"LAST BRIGHT COOKIE." (SECOND OF 2 PARTS)

(PART TWO OF TWO)

Reloading, my vision drops to my rifle's receiver.

     All is slow.

     All is slow, and gleams.

     Metals gleam.

     The smooth blued steel of the bolt, the long grooves in the receiver where the bolt's locking lugs and roller travel, the bright chrome flange at the entrance to the chamber, the copper-jacketed bullets, brighter brass cartridge casings - all these metals seem to glow with a radioactive light from within.

     This instant folds back on itself, scrambling upstream in time like a climber clawing the ice on a slope that ends just below him at a thousand-foot cliff. It is as if my life, knowing it is about to end, has decided to stretch this last moment into the sixty years or so that I won't get to see and hear and smell and touch. A little place, a fine warm nest for me, is bounded by the lip of my helmet, the collar of my flak jacket, my own face and shoulders and arms engaged around my rifle, and the rifle itself and the low sandbag parapet it rests across. My hand ‑ this is all in the same instant, now, the same tiny cove in space and time where what I must do saves me from having to look at the humans who are walking this way to eat my last bright cookie of time ‑ my hand reaches under the rifle and grabs the empty magazine. Thumb releases latch. Hand opens, lets fall magazine on sandbag, grabs another. Its weight says it's full. My happiness is extreme: I am not out of ammo. The flare­light lets me see down through the rifle's receiver, glinting facets of grey steel grooves, as the loaded magazine comes up from below and snaps in. The top two cartridges shine for me like God's own golden torpedoes, the instant stretching as the bolt, sliding forward, peels off the top cartridge and pushes it into the chamber, copper pointed 7.62mm bullet first, brass casing behind, hardened steel bolt clings home and rolls to the right, locking. This, the expanded instant lets me think, is why I'm here. This is what my stepfather knew, my uncle, their fathers: mechanical perfection and maleness, the hard, lightly oiled, amoral, monstrously beautiful fit of a live car­tridge seating in its clean‑machine chamber and the bolt locking home behind it.

     I beg:

     Please go away O please go away. Okay. Take this place this awful place. I don't want this place honest it's yours anyway. Take it, and just let ME go away. I'll never come back. Honest.

     I put my cheek to the rifle and look up. They're closer. I fire. As the rifle lurches into my shoulder, I hear a crackling like bacon on a too‑hot griddle, and foul smoke burns my right eye. Blinking, shooting, knocking down the fierce little soldiers, I know I've burnt my cheek on the rifle's hot receiver and smile at not feeling it: how violently wonderful, to live long enough for that burn ‑ or its scar ‑ to matter...now so many of them are through the concertina I can't see the wire any more, and I wish the soldier mother would attack somewhere else, but I guess our guys are all down and I am the only one still firing so they are coming for me and my rifle the muzzle climbs on full auto, makes me shoot over their heads, I hook the hinged butt plate over my shoulder so I can lever the muzzle down with both hands at the grip I keep knocking them down but there are too many and the soldier mother keeps coming, not even firing, out of ammo or wait­ing to get closer, I see that little head looking out of the bundle, looking over her shoulder at me, she's getting too close, I can see the baby's dark eyes now in the flarelight, wide open and unblinking, staring over her shoulder at me. How can Vietnamese eyes open that wide? I see only the child's eyes. The child's eyes see only me. The mother's eyes are on the ground. She's watching her footing. She doesn't fall. She doesn't stop. She doesn't hurry. She doesn't slow. She keeps coming, and I turn my wonderful rifle, my savior, and terror mixed with something else gorges up from my stomach and vomits through the rifle at them. I aim for her legs but she leans forward and I forget to lever the muzzle down and the rifle belches up her and the kid like zipping a pair of coveralls and they're slammed into the mud as if by the fist of some uncaring giant, then I'm hit and spun away from the rifle and I scramble like the panicked rats we used to dip in diesel fuel and light up in the bunker and I thank Ski for being dead and pull him further on top of me and roll Glover onto my head and shoulders and I sink into the beautiful mud, my mud, my mother, home.

     I hear them.

     A single rifle shot at the machine gun bunker.     

     Silence.

     A single rifle shot at the med bunker. 

     Another single shot.

     Silence.     

     Some part of my body calls for attention. I remember I was hit, I'm wounded somewhere, but I am so commingled with dead people and mud that I can't tell what part of me was hit.

     I feel the swelling in my crotch and think, O Dios mío, I'm wounded there. But it's not a wound. I have a hard‑on. Doc Motto said a lot of guys get a hard‑on just before they die.

     Six more shots, pistol shots, slow and rhythmic and careful, like the tick of time.    

     Silence.

     Steps. Voices, tired, speaking Vietnamese in short nervous phrases. The steps, the voices, come to us. A boy‑sized rubber soled black tennis shoe, eerily like we wore back home in that other life, last year, as children, scrapes my forehead. My right eye clenched closed, buried in the mud, I see only a glob of red mud covering the toe of the tennis shoe out of my left eye. The mud flashes red in the electric‑arc light of a descending flare.

     That sound.

     Fucking unfair: the sound takes me to when I was a kid out on Gearhart Mountain, but they won't let me go there. I've just killed my first mule deer and I have to cut his throat to bleed him but the hide is too tough, and my stepdad Bill is telling me, "You have to stick it," and makes a motion which I imitate, driving the knife into the buck's throat with the heel of my hand, thhht! butcher‑shop sound.

     But I can't go there. I'm here. They're bayoneting each of us to see who is alive. They spend a bullet only for those who squirm. Jesucristo, they're good.

     What's exposed? My left leg. I can do it: left leg, you do not exist for me, you will take the thrust and you will be just one dead leg. My back, mierda, the middle of my back is open....

     That sound: the bayonet, the knife driven into the deer's throat. Glover passes the test, he's dead, they don't shoot him. The tennis shoe moves against my forehead. I feel the soldier's body jerk as each bayonet thrust translates into a new scraping of my forehead by his foot. The scraping is delicious pain telling me I'm still alive. Please miss my spine. I can play dead if you don't stick my spine. A flare drifts low, throws white light under Glover's leg. I see the spider, little black spider, eight‑legged daintily tiptoeing away from the toe of the black tennis shoe, trying to make its way up the slick mud slide carved by the soldier's shoe as it slid to rest against my forehead.

     Go, spider, this is a bad place...leave this place of death, go to the place of life, take a message for me, from us, carry a droplet of my blood back to the living, back home.... I watch the spider walk up the slippery clay chute. It becomes all I can see, then the flare drops below the berm and I see nothing. Time happens, a second, a year, the foot is still there. Please let me see the spider one more time.

     The soldier whose body touches mine is talking in low, tired tones to someone behind him. He pauses between bayonet thrusts, soldierly labor. Lying here on earth's breast, comforted by my cloak of dead friends, I feel a sympathy for his tiredness. Another flare pops, high and farther back.

