THE MONSOON DAYS by Jonathan Starke
for Cliff
Peek-a-Boo poisoned the wells. He should have died fifty times over. He didn’t die once. It didn’t matter how hostile the VC hamlet, how hot the region on the map, Peek-a-Boo would just stroll to the closest well and do his thing. I guess that’s what intrigued me most about him and scared me most. It was all in how he’d hold the territory map in one hand, each well marked with a green x circled several times, and carry his rifle in the other hand at the midpoint of the gun like it was a nuisance he was going to toss into the dirt any second. But he would just stroll, the map out, the gun loose, and you’d think he was looking to get picked off.
Peek-a-Boo never looked at the map once we got into the hamlet. He looked straight ahead at those wells, those gaping water mouths. I think he studied the maps in his downtime, under the sway of branches, the slap-slap of the monsoons, and he had it down cold with each new hamlet, diddy-bopping all over the place, never worrying about the direction he took. I figured it was like how my mother used to play the piano in the living room when I was kid, and she’d make me turn the pages even though she knew the song by heart and played with her eyes closed. There was some kind of comfort, a need for guidance that came out of her knowing the right notes were there, dotted and curvy on each dog-eared page.
We called him Peek-a-Boo because of how some of the wells were covered with tarps, the villagers thinking we wouldn’t know what was under there and figured they might be able to save their water supply. Problem was, under that tarp could have been a VC or a sympathizer, waiting to put one through an American soldier’s chest. Nothing under that tarp but an old well, right? Then, peek-a-boo! A pop-pop-pop – the flint spark of a pistol – and our man is dead. Peek-a-Boo.
Other guys wanted that assignment. They wanted to have only one task. Poison the well. Poison it. It’s just a stone circle. It’s just a few feet off the ground. You know that enemy when you see it. There’s no guessing there. A well is a well is a well. It doesn’t come in the forms of man, woman, old, young, child. It doesn’t offer you a canvas sack full of rice with a live grenade at the bottom. It will not cry when you shoot its parents or torch its hut or rape its child. It’s only a canister full of poison, plopping into water, sinking. You walk on. And that’s all that’s heard then, just the sound of an object crashing through water, and so many wondered, how can that keep a man up at night? How can that water talk back to him?
It wasn’t just his ghosting under fire that threw me. Peek-a-Boo said he had an estranged younger sister named Lulu. He wrote letters to her. One night we were up late, patrolling a fifty-meter perimeter outside the hooch. This was months before we even got into the whole hamlet-raiding business in Quảng Ngãi. There was no war where we started out, so close to the water.
We used the patrol time to smoke joints. I got paired with Peek-a-Boo a lot, and one time we were talking about the simple things: missing the farmland back home, flipping through Klimax and Scruw magazines, biting into a charred hamburger. The joint went from me to him, and Peek-a-Boo started in about Lulu. He was drafted at eighteen, but at sixteen, he’d sort of fallen out with his sister. Said she saw him snap the neck of a neighborhood cat on a scorching summer night. She never spoke to him again. Not a word. Just hush.
I didn’t know why he told me. He felt safe, maybe. Protected by towers of elephant grass, nothing but us and those green walls. I remember looking up into the jungled darkness and thinking, Is this the first rainless night? It must be. I remember no other. That makes it true. And when I was back again, Peek-a-Boo was telling me about how he carried that cat limp by the scruff and buried it deep in the back corner of the yard under blinking stars and above the nose of the devil. Said it wasn’t the only time. I was thankful he couldn’t see me. I kept nodding and rubbing my thumb around the barrel of my rifle like my mother used to do with the spout of a Coca-Cola bottle, and I just kept saying, no shit, and somehow that seemed a comfort to him, that I was treating him like one of the guys and not some freak with a hole-in‑the-head story.
