NEW VOICES

A Short Story

by Tom Abrams

Small Arms Fire

IN FRONT OF YOU DOLPHINS muscle up from the sea. The water is wrinkled and full of green ribbons. The bottle beside you is a dead soldier. In a burst, the bird with the other world concealed under its wing explodes into flight. You wince, and then let it go. A smile just starts in the corners of your mouth; it never gets anywhere.
To the left the shore turns, angles out like a long white road, peppered by tanks, APC's, trucks, tents, men in fatigues. Because of them, you can sit here with your back against the war.
Heat bends the air. Human motion has moved to blue -- the heads on the water, the bodies cut at the waist, the knee. The bolts of color are the daughters and small sons of the women hired to fill sandbags for the airstrip at Quang Tri. You see but cannot hear them. The wind takes their voices inland.
There's a girl in an orange blouse. She's wading toward you, watching her feet. Now, chasing minnows, she misses, kicks water into the air. Each drop falls down with a sun in it.
You look at her awhile, her narrow hips thrust sideways as she stands at rest. A child will ride there sometime not far perhaps. By the age of twenty she will be old. But at the moment she is young and uncommonly pretty. More daughters take shape. The world starts, and your sight spreads out; she disappears into it.
Rafael is walking along the shore. He strolls over like a young prince at the end of his journey. He's from the South. His voice is full of black cotton.
"Where you goin'?"
"Nowhere," he says. "You want to come along?"
"C'mere."
He sits down, hands you a j.
"How'd it go?"
"The truck's where it was ... we couldn't get it any closer." He wipes his nose on his wrist. "Mumaw's guardin' it. Want a keep him out my eyes long as I can."
"Billy get ice?"
"I don't know ... He was last seen lookin' in the truck mirror, tryin' to figure out if he was still present I guess. A big piece of information missin' there, even for a cook. The boy took one too many headers. Used to know where Spaceman was. He was taggin' me around, but I lost'm ...You notice his tattoo? Say he got it on R&R. A tattoo of Elmer Fudd. How fucked up at the time are you to get a tattoo of Elmer Fudd put on your arm? Buchanan ... I jus' saw him a minute ago. What's that other one's name ... the one got ringworm?"
They had real names, but their war names were closer to the truth: Gila, June-bug, 8-Ball, Fish ...
"Fish. Yeah. He's out lookin' for a small wound. Who'd I miss?"
"Guy-jacks."
Rankled, he says, "He's the last word ain't he?"
"I thought he was your buddy."
"He saved my death. What do I owe him? Fire that up, Doc."
His eyes inhale the scene.
"Ain't it rare?"
He picks up the bottle, holding it to the sun at arm's length.
"A fifth of Eden ... mmm ... purple Jesus." He takes the last nip, shuddering. The skin makes x's on the back of his neck.
"Damn, that is rough. You drank all that?"
"I drank part of it. After which, I spilled most of it. Then I drank what there was."
"Just as well ... Whyn't you in swimmin'?"
"I don't know how."
His eyes fix on you. "You got 37 days and a wake-up. You startin' to miss this place already?
"I locked up your piece," he went on. "It weighs the same as mine I notice. It's not like you said."
Your rifle had grown so strangely heavy of late, you could barely lift it.
"Hey, you gotta hear this joke ..."
"O" you say, for your thoughts are now traveling in circles of smoke.

Part of the morning goes by you and down the road into the past. You're looking at Rafael, his nose hooked, too far from his face. His skin is coal-blue. Hawklong, his stare is a cage he has closed on the scene. All around him the air is blonde.
He says, "I was thinkin' 'bout Spaceman."
"Thinkin' what?"
"I wonderin' what in the world his parents are like ..."
After awhile you say, "Rafael ... you findin' what you need?"
"It ain't far, I reckon. It's always jus' yonder. I'll be alright. I go home ... I'll drink my Seagrim Gin, drink my Log Cabin ... shit jus' get me by is all."
"You ought to kick."
"You ought a jus' leave me alone on it. You always harpin' ... goddamn it."
The sun is so sharp it cuts his eyes to the ground. "You 'n everyone."
"Just the same ... seems like it's gainin' on you."
"No matter where I run to, I meet myself there ... no way around that. But what's it matter? I kill myself, or I keep on dyin'... Shit jus' take the edge off my thinkin' on it."
Rafael stands. Wearing the clouds like scarves on his shoulders, he grins; then the sand steps him away. His body cuts a black path through noon.