     Spider! It is the same spider, but this time I see it huge. It is the great hairylegged beast at the center of all the white light in the universe. Its totemic legs lift and bend and reach in rhythm, a ballet of redwood boles in the flarelight. I see how perfect it is, how perfectly it moves. It is everything. That spider is my whole world.

     The spider is solving a physics problem. The wet clay is at once sticky and slippery. Its four front legs, giant shaggy steamshovel arms, must reach up, pull, but not get stuck. The four back legs must reach down and push, and must not slip, else it will slide under the soldier's toe. Each leg lifts grandly, bends, reaches, tests the earth, pulls, pushes. No one leg does too much or too little, they share the weight, they balance the giant obsidian body, they move in cadence, visual music.

     The flare drops near the earth; the spider's shadow lengthens and swings hugely as the wind carries the flare to the side. The flare falls beyond the spider and its shadow covers my eye and the spider's body explodes in size to occupy my entire vision and something thumps the left side of my back and the boy‑sized black tennis shoe walks away.

     

     The clear rippling water returns, this time flowing top to bottom across a grey rectangle, and also this time with sound: the gurgling and dripping of real water have replaced the silence of the dream water. But it recalls the dream water for me, and the pictures of the boat and the dusty street and the feral children are just beginning to re‑emerge from behind the watery rectangle when I realize that I've gradually awakened, and am looking out the window at the rain.

     I'm alone in the room again, its walls sponged with the soggy grey daylight of a rainy season afternoon. The dream pictures follow one another through the rainy rectangle into my awakening. As the weapons belt and the bloody forearm begin a kaleidoscopic flip into the pictures of the dusty street and the children and the firefight, horror rises in my throat and pounds in my temples until I nearly black out again. I yelp. The pictures stop.

     I look around the room. The two rifles have been taken from the corner and taken apart and their parts spread on a military poncho near my cot. There is a stack of loaded magazines by each rifle: the M14 magazines are straight; the AK magazines curved. The two patas de gallina were left beside the poncho by whoever was cleaning the rifles...Hortensio, I remember being awakened by the smell of gasoline and seeing Hortensio squatting on one stool cleaning rifle parts with an old tooth­brush in a red plastic pan. Delfina sat on the stool beside her father, watching his movements with her child's inten­sity. The gasoline's pungence still hangs in the wet air.

     I roll onto my side and adjust the folded jeans Agapita has left me for a pillow ‑ my own longlegged, skinny jeans, I notice, that's why they call me Gordito, Fatso ‑ until I can relax and stare at the two stripped‑down rifles on the poncho. Esas metrallas conocen quien soy, those rifles know who I am.

     I feel myself a magnet, and steel is doing what steel does: the rifle parts seem to creep toward me. The attraction is both physical and emotional, as if what had passed between a man and a rifle has become some spiritual force‑field.

     Empiezo con el Aka, I'll start with the AK. There are the brown plastic banana clips ‑ magazines, actually ‑ called that because each cartridge is slightly larger at the base than at the business end, and thirty rounds stacked in the magazine form a banana shape. There's the signature Kalashnikov gas cylinder with its beveled end above the barrel, unlike this gringo M14 but like most armas soviéticas carried by Hortensio and Agapita and the other members of Jícaro's cattle co‑op who double as milicianos, part of the Sandinistas' attempt to organize the way we earn our livelihoods, then convince us to "Defend the cooperative, defend Sandinismo." Piricuacos: they yip slogans like mongrels.          

     The Aka, with its short, klunky shape and clumsy balance, is familiar to me, but some of its smaller parts, spread out on the poncho, are not. The rifle refuses to cough up its connec­tion with me. I try to find pieces of my own life among the dully glinting steel parts. Then the force that had stretched between me and the group of rifle parts seems to strike at me and recoil into itself like a rattlesnake suddenly encountered upon rounding a bend in a mountain trail. I recoil too, and comes a quick clammy sweat like those of my malaria attacks, but now the sweat pokes icy needles through my skin from inside. I lay back, look away to the rain falling outside the window, pull the blanket up to wipe sweat from my face and eyes and to warm myself, then turn back to the disassembled rifles.          

     I look at the M14 parts. I remember every one, and unlike the AK‑47, the M14 parts seem to welcome me among them as family. I can feel my body assembling them: line up the flat side of the gas piston with the flat side of the hole in the cylinder, drop it and jiggle it till the rod falls through and the piston seats ‑ a little air will whoosh out. Tighten the cylinder nut with the wrench from the well behind the hinged butt plate. Take the bolt by the roller... I fall asleep with my fingers forming into the specific grips required by each piece.

     Agapita is standing on me in the dark, desperately kicking my legs to get footing on the cot, stretching my blanket between her thumbs and forcing the blanket to tear enough to slip over the heads of the nails driven into the soft concrete at the window's upper corners, then bent into crude hooks.

     She jumps down and falls on her knees beside the disassembled rifles, turning on her flashlight and laying it on the poncho beside the AK‑47 parts. Her movements as she assembles the rifle are as urgent as when she kicked me awake. Her urgency startles me fully awake as I hear explosions in the distance. Now comes the staccato racket of automatic weapons firing from the direction of the miliciano guardpost down the street at the north entrance to the village. Exploding mortar rounds walk the length of the street, patiently approaching.

     The steel parts snik and ping as the feverish mound that is Agapita assembles the Aka. I see a hunch to her silhouette: Delfina is slung on her mother's back in the tired red cloth Agapita uses to carry the child as she tends the vegetable garden or walks to the junction to catch the bus to market in Jalapa.

     She straightens, stands, lurches toward the door. Her flashlight's beam lances about the room. She turns, nestles the flashlight in the crook of her left elbow, against the vest of Aka magazines that flat­tens her breasts with its weight of lead and brass and powder. The light shines upward onto her face and glints off streaks left by her tears as she bends over the rifle, pulls a magazine from the vest and slips it into the receiver of the upside‑down Aka, slamming it home with the heel of her hand.

     She tosses the flashlight onto the poncho among the M14 parts. Its beam catches a spider walking on a wrinkle in the poncho, just in front of the lens, and throws its huge shadow on the opposite wall, hairy steamshovel legs bending and reaching. The spider's shadow breaks the dam in my memory, rudely jamming the gears of my mind back to the firefight at Tho An, back to the Mekong riverboat in northern Cambodia, back along the weary parade of small, dark‑skinned, dark‑haired, dark‑eyed people I've watched, first across my rifle sights, then through 35 millimeter camera lenses, the parade of people burdened under weapons too large for them, in Laos and Vietnam and Thailand and the Philippines and Honduras and Guatemala and El Salvador and now here, back to the time of leaving the world behind, trading gun belts for tool belts, nailing roof‑decks on Colorado A‑frames, memory returning in an avalanche as my mind speaks English to itself for the first time since weeks before the malaria made me delirious. 

