The Hour of the Innocents Page 19

  The second thing was that there weren’t so many of them. A dozen at most, probably fewer. Just an ambush team meant to kill and pull off before becoming decisively engaged.

  It was his turn now. He began hunting human beings.

  He went dead still. Time had become his friend, not theirs. And they knew it. He listened. For what seemed a very long time but was only moments. He heard nothing but the howling beyond the smoke. Like crazy Rebel yells.

  A doomed man’s sandal found a kernel of grain on the floor of a hooch. At the crack, Tomczik fired a full burst through the thatch and bamboo.

  A creature cried out, stunned at the disarrangement of its body. Tomczik ran. Bullets bit the air around him again. Auto bursts, sloppy fire. He couldn’t spot the shooter. Behind him. Somewhere.

  He crashed through a bamboo door, weapon ready, and found nothing.

  The faintest movement caught his eye. A hatch in the floor, closing the last millimeter.

  He looked around for blood, for evidence of a captive American. And found none.

  Pulling his last grenade from an ammo pouch, he primed it.

  A black-clad figure appeared in the doorway. The man appeared confused by what he saw. That gave Tomczik just enough time to raise his M-16 one-handed and put a burst into the other man’s torso.

  He couldn’t see a grip or notch to open the hatch in the floor. So he just set the grenade over the frail wood, released the lever, and hurled himself out into the dust.

  After the blast, he dashed back inside, with thatch already burning above him and moans from the compartment under the floor. He emptied a full magazine through the splinters, trying to find human flesh through the smoke and underground gloom. The moaning stopped.

  He reloaded. Counting how many full mags he had left: two.

  He scrambled outside to work down the line of hooches from the rear. Two black-clad figures climbed the dike a dozen feet away. Fleeing.

  Tomczik killed one and wounded the other. One shot for each. Sparing his ammunition now.

  In the hooch the two men had evacuated, he found PFC Milton Weinberg, with the skin peeled from his chest and slight muscles unveiled. To save their bullets, the VC had crushed his skull.

  Tomczik registered that the firing had ceased. The shouts, the wild hollering, had come closer. He scuttled out the backside of the hooch and low-crawled to where he had a view over the paddy.

  The smoke had thinned to nothing. A dozen GIs splashed through the last stretch of water and mud. Yelling like kids unleashed to break anything they wanted.

  Farther back, the rest of the platoon was strung out all the way to the dike. His men had come after him. The others had followed. Had the VC held in place and kept their machine gun ready, it would’ve been a massacre.

  Tomczik waited until his soldiers reached dry earth and began to spread out tactically. It was strange to watch them from the enemy’s perspective. One after another, they began to call his name.

  He shouted back. Telling them to go to ground, to do things the right way. In case there were any stay-behinds.

  Going through the hooches, they found Sergeant Rodriguez’s corpse as well. With his cock and balls cut off and stuffed in his mouth. There were seven bodies to recover, the entire squad.

  It had all been for nothing.

  * * *

  “I wrote him up for a Distinguished Service Cross,” my visitor told me, “but the brigade commander felt DSCs should only be for officers. The battalion commander agreed with him, of course. And then there was the business with Lieutenant Gibbons. A Silver Star didn’t call as much attention to what happened as a DSC would’ve.”

  “What happened to him? The general’s kid?”

  Larry Masters was on his fourth beer, while I still nursed my second. Beyond the window, the mid-December darkness thickened. I had missed my hours of practice but didn’t care.

  “I wanted to court-martial him. But nobody in the chain of command wanted any part of that.” He twisted his mouth. “Know what they told me? ‘Only four Vietnamese died. Forget it.’ I mean, I’m no softie. I didn’t have a problem with killing the enemy. And I could accept that sometimes civilians got caught in the middle of things, that mistakes were made. But when a U.S. Army officer goes berserk and orders his men to fire on a pack of terrified noncombatants, something’s just plain wrong. Whether it’s four dead, or four thousand.” He slapped down another empty bottle. “Plenty of bad things happened. Not because we wanted them to. It’s not the way people say. You don’t go out looking to hurt innocent people. You even start off thinking you’re protecting them. But it’s a war. And bad things happen. No matter how hard you try. That lieutenant was off the reservation, though. What he did was … unforgivable.”

