Anderson looked at the sky from his hole. As a field of black clouds slid past the round moon, all he could see behind the shadows was a shimmering hardball suspended beyond the reach of his hand. He’d not fired a round.

  At dawn, as they looked out from their foxholes, the men of Delta Company saw hundreds of trees snapped and tossed about like matchsticks and craters the size of watering holes and mounds of red clay charred and smoldering and they saw one another and they saw the sky blueing up overhead, but they saw no dead at the edge of the camp. The bodies that had ringed the camp had vanished. The men waited for another assault, but there was no sign of NVA anywhere. Slowly the Americans crawled out of their holes. Some ran hands up and down their limbs. Others sought silent company. A few opened up Cs and began eating. In the still air only the sounds of men breathing and can openers prying at tin lids could be heard.

  They’d been lucky. The unit had taken two KIAS and three wounded, a miracle considering the intensity of the incoming. The captain called in dust offs for the casualties and told First Sergeant Tremble to have the company prepare to leave. At mid-afternoon a squadron of Hueys slipped over the eastern range and descended. As they boarded the craft, First Sergeant Tremble shook the hands of the men of Fire Team Alpha for playing so well.

  When they were airborne and drifting away, Anderson happened to look back and down at the airstrip, now largely obliterated. Only the left sideline of the outfield was intact. He blinked several times to make certain he was seeing what he thought he saw—two men, mere dots, two-legged ant-men running up and back, throwing themselves down and sliding with near-perfect form.

  Anderson nudged Small to get his attention, but Small, already smiling his usual smile, popped a stick of gum in his mouth, looked away and began chewing. Candy ran his tongue over his molars. Anderson leaned back, closed his eyes, and pictured his wife hanging beneath the white canopy of a parachute. She was smiling and waving, and he was holding a baseball up for her to see. It was glowing silver-white in his hand and had a face, a flat face with an impish grin.

  Stonehands and the Tigress

  Contending a monotonous mantle of vegetation—palms the width of a man’s chest and trees the girth of mine shafts—Second Squad, Third Platoon marched single file up the bitter ascent. The climb had been most difficult the last hour. The combe was riddled with vine tangles and elephant grass, a habitat for spiders and mosquitoes and leeches, and for snakes—cobras and little green vipers called two-step death. Though aware of every swaying branch, every strange sound, every smell, every silence, the grunts, as they called themselves with ambivalent pride, moved with machinelike apathy, ants tirelessly lugging great burdens. A Shau was open to sudden mortar attacks and fierce ambushes, booby traps and tunnels and punji stakes.

  They’d humped three hours now. Sweat blackened their fatigues and burned acidlike in the fine cuts left by blades of razorsharp grass. Halverson halted them in a rocky clearing atop a ridge, where they tossed off their helmets and eased out of pack straps gravid with grenades and cartridge cases. Some dropped to the ground and sprawled out spraddle-legged on the spot. Some fired up cigarettes while others found shade or a tree to lean against. They wiped away sweat with green bandanas and sipped tepid water from canteens, water that barely slaked their thirst.

  As he sipped, Stonehands gazed at the elongated depression below where miles of verdant treetops ran to a horizon of jagged peaks that blurred into a blue sky. He held his M-60 in the crook of his left arm. Two belts of ammo crossed his shoulders, one feeding into the machine gun, which he and the others called a pig. A tall man with long, powerful thighs, he was solid and flat in the chest, and wide and slightly stooped forward at the shoulders. His name was Walter Harvey, but he’d not been called that since jump school where he’d dropped two opponents in the first rounds of his only fights—two pickup matches.

  Near Stonehands, Donatello sprinkled his trouser cuffs with insect repellent. A cigarette dangled from his lips. Roughly the height of an average Vietnamese, he was a wiry man who’d husband insect spray and batteries and recycle cigarette butts like a miser, then turn around and blow a month’s pay on beer and boom-boom girls in Quang Ngai. He hailed from New York, a place, so far as Stonehands could tell, where the populace distrusted everyone but politicians.

  Donatello said, “Should’a stayed at Benning,” and pointed at Stonehands’s M-60. “You’d be boxin’. Instead you’re humpin’ that pig.”

