BANNING

Banning

     Poor people and servicemen on leave traveled by Greyhound. So the trip through the January night to my first permanent duty station after boot camp was just an extension of my childhood. Except for how I smelled: twentyfour hours in a closed bus wearing the same dress green wool uniform works its own alchemy, a brew of stale sweat, wet wool, tobacco smoke, and dry cleaning fluids which has to be stored in the synapses of every veteran.

     It grew bitingly cold as the bus moved deeper into the January night and the California desert. Sometime in the middle of the night we were disgorged at the bus stop in Banning. There either was no bus station, or it was closed. Two or three of us on our way to the Marine base at Twentynine Palms had to wait outside for the local stage that would take us on our next leg. There was a bench to sit on, and a concrete wall to lean against. The bench was occupied by two old men. I was puzzled that they weren't home in bed, since they weren't waiting for the same stage we were, and there didn't seem to be anything else happening in Banning that time of night. 

     I wasn't interested in sitting anyway. I was too cold. My wool overcoat was near the bottom of my seabag, that monster of design inefficiency that is long and narrow and opens only at one end, so anytime you want anything that isn't on top, you have to unpack the goddamned thing to get what you want, then repack it. This usually occurs when a drill instructor is yelling at you to hurry up, or when your bus is leaving.

     Besides being cold, I was sleepy and hungry and homesick and needed a shower. My uniform was rumpled, and, I was sure, twisted all around my body. I felt like shit.   

    One of the old men was eyeing me. I wasn't used to traveling in uniform; later I would find that some people would avoid even eye contact with you, while others would talk your leg off. But this time, I simply noticed that I was being watched. I felt too miserable to care why.

     The old man finally spoke: "Look at you, boy," he said to me. "You don't know how lucky you are. Just look at you. Young, strong, proud... got your whole life in front of you. And just look at how you fill out that uniform."

     I grumbled that I sure as shit didn't feel very proud at the moment, and as far as how I filled the uniform, I'd probably get my ass chewed for it if an officer saw me right then.

     "Well, I still say, you don't know how lucky you are," the old man insisted. He turned his face away, speaking now more to his own past than to me: "You can complain all you want, but I'd give anything in the world to be in your shoes right now."

SAIGON TRIPTYCH 1968

Saigon 

1. LA Cop

     Some things from that summer are a continuum in my memory: I recall traveling to the place, who was there, where I went next. Other things are isolated, like one of those oldfashioned photographic portraits with just a face in an oval: no background, no past, no intimations of the future. 

     This story is like that. Somewhere in a hallway of MACV (Military Assistance Command, Vietnam) Headquarters in Saigon, I was talking to a man, a stocky middleaged American. He wore civilian clothes and a sidearm. He was telling me that he was a cop; he'd been walking a beat in Los Angeles when opportunities opened up for American policemen to go to Saigon and work as advisors to the police there. 

     I told the man I was a journalist. He gave me this strange look, from deep within himself, then said something like, "...huh. You want a story...." and hinted that he knew one that would curl my hair. I said I was all ears. He said he couldn't really tell it, that it was secret. But he wanted to tell it, I knew by the way he stayed rooted where he stood, the way he quickly and repeatedly engaged and disengaged my eyes with his. I said we could go somewhere and talk. I said I could keep his name out of it. He said he couldn't do it. But he wouldn't move to leave, and I wouldn't either, so we both just stood there. I leaned against the wall. Casual. I gave little prompts: "So, police work?" That kind of thing. He would shift his weight, start to turn away, then turn back and say one more thing. This went on for a while. Police work, well, yeah. They would go out at night. They would go to villages, towns. Just a few men. They had a list. Suspected VC. Big shots. Sometimes names get added to the list. He paused, shifted, spoke to me with his eyes, pleading with me to understand what he was saying but not saying: Lotta names get crossed off the list. 

                     

2: Kids

     I was walking alone in Saigon, in the outskirts of the city where refugees had put together shanties from the heavy cardboard sleeves that bound cases of C rations, wood from ammunition crates, and other detritus of war. It was hot. No. It was hot: the sun seemed a huge cymbal from the devil's own band, clanging out waves of molten brass that all but banished blue from the sky. The sun, and foot and vehicular traffic, had pulverized the dust of the street into the finest powder, which, with the passing of any foot or wheel or furnace-breathed breeze, rose in gritty ubiquitous clouds and hurried to stick itself to anything that claimed kinship with moisture: skin, eyes, teeth. No young men were present. (In Vietnam, it seemed you were mostly in places where there were no young men, or only young men.) The eyes of women caught just enough sunlight to reflect it from the shanties' dark interiors. Children owned the streets.

     I came upon a little girl standing alone in a wide dusty street. She wore filthy bib overalls, and a plastic bracelet on her left wrist. Snot was running from her nose; tears from her eyes. She was holding Black Label beer cans to her ears with both hands, in the way kids all over the world will hold sea shells to their ears, listening to the ocean. She held the pose as I photographed her; the picture has been published several times.