  “But he got away with it?”

  “No. Not exactly. I did manage to get him a field-grade letter of reprimand and gave him an efficiency report that were both career enders. I figured his daddy could get the letter yanked from his file, but not the OER. They asked me to soften it, but I just couldn’t do it. What that sonofabitch did, what he tried to do, ran against everything I’d been taught, everything I believed in as an officer.”

  He sat back and softened his posture. “Anyway, they fixed his jaw, got it all wired up, let his promotion to first lieutenant go through, and reassigned him to MACV as some one-star’s aide-in-waiting. Not all of his old man’s friends could help him in the end, though. First Lieutenant Stephen Forsythe Gibbons wound up beating the hell out of a prostitute in a room at the Caravelle Hotel. Oh, he might’ve gotten away with bloodying up a dink hooker. But not with doing it at the Caravelle. That got the ambassador’s attention. So Dad’s pals sent the little shit home with a Purple Heart. For his broken jaw.”

  Masters sighed. “I got my walking papers not long after that. The revenge of the Green Machine. ‘Unfit for service.’” He chuckled, but the sound wasn’t happy. “I’m not sure exactly what I am fit for, to tell you the truth.”

  “What do you plan to do?”

  “I don’t really know. My wife divorced me while I was in Nam. There weren’t any kids, so I can go anywhere I want. I’m just not sure where I want to go.”

  “Well, you don’t want to stay around here. We’re all clawing tooth and nail to get out.”

  “I just stopped by to see Matt. I’m actually on my way to New York. My wife’s father liked me better than she did. He may have a job for me.” His eyebrows tightened toward each other. “You don’t think he’ll mind, do you? That I came to visit? I know some guys just want to put Nam behind them.”

  I took the question seriously. “I’d say Matty’s of two minds about all that stuff. I mean, that’s how it strikes me. But I really don’t know. He was glad enough to see Doc, we drove down to Philly to see him. Although that was another story.”

  “How is Doc?”

  “He’s a junkie. Or the next best thing.”

  My guest frowned at his beer bottle. “Some people can’t deal with what they go through. Only they don’t know it until afterward.”

  “Look, I’m going to make a box of macaroni and cheese for dinner. You’re welcome to share it. Although it’s not going to make you faint with pleasure.”

  “Better than C-rats.”

  “Help yourself to another beer.”

  “I should go pick up a couple of six-packs. I’m drinking you out of house and home.”

  Matty rapped on the door. I hadn’t heard him on the stairs, which was odd. But I knew his knock the way you know a girl’s footsteps.

  I flicked on the outside light. Matty stood there in a dark suit, without an overcoat. I let him in.

  The sight of his former company commander startled him. He came partway to attention, then froze.

  Larry Masters held out his hand.

  Slowly, Matty took it. And he held it.

  “Hope you don’t mind me dropping by.…”

  “No, sir. No. Not at all.”

  “No more ‘sir’ stuff
. That’s over and done with. It’s just ‘Larry’ now. I got out myself, by the way.”

  “I never thought you’d leave the Army.”

  “Long story. For another time. It’s good to see you, Matt.” My visitor summoned his best smile of the day. “You look like a hippie or something. That hair.”

  Matty ran his fingers over his scalp, the way women do if a man or a mirror unsettles them. He looked a little freaked out. In a black suit that didn’t fit properly, with a white shirt and black tie, he could have passed for a down south preacher in a Depression-era movie.

  “You look like you’ve been to a funeral,” I said when I could get a word in.

  “I was,” Matty said. He looked at the ex-captain. “Doc’s.”

  SIXTEEN

  Compared with the guys in the Philly bands, we looked like thugs masquerading as hippies. With suburban teeth, amphetamine waists, and managed hair, they resembled the musicians in photo shoots for Rolling Stone. Even their roadies looked more polished than we did.

