1967 Here
Hammer raised as you crouch on someone else’s roof, you strike and it’s too quick to happen, but the shingle is on the roof and 1967 is, for a moment. Here, your army-issued rifle, its lips puckered. Chapstick needed. It’s here. Here it is, in your glove, the stack of fifties from the client still in his office swivel.
His cigarette thinks a question mark. You wave it away.
He reenters the Times paper. There you were, red all over. There you weren’t, the page turned.
#
X Marks the Spot
Unlike the rest of the Viet Cong, he idled beside the Soviet packs, and thus, was shootable. Pith helmet, only fabric, how easy it would be. A canteen on one hip and a grenade on the other. At his sleeve, a tanline going watery.
The colonel’s breath grew around your neck. “Steady on Charlie.”
In the military alphabet, the Viet Cong were called Victor Charlie. The colonel had shortened it to Charlie—no victory was too small to take.
You once read that snipers are more likely to pull the trigger because they’re so far removed. But in the scope, you were moved. He yawned, wincing. That black-white scarf couldn’t hide those inflamed bumps from a shave so imperfect. You’d flick him there. Those packs aren’t gonna unload themselves, buddy. Next week, you might teach him the right way to angle a razor.
The sound was so passive and expected, like onomatopoeia. Boom. And the colonel was clapping your back. “It’s official. Welcome to the battalion, son. Welcome to the battalion.” Comrades were cheering for your cleverness. Come twilight, they shared their pound cakes.
“Here it is.” Hughes forced a half into your face. “Glad you’re one of the good chinks.”
Here it is, the pounds squeezed down your throat, but you didn’t deserve this.
Here it is. You hadn’t killed the boy. Just the grenade.
#
Small Mercies, Smaller
Sheila’s dead. You still visit the cathedral basilica, though now on Thursday in the a.m. because it’s furthest from Sunday. The pews are mostly empty, but the priest firebreathes the same Old Testament and hallelujahs. Candles shed the same beeswax, which you fan away with the setlist.
The lapis dye from Mary’s stained glass robes washes your hands as the tithe basket arrives. Nine dollars, some quarters, nickels masquerading as quarters. You make a show of patting down your pockets, face false with confusion.
In the third month away, you received a parcel from your fiancée: a vial of eau de toilette and a sepia photo of herself with nothing but an ever fountain of chiffon from her elbows, drama in her petaled lips. You pinched the atomizer. Instead, apple brandy happened.
“Stick your tongue out,” you told Roger, a younger comrade.
He frowned. “I don’t think so. You know the penalty for contraband?”
You spritzed Roger anyway. Laughed when he yelped, the kid. You banded together only because Roger was always scared and you were the only nonwhite in a platoon of white who thought it was comedy, Asians versus Asians.
Still, he accepted a look at the photo. The moral dilemma ate at him as he dipped from her Aprilfell hair and the blur between her thighs, then those tits. A pulling-apart of bread.
While you held it out, you finally noticed the overfrothed cursive on the back: Remember me?
You considered the equation. Remember me?, as in an invitation to relive her, your chest ashed with mascara. As in a reminder. As in a plea to abstain from Saigon. Remember me?, as if a genuine question, the answer being of course.
You apple brandied him again. He scrubbed his tears, cursing you out like an adult, as the photo shied into your rucksack. As if his irises hadn’t already blued with the subtracting.
Hallelujah. It’s Thursday in the a.m., and the tithe basket leaves mostly unchanged. Hallelujah.
#
Night Shifting
Five-Foot-Jon, who never washed the carbon kickback from his face because he thought it made him look bigger and badder, had fled from the bushes. “This massive orange fucker snuck up on me while I was pissing,” he panted while doing his fly. “Tiger, I think. Its eyes were glowing yellow.”
“You sure it wasn’t Hughes perving out on you while smoking a double?” a comrade asked, which got cackles and a middle finger from the camp, and that was that.
Night shifts were when you usually answered the photo in your rucksack. But that night, those eyes glowed so yellow that dawn came early.
#
Four Clauses
One, you would not sound your alarm. Two, Charlie’s night scouts would not sound their alarm, because three, a meeting of arms would not end in a handshake.
Four. Hide—wear it. Better to stay starved, yet still within skin.
#
SIGN HERE:
Before the cancer had mined out your mother, she worked overnight as a supermarket stocker. She would come home just before you left for school, joints swollen for little more than twenty dollars, sometimes saying things like, Eat full before shopping, Xīnrán. Milk at smaller shop more cheap, OK? (By smaller shop, she meant the drugstore off Donegan.) Xīnrán, Wednesday morning veggies more fresh. You would nod and memorize this deeply, as if one day this knowledge could help you liberate her from the supermarket.
As you search this sweet potato for illness, there is a comfort in knowing that, because it’s Wednesday morning, it has gone through the fewest hands: the harvester’s, the packer’s, your mother’s, yours. The sweetness is still whole. The soil not yet grabbed away.
