Songs for The Lost

Maria, Here Come the Death Angels!

MARIA, HERE COME THE DEATH ANGELS!The jungle reeked. Its pungent stench, a miasmic brew of competing flora species and rotting vegetation, reached the outskirts of the village.

The weary men were gathered in a loose circle there. This, their makeshift camp of two days wait, baked in the torturous air. The weeks behind them – of slinking like animals through the wilderness, and fighting there, too, and fighting there and fighting there – weighed on them. They were the ragtag remnants of Rogue Angel Company. Tired, weak from hunger and malarial fever, most of them wounded. They each of them owned lost eyes.

In the distance the village children stood huddled, watching the men curiously, whispering among themselves.

A man, turning onto his side where he lay in the grass, groaned. The bandage encasing his thigh was stained red with blood and brown with dirt. Then drowsy quiet returned while each of the men drifted between the place they were and those places they yearned to be.

Into the dead silence, Private McCall’s voice carried like an unexpected beacon of light. “You know, I’ve seen angels here. I mean it. You boys lookin’ at me like I’m nuts but it’s true. The real McCoy, with my own eyes.”

The men were indeed looking up from where they finished their meagre rations or habitually cleaned their weapons or lay with eyes closed against the angry molten glare of the sun. Their murky eyes cleared as they examined their companion but still they eyed him with suspicion. Still, their weary expressions haunted them.

McCall finished, a song in his voice. “And here they come to save me again.”

The men followed the Private’s gaze staring over their heads. There in the bloody dusking west hung a murder of great mechanical birds. Choppers! Rescue! Salvation!

Everyone erupted into joyous laughter at the Private’s words, ecstatic at the sight of their deliverance so close at hand, the deathly pall of their dark mood lifted. The village children, following the direction of the men’s gesticulations, pointed and cried out excitedly, too.

“Angels! Yeah, McCall you got it, brother!”

“We’re saved, boys!”

“f**k yeah we are!”

“Dustoff!”

“From up high, here they come!”

They leapt from their rocks and logs and finished their duties with renewed energy, as if their bones and muscles and hearts knew no ache. Some threw their dirty helmets skywards in celebration.

“You boys want to join me in Heaven?” McCall went on in a mighty voice rising over their clamour, fuelling everyone’s relief and joy at the sight of the machines and the transient escape they represented. The captain eyed him approvingly and clapped a hand on his back.

Private Dobbs, though – off to the side of the group and thumbing once again through the handful of photographs he kept stashed inside his shirt pocket – caught something in his companion’s eyes which seemed to betray a deeper knowledge or meaning that the rest of the platoon hadn’t noticed.

“Thank you, Lord,” McCall muttered under his breath, to himself and no one else but for Dobbs, who heard, and would wonder about it for the rest of the day. “Thank you for my time on this ripe Earth.” And then he’d slung his Ithaca 37 across his shoulder and was on his feet, eyes in the sky.

Soon, the host arrived, and with it a great wind that whipped about the men like a storm.

Night-time Pattaya was awake and in the throes of living. The bar was tiny

and congested with smoke and the sweat of the humanity filling it to its corners. Soldiers crammed the room, rejoicing in their shore leave with prostitutes riding their knees while waitresses wove among the throngs carrying glasses to and from tables.

Dobbs watched his pals, Lambton and Calling and Cartier, stagger off with a girl apiece. He smiled, genuinely happy for them. Placing a hand over his pocket, he smiled and sipped his tepid beer.

He felt his eyes on him. Looking from his drink he found McCall leaning backwards on his stool, his empty glass on the table before him filled with cigarette ashes. Dobbs smiled at him, and winced when he saw McCall’s eyes lower to where his hand hovered lovingly over his breast pocket.

“What you always hidin’ in there, pal?” His raspy voice came through the music and conversation like a knife. “Huh, pal? I bet she’s a pretty thing, whoever she is. Am I right? I’m right, ain’t I?” He was smiling, and Dobbs laughed sheepishly.

“You got me figured, McCall. Yeah you do. She’s a beauty if I ever seen one. Makes me the lucky man I am.”

McCall nodded approvingly. Turning his attention to the smoky air he reached a hand out, closed his fingers. Dobbs watched, impressed, as he opened his fingers and the giant black fly flew from his hand.

“You’re a magician, brother,” Dobbs laughed, swallowing his beer and waving at a passing waitress to bring him another.

McCall only shook his head. He cut the air with his voice: “She got a name? You got a picture you can show me?”

Dobbs put his glass down and retrieved the pictures. Pride filled him. He loved showing her picture, and did so whenever he could. She made him better in the eyes of others, he’d always thought. She made him a man when he usually only felt like a boy playing soldier alongside men. Passing the pictures across the table he said, “Her name’s Maria.” Watching McCall scan the photographs, seeing his appreciative appraisal of each in turn, cajoled him into revealing his greatest desires to his fellow platoon member, though they didn’t know each other very well at all. “I’ll be done here in six months, God willing. s**t, I can’t wait to see her. It feels like forever. I just can’t wait, brother.”

McCall whistled, holding a picture towards the overhead light for clearer inspection. “I bet you can’t wait. Boy, I ever had a girl like that I’d be counting the days till’ I got to f**k her brains out the minute I was back, too.”

They laughed together. They knocked their glasses together in a toast to Dobb’s Maria and to beautiful girls everywhere. They watched soldiers dancing with whores to ‘My Boyfriend’s Back’ spinning on the jukebox and crackling the old tinny speakers. They finished their beers and ordered again. The night was long and easy. Dobbs thought that he could live with nights like this if he had to, where he didn’t have to worry over shadows in the grass that might snipe him homebound in a bag. Nights like this would do until he was home again with his friends and his girl and the food he liked to eat and the things he liked to do.