"Hortensio está muerto, Gordon," Agapita is saying, Hortensio is dead, and she says "Gordon" in English as if it left a scum on her teeth, "so you're the only gringo hijueputa who can put together this gringo hijueputa..." Sobbing through her curses, she flicks her hand angrily toward the M14 parts on the poncho. "And they won't give a shit about your chingada neutralidad periodística” ‑ she spits the words, your precious fucking journalist’s neutrality – “these bastards you gringos pay to kill us don't even look in a house to see if there are kids inside before they blow it. ¿Qué vas a hacer, Gordon?" Crazily, as if there were time for it to matter, I hear her question two ways: “¿Qué vas a hacer?/¿Qué vas a ser? What are you going to do?/What are you going to be?”

     She chambers a round in the AK, slings it on her shoulder,  reaches under the vest, pulls out the ancient US service .45 that she carries cocked and locked, for herself and Delfina, in case they catch her. I hear the 2‑stage slide of that weapon, the snik of the safety. She stuffs it back into her belt. As she turns for the door, I see, in the periphery of the flashlight's beam, Delfina's large dark eyes, wide open and unblinking, staring at me over her mother's shoulder.

                        

END

"LAST BRIGHT COOKIE" (FICTION)

Last Bright Cookie 

A short story by Dean Metcalf

(Part 1 of 2)

     I know nothing of myself or of the world except this clear

rippling water, flowing right to left like a slow unaerated

waterfall tilted onto its side. Now a boat wells toward me from

the darkness behind the stream, merging with the stream and

undulating, hula‑like, with it. It is a large wooden boat, with

plenty of space on the plank deck for families to roll out their

woven straw sleeping mats and to stroll about. The people are

dark‑skinned, with black hair and large dark eyes that notice

me, but offer no reaction beyond acceptance that I belong among

them.

Most wear a simple, multicolored body wrap which extends

from waist to ankle on the men and from breast to ankle on the

women. Someone shouts, and the boat begins to move with the

stream. It seems to be inside the stream.

     Night. I am aboard as the boat comes alongside a high cliff. Small people, some carrying torches whose light transforms the eroded cliff‑face into a vibrating corduroy of light and shadow, run up a gangplank from the base of the cliff to the deck. Niños. Ah. Language, at least, is beginning to return. 

     The children carry baskets piled with food: hands of short thick bananas, hot cobs of corn, skewers of roasted meat and dried red peppers, slices of ripe yellow mango and pieces of broken white cocoanut meat. The colors of the food flicker like neon seen through night rain.

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     I grow angry at the fragments of my life dancing on the fluid screen. I want my nickelodeon memory to break open and utter my name, to locate the pictures in my past. But memory goes its own way. A bell rings; the waves of its pealing resonate in frequency with the rippling of the water. The boat shudders. Niños scurry among the sleepy passengers, trying for one last sale, then run down the plank, torches bobbing away into the dark. The boat fades from sight behind the stream.     

     Receding torchlight coalesces into the fire in a rough red brick fireplace in a small wood frame house. The hearth fire undulates with the surface of the stream, and is liquid like it. The pumpkin‑flesh color of the walls makes them seem to stretch to meet the fingers of orange flamelight as a cat will arch its back to meet a human hand. Something beckons from the left. The stream joins the appeal for movement, a polite usher saying "this way, please." The left wall ends in a post. From a nail in the post hangs a carpenter's tool belt, and it is that which beckons. The belt is even more familiar to me than the fireplace, the wall, the post.

     The belt itself is of faded green nylon webbing; tired threads hang from chafed places. One group of frayed threads hangs in such an attitude as to conjure before me the boneless, wizened stump of the arm of a derelict Japanese veteran, still wearing the remnants of his World War II uniform, holding out a tin cup with his one hand in a crowded pedestrian underpass. Yokohama, my memory says, but does not explain. 

     My hands close, twist in opposite directions, twist back.  They are remembering the latching of that belt around me. The leather pouches, once rough, are worn to a dark mottled shine. Dim outlines of hand‑tooled flowers show through the worn shine of the near nail pouch. Who tooled those flowers for me? A claw hammer, its long hickory handle bronzed from sweat and sun and beeswax, hangs from a latigo loop on the wearer’s right side. A combination square rests in a scabbard opposite. Half‑inch cold chisel, drift punch, nail set, awl, razor knife, tape measure: each in its leather home. Mis manos conocen cada uno... son mis hierros: my hands know every one...they're my tools.

     A man's dark‑haired hand and forearm reach around the post, unhook the belt, take it away. Es mi brazo, that's my arm. The  hand and forearm reach back around the post and hang another, similar, belt on the nail. Now the hand and forearm are bloody. This belt, weighted with dusty green canvas pouches, hangs ponderously from thick canvas suspenders. Two pouches hold canteens. One holds a small mili­tary first aid kit. Six pouches hold ammunition magazines for an M14 rifle, the rifle the gringos used after the M1 Garand and before the M16, that deadly black plastic toy that's now all over latinoamérica. The bayonet is in its stiff olive drab scabbard that's supposed to sharpen the blade being sheathed and unsheathed, but doesn't. ¿Cómo conozco éso? How do I know that? I ask, still searching for some stray artifact that will transform itself into a mirror of my past.

     There is a flitting vision of men walking with rifles through waist‑high grass. I'm one of them, snikking the ring of my bayonet’s hilt home over my rifle’s flash suppressor as a harsh voice says, "That's it, that's what I like, lemme see some steel on the end of it." The vision is gone before I can track my identity in it.

      Esos también son mis hierros: those are my tools too. I wince at my own phrase; it seems appropriate to use the same word, hierros, irons, for tools and for weapons. Everything I know about myself so far says only that I am a workman and a soldier. The similarity between the tool belt and the weapons helt seems to say I could be any workman, any soldier, any time.

     The weapons belt recedes behind the stream.

    

     The sun is directly overhead, a hammered brass cymbal raging about the sky, banishing blue to near the horizon, and further pulverizing the dust of the wide street. Here on the outer edge of the city, only a faint mix of noise from the hordes of Japanese scooters, police whistles, roaring American army trucks, and the cries of black marketeers reaches the fly‑festered ears of the squatting women and feral‑eyed children and rare inert old man who occupy the ammunition-crate shanties defining the street's ragged edge. Artillery crunks in the distance.

     I look at the sky, trying to see something there besides sun. The sky becomes a rectangle of fierce white light. The light extrudes itself into sound, a raucous shriek that hurts my head. The shriek ends in a flutter of green and yellow, and the rectangle is filled by the head of a great horned beast. A woman is laughing. I waken, afloat in sweat, and see her just as she pulls her head back in through the window. It's Agapita; she turns and sees that her laughter has awakened me. "Lo siento, Gordito, no pienso reír a tu dolor... sorry, Gordito, I don't mean to be laughing at your pain. But it was so funny, Claribel stuck her head in the window just as you were waking up...."

     "¿Claribel?"

     "Sí, nuestra vaca... don't you remember our cow?" 

     "¿Y el grito?" I ask, What was the scream? How fine, after swimming through a swamp of dreams, to be conscious at last, speaking my language. Now I can find out who I am.