I was really glad Peek-a-Boo had the joint, because it was lighting up his broad face, and I didn’t want that kind of light on me. He couldn’t see what my face might have been saying. I’d never met anyone who’d done bizarre things like that before. And wasn’t he the kind of man the army wanted? Unclear in the head, in need of escape. But it was all draft, and I was here too. Any man. Any man will do.
When he offered to pass the joint over, I took my hand off the gun neck and waved the joint back. I cited fatigue. Maybe he believed that.
Whenever Peek-a-Boo would reach a well, he’d lean his rifle against the bricks. I’d say, Henry-oh-Jesus! and shake my head and my helmet would scratch my scalp and rub my hair, because it was really always too loose and the straps were shit. And the guys would call me Henry Oh, because I guess they never heard anyone say Henry-oh-Jesus, and how would they have, anyway, when they weren’t around to hear my mother repeating that phrase over and over when she found my father had blown half his head off with a shotgun in the guest bedroom while she was washing dishes at the high school. But I walked into that. I was there.
I was sure Peek-a-Boo would get shot one of those days, the way he’d lean his rifle against the well bricks, take off his rucksack and set it beside the leaning gun, roll his shoulders like he was going down for a swim. He carried several ammo pouches on his belt, but I’m not sure he ever kept bullets in them. This is where he stored the canisters of Agent Blue. The poison. AB. He called it Albert Baylor. On nights before a raid, he’d say, Going to check in with Albert Baylor, see if he’s brought any of that sweet, hallelujah news. But we both knew that wasn’t the case. Albert Baylor was a toxic herbicide. Albert Baylor brought gut-puncturing death.
Agent Blue was designed to kill the Vietnamese rice crop, just like Agent Orange. It was to be sprayed from a skinny gun, dusted like stinging rain from the sky. See, because rice is hard to bomb. It’s hard to burn. It’s small and can fit and survive in tight, awful places. I think the US government got tired of the idea of a slow killing by ridding the Vietnamese people of their crops and having them die of starvation. Put Albert Baylor to work directly on the people. Cut out the middleman. Speed up the process.
I wasn’t sure Peek-a-Boo wouldn’t jump down the well. I just figured he wouldn’t. He’d reach into one of those ammo pouches and pull out a canister. He’d hold it in the palm of his hand, serve it up to the sunlight. God knows why. There was nothing to see. Nothing through it. It was solid, but he watched it like a scientist with a beaker. I’d like to think he was imagining Albert Baylor was a kind of purification, that it actually cleaned the water, fluoridated it, saved the teeth of the youths and mended that of the old. And he’d let the canister hover for a moment before, whoosh, he’d come limp at the wrist, and his palm would drop like a trapdoor, the canister on its way to the water.
I stole one of his letters. Maybe it was the worst thing I did over there, maybe it wasn’t. What does anyone really know about right and wrong in a place like that? When your ear hairs are full of the tickle of rushing bullets and you don’t have human skin anymore; you have this mud skin because of the monsoons, and you crawl around in it all night and day. And some of the boys didn’t even have that anymore. Some hovered bloody and breathless on stretchers, later wiped clean with a rag at the face and hands. And I still shake awake at night thinking of all those dead brothers who had teeth or ears or scalps or fingers taken in the night. I’m not sure what I lost over there, and maybe that’s why I pace the backyard when I can’t sleep and let the cold ground shock my bare feet. Send my mind to elsewhere. But here, the thing is, I stole one of his letters.
Littlest Lulu,
I hope you’ve gotten my letters, but I guess school keeps you from writing. I have to keep this one brief. They say it’s war out here, and maybe you’re seeing war on the TV at home, but that’s not the kind of war I’m fighting, so please don’t be worried. You can bet I’ll make it home one day. I’m working as a filing clerk at a South Vietnamese Air Force base just outside Saigon. There’s never gunfire here because the enemy can’t make it down this far. You want to hear something strange? They pay my salary in soda bottles instead of money. Sometimes in candy. I got a gift for you in town the other day, and I’m going to send it soon. Ribbon and pretty paper are hard to find here. Anyhow. What I meant before is that sometimes the news doesn’t present the truth of things the way you might see them or understand them elsewhere. You know what I mean? Just remember that the truth is elusive. But hey, I hope you’re making friends at your new school and that Mama’s giving you these letters. It’s important we keep up on each other’s lives. I know you’re busy, but it would be nice to hear from you, even just once. It seems there’s nothing but time here. Like the world’s a more endless thing than we’ll ever understand. Anyway, I hope to bring you here one day when there’s peace again. Sometimes we’re allowed these small dreams. Take care of yourself.