The cashier’s mechanized arms swipe the barcodes of the canned food faster than you can unload your basket. The red laser slices open a can of smoked rainbow trout. Tomato, corn, chicken noodle soup. Green and beans. Salsa and verde. Cans, in a green sock and looped to Roger’s rucksack. Penduluming as he danced to avoid licorice vines. Flowers too pretty to trust and thickets massive enough. That orange fucker.
By the fourth hour of trekking through the jungle, you noticed the green sock’s sticky size indicator peeling.
The sergeant raised a fist. The platoon stiffened. You finally swallowed that salt pill. Sodium electrified the butt of the rifle, its trigger.
No one was sure who opened the silence, machine gun trilling like a Christmas carol, but you unloaded the cartridge anyway, direction be damned. Direction be wherever the M16 points. Everywhere, north.
By this point, the sock cuff lost its elasticity but was still so green.
The rifle clicked its emptiness, and Roger was pulling you by your rucksack. You two stumbled toward the riverboat, over kapok roots and limbs, heads a-rolling. Lucky shots, you called it. Tails, tucked between your legs. The political subtotal increased, she is tapping your shoulder. Is asking if you are okay, and, Xīnrán, do you need to sit down? “Sir?”
The potato has been squeezed out of the sweet. The dough out of the sour. You surrender them to extra hands anyway. Sign on the dotted line. You’re fine, but thanks.
#
Fur & Claws
Silly boy. You should have sounded the alarm.
Those sons did not come to bring you dawn. They came to bring you down.
#
The Name of the Game
One of the local village girls found you kinged in the shade of a banyan. She wore trousers under an áo dài, which crumpled around her like a brown lunch bag, an illusion of fullness. Secondhand gunpowder ringed her mouth, Russian-red.
You told her your name, your battalion, not to tell her your name or battalion but to prove that, despite your face, you spoke American, just American, like all the greats.
Her Vietnamese hardened into rock. Was throwable.
So you tell her why you’re here through a stately gait and cartoon sneer—the colonel demoting you for igniting a smidge of C-4 to heat your beef hash (and not for wasting easy shots). Life in America? Jimi Hendrix shredding an electric guitar. Your unfeathered hands flew, eagled, striping a sky with red, white, blue.
And you? Your life, here? your hands said.
She twined a hanging root from the banyan around herself, then mimed an explosion with her arms spread wide. You guessed war, pretending to fly with the recoil of an imagined gun. She shook her head and repeated, re-repeated, this one act, this waste of noon.
Luckily, the laughter was free enough.
#
of the rib
The last time a soldier said thank you, the colonel called it a suicide. This, then, was the best kind of suicide: A man gracious to be axed open. His softest bone taken. A body finished off, and saved.
#
Gathering the Ghost
The new client is your age in white wealth, Davidoff cologne. On his wrist, even time is gold.
“Past the family room, to the left, and down the hall,” he says, fully performing the Oxford comma. “Just please do not shit. Wives, you know?”
You play it off with a chuckle. “Sure.”
He nods tight-lipped. He doesn’t buy it.
So. He’s the type that probably enrolled in Princeton or claimed gay to avoid the draft. Otherwise he’d forget the Oxford comma, learn to contract his words. Gold or not, time kills the same. The rich can’t buy their way out of this one.
The laureled vanity automatically blinks on, revealing a bar of soap still glossy, pots of vanilla hydrangeas. Yep, this is a bathroom straight from a home living magazine. Even the kitten figurines and liberal newspapers are all thought-out on the shelf. Wives, you know?
“See, that’s the problem. She’s not your wife.” The colonel pats your shoulder. You shrug him off. “Three days. That’s all the commander would approve.”
Beside her hospital cot, you peeled the hair from her sticky neck and forehead, the hair already so gone it was like gathering a ghost into a stretched-out rubber band, which the neurologist had found in his lab coat pocket. At least the doc had bedside manner—happy to have the good news, a little apologetic the good news was just a stretched-out rubber band, sympathetic as the twitchy thing wailed for an impossible sleep, the scythefall, asking when, begging for now with each spasm, a leaf in rain, her body with a mind of its own.
“It’ll be okay, hon. Hang in there.”
“Cut the shit.” The sound barely survived her mouth. “Did you get the…?”
“Hell yeah, I got your gift.” You kissed her in full. She stared beyond you. “Fuck this country. You’re the one thing that kept me going. The thought of you.”
“Remember me like that. Just like that.”
You sleeved away her bittersalt tears as her bladder leaked because she couldn’t stop fucking twitching, goddamnit. She couldn’t stop fucking twitching.
If only Roger could see her now, how beautiful she was.
The door rattles. “Are you done?”
“Gimme a sec,” you say too quickly. You turn on the faucet to prove the point.
He retreats. So there. His wrist can, in fact, be pickpocketed of an extra second.
The rubber band—it coiled into itself.
It’s true. You would’ve rather enrolled in Princeton, gotten pegged. Had a bathroom to be looked at, not shat in. And the air would be more than pissed sheets and bacteria, Campanella roses, how beautiful, and yours.