     Agapita laughs again. I know her by that laugh; it begins down low in her stout brown body and erupts with such force that it snaps her head back. She seems forever laughing at the sky. "No mas que eso chingado perico," she says, "Just that fucking little parrot. Claribel chased him off the window sill.

     "You've had a bad case of malaria, Gordito. You're very weak. You'd better sleep some more." There is a shout from outside; Agapita ducks out the door. I'm too weak to yell after her. Entonces, soy Gordito, so I'm Gordito.     

     With an effort that nauseates me, I roll onto my side and look around the room. Like most of the houses in Jícaro, it is a small, rectangular, one room concrete block building. The walls are painted a bright turquoise green inside and out (I remember the outside, with its lonely valiant row of flowers between the north side of the house and the two muddy ruts of the street); the rough wooden door, standing ajar just now, is crusted with successive layers of fuchsia enamel. The single window is a rectangular hole in the wall. The earth floor is swept. My bed and two three‑legged stools, patas de gallina - chicken feet, as we locals call them ‑ are the only furniture in the room.

     Two rifles lean into the opposite corner. I study them, hoping they will tell me something about myself. So far, all I have to go on are the dreams and Jícaro and Agapita...and now I remember her husband, Hortensio, the wiry, good‑natured cattle farmer with a Clark Gable mustache and face lined beyond his twenty‑four years, and their baby girl, Delfina, who plays with me sometimes in the evenings, whose big eyes haunt me in a way I don't understand. I study the two rifles in the corner as daylight dims. Emecatorce, Aka, I mouth their names: M14 and AK‑47. Zancudos come with evening and whine in my ears; I retreat under the blanket until only my eyes are uncovered. I stare at the rifles. Mierda, they're everywhere. The Russians and gringos pass them out to all us poor hijueputas so we'll kill each other off. They could be anybody's. They don't tell me mierda.

     The fever returns with darkness.

     I'm on the street again, under the brass‑cymbal sun. Dust and sweat mix in a gritty soup I can't keep out of my eyes or from between my teeth. Children come running. I smile, and walking turns to wading as the wave of children breaks around

me like hip‑deep surf. Little hands pull at my trousers and fingers; one quick, practiced hand tries to break my watchband, but can't. "Hey you, fuck you, you give me money!" one boy shouts, his voice a miniature thunderclap. The others chirp harshly and claw at me with the urgency of children hungry enough to be desperate but not yet starved into that near catatonia where only the eyes can demand. My notebook squirts from a hip pocket. I turn, bend over to grab it away from the three children already fighting over it in the dust of the street. My appoint­ment book and the business cards of the USAID officer and the WBAI reporter fall out of my shirt pocket. As I reach for them a hand, darting like a hawk's beak, snatches the fountain pen from the other shirt pocket. Gotta get flap pockets. I panic, reach down with both hands. They push from behind and jerk me down from the front. I'm on my back, defending my soft parts with feet and hands. Sticks and rocks come at my eyes. A circle of small fierce faces blots out the sun. As vision fades, the face of one of the smallest children becomes the face of an infant slung on its mother's back, the mother one of too many pith‑helmeted soldiers coming through the coils of razor wire on the perimeter, short dark people with short AK‑47s with short bayonets coming through the concertina to kill me and Ski and Rabbit and DeMine and the handful of others left out here to rot, coming through the wire, so many of them that the very earth, the red muddy earth glowing horribly in the white light of the drifting parachute flares, coming through the wire, the earth like a carcass teeming with pulpy maggots methodically converting its past into their future, coming through the wire, and they're on top of the corner machine gun bunker now and Ski gets up from beside me to start for the bunker as the bunker erupts from a grenade and then a rocket, sparks trailing, hisses across the compound and Ski is standing beside me, his body quizzical because it can't see because his head is gone, and I think how odd, the twin crimson fountains spurted by his final heartbeats from the severed carotid arteries, and Glover screams and crumples beside me and Ski's body decides to give it up and falls on me and I'm still firing my rifle on full automatic, short bursts, there are more of them than I have ammo for, save a long burst for the end of the magazine ‑ keepembusywhileIreloadfast....      

     The bolt locks back after the last brass casing tinkles onto the pile of its smoking brothers. 

          Now is a valley in time.

     What name shall I give to this valley?

     Mm.

     Reloading Valley, I guess.

     It's nice and cool here.

     Cool, and quiet.

     Things move slow.    

     I don't know. You have to understand. I am nineteen, and this is the last moment of my life. You have to wait. You have to understand that I don't know what time is doing now. You have to understand that what time is doing now in Reloading Valley is its Long Gone Boogie and its Forever Minuet. Time is doing Always and Never at the same time, and it is doing them to me, here in Reloading Valley, the last moment of my life. It can't be told. You are stuck here with me in Reloading Valley while I tell it.

     I hunker.

     Reloading, my vision drops to my rifle's receiver.

     All is slow.

     All is slow, and gleams.

     Metals gleam.

     The smooth blued steel of the bolt, the long grooves in the receiver where the bolt's locking lugs and roller travel, the bright chrome flange at the entrance to the chamber, the copper-jacketed bullets, brighter brass cartridge casings - all these metals seem to glow with a radioactive light from within.

     This instant folds back on itself, scrambling upstream in time like a climber clawing the ice on a slope that ends just below him at a thousand-foot cliff. It is as if my life, knowing it is about to end, has decided to stretch this last moment into the sixty years or so that I won't get to see and hear and smell and touch. A little place, a fine warm nest for me, is bounded by the lip of my helmet, the collar of my flak jacket, my own face and shoulders and arms engaged around my rifle, and the rifle itself and the low sandbag parapet it rests across. My hand ‑ this is all in the same instant, now, the same tiny cove in space and time where what I must do saves me from having to look at the humans who are walking this way to eat my last bright cookie of time ‑ my hand reaches under the rifle and grabs the empty magazine. Thumb releases latch. Hand opens, lets fall magazine on sandbag, grabs another. Its weight says it's full. My happiness is extreme: I am not out of ammo. The flare­light lets me see down through the rifle's receiver, glinting facets of grey steel grooves, as the loaded magazine comes up from below and snaps in. The top two cartridges shine for me like God's own golden torpedoes, the instant stretching as the bolt, sliding forward, peels off the top cartridge and pushes it into the chamber, copper pointed 7.62mm bullet first, brass casing behind, hardened steel bolt clings home and rolls to the right, locking. This, the expanded instant lets me think, is why I'm here. This is what my stepfather knew, my uncle, their fathers: mechanical perfection and maleness, the hard, lightly oiled, amoral, monstrously beautiful fit of a live car­tridge seating in its clean‑machine chamber and the bolt locking home behind it.

     I beg:

     Please go away O please go away. Okay. Take this place this awful place. I don't want this place honest it's yours anyway. Take it, and just let ME go away. I'll never come back. Honest.

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 Alvarez 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
and the ditch  
will carry power    
down to the well  
and water    
up the hill
to the house.                        