  I had gone to plenty of concerts at the Electric Factory, a reclaimed industrial building in center city, and should have had better sense than to expect behind-the-scenes magic. We squeezed into a corner of one of the dressing rooms as the Philly bands partied with select camp followers. A fat joint went around in the management’s absence, but only Frankie took a token puff when it got to us. For the Philly bands, this was an easy gig, with their fans taking advantage of off-night prices. For us, it was a death match.

  The Factory was the premier place in Philly for name acts not yet able to fill the Spectrum, as well as for local bands hoping to break out. Of all the halls we had played, this was the one where the odds were best that a talent scout or producer would be in the audience. For the first time since Matty walked into the Legion, I got the inside shakes.

  The Philly boys weren’t rude. Just condescending. They pretended to treat us as equals but made it clear that they didn’t take us seriously. If the Factory’s booker had heard about our performance at Lancelot’s Lair, these guys had not. Or they didn’t believe what they’d heard. We were yokels in the big city, booked in error or as a joke.

  A guitarist in a buckskin jacket and Stephen Stills cowboy hat gave Matty the nickname “Dumbo.” Picking country runs on a big Gretsch, the dude giggled, all in stoner fun. The name caught on among the musicians and hangers-on.

  Matty smiled and didn’t say a word. But I’d come to know him well enough to sniff an odor of fury. When he beat the crap out of Bronc and broke Buzzy’s nose, those actions had sprung from an inspired rage, from adrenaline rapture. The vibes he radiated now were cold and more frightening.

  Matty could take a ribbing. His north-of-the-mountain crowd could be merciless teasers. But Larry Masters had come down with us—he was taking the morning train up to Manhattan—and Matty was embarrassed. I suppose we’re forever doomed to yearn to impress those who once held power over us.

  Matty’s routine was to warm up without an amplifier before we went onstage, running through shaman riffs to witch out the demons. Now he only tuned his guitar, bending over its body to hear through the ruckus, then laid it in its case. I understood. He wasn’t going to tip his hand, wasn’t about to alert them that we were serious players. Let them pass around another joint or two. Let them get can’t-tune-my-B-string stoned before we ambushed them.

  Matty was hunting human beings again.

  The atmosphere worsened when Angela came with her girlfriends. A carload of beauticians and factory girls, they’d driven down after work, speeding-ticket fast. In Schuylkill County, their getups passed for fabulously hip. In Philly, they were rubes. The local girlfriends and groupies rolled their eyes behind the backs of women grown men fought over back home.

  The toilet we shared was disgusting.

  * * *

  If many of our gigs had belonged to Frankie, that night was Matty’s. We kicked off our set with “Angeline.” My nerves disappeared as Stosh counted off the tempo. We tore into the song.

  When Matty’s solo came around, the notes exploded from his amp. For anyone with musical sense, it was breathtaking. Had you only seen his fingers fly over the Stratocaster’s neck, you might have thought he was scalding his fingertips, unable to find a place where they could settle. His playing excited Frankie and me into jagged antics. On the drum fill, Stosh went nuts. By the time we jackhammered into the final verse, you could hear the audience shouting over the music’s roar.

  I glimpsed Joan, who had made her way to the front of the crowd. I was glad, almost thrilled, to see her. I ached to impress someone, to have someone close by who could be impressed. If only for a forty-minute set.

  She smiled up at me.

  Matty didn’t wait for the applause to die. As I swapped the Rickenbacker for the Les Paul, he stepped out of his safety zone by the amps and strode up to Frankie.

  “I want to play ‘Bad Boy.’ Now, not later.”

  Frankie shrugged. It was the first time Matty had ever interfered with the order of a set. As the audience calmed, Matty turned to me.

  “If you don’t mind,” he said, “I’d like to play both solos myself. Just this once.” He added, “Please, Will.”

  Coming from Matty, the word please embarrassed me.

  I nodded. Sure. Do it.

  Matty couldn’t write a song to save his life, but he had cooked up a dazzling guitar instrumental. Usually, I took the first solo, then he followed.

  Matty surprised us all again. Breaking his tradition of onstage silence, he pushed up to Frankie’s mike and announced, “We call this number ‘Message from Dumbo.’”

