DREAM: RATTLESNAKE AND PISTOL

This dream is the title piece for the book, which will be 400+ pages of stories from Vietnam and the other wars I’ve seen. It’s also what I asked my friend Cruz Ortiz Zamarron to represent graphically. Now that he’s done that, I thought it might be a good idea to put the two close together.

     The book has a number of dreams, mostly post-combat nightmares. The rattlesnake dream was a nightmare that turned a corner in my life, a playing out of the change in me that began with holding the baby boy at bayonet point in the burning village of Tho An in April, 1966. (see Prologue)

     This book is the history of that change. We might call the dream the acorn from which it grew.

Dream: Rattlesnake and Pistol

People come running up to me: people I know, friends, family, the human community. They're all afraid. They scurry and bump into one another in their urgency to summon my help: "Dean! Dean! There's a snake... you have to shoot it. Hurry!" I follow them. They form a wary circle around the snake, a rattler with powerfully writhing body as thick as my forearms, and triangular head the size of a fist. I'm in the circle, between the people and the snake. Someone hands me a pistol. It's a Hi Standard .22 semiautomatic with a 5" barrel. I recognize it in the dream, and later when I waken, as the first real pistol I ever held, the one my step‑dad Bill Gano taught me how to shoot when I was a kid, setting up bottlecaps on a log to represent snakes' heads. The pistol is totally familiar: the purposeful weightiness, the dully glinting, no‑nonsense machined surfaces, the knurled metal grips, the thumb safety and the blade front sight and the notch rear sight at the rear of the slide, even the screws, all as I remember them, in their proper places. The people become more frightened, their urgings more frantic: Hurry, they say, and shoot the snake. You're the only one who can do it. The snake throws its body into a coil of scaly, muscular loops. It cocks its head. It emanates power. The people surge back, their entreaties swelling to an ever higher pitch. I take the pistol and look down at the snake. It's in position to strike, but something is missing, which I notice more viscerally than visually. What is missing is that last critical increment of muscular readiness, the quiver of surgical tubing under tension. As I look closer, I notice that the head, instead of hovering just above the coils, tracking its target in readiness to strike, is still resting on the topmost coil, in a physical attitude which suggests both threat and a certain reluctance. And the mouth, which, if open to strike, would have been a terrifying maw in a snake that size, is still closed. I remember that a rattlesnake ready to strike flares its jaws open to almost 180 degrees in order to point all four fangs at its target. And this snake's eyes are not the cold, unblinking eyes with vertical black pupils I had stared into from six inches away, on the Rogue River, as a teenage boy. They are much larger, softer, moist, and brown, more like a dog's, or even a human's, eyes. The snake looks back at me. Its eyes convey ferocity layered with a deep wisdom; and with more layers of warmth, menace, accusation, resignation, regret, and a slight admixture of pleading. Though the snake does not have a voice, what it says with its eyes reaches my brain, not in words exactly, but still in a form akin to language. Ah, the snake says with its eyes. I guess you have to shoot me. I am, after all, a snake. And yes, I am dangerous. I wish I could promise never to bite any of these people, but I can't. I am what I am. But I'm not that different from you. And if you kill me, what does that make you? The urgings of the people in the circle around the snake and me have become a cacophony. They're aware of the eye‑to‑eye conversation between me and the snake, and want me to shoot before I have time to think about it. The snake is lying in its coils, its eyes now conveying only sadness and a deep reserve of dignity that says it will not demean itself by trying to avoid its fate. I reach down, pick up the snake, and put it in a burlap bag. I leave the circle. The people howl in surprise and protest, but express relief that the snake is no longer free among them. I walk down a road that leads away from the circle of the snake's accusers - the circle of my people - with the rattlesnake in the bag in my left hand, and the pistol, still loaded and still unfired, in my right.