Your skin is right up against the sun. Soon, sleep burns through time.
Then, and it seemed only a moment that you were away, from the place where you have lain down in your life, you rise, and wake to the electrical whine of gulls. The world looks back at you, a strange creature in a field of objects. The dream you were having goes away without saying goodbye. But a character is left behind, something like a man, brick-red in color, a long goat face, eye-sockets of white heat. The description of a devil, perhaps, yet it does not seem to be this. The expression on its face is really sort of kind. Out of its element, it stumbles about, dissolves. You don't even recall it after it's gone.
You're smoking a menthol. Your eyes catch on aspects of your appearance. Salt has formed white lines that jag through the dirt in your fatigues. Your boots are dull red from mud. A tan circles your shoulders and stops, where the flak jacket you always wear ends.
Some kids find you. A half dozen of them. They're selling beer, the cans covered with cold sweat. Then she comes again; the world falls away behind her step. She stops, looks at you and smiles, then starts again. Her hair flows behind her like black wind. Her complexion is bamboo. She's wearing that orange blouse, black pajama bottoms. Her feet are bare and callused. Close by now, she smells of the sea. The shadow of a companion cuts her face in half vertically: one eye is coal, the other diamond.
You try to speak, but the words are swollen with both death and hunger. Your teeth feel like corn.
She tells you her name is Lee. When you tell her yours, she's amused. Out of nervousness, you have spoken your full name. Even you have not heard it for a long time.
"Where does this long name come from?" she asks.
"It's Hungarian."
"I have never heard of this place," she says. "How may I call you?"
"They call me Doc."
She says, "I am part French."
The wind tilts, and the other kids come back into their places. They bring out their wares. Lee takes an opium ball from a young girl beside her and kneads it ito the shape of a flower. She holds it up saying, "The hand of an angel."
When they see how fat your wallet is, a covey of voices takes to the air.
"Souvenir?" Lee says. But her smile reaches into irony. It's an easy smile and shorn of all malice.
They want to exchange money. Their piasters for your script, which they call dollars. A girl attempts to explain the transaction.
"See ... souvenir ... twentee dolla' 'merican, you twentee piaster. Changee." She moves her hands to show you how it goes.
"Never happen," you say.
"Pot, too," a boy says. He takes a cellphaned ten-pack from his hat. You shake your head. He takes out another, and then a third. They like to bargain. It's a kids' game to them. Some times they get carried away. And you're just playing, too. The money means nothing to you. You have a lot of it. In the mountains there's nothing to buy with it.
"Thirty beaucoup," Lee says.
"And beer," you say.
"Neva hack it, g.i.," a tough kid says.
Lee takes a can of beer, opens it.
"We will trade now ... okay? Please." And she smiles again, and it touches you in that place the flowers are in winter.