  Stonehands pretended to listen. His thoughts were aimed on a particular boy. He was stumped as to why after months of sweeping villages, of seeing bodies burned or riddled with holes, the boy in Hai Drong came to mind so often. Why not Howkert, who’d been found in a gutter in Quang Ngai City with strips of skin sliced from his chest?

  As operations go, Hai Drong had been unremarkable—two sniper rounds, a captured vc turned over to the ARVN. Only the boy made it different. He’d come straight up the middle of the road on a rough-hewn crutch smiling a gap-toothed smile like he was the local Welcome Wagon, his left arm gone, his left leg off at the knee. As he moved, his body listed to the right and he swung his good leg forward violently like a cricket hopping on one leg.

  They’d fed him candy and canned peaches, given him cigarettes and watched him smoke. He’d called each of them Joe. They’d named him Sammy, a name he seemed to like. Someone crowned his head with a fatigue cap, and when it was time to go, he followed along as if one of them. Di di mau, he was told—no go with Joe. He’d struggled to keep up, hopping fiercely down the same road, following with the smile glued to his face as if that could change their minds. Then he fell and sat in the middle of the road and watched them leave.

  “Be in fat city in Benning, Stoners. That colonel liked you.”

  Donatello spoke so loudly Stonehands had to look. He grunted. Boxing was behind him, a backslapping experience, curious and short-lived. After hearing of his matches, his mother insisted he see a chaplain and get a job “helping. No fighting.” She hadn’t raised her boy to hurt men with his fists. He’d explained that no such jobs existed, that the Army expected men to be violent.

  “You’re my son. Do as you’re told,” she’d said.

  Stonehands was a good son. He’d not taken the colonel’s offer and had quit boxing.

  A few yards away Drammel stood, field-stripped his cigarette and unbuttoned his fly as he eased into the bush.

  “Watch out a snake don’t bite you,” Donatello said.

  Drammel shook off Donatello’s comment and entered a vine tangle to urinate. He was a shy freckle-faced kid who twisted words when excited. Listed among his phobias were snakes, spiders, and elevators. He liked to say the one good thing about Vietnam was no elevators. An instant later he came out, buttoning up as he charged through the bush. Aiming a finger in the direction he’d come from, he looked at Stonehands, then Halverson, and said, “A mockin’ funky hole while pliffin’ by the ease.”

  “He’s talkin’ in tongues again,” Donatello said.

  Halverson sat Drammel down and told him to take a few deep breaths.

  Once he understood Drammel had found a hole, Halverson ordered the squad to set up a fire perimeter and said to Stonehands, “Bring that pig over here.”

  Stonehands stood at the mouth of the hole and kept his M-60 at the ready as Donatello removed a silver chain given to him by a boom-boom girl in Quang Ngai. A lucky tiger’s claw dangled from it. He laid the necklace in Halverson’s open palm along with a pack of cigarettes and took a flashlight from the sergeant’s other hand, but not the .45. He knelt before the hole, flipped on the light, and peered in. He said it didn’t seem to be a tunnel, too shallow, no more than six to seven feet deep. Halverson ordered him to check it out anyhow.

  Donatello squirmed in and vanished. An instant later, he shouted, “Well, damn.” At once, a tiger cub with rosettes on its back shot out, clawing at the ground. Donatello held a rear leg firmly in his grasp. He quickly stuffed the flashlight in his trousers and lifted the cub into the air by the nape of the neck, where it hung limply.

  Stonehands shook his head. He’d grown up around bears and deer and owls, understood, as Donatello never could, the gravity of removing the cub. What did a kid from New York know?

  “Put it back,” Stonehands said.

  Donatello smiled. “Looks harmless enough now, don’t it, Hal?”

  Halverson tickled the pink inside of its ear. The cub shook its head. “Cute, ain’t it?” Halverson said. “I don’t see no harm.”

  The cub seemed to like the attention. Halverson grinned as Donatello handed it over to him. Halverson scratched the tuft on its chin. Donatello hung the tiger’s claw around his neck and reached for the animal.

  “You bein’ a fool, Donatello,” Stonehands said. “Put it back ’fore its momma come.”

  Donatello licked his wrist where the cub had clawed him, then said, “Well, you just open her up with that pig, Bro.” He took the cub from Halverson and tussled with it as he wrapped it up in his bandana. He smiled and stuffed it inside his shirt so that only its head stuck out. The cub closed its eyes as it licked sweat from Donatello’s chest.