                                                                                          (c) 2012 Dean Metcalf

"YOU'RE TOO LATE."

            "You're too late."

(Note: In this chapter, I’ve used “BULLRUSH” as the call sign of the battalion I was working with. BULLRUSH was indeed one of the infantry battalions based in the same 1st Marine Division Command Post as my outfit, Direct Air Support Center, at Chu Lai. What I don’t know is whether it was the same battalion we were working with during the events described in this chapter. I’ve used it here because it was one of the battalion call signs we used in that place at that time.)

     We were on watch in the Direct Air Support Center at Chu Lai. There were two or three enlisted men under me, radio operators and air traffic controllers. There was a watch officer, in this case a Lieutenant who kept his nose in a book "so I can stay out of Corporal Metcalf's hair while he runs the DASC." We were the air traffic control shop for the First Marine Division: we coordinated and dispatched helicopters on courier flights, trooplifts, medevacs, gunship missions, and whatever else they did; and also sent out our own jets - A4 Skyhawks, F4 Phantoms, and F8 Crusaders - on air strikes either by themselves or in support of Marine infantry units in the area. 

     A situation had been developing before I came on watch. A few kilometers from us, a Marine rifle platoon was surrounded by a superior number of Viet Cong. In the early part of our 4 hour watch, neither side had yet gotten the upper hand. But the VC ring around the platoon tightened, and things sounded grim. I was talking directly with the platoon commander’s radio operator, and I could feel the heightening tension in his voice. I could also hear rifle and automatic weapons fire and grenades going off when he keyed his mike to talk to me. 

     The VC tightened the ring again, and it became clear that the infantryman's greatest fear was staring them in the face: they were in imminent danger of being overrun.

     The only thing that had prevented this all along had been artillery. Now, whoever was adjusting artillery fire for that platoon - he must have been a real ace - walked the impacting rounds in closer and closer to his own men until everybody in the fight, Marines and VC, was pinned down by the artillery. The platoon commander had hoped this would break up the attack and send the VC fleeing, but instead it produced an awful stalemate, one of a kind that was to recur often during the coming years of war: the VC tightened their ring even further, to the point where the artillery couldn't be brought any closer without hitting our own men. The fact that they were dug in was the only thing preventing that now.

     So a few miles from where we sat in an air conditioned bubble, two concentric rings of desperate young men were hugging the planet as hot metal ripped the ground and air around them. Grenades were being rolled into foxholes, sometimes with enough time left on the fuses to throw them back, sometimes not. I began to hear screams on the radio. 

     "Landshark Alpha, this is Bravo two six...I need an emergency medevac, NOW, HURRY! over." The radio operator was screaming at me: "He's my best friend, for God's sake! He's bleedin' bad! He's gonna die! GET..ME..A..MEDEVAC! ..MEDEVAC!..NOW!..OVER!" The sheer will in that man's voice comes back to me, even now, across the years.

     Fluttery things happened in my stomach, along my spine. Everyone in the DASC had heard that, and we knew that by now, that grunt battalion's entire chain of command, including the battalion commander himself, was monitoring our net.

     "Two six, Landshark...." I was shaving call signs now; seconds could mean lives. Anyone else using this net, having heard what we'd just heard, would shift their traffic to another frequency and give us the air. "Roger your request emergency medevac. Hang on. Out." I wanted to try to comfort the guy somehow, but comfort takes time, and comfort wasn't what he wanted. He wanted a helicopter to come out of the sky and carry his bleeding friend to a hospital. He wanted that and nothing else in the whole world, and I was the only one he could ask for it. 

     While all this was developing, I'd felt the presence of the infantry battalion commander. I hadn't talked to him yet, but orders coming out from him had been few, succinct, and had obviously come from a cool head who cared deeply about his men but wasn't about to panic and lose one or two helicopters and half a dozen men trying to save one. 

     I got on another radio and called the battalion's call sign. The Man himself came on: "Landshark Alpha, this is Six Actual. I heard. You may not, I repeat, you may not send in a medevac at this time. The artillery fire is continuous, and must remain so or those men will be overrun. The bird would just be shot down by our own artillery. Repeat that back to me. Over."

     I repeated it. 

     Then: "Sir?"

     "Go."

     "I have a medevac bird with a gunship escort ready on the airstrip, engines running. Can I get them in the air and have them circle near the platoon, so they can drop in if there's an opening? Over."

     "Some of those arty rounds have proximity fuses. They could knock the birds out of the air on their way to the target. Over."

     He hadn't told me to shut up. He knew I was trying to find a way. He didn't think there was one. But he wanted for there to be one, I guess even worse than I did. He would write the letter to the next of kin of guys who got killed, not me.      

     "Sir, I’ve been a Forward Observer for both artillery and naval gunfire. I have a radio on the arty net. I can plot the position of the guns on our board, and we already have the platoon's coordinates plotted. I can plot the trajectory of the artillery rounds, including their maximum altitude. I know what the guns will do, and what the fuses will do. I can keep the birds near the platoon, and still clear of the artillery. I know how to do that, sir. I will take responsibility for it. And the air crews want to do it, sir. They know the drill, and they've all volunteered...." 

     I left the mike keyed without speaking for half a breath, then changed my tone from that of a Corporal speaking to a Lieutenant Colonel to one of two Marines speaking to one another in combat, just trying to find a way: "...they're Marines, too."

     It was a stupid, insubordinate thing to say to an officer who had been working with Marine pilots for the better part of twenty years. But it touched him, I could tell. That was the beautiful thing about the Marine Corps: a Lieutenant Colonel, even a General - the good ones, anyway - was a Marine first and an officer second, so that what bound us together was stronger than what separated us. In combat, anyway.

     I heard a hint of relief in his voice, even a touch of brotherly gratitude for my help in carrying his load: "Landshark Alpha, Six Actual. You may proceed. You may put the birds in the air, on standby. Their location is your responsibility. You will keep me informed about everything you do. And you will not, repeat, will not, lift the artillery fire or send the birds into that landing zone without personal clearance from me. Over." 

     "Wilco, sir." Will comply. Left unsaid was what we both knew, that a Corporal can't relieve a Lieutenant Colonel of responsibility for anything.

     All this took a lot less time to do than to tell. A few seconds on another radio got the medevac chopper and its gunship escort into the air and vectored to a position aloft where they could see the besieged platoon but were clear of the artillery's trajectory.

     I got back on the horn to the platoon's radio operator. "Two six, Landshark Alpha. Medevac bird and gunship escort are in the air. But I have direct orders from your own battalion commander not to lift the artillery around you. He will lift it if the situation allows. Until that happens, the birds are on standby, circling near you...I'm sorry, man. That's the best I can do."

     "...you...God...FUCK! MEDEVAC...you gotta...I'm holdin' 'im, he's bleedin' all over me, you gotta...." He was sobbing and screaming and pleading all at once, blaming me, the only person he could blame, for what the world was doing to him.