She leaves, comes back, leaves and returns on her journey through the hour. Now and again, she helps her mamasan, takes money to her, something. Her mother looks unbearably old. She is dry leather in clothes, a black smile. Her once distinguished features have been completely folded away.
You go off by yourself, not knowing what to think. For a man can be a magician but then he comes upon desire. The wind seems to blow the world out. June-bug shuffles by. He sees you and you see him and maybe you nod to each other, or maybe you just think you did.
June-bug hadn't ever been such a bright light, but he wasn't always blanked out like now. One night on guard duty, he'd left his fox-hole to take a leak and got lost on the perimeter. He cleared the mine field without a scratch and somehow always taking the wrong turn ended up in the jungle for a week. He'd come to a small clearing and found two heads stuck on poles out there. He knew one of the men. They had been friends. What he couldn't get out of his mind was that they had grown beards after they were dead. Now he shuffled around like an old man with the eyes of a saint, and he wasn't nineteen yet.
Lee comes to you, puts her ear to your shoulder.
"You disappeared ... I turned around, and you were gone."
The sun is knocking on the water. There is one gull in the hang of the wind. And she only takes your hand into hers, but she has touched you deeper than you can follow.
"You must look at me first," she says.
"What?"
"You must look at me," she says.
The two of you are walking down the shore. There must be some place here to call your own. You come to where a tank is set up, aimed at the day. You catch the radioman's voice in passing. He shoots the breeze. A young girl appears from behind the tank. She isn't wearing much, and her smile is a hook. When she is past, Lee calls her: "The girl with three mouths."
Farther on, there is another girl with soldiers around her. They are not hidden well. These are ARVN troops. Useless, to your way of thinking. A month ago, at a camp named C-2, some ARVN had fired on the kids scavenging a trashpile, killing three of them.
Lee says, "He numba ten."
You look back roughly with your eyes. This time you see it is a young boy. Caught in fantasy, he wears a rope leash at his neck. His face is a mask of lipstick and rouge, smeared absurdly. It's difficult to believe the lines that have eaten into your face in less than a year, but here they are again, dining on a frown.
Then she repeats it: "You must look at me."
She takes you into a grove of palms, into the shade and the penciled light; you walk through design. She sits down in a shadow that trembles about her like dark mercury. Lifting her blouse, she shows you a secret that her clothes have kept. Her nipples are obliterated. She is marked by the fairest scars, like intricate webs, though their beauty is separate from loveliness. You begin to say something, but her face is turned away.
Red earth skeins the sand here like the roads on a map. In the distance behind you, the blue-green mountains roll up into a frozen sea, its waves caught in arced stillness. Each horizon is a bridge across the river of color. The tide has a voice, and the wind answers it. There is a radiance of pale sulfur below the palms, grape shadow, lilac. And her at your side as if you had been divided in two.

She is asleep. Her eyes move rapidly under their lids, trying to keep up with her dream. The two of you made love and then fell asleep, and you woke soon after like an animal you felt so innocent. These are the first hours you have been friends with yourself ... for how long? You've been alone, lost with the holes in your days; and now, as though a photograph had been taken that froze you in this moment, she frames your shoulder.
You think, She is a woman; she has never been a child; there's no time for that in this country.
And you have to smile, recalling the reason you're here -- the strange order that came down from Battalion saying that anyone who managed to stay alive for a year would receive an award. Didn't say it that way exactly; it came dressed carefully in military lore. But that was the gist of it. And if any such qualified troop did not deserve an award, the colonel wanted to know, in writing, why not. It was easier to do it than it was not to, in other words, and now you and Rafael are carrying a load of clowns forty miles to service battery so the colonel can pin a decoration on them. The colonel had quit alcohol when he arrived in-country. And he came across as just that, a man badly in need of a drink. You recall the XO as he explained the detail, weighing his words as though they actually had value. There hadn't been much to smile about lately, but it was hard not to just then. Even the guns that night seemed to be laughing.
Top had picked you for the detail to get you off the hill before you totalled, as lately you had gone remote, even your own body only a scene that you are watching from a little way off.
"Pretend it's TDY."
"I need a shotgun."
"Well, I can guess who you want. Sure. Why not? You can leave him there far as I'm concerned."
You smile now, but even if she were awake, she wouldn't have caught it; your mouth doesn't move.