  “See, Stoners, it likes me already.”

  “It don’t know you yet.”

  Donatello laughed.

  At the forward fire base Donatello scavenged three bags of powdered milk and a jar of honey and drained the syrup out of a can of fruit to feed the cub. Men came to the tent to see. It was a welcome break from the monotonous low drama of war and the petty annoyance of fear. It was a piece of home, a pet, something not yet ruined by the war. The captain stuck his head inside for a peek and reminded the men that a regiment of North Vietnamese was operating in the A Shau. He didn’t mention the cub, which meant he wasn’t going to cause a stir.

  One man donated a poncho liner, another two cans of evaporated milk sent by an aunt from Milwaukee. Still another said the cub was a sign, good luck, and should be made the company mascot. Donatello said Drammel was the company mascot and dangled his claw necklace in front of the cub, which lay on its back swatting at it. When the visitors left, the squad lit a joint. As the weed passed from hand to hand, Donatello romped with the cub. He asked what to name it, and the squad began compiling a list, the favorite name being Butter.

  McPherson, a sad-faced kid from First Squad, said the Montagnards believe a tiger has supernatural powers, that it is part animal, human, and spirit.

  “What’a you know?” Donatello asked.

  It sounded like a challenge, and McPherson, being timid, seemed apologetic when he explained he’d read it somewhere.

  “Where?” Donatello demanded.

  Jurgens, a spec four from another platoon, said, “I know somethin’ about tigers.”

  Donatello said, “Let McPherson finish.”

  “I read about animal myths,” McPherson said. He seemed to wait for Donatello to take issue, but Donatello was distracted by the cub, which had found its footing and was trying to run away.

  McPherson swallowed and explained that according to the story the tiger had descended from kings and queens who ruled the forest before the coming of the Annamese and is driven to mate because its spirit can pass into the heaven of kings only if it leaves behind posterity.

  “That’s it?” Donatello said.

  McPherson gave a nod.

  Donatello said, “That’s dumb.”

  Jurgens nodded knowingly. “Ain’t either. Tigers,” he said, “ain’t other animals. Not here. Had me a shack-up in Quang Ngai who told about a princess.”

  Fists stuffed in his pockets, Stonehands stood to the side and listened as Jurgens told the legend of a princess who ran away with a lover, a Radai, a great hunter-warrior, rather than marry the Annamese king she was promised to. The couple was tracked down by the king’s soldiers, and the Radai dismembered, his remains strewn over the highlands. Thereafter, Jurgens explained, the princess refused to eat, died, and was sent to the spirit world on a pyre, though he called it a “pier.” According to his boom-boom girl, the tigress leaped out of the flames and killed the Annamese king. Always hungry, she had, he claimed, “roamed the jungle ever since in search of her lover’s spirit.”

  Donatello gathered the cub in his arms. “Fairy tales are for kids. Besides, what does a pier have to do with tigers?”

  “Uh, uh, he means a pu-pu-pyre,” Drammel said.

  “It’s cute,” Jurgens said, “but I wouldn’t want to meet its momma, even if she is a goddamn princess.”

  The others were skeptical and joked about it, but Stonehands felt something resonant in these stories. Ain’t right to mess with the natural, he thought, but a lot of things weren’t right. Howkert, the boy, the vc. The image of the boy on the crutch came like a curtain, closing his mind to anything else.

  Donatello stood up from playing with the cub. “Thinks I’m his mommy. Whachu think of the name?” he asked.

  Stonehands blinked but didn’t answer.

  “Well, man, what about Butter?”

  “You hear what those boys said?” Stonehands asked.

  “You superstitious, Stonehands? ’S ’at what’s buggin’ you? You scared?”

  Stonehands saw nothing wrong with fear or superstition. Luck and prudence, it seemed to him, had everything to do with everything.

  “S-s-s-Stonehands a-ain’t a-afraid of nuh-nuh-nothing,” Drammel said.

  “Didn’t you hear, Bro?” Donatello said to Stonehands. “It’s unlucky to be superstitious.” He laughed and looked at the others. “Get it?” He clutched the cub to his chest.