#
Spare Me
The retail clerk rings up the deep-tread snow boots. He so openly smacks a wad of gum, unafraid of getting caught in the way only an I’m-almost-twenty can afford.
“Sorry. We don’t combine with Black Friday deals,” he says when you ask about your veteran discount. “But God bless. Where did you serve?”
“Your store has combined for the past decade.” You wait for an answer. The green in his mouth greens. “Nam.”
His chewing skips. “Sorry. We don’t do that here. You still want these or no?”
Do what here? Do war here?
Sighing, you swipe your card. Half off is a bargain, veteran discount or not.
When he isn’t looking, you abandon the old pair with detached soles by the racks.
The cold outside wants your fingers. The heels pinch, but it’s fine for now. To break them in, you choose the scenic route through Christmas in the Park, where a bah-humbug snowstorm has driven away most goers. Still, conifers live a little under dollar ornaments, tinsel, multicolor.
You’re on tiptoes, heels raw. It’ll be fine once they get older. Broken into.
You’re on thin ice. Yes, we do that here. Because all that happened was you fought there to continue a proxy war in a Macy’s, in front of a boy who is speared only with mint and none the wiser. Maybe he was right to exclude the veteran discount, which implies that the country is left behind.
You’re through it. The cold wants you, so you hold on, boots still walking. Feet gone.
#
Hey, hey, LBJ
How many kids did you kill today?
—Protest chant from 1967
Knee-deep in the paddies, Roger ducked behind a terrace wall to reload for the fourth time. Like a coward, he shot all at once just to take his sweet time reloading under cover.
“Goddammit, Roger. Four clips blown already?” Says you.
“Fuck off,” he snapped, tremoring as the water peeled back its lips with missed shots.
Charlie had the high ground. Had caught on and now wore green instead of black. So when the tallest grass defied the wind, you melted headfirst into the shallows before deciding to.
You saw it secondhand. His shadow, once indigo with youth, blanching on the flooded field. 7.62 millimeters through his ears, barely enough room for a lyric. His voice still fluid around you. Eyes bluer still. The faltering of skeleton, stilled.
That extra second. The extra room.
Come in.
“Ma says half her garden is dead. Nevada’s in a drought.” He filled you in between the pages of his letter, sitting in mud while everyone else sagged on weatherbeaten legs.
“A drought’s not so bad.” You imagined its warmth. This monsoon was so ferocious that, after erecting the tents, you all had to move the sealed canisters of gunpowder in before yourselves. “If only there was a way to mail these clouds home.”
His chuckle was more a two-part exhale. You were filled out.
Later, you would learn there was a way to mail these clouds. Operation Popeye was the U.S. government’s top secret project to seed the clouds with silver iodide and extend the monsoon seasons, thus ruining Charlie’s roads, clogging rivers, beating weather.
But by playing God, they too forgot about their children. The U.S. besieged their own troops in hours with a year of rain. And at last the city fell, toppled by the weight of its own people.
#
Your thoughts in a normal January . . .
Today’s a lucky day: The toast landed buttered-side up.
The silver’s going gray. To dye, or not to dye?
He read the newer testament this time, Sheila. I tithed real good.
God, I tithed too good, so forget the Pepsi. Water’s fine.
A comrade once died after contracting dysentery from a contaminated water bladder. Imagine that!—dying because the iodine tablet from your own government failed to distill your water.
Actually I’ll take the Pepsi. Forget the fries.
Today’s a lucky day: The -nam is still in Vietnam.
The box dye. The hair.
We’re both here for his money. The difference is after the boom, she searches for fireworks.
Imagine that!—stepping off the plane only to be pelted with boos. Dying because they failed to honor your discharge.
Boom. Which is to say, boy, that there are sillier ways to die, stilled.
The sky. The sky.
#
You’re welcome.
You spread over a Charlie like morning as your steel gaped, unsure whether to laugh as he shrank four sizes too skinny for his flak jacket. How unlucky that he who crouched within a banyan, magazine clean, saw your face before hearing your American, great American.
“Is this the last time my own house’ll try to kill me, or should I move out?” Daniel jokes.
You chortle and say, “We’ll see,” then head to the van, pockets happy. The tip is generous—he’s a longtimer, and you’ve come the day after a shingle almost crushed his skull.
We’ll see sidestepped the question. But even with the rearview mirror frosted over, you saw. You could’ve told him you’ve lived under the American government and, nonetheless, vote. That a shingle topples only to find better ground. Stay—this home has never been so safe under your nails, the asphalt dust, the dried blood despite the glove—here. It’s here.
He togethered his hands. Offered them like a bouquet, face hidden.
You did it, the muzzle on his mouth like an animal. This first kiss was the first to count. It tasted metallic, like adrenaline, tasted like coriander seeds and sex, but not love-making. Lemongrass.
Silly boy. The sun never closes its eye. We simply turn away.