A cloud darkens the sun. She is stirring in her sleep. You don't know where to begin, or how to say to her what you must say to someone at last besides yourself -- that you are dying of disguise; always meaning one thing, and being something else. That actually, you are two people, with their backs to each other, cambered so that they will never meet. And how can you describe the waiting, the days, pinballing up to their certain level, and back to their lay, and the nights worse. And the war was bad but the quiet times killed you in a different way, because time did not move then. That is all life is to you now, the waiting on life to begin. Or say, this is the way it's had to be, to close your eyes, to keep from looking any more.
For Death lives here. You have seen it. And you are the pattern of the empty spaces it has left. You have seen it stand tall with broad shoulders; you've seen it come begging in the shadows. You have seen the hills laced with artillery patches, the land gone black; you have seen napalm stretch a quick shadow across a race with the stilling of one child; the good body of a woman turn into a zoo of bullets; scars running like concertina wire down an old man's face, as though he wept so hard the tears burned tracks on him; you have seen a friend's smile stop at midyouth and go out the back of his head, then had him return that night in a dream saying, Death is a place I've been. Like the must in the addict you feel the wait, but how do you say it?
There is a brief shower. For the moments that it endures, you look out through the bars of the rain.

Through a hole in her sleep, she is looking at you. She is slowly rising within herself. In the sequence of a wind, a black snow falls, patterns are printed in air. It is the wind's ink. Time blinks like an owl. An episode from yesterday morning enters. Once again you pass the old peasant crumpled by the side of the road. The mine he detonated had taken off like a terribly quick bird and touched him with its wings. A mongoose gnaws at his armpit; one hand jerks back and forth, as if the dead man were gesturing you to come closer.
Touching your arm, she gives it muscle, nerve. She is holding you. Her hands make you into the shape of a man, as they lead you back to the present.
"I've been alone. I don't know if I can talk to anyone but myself."
She says, "I feel, too."
She moves slightly, and the sun is stranded in her hair.
She says, "When will you return?"
"Tomorrow."
"I will cry."
"I don't understand."
"Tomorrow is too far."
She closes her eyes on your reflection. Your mouths taste bad together, but it doesn't matter. Then the falling, and the earth does not catch you, nor nothing beyond. You are swimming in her now, and you have found the door to the sea.

Rafael and you are alone in the tent by the LZ at service battery. He is drifting in and out of his personality. One candle is burning. Outside, a cricket is singing in its best black voice. It's not a cricket like you all are thinking. It sounds like a sawmill in the distance.
"When I die, Doc ... if you aroun' ... I want you to set my body afire ... 'n pour this on it ... see, here in my boot I keep it. Pour it on the fire, 'n I'll climb the smoke to heaven."
"You're mumbling."
Every shadow has its roots in the light of the candle.
"Each grain is a little map ... that leads you out of your eyes ..."
He drifts away, then returns like a stranger to his last thought.
"That Buchanan ... he's a crazy man. Know what he tell me? -- All those I have killed will be my slaves in paradise."
He starts saying it slower now, like the street his thoughts are on is so long, he's not sure they will arrive.
"You gone be leavin' soon, Doc. You gettin' short as hell."
You say nothing.
"Gettin' so short can't hardly see out your eyes no more."
"What's that mean?"
"You always knowed before," he says. He rises, throws the flaps back farther on top of the tent. The wind says something, and the candle weeps. Rafael is a shadow standing in a triangle, the zero moon perched on his shoulder.
"What's bothering you?"
"That gook."
"What about her?"
"None a that shit's any good here."
"What're you talkin' about?"
"Carin'," he says.
Anger comes quick, makes you stumble inside yourself, like a blind boy for the first time out walking his cane.
Rafael turns away, glares at the winking of small arms fire on a distant hill. He was looking into the future, but you didn't understand it just then.

[ Story copyright © 1998 Tom Abrams. All rights reserved. ]

Tom Abrams is an American writer living in Spain. This is his first appearance in New Voices, but we have reason to hope it won't be his last. Here he is in his own words:

"I am a Tampa writer. I now live with my wife Jane in Madrid. I have a novel published called A Bad Piece of Luck. A collection of short stories, of which 'Small Arms Fire' is one, called The Drinking of Spirits, is to be published shortly. My publisher is Joe Taylor, Livingston Press, Coatopa, Alabama. If Joe is sober, he will often as not pass along personal mail to me."

As will we at TW3. If you have a comment for Tom Abrams, send it along to abrams@pictograph.com, and, sober or not, we'll forward it at once.


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