  Too fatigued to argue, Stonehands shook his head and lifted his tent flap. Outside he was met by Halverson, who told him he had last watch at a listening post. “You got four hours to get some shut-eye.”

  “After humpin’ all day?” Stonehands said.

  Halverson shrugged. “Sorry.”

  Three hours of blackness at a listening post! Stonehands shrugged and went to his own tent. He lay down and tried to think of something pleasant to whisk him into sleep, but there was the boy again, hand outstretched for candy, and the cub, swatting at the claw. These two fused into a picture of Howkert sitting next to Stonehands, saying he was through. Through? Stonehands hadn’t understood at the time what Howkert had meant—crazy talk, rambling words about the only thing to live for and finding love and never seeing things the same. Stonehands closed his eyes and saw the narrow trail to his home in the Smokies, a turn in the path, and his house on the right, its windows open, a bluebottle fly buzzing by his head, and smells. . . . In the dream the boy came hopping down the road, but the road led to Stonehands’s home. Then the boy was engulfed in a ball of darkness that swirled like a cyclone.

  Tim Grofield, the sergeant of the guard, shook Stonehands’s shoulder. “You awake, Harvey?”

  Stonehands awoke and sat upright in the dark.

  “Yeah, Sarge.”

  “You sure? You were talking in your sleep.”

  “I’m sure.”

  “Come on, then,” the platoon sergeant said.

  Stonehands slipped into his boots, tied the laces, and crawled out. Grofield passed him an M-16 and told him to follow. Fog had crept over the valley and sealed it in. At the perimeter, a guard spread the concertina and handed over a commo wire and said, “Follow it.” It was impossible to see more than ten feet away. Running the wire through his palm, Stonehands silently walked through the fog, Grofield a close step behind. Two hundred meters beyond the fire base they reached a foxhole big enough to accommodate one man.

  Smith challenged them. Grofield said, “Slick silver.” Smitty told them to advance and said he was glad to leave—the fog and all. “Times I felt I wasn’t alone,” he said. “Like Charley was breathin’ on my neck. Creepy like.”

  Stonehands laid the M-16 on a sandbag. He listened till their footsteps died, then sank down into the damp hole and called in a brief commo check.

  The first hour he thought about anything he could but the boy. He recalled the soldier he’d boxed at Benning, a white youngster with a boy’s face and a man’s body, the one he was afraid to hit because where he came from blacks didn’t hit whites. He’d knocked him to his knees, then held him from going down until the referee urged him to a neutral corner so the count could begin. Later the soldier had congratulated him, had shaken his hand and smiled affably as if they were now friends.

  Stonehands thought he heard footsteps nearby somewhere in the damp night. He concentrated, trying to locate the sound, but heard nothing. The fog-heavy air quelled sound. In this soup Charley could walk up on him before he’d hear anything. He’d heard of soldiers going crazy at a listening post but figured they just didn’t have strong minds or had just had enough of combat. Maybe, like his buddy Howkert, they were merely looking to escape.

  He missed Howkert, Howkert the reader who would quote Camus and Sartre, the hippie who’d been drafted, who’d come to ’Nam with a what-the-hell shrug and a medic’s bag and more guts than sense. “Why not?” he’d said. “I hear the dope’s good.” He had a way of seeing things that made the lunacy of war seem absurdly logical—like the old wood carrier they’d stumbled upon on the way to Dak Chat, an old man who stepped on a toe-popper, a mine meant to shatter the foot and ankle. Howkert had treated the wound and called for a dust off. As they waited, he’d asked the interpreter to ask if the old man was authorized to sweep minefields, if he held a union card. The interpreter said he didn’t understand. “That’s the trouble with this country—no unions,” Howkert had said.

  Howkert hadn’t deserted because he was a coward. One thing Stonehands and the others were certain of was that Howkert was brave. But he’d deserted. What would he have thought of the boy who’d lost both limbs on the left side—both, so that no matter what aid he used to walk, he would always list to the right. How would Howkert have viewed it?

  A noise distracted Stonehands, indistinct, but sound nonetheless. He was sure, so certain that he pressed the rifle butt into his shoulder and looked out over the barrel. Something was out there, an animal, a deer or wild pig. But the sound was gone, and eventually he lowered the M-16. This hadn’t stopped being a forest just because of the war.