     "Stand by, Two Six." Pathetic words. At that moment I wanted only two things in the world. The first was to be able to say to him, “Here comes your help: your friend will be safe now.” Since I couldn't say that, I wanted to be there with him. I sincerely felt that I would rather have shared the danger than be blamed for not relieving it.

     "Bullrush Six Actual, Landshark Alpha, over."

     "Six Actual, go."

     "Sir, can I replace the arty with air strikes? If I can, I think we can get those birds down to that platoon."

     "The VC are thirty meters outside that perimeter. Our people will be overrun within a minute if that artillery lifts."

     "Not if there's no gap between arty and air, sir."

     "How will you keep from shooting your own birds out of the sky?"

     "Timing, Sir. It would have to be an instantaneous handoff. I can get my birds in position so they can be strafing within a few seconds of the last arty rounds."

     "Set it up, then talk to me again. You may not do this without my clearance. Out."

     "Uh, sir?"

     "Yes."

     "Sir, this can only work if I can work directly with arty. They would have to cease fire directly at my command. If we have to wait for two or three radio transmissions, there'll be too long a gap."

     "That's right. Good. I will give that order. Set it up. Check with me. Out."

     The platoon had already taken several casualties when I inherited the situation, but they had all been wounds that weren't immediately life threatening. The radio operator's buddy was the first to be critically wounded. By now, casualties were mounting in number and gravity. The stalemate was shifting in favor of the VC; if things kept on this way until nightfall, what the VC couldn't accomplish by frontal assault would happen by attrition. In the face of that, a risk now was less risky than a couple of hours ago. Or even one hour ago.

     The table in front of me was piled with radio remote consoles, microphones with their cords snaking in all directions, and the handsets of EE8 field telephones. The Lieutenant had long since put down his book, and had taken direct control of all the missions in progress besides the one I was working on. He had been listening as I spoke with the battalion commander. Knowing he was responsible for everything I did, I looked a question at him. He nodded. 

     I would begin by organizing the aircraft, giving the Colonel time to notify the arty battery that I would be giving the command to check fire. I swept the desk clear of anything but what was necessary for this mission, unplugged the microphones, unsnarled their cables, plugged them back in with their cables in neat parallel lines across the desk from the consoles to me, mikes resting on the forward edge of the desk. There was one mike for choppers, one for jets, one for artillery, one for the pinned-down platoon's radio operator, one for the battalion commander. If I got my wires crossed - if I said the wrong word to the wrong party, I could get a lot of the wrong people killed. It went without saying that by saying the right thing to the right party, I would get a lot of the right people killed. That was what we were there for.

     The original medevac chopper and its gunship escort had long since run low on fuel and been replaced. I replaced those again, with freshly fueled aircraft, and sent up another pair of gunships, orbiting them above the medevac birds. We used the word "angels" to denote altitude; "angels ten" meant ten thousand feet. I scrambled a pair of A4 jets with a full load of strafe and rockets aboard, then put a series of similar pairs on standby, to take off at regular intervals so they could replace the attacking pair on station as soon as they were out of ordnance. The pilots, talking with one another, would set their own timing so there'd be no gap over the target. I got on the horn with the artillery battery. The Colonel had talked to them. I told all these people, the cannoncockers, the air crews, exactly what the plan was. Everyone understood that timing was everything: if there was a gap, the grunts would be overrun. If there was an overlap, our artillery would be shooting down our own aircraft, and they would be crashing into one another above the platoon's position, killing more of our own people.  

     "Bullrush Six Actual, Landshark Alpha, over."

     "Six Actual, go."

     "Sir, everybody's ready. All the pilots know the plan. It looks good up there. Over."

     When two radios were near the limit of their operation range, all you got was the basic content of the communication, if that. But the battalion commander was just down the road; communication was 5 by 5: loud and clear. So the Colonel's deep breath was audible before he spoke: "Okay, Landshark. Do it."

     The arty people told me their Time of Flight, the number of seconds between the firing of the guns to the  projectiles’ impact on target. I told that number to the A4 pilots; I think it was seven or eight seconds. Artillery and I agreed that their next fire mission would be the last. 

     I remembered one time in 1964 when my section of naval gunfire spotters were doing crosstraining as Forward Air Controllers in Japan, working with Marine jet pilots. They had wanted to show us just what they could do, if things ever got really tight. It was risky, but wildly effective. My section had been set up on a low hillock in the foothills near the base of Mount Fuji. We'd asked one pilot what was the most coverage he could put on a target in an emergency. "That'd be what we call 'gear down, flaps down, low and slow'," he said. "Like this." He rolled in, landing gear down and flaps at their steepest angle to slow the aircraft and increase its time on target. He just missed clipping our radio antenna; I remember pressing the side of my face into the dirt, and still clearly seeing the pilot’s face and helmet as he passed. The thundering presence of the aircraft alone was enough to keep an enemy's head pinned down. 

     "Can you give me gear down, flaps down, low and slow?" I asked the A4 flight leader. "That will probably get you into some ground fire," I added. Dumb, I said to myself. The pilot knows there's a war on.

     "Yoooobetcha, Landshark. Say when."

     "Shot," arty said to me, meaning the last mission had just left the guns. "Shot," I said to the A4 pilots. We'd set them up so they could begin their run-in just before the artillery rounds landed. The first bird was strafing along one side of the platoon's perimeter within seconds of the final artillery impact. As soon as he passed beyond the target, he pulled up sharply to clear the way for his wingman, coming behind him, to strafe a line along the opposite side of the perimeter. Several flights of A4s tore up the ground around the infantry with 20mm cannon fire and rockets; we added 250-pound bomb runs at a little greater distance, once the pilots got close looks at our guys and their guys on the ground.     

     Time for the second shift. I said "stop" into one microphone; "go" into another. The A4s pulled away as a series of Huey helicopter gunships, which had been circling directly above the area, dropped down to strafe. Their machine guns were less powerful, but they had the advantage of being able to bank in a tight circle, and completely ring the platoon with fire. We had the gunships stacked up to follow one another in as they ran low on ammo, so there was never more than a few seconds without intense fire being put on the ground. 

     The other reason for switching to gunships was that, by tightly circling the platoon (which jets couldn't do), they left the sky open above it. I now had the medevac chopper move into position directly above the center of the platoon's position. There was no way for it to approach from the side. The pilot said he could drop her straight down. 

     "Bravo Two Six, this is Landshark Alpha. Get your emergency ready. Here comes your bird, straight down from above you." Nothing in my life had ever felt so good as saying that.

     Two Six keyed his mike, but waited a long moment to speak. The panic was gone, replaced by a calm, bitter voice: "You're too late." 

     Nothing in my life had ever felt so bad as hearing that. I still hear it.

CHINESE SOLDIERS, WOLVES, TUMALO

The nightmare recounted here, A6 and Wolves, entered my life as a result of graduate studies in the History of Consciousness program at UC Santa Cruz. And, of course, because of my recent experiences as a Marine, then journalist, in Vietnam, then also Cambodia and Laos.
     This is the nightmare that launched me bodily out of grad school, first becoming a lost soul hitchhiking through Oregon, then to being a deckhand on albacore boats off the Pacific Coast...