Cranston
I think Peek-a-Boo’s job took a different kind of toll on him. He didn’t get to actually see the death he was making. If I had to crawl into a foxhole and shoot a guy, I knew what I’d done. I’d see his eyes get big and how he’d try and jut a blade at me, and I’d squeeze that trigger and feel the kickback, the rifle butt punching me in the ribs, and I’d know that job was done. When you see the trickling blood, the eyes roll back, smell the shit and piss, drag the body out of the foxhole and check it for weapons, you’ve at least got a result. The body is a result. Peek-a-Boo didn’t have any of that. You kill so few men up close that you keep a tally of those encounters. I only had seven. How many people did Peek-a-Boo kill? 1,000? 5,000? A man couldn’t know. Hamlet after hamlet, map after map, he only saw things in green x’s and circles, and I can’t imagine what that kind of life would do to a person, the only one of us who didn’t bring death with him, who didn’t kill in the now but left death behind him, killed in his sleep, in his wake, tallied up more bodies the farther he got from each hamlet and never fired a shot or took a stab. Hold. Release. Walk on.
I got lost once. This was toward the end of my tour, long after the last time I saw Peek-a-Boo. People always ask, How in the world could you get lost? Well, how do you get lost trying to find some new café in your hometown, driving your civilian car, line-painted concrete, no napalm or singing bullets? Shut up with your stupid questions, is what I say. You go on ambush patrol. It’s late. Sometimes you think the captain is sending you out because he wants you rid. Why do you seem to get picked every time? Why does he point his finger at you like it’s a bony gun? No matter. Stay is no option. Go. Go. Well, you do. And you go.
We took fire. You’d think I’d have seen more of the shots. I’d like to say it was easy. That the shots burst like comet-tail explosions and I could pick the VC off. This isn’t true. I didn’t see anything. I only heard a chorus of rapid pops. I dove down and shot back. Then I got up and ran all through the darkness, my rifle over my shoulder, swinging off my hip and slapping my ribs. I was sick of it all, so I ran until I couldn’t hear the gunfire. The VC/American chorus singing bullets from one side to the other. I’m saying I ran through the darkness until I couldn’t hear that anymore.
Peek-a-Boo started wrapping his letters to Lulu around the canisters. I think he realized she wasn’t ever going to write back. It didn’t seem to affect him, not in his face, not outright in what he said. The way he was so calm about things – the blazes, the rains, the lip-red wounds – you’d think he’d been in the jungle all his life. And so he started rubber-banding his letters to her around the canisters.
He told me weeks after that he’d gotten a letter from his mother that said Lulu had died in a car accident. I suppose that’s why he started sending the letters down the well. I wanted to say that I’d lost someone, too, and that sometimes I thought about my mother kissing my father’s bloody half-head as she held it in her lap, but I guess I didn’t tell him that or say I was sorry. I guess I only said, What happened? and Peek-a-Boo said she was on her way home from a swim meet. One of her friends drove, and who wore seatbelts back then? Some high school boys in another car down the lane were drag racing and pitching back PBRs to fuel the driving. The car Lulu was in, it was spun, not flipped, spun, and it tossed her upper half through the passenger window. She hung out the window like that in the chill of night on a small gravel road, her breath showing up in the cold like train-engine steam. The paramedics found her out of blood a while later, the car halfway off the lane and into the ditch. Peek-a-Boo said he knew that lane, had driven it many times. It was narrow and winding and buttressed by sand farms somewhere outside of Klakanouse, Wisconsin.