  I never heard a guitar played so savagely. Hendrix and Pete Townshend smashed their axes doing their Theatre of Cruelty acts. Matty revered musical instruments and wouldn’t have harmed a kazoo. But the sound of his playing made me think of living beings suffering through torture. In another first, he took center stage, huge and still except for his flying left hand, with his eyes closed and his face worshipping the rafters, blond hair falling straight onto his shoulders. Colored lights floated over him.

  He ran out the number twice as long as usual, taking it to places no other guitarist was going to rival that night. If ever. He played so well it grew vicious, purposely humiliating the idiots who had written him off as a lummox.

  He tweaked his volume knob with his little finger, going even louder. A machine-gun cascade of notes cut invisible flesh.

  The Electric Factory was the home of cool, where the cosmically hip sat cross-legged on the floor and judged bands harshly. Matty had them standing up and howling.

  As he played that long solo, I understood at last: The exploits his former company commander had recounted were identical, in spirit if not in kind, to Matty’s guitar assaults. He really was a killer. And the crowd loved it.

  We all made perfunctory nods to the notion that our music was about peace. And love, of course. But it never was. It was raw aggression. I don’t mean only the music of the Innocents, but all of it, from the pop outbursts of the British bands to the flower power pretensions of West Coast groups. It was all about domination, the many hues of anger, outright rage. It wasn’t even about sex: That was a sideline. We sang hymns to death in countless, gorgeous voices.

  Jim Morrison saw through the lie. And the glimpsed revelation devoured him.

  The crowd became the now familiar beast of many heads, a creature that consumed each individual. It felt the urge to fight and fuck at the same time, but all the monster’s clumsy members could do was clap and yell.

  We swaggered into “Hideaway.” I looked down and found Joan’s eyes. Amid the emotional turmoil and mighty noise, she looked wonderfully sane and separate. I wasn’t going to sleep with her. Not that night. I fought the impulse, even as I relished the possibility. I had committed myself to Laura, who was back in her dorm room, studying doggedly, sparring with devils I could not begin to imagine. It was my duty to be loyal to her, to stick by her.

  I was too
young to understand that duty is love’s assassin.

  * * *

  Matty’s efficient fury was contagious. We didn’t just put our hearts into that set, we invested our souls. By the end, we were brined with sweat, as though the looming holiday were the Fourth of July, not Christmas. For all the heady nights we’d had as a band, we had never played with such passion or with such a lack of mercy. But there was no sloppiness, not one out-of-place note. We hit each beat on the microsecond, with the precision that stabs below the listener’s consciousness. We were disciplined and savage, filling that hall with a thrilling sense of danger. The music was every bit as barbaric and insidious as our worried elders feared.

  I suppose we became Matty’s new squad on that stage. High on the crowd’s frenzy, we wrapped it up with “Glass Slipper,” unplugged our guitars, and walked off amid an uproar. Had Matty said, “Follow me!” we would have marched straight through that crowd, stormed into the dressing rooms, and clubbed the shit out of those skinny suburban kids who had held their noses when the hicks showed up.

  But Matty’s mission was over. He had no rounds left. As we left the stage, I glimpsed his drained-of-blood face.

  The now familiar pattern repeated itself. Cupid, the second band on the bill, delayed coming out. The audience felt the old urge to touch the music, to become part of us, and we fielded cries of “Great set!” and “Heavy shit, man,” or “You blew me away, brother, you blew me the fuck away, you know?” Strangers wanted to shake hands, to touch a shoulder.

  Startled, I spotted Joyce and her biker boyfriend from the Warlocks. But they were yucking it up with Angela, who looked as slender as a wraith in profile. All the bad blood had drained away. Everybody longed to be cool with the band.

  I hunted for Joan, who had faded into the crowd. I just wanted to be polite, to thank her for coming. To maintain the connection. Just to stand smell-it close for a few minutes. I wasn’t going to spend the night with her in Quakertown. No matter how badly I wanted to. But I didn’t want to let her go too quickly.