Chinese Soldiers

     Back at UC Santa Cruz in the fall of 1970, I got a job as teaching assistant in Political Philosophy for Professor Sheldon Wolin, a nationally known professor and writer whose best-known book was Politics and Vision.
     During the winter quarter, Wolin had decided to include works by Asian writers, because the Vietnam war was still such a big factor in everyone's lives. Readings from the Selected Works of Mao Tse-tung were on the list, in particular On Protracted War, Mao's treatise stressing the importance of the relationship between political and military factors in conducting revolutionary or anti-imperial war.
     I had devoured much of that material - obsessively, as usual - along with People's War, People's Army, by Vo Nguyen Giap, the Vietnamese general who had commanded the forces which defeated first the French, then us Americans. As Wolin and I talked, he decided that, although he always lectured to the entire class and the job of teaching assistants like me was to lead discussion groups of a smaller number of students, in this case I should give the lecture to the class as a whole, because of the combination of my experiences in Vietnam, reading, and journalism in Southeast Asia.

     I re-immersed myself in the writings of Mao and Giap, even going back to Sun Tzu's thousands-of-years-old classic, The Art of War. When the time for my lecture came, I think I was too overwrought to do as good a job as I might have. What I tried to say was that Mao and Giap had invented a new calculus, which performed a new kind of summation of historical factors to make the answer come out in their favor. I drew on the blackboard a rough outline of the map of China, then put in symbols to represent the massive buildup of Japanese military power there during the 1930's. The map showed that the Japanese Navy controlled the coastal waters of China, and had strong garrisons guarding major port cities, rail lines, highways, etcetera. The Chinese fighters for independence, which at that time - the buildup to WWII - included both Mao's Communists and Chiang Kai-shek's Kuomintang (Nationalists), had a tiny fraction of the weapons the Japanese possessed.    
     But, in spite of Mao's famous saying that "power grows out of the barrel of a gun," he taught that guns weren't the whole story. With the proper political organization, political will, and military strategy and tactics, China's huge population could overcome the Japanese occupation. Since they didn't have enough weapons but had so many people, they'd use people to get the weapons. Attacks would be planned on isolated Japanese outposts, with all the weapons the Chinese could gather in the hands of the leading attackers, who would overwhelm a small number of well-armed Japanese and escape to fight again, next time with more weapons.

     I used, as an example, Gunny Rogers' tales in boot camp of waves of attacking Chinese soldiers being slaughtered by U.S. Marines' machine guns at the battle of the Chosin Reservoir in Korea, noting that although the Chinese took huge losses, they drove Allied forces back south of the 38th parallel.
     I don't know what effect my lecture had on the class. But soon after I gave it, I had this dream:

      Dream: A6 and Wolves

I am sitting at the top of a mountain of wolves. Its surface writhes as they attack me. Though they are so numerous as to form a moving mass that stretches down the hill as far as I can see, I do not experience them as a mass, but rather as an infinity of giant individual wolves, each of which is making a heroic, fiercely intentional effort to kill me. I see each wolf with perfect clarity. They are all identical. They are bigger than any wild or domestic canine, the size of a horse colt too tall to walk under its mother's belly. And all are of that perfect obsidian blackness that absorbs most light yet throws off highlights like electrical sparks. Their heads are the size of a bear's head. Their jaws are all open wide enough to take my head inside, which they are trying to do. Their teeth are pure white, and throw off glints of light like the highlights thrown off by their churning obsidian bodies. Their fangs are the size of my fingers. Their eyes and tongues and the tissue in their open mouths are crimson, like arterial blood. I am firing a machine gun at the wolves. It's a U.S. model A6 .30 caliber, aircooled, tripod mounted weapon with a pistol grip, the kind used in the Korean War by people like Gunnery Sergeant David J. Rogers, one of my drill instructors at boot camp. It is also the same machine gun I'd used as a pillow in the hut in the jungle in Laos, that summer of 1968. The hill itself, and the way it's covered by waves of wolves attacking me, also spring from the pictures my imagination painted when Gunny Rogers told about human wave attacks against Marine positions by Chinese soldiers at the Chosin reservoir, and the slaughter that ensued. I am killing the wolves like those Marines killed the Chinese soldiers, who are piling up in front of the gun. Each time I kill a wolf, it drops, snarling, on the pile of its dead brothers. Before I have time to recover, a new lead attacker takes its place, climbing the pile of dead and writhing wolves with that swift, murderous intentionality I once saw in the movement of the legs of a pit bull terrier that was chasing me as I passed a farmstead on a bicycle. I am allowed to waste no instant. Each wolf moves so that the death of his brother shields his approach, and he is springing for me even as I swing the gun. No wolf dies until I see his wild red eyes up close, until I feel the shock of his great teeth snapping shut barely in front of my face, until I look into the cavernous red maw, open now to take my face inside it, until I feel his hot breath, until I see the bullets slam into his throat and mouth and skull, just in front of the gun's muzzle. So it goes, into the night, wolf after attacking wolf, each attack a new mortal emergency, made more urgent by requirements to change ammunition belts and to unscrew and replace overheated barrels with my bare hands, with never a moment to make a slip, to waste an instant, or to call for help; and no help to call for.

     I awoke from the dream, dressed, rode my bicycle to campus, and told Professor Wolin that I would be leaving at the end of the quarter. The evening before the dream, I'd had no inkling that I would be leaving graduate school. The dream had blasted me bodily out of the life I had known, the academic future I had planned.
     I lived in a tiny apartment in San Francisco for a month, got rid of everything I owned except what I could carry in a backpack and two small boxes of books I stored with my friend Peter Balcziunas, and hitchhiked to Oregon.


Tumalo

I hitched a ride eastbound in central Oregon. Maybe I’d go visit my aunt Bessie and uncle Lank in Baker. Mostly, I just wanted to breathe the thin, dry air that had felt so right to me as a boy and younger man. Unspoken, and perhaps unthought, was also the desire to touch and feel something which I had known before the war as clean and beautiful and…normal, and healthy. Every day in grad school, and too many of the nights during and following the weeks of preparation for my lecture on the politico-military writings of Mao Tse-tung and Vo Nguyen Giap, had wrapped the war back around me like a bloodsoaked blanket.
I was broke, but had a little food in my pack: oatmeal – my grad student’s stay-alive staple - and some brown sugar and dried milk to mix with it, and coffee. I lived from campground to campground. Fine with me: I was back in Oregon.
Settled in the back of a rancher’s pickup, I was watching the juniper, sage, and Ponderosa pine flit past, when I saw a small road sign with an arrow pointing down a gravel road to Fish Lake.
Fish Lake! I squirmed around and thumped the top of the pickup’s cab, told the driver I wanted to camp here, and lowered my pack to the ground and thanked him as he rolled to a stop.