     I was walking down a very wide street, if that is what we should call a flat dusty strip bounded by refugee shacks. Children rushed out from within, between, behind the shacks in twos, threes, hordes. They surrounded me, shouting in shrill voices in the language they'd learned from GI's: "Hey, you! Fuck you! You give me money!" Small hands curled into claws worthy of predatory birds and tore at my wrist watch, skin, clothes. My notebook was yanked from my hip pocket. It was important. I wheeled and bent over to retrieve it. Business cards of journalism contacts fell from my shirt pocket; a child's hand darted in and plucked my pen from the same pocket. They worked together like coyotes, front and back. 

     Later that day, a friend and I caught an Air Viet Nam Boeing 727 to Phnom Penh, Cambodia. That night, I dropped into an exhausted sleep in my bed in the Hotel Mondial, and had a nightmare about the Vietnamese children. Like a two part television special, it began with a recap of the day's events, then continued beyond what had happened that afternoon.

Dream: Vietnamese Children 

I'm walking down the Saigon street. A few of the children are running up and tugging at my hands and clothes; then one stops squarely in front of me on the sidewalk and cups his hands and sticks them in my face and says, "You! Fuck you! You give me money!" I say no but they won't step aside so I just keep moving through them. There are so many now that I am wading as in hipdeep surf, and there is more tugging and I push them away and yell "didi!" and they yell back at me with their shrill angry voices and more of them come and they get closer and finally one of them snatches the Vietnamese phrase book from my back pocket. I turn quickly and it falls to the ground. The kid backs up. I bend over to pick it up and a notebook and a pen fall out of my shirt pocket and some loose papers begin to scatter as the wind flips the pages of the notebook. I reach for them quickly but the children are all over me grabbing for my things. A kid behind me has my wallet almost out of my back pocket and I drop everything else and turn to grab him and, turning, I fall. I'm on my back now in the deep dust of the street, clutching the wallet to my gut with both hands. Smaller, clawed hands with terrible strength wrench it from me and the sky is lost in a cascade of leering children's faces. Sticks and rocks come at my face from among those smaller faces and the sticks get bigger and the faces blur together and I see nothing else and feel only the now painless thudding about my head and the dust in my lungs, and the children's shouts fade into a cacophony of shrieking laughter and that stops suddenly and there is only the thudding and then the barking of a dog out in the darkness. 

DITCH (POEM)

                              Ditch

                                  

We need a ditch for two pipelines:

3/4" electrical conduit

to carry power

down to the pump in the well;

1‑1/4" polyvinyl chloride pipe

to suck water from the aquifer

     250 feet down

and push that water

up the hill

to the house.

I sweat and wonder:

if light were in that aquifer

and if my eyes were there,

what great mute movings

of mineral and water

would I see?

If once I saw that deep place,

I'd see it in my dreams forever,

see it every time

water gurgles up the pipe

I will lay in this ditch,

see it every time

water makes its aural glitter from the tap,

singing water music in our kitchen sink.

Ten feet from the old well,

left at forty‑five degrees ‑

so the ditch will fit the pipe fittings ‑

then fifty feet more

to the new well.

The D‑handle clam shovel

works for a while

in the clayey mud,

but won't cut the shallow asphalt

of the old driveway.

Get the pick.

Beeswax the handle's lower inches

till it's a sticky grip

that doesn't cramp the left hand;

leave slick the hard, smooth,

weathered hickory of the upper handle

so the right hand can slide,

like Rosendo Álvarez taught me

fifteen years ago.

Right hand, you push out and down in

a long arc, then begin

a quick pull to the waist

as the pick comes level.

Left hand, you stay a steady pivot

till we're horizontal, then

all systems accelerate

in the direction of the earth:

Knees ‑ you bend.

Butt ‑ you drop.

Left shoulder, pull

as left elbow rotates

     down and back.

Then, just before impact,

left hand, you

whip the pick.

Ahh.

The stiffly gooey crunch

of the pick's wide blade

through mineralized cottage cheese

of cold asphalt and decomposed granite gravel

satisfies.

Noon.

Stiff‑kneed downhill jog

with tail‑spiraling spaniel

to the mailbox.

Another rejection slip.

Back in the ditch,

whip the pick!

"Interesting," the editor said,

"but not our style."

My anger bites the asphalt:

a good sharp tool.

The driveway's cut now.

Clean the clods

and deepen the ditch.

The pick's still the best tool:

when I dangle the handle, the wide blade slides

along the trench bottom,

scooping out clods

and loose earth.

There.

Sixty feet of clean trench

     in half a day,

just the right depth,

straight as the pipe

that will lie in it.

Next time,

put this skill

in the poem.

Then the poem                                                  © 2013 Dean Metcalf

and the ditch                                                          P.O. Box 548

will carry power                                                    Joseph OR 97846

down to the well     

and water     

up the hill

to the house.