in Palo Alto, but Caroline did not. She’d started college at
Berkeley, but then she’d dropped out. Her parents hadn’t seen her for several
months.

Her mother took
me through their beautiful house and showed me Caroline’s old room. She had a
canopy bed and her own bathroom. There was a mirror with old pictures of some
boy on it. A throw rug with roses. There was a lot of pink. “We drive through
the Haight every weekend,” Caroline’s mother said. “Just looking.” She was pale
and controlled. “If you should see her, would you tell her to call?”

I would not. I
made one attempt to return one little boy to his family, and look what
happened. Either Sergeant Redburn jumped from the Golden Gate Bridge in the
middle of his investigation or he didn’t. Either Paul Becker died in Mercy
Hospital or he was picked up by the military to be their special weapon in a
special war.

I’ve thought
about it now for a couple of decades, and I’ve decided that, at least for Paul,
once he’d escaped from the military, things didn’t work out so badly. He must
have felt more at home in the tunnels under Cu Chi than he had under the bed in
Mercy Hospital.

There is a
darkness inside us all that is animal. Against some things— untreated or
untreatable disease, for example, or old age—the darkness is all
we
are. Either we are strong enough animals or we are not. Such things pare
everything that is not animal away from us. As animals we have a physical
value, but in moral terms we are neither good nor bad. Morality begins on the
way back from the darkness.

The first two
plagues were largely believed to be a punishment for man’s sinfulness. “So many
died,” wrote Agnolo di Tura the Fat, who buried all five of his own children
himself, “that all believed that it was the end of the world.” This being the
case, you’d imagine the cessation of the plague must have been accompanied by
outbreaks of charity and godliness. The truth was just the opposite. In 1349,
in Erfurt, Germany, of the three thousand Jewish residents there, not one
survived. This is a single instance of a barbarism so marked and so pervasive,
it can be understood only as a form of mass insanity.

Here is what Procopius
said:
And after the plague had ceased,
there was so much depravity and general licentiousness, that it seemed as
though the disease had left only the most wicked.

When men are
turned into animals, it’s hard for them to find their way back to themselves.
When children are turned into animals, there’s no self to find. There’s never
been a feral child who found his way out of the dark. Maybe there’s never been
a feral child who wanted to.

You don’t
believe I saw Paul in the tunnels at all. You think I’m crazy or, charitably,
that I was crazy then, just for a little while. Maybe you think the CIA would
never have killed a policeman or tried to use a little child in a black war,
even though the CIA has done everything else you’ve ever been told and refused
to believe.

That’s okay. I
like your version just fine. Because if I made him up, and all the tunnel rats
who ever saw him made him up, then he belongs to us, he marks us. Our vision,
our Procopian phantom in the tunnels. Victor to take care of us in the dark.

Caroline came
home without me. I read her wedding announcement in the paper more than twenty
years ago. She married a Stanford chemist. There was a picture of her in her
parents’ backyard with gardenias in her hair. She was twenty-five years old.
She looked happy. I never did go talk to her.

So here’s a
story for you, Caroline:

A small German
town was much plagued by rats who ate the crops and the chickens, the ducks,
the cloth and the seeds. Finally the citizens called in an exterminator. He was
the best; he trapped and poisoned the rats. Within a month he had deprived the
fleas of most of their hosts.

The fleas then
bit the children of the town instead. Hundreds of children were taken with a
strange dancing and raving disease. Their parents tried to control them, tried
to keep them safe in their beds, but the moment their mothers’ backs were
turned, the children ran into the streets and danced. The town was Erfurt. The
year was 1237.

Most of the
children danced themselves to death. But not all. A few of them recovered and
lived to be grown-ups. They married and worked and had their own children. They
lived reasonable and productive lives.

The only thing
is that they still twitch sometimes. Just now and then. They can’t help it.