His reveries urged him to call across the table, “Hey, McCall. You like baseball? You a baseball man? Who’s your team? Who’s your best player?”

McCall eyed him strangely. He laughed, shaking his head. “Nah, brother, I don’t know baseball worth a dime. I never could play. Never wanted to, neither.”

Dobbs nodded. Drunk and less inhibited than he would have been otherwise, he ventured, “You know, I don’t even know your home town, brother. You look like a county fella somehow. Don’t ask me why. Just a feelin’ I got.”

McCall, wearing the same pensive expression, said, “Come on, brother. I need some air. This place stinks to high fuckin’ Heaven of sweat and smoke. Sneak your beer, though. No one’s lookin’.”

They slipped from their stools and out the tavern’s back door, surreptitiously toting their glasses. The voices they left behind sounded ecstatic. The late evening air was cooler but humid still. Mosquitoes annoyed their eyes but they were drunk and didn’t care. They were used to hungrier mosquitoes besides, and bullets hungrier than any creature.

They wandered a meandering line out back of the tavern and beyond its small gravel lot into the thick elephant grass. Beyond the trees they could glimpse the morose lights of the ghetto district. Following the gurgle of the water they found the river a minute later, dark and spotted with reflected stars. They stood there, looking into its depths, drinking their drinks.

“What did you say was her name?”

“Hmm?” Dobbs shook his head, chuckling, wondering at the languorous mood come over him, as though the water enchanted him, or else he’d only just caught up with the fact that he’d drank one too many.

“Your girl?”

“Maria.” Maria. Even her name he cherished. The way it conjured to mind everything about her. Her voice her smell her ways, how she looked as pretty with short hair as with long. Maria.

“Maria,” McCall said in a protracted way, sounding as though he was savouring her name just as Dobbs was savouring it. “It’s a nice name she’s got, for sure.”

They lit cigarettes and smoked in silence, enjoying the moonlight. The hum of the nearby bush was there with them, too, like some great electrical thing.

Into the nocturnal calm: “She ain’t never gonna see you again, Private.”

It took a moment for the words to seep through Dobbs’ muddled thoughts. When they did it was in conjunction with the burst of sensation which tore through his stupor. His eyes cleared and he stared with mute horror at the dagger hilt protruding from his stomach. He examined it until he understood the fact of it piercing him. He felt its blade ruining him inside. A growing pain emanated from the spot. The sight of his blood pouring from the wound and running the length of his pants stunned him. It seemed queerly as though he was divorced from this happening, as if he were watching a film of this violent act committed not upon himself but upon another person, but for the pain. He’d never smell her smell again. This great loss was his.

McCall’s breath was rank as sewage as he leaned close to his ashen face. “Maybe they are angels, Private. And maybe I’m the strongest of them all. Maybe I’m the great deceiver now, and I can’t wait to get back into the jungle to do what I do best in the world. I love the jungle, Private. It’s where I met the Master, okay? I fuckin’ love the jungle. With all my wrathchild’s heart.”

McCall curled his fingers over the dagger hilt. He wrenched it from side to side. Dobbs fell to his knees from the pain. He felt the blade slicing through his insides, the obscene collision of this razor-sharp intruder with his delicate unguarded veins, muscles, organs, his crumbling architecture. His agonized cry was swallowed behind McCall’s hand as it clamped over his mouth. He extricated the blade slowly and then plunged it into the Private again and again and again. The blows opened Dobbs’ neck wide, and his belly, too, to reveal his tangle of intestines coiling in the mud near the river’s edge like a grotesque orgy of serpents.

The moon moved across the sky. The forest grew loud, violent in its animal clamour, and then, after a time, became somnolent-sounding. McCall stabbed and stabbed. A while later, McCall sheathed the dagger in the scabbard he wore beneath his shirt, without wiping it clean. He examined the body gleaming in the lunar light. Minutes passed and he proceeded to drag it to the edge of the river and roll it into the water like one would a log. Dobbs’ devastated corpse bobbed briefly before submergingbeneath its black surface.

McCall looked into the waves. The stars shook frantically there. He was still watching when the water grew calm and the stars had fallen into stillness, to haunt the river with their frosty, otherworldly light.

A subtle tremor on the air gave the spy away. McCall spun and found the Thai boy huddled behind a skeletal berry bush nearby. Realizing he’d been discovered the child stepped out from behind his meagre cover and hovered anxiously in his place, looking as if he were steeling himself to flee but was unable due to his fear. The wooden fishing line he held quivered on the air in his small trembling fist as though in the throes of a frenzied invisible fish.

McCall sized him up with hard eyes. He undid his pants and pissed into the mud, watching the boy unwaveringly. “You know who I am, don’t you, boy?”

The boy nodded, his eyes moons of terror in the darkness.

McCall nodded in return, as though satisfied with the honesty of the child’s response. He finished his piss. He gobbed into the mud. He murmured, “Off with you now. Maybe we’ll meet again one night, in the forest, in the city. Beware of me, boy.”

The boy scampered mouse-like into the shadows.

The soldier turned and strode into the night.

The boy, having nearly reached the relative safety of the scraggly tree-line abutting the lot – and his village not far beyond – dared to slow and look the way he’d come. With fearful eyes he searched for the soldier but nowhere did he see him, despite the wide open space of the lot with the river flowing on one side and the squat, ramshackle tavern a ways in the distance. A chill crawled the length of the child’s spine. He understood then that he would have to be strong in the world. In his peripheral vision he discerned a shadow pass across the stars and blight their glow but when he looked there was nothing, only the night sky, dark and immense.

Where worry has no home.