There’s not much to being lost. Except it’s scary as hell. You’d think a person would walk. Wander. Try and catch up with the platoon. Where was I going to go? I had no radio. I found a ditch the night I’d run off. It was a little full of water when I got in. Days passed. I just stayed in that ditch, afraid to move. I knew I’d be found, and I just prayed it was us who found me.
Three of those days it just rained. That’s not uncommon. It filled up my ditch by a foot. I didn’t have my Monday Pills and was sure I’d end up with malaria. At some point, my palms had gone pruney. My mother used to come home with pruney fingers from washing dishes all day, and they always smelled of lavender soap. She said she preferred to smell good and have pruned hands over normal hands and smelling like rubber dishwashing gloves. I was just happy to be near her, to smell her at all. And that’s what I mostly thought of when I was trapped in that ditch, the smell of my pruned mother.
You knew the sound of a VC squad because they didn’t talk. They moved so natural, instinctive. I had one come near me over those ditch days. I remember looking up and seeing about seven of them, their sandaled feet. Fourteen ankles. Your stomach drops out then. They talk about fight or flight, but what is it really when you know death is breathing off the trees and you’re shivering alone in a flooded ditch?
They communicated through hand signals, even then, even in no direct presence of an enemy. They’d staved off invaders for hundreds of years, and why was this any different? It’s hard to think that some people are born defenders, but are they not? The tunneling and technique and wherewithal. I just kept my body down in that water, my neck cut off at the waterline. After a span, I can’t say the length of it, they did finally walk on, quietly, the ankles moving over the land in what seemed to be ebbs. Sometimes I tell myself that didn’t happen, and I think maybe they were just deer and it was all in my head, but there are no deer in the jungles of Vietnam. You can look it up. I had to, just to be sure. You can find them in the jungles of Laos, though, and I know I was never there.
Peek-a-Boo stopped talking to me. It wasn’t long after he started attaching his letters to the canisters. He kept writing them to his dead sister and dropping them down the wells. He had to shut me out, because I think he needed a total separation from humanity. His was all lost now, and what was I to him? Only a reminder of what remained. Truth. People. The world beyond the monsoon days, the America we all missed and believed in. There was no hope in Peek-a-Boo, and he didn’t want to see hope in anyone or anything. He had become the extinguisher of hope. The killer in the quiet.
The last time I went on a raid with him, before I was transferred, Peek-a-Boo did a strange thing at the well, and this is the last memory I have of him. After holding a canister to the sunlight, he stripped off a letter to Lulu and tossed it into the well. Then he pried open the canister top with his pocket knife and dumped Albert Baylor all over his hands. He ground it between his palms and let the grains slip between his fingers. I watched them float. I saw them drift down through the sunrays, a curtain of powder falling. I didn’t think about what it might do to his hands, because I didn’t think it could poison him or kill him. His ever dying, it just didn’t occur to me.
I heard a radio. An American squad was humping by, and I heard a doc calling out. I almost didn’t come up out of that ditch. I had spent those days submerged in the water, the monsoon like wind chops on my body, thinking I’d never be found. And sometimes when you’re out there under the blue-black night, the cracks in the distance, you lose common understanding. What of you has been lost, and what’s to be found? And I wondered if home would be like this. A confusion of brush and blood and harvested trees and that I might step into my own house and not recognize the bend of my mother’s nose or the tune of her piano. I worried this home I knew, this America, would not resemble any place I recognized. Because what boy was I then? And what had I become? Something recognizable? No. No. So I rose from the ditch, hungry and out of control, and shouted at the soldiers in bungled Vietnamese, Bắn! Bắn! Roughly, Shoot! Shoot! But nobody fired.
Jonathan Starke is the author of the novel You’ve Got Something Coming (Black Heron Press, 2020). His stories have appeared in The Greensboro Review, Shenandoah, Passages North, Third Coast, and Green Mountains Review.