It was the same Fish Lake where Mom and Bill Gano and Darrell and I and Bessie and Lank had spent a weekend fishing for bullheads, when Darrell and I were still young kids, a few years ago. A lifetime ago. I carried my pack, and the cheap guitar in its gig bag which I’d bought in San Francisco, and settled into a campsite with a picnic table and fire ring near the water’s edge.
The next day a young couple with a daughter 2 or 3 years old drove up and settled into the campsite next to mine. As dusk turned to dark and the family were setting up camp, the man walked into the sphere of light from my fire. “My name’s Jack,” he said, holding out his hand. Jack and Gloria and their baby daughter, Christiann, and I hit it off pretty well and sort of became a little tribal unit. I was good at scrounging firewood, and with the camping stuff they’d brought in their old Chevy, our two campsites became a homey little village. Even my inexpert guitar-thumping seemed somehow right in that time and place. I started writing a little song:

All these green rivers
are followin’ me
trying to carry me
home to the sea…

The next day, Jack and Gloria asked if I wanted to move with them to a favorite campsite back to the west, closer to Bend. It felt good hanging out with them, and the move would put me closer to the coast. I needed work in order to eat, and had been seduced by rumors of the good money to be earned crewing on albacore boats off the coast. So I gladly joined their family troupe.

Tumalo Creek was somewhat more than a quiet mountain stream when we got there. Its steep gradient at that point in the foothills of the Cascade range, and the June snowmelt which was then at its heaviest, combined to make Tumalo a roaring, tumultuous river when we unloaded the car and made camp on its southern bank. It was beautiful. Little Christiann played nearby in the woods between our campsite and the riverbank as we set up camp. Jack and Gloria kept watchful eyes on her, lest she go too near the water, but seemed to have reached a parental agreement not to discipline their child harshly: “Christiann, be careful now. It’s not safe near the water.”
Our shared campsite was in pretty good shape by dark, and we made a meal together. I roamed the woods  bringing in dry twigs for kindling, and larger limbs to hold the fire into the night, while Gloria and Jack busied themselves cooking and Christiann darted happily around all of us.
By late the next morning we had settled comfortably into life in our “homestead.” Christiann was playing as if she’d grown up there, and Jack and Gloria and I were relaxing in the June sun…
“Jack! Where’s Christi?!!  We all ran to the water’s edge – not there – and searched quickly among the trees nearby. Not there either. “If she’s in the water, we have to get her NOW,” I said sharply, my veteran’s instincts telling me that the child’s life was, in these few seconds, in the balance.
          I ran a few yards downstream and jumped in, close to the bank: if she were trapped under the bank, there was still a chance… the unforgiving current, only recently melted off the shoulders of the mountains immediately above us, was pure ice water. And its strength! - the current yanked me sideways with a power I hadn’t imagined, even after looking at and listening to it up close for a day. It was impossible to straighten my legs enough even to touch the bottom, three or four feet deep. I tried for a while to grope under the bank, hoping I would touch something soft. But no: everything was cold, rough, and moving violently. My situation changed: having at first thought only of getting to Christiann in time, I now realized that Tumalo Creek could easily kill more than one person in these few minutes. The bank blurred past. Jack and Gloria were already out of sight upstream. The current was too powerful for me to search in it. I reached for something on the bank strong enough to hold me as I climbed out. My first two tries yielded handfuls of gravel and broken sticks. Then I grabbed with my right hand onto  the root of a large tree that grew back from the water’s edge. The current yanked me violently downstream, my grip held – I now realized I was holding on for my life – and my momentum flopped me up onto the bank like a large, terrified fish.

Jack went for help while Gloria and I kept searching the nearby woods, shouting often, “Christiann…Christiann!” and listening after our shouts for any timid, or playful, or pained, reply. We heard only birds and squirrels.
Jack came back with an old man who lived with his wife in a cabin near the bridge which crossed Tumalo Creek nearby. His name was Bob Hendrickson. He seemed a very level-headed man, and knew the surrounding area because it was National Forest, and made his living partly in those woods, cutting and hauling dead timber and selling it for firewood. He said we needed more help, and hurried back to his cabin to phone the Sheriff’s Office. They would put together a search party.
Vehicles and people began to appear. Deputies’ wives and neighborhood women who lived along the river, and those of their husbands who weren’t working that afternoon, or could get off, organized themselves into a search party. Women brought potato and macaroni salads and set up propane stoves to prepare hot dishes for the searchers. They’d all done this before.

In a short time – it was still early afternoon – Deschutes County was mobilized in a way that rural Americans have always done, with people stepping into a breach when one of their own is in serious trouble. This time, it was a two and a half year old girl. No questions asked.
County agencies organized around their leaders. Smoke jumpers arrived from their base near Redmond, a few miles away from the county seat at Bend. Men who were accustomed to being in charge took charge, organizing all of us into search details, communications details, and groups to feed all of us.
All except Jack, Christiann’s father. The head of the local Search and Rescue unit had instructed Gloria to stay at our campsite, which became base camp for the search. If Christiann was found by any of the searchers, she would immediately be brought to her mother at our campsite, which had also blossomed into a paramedics’ station.
But Jack had become useless. Gloria quietly let us know that Jack had previously had a drug problem, had been recovering pretty well, but also kept some pills on hand. She told us, her face a tortured mixture of worry for her child and worry and shame about her child’s father – they weren’t married – that as soon as Jack returned with Bob Hendrickson and the search began to get organized, Jack had taken some pills. Quite a few of them, she said. She called them “reds.”
I joined the search. Jack was flaked out on his sleeping bag, barely conscious, not speaking. At first the search leaders thought I was the father, because I was trying to be part of the effort, and was obviously worried. Gloria and I finally made it clear that I had known them only two days, that Christiann’s father was the man lying on his sleeping bag, seemingly incapable of speech. Eyes searched Gloria’s face and mine, and the camp scene. Shadows crossed all our faces as glances and stares first probed, then were averted.
A team of divers had been called in as soon as the search was organized. One man equipped with wet suit, a belt of lead weights, and rubber boots sealed at their tops, entered the rampaging creek tied to a safety line with one of his teammates holding the other end of the line around his hips and following along on the creekbank.
That effort lasted only a few minutes. The water was too swift, even for a man so equipped, to actually search the creek bottom and under the banks. As the divers conferred with the Search and Rescue leaders, the reality of the situation showed itself: they were now searching for a body, not a live child; and any person, however well trained and equipped, who tried to work in the stream was in immediate danger of losing his own life. The calculus was unavoidable: the risk of losing a second life was not worth the chance of finding a corpse – not even the corpse of a young child. The dive team packed up and left, saying they’d return when the water lowered. The rest of us continued searching the woods.

We searched all night, shouting “Christiann! If you hear me, make some noise, please… Christiann!” Our shouts into the darkness took on a pleading tone, as if all of us were begging God to send some alternate message besides the one that was forcing its truth upon us. During one of my return trips to the campsite during the pre-dawn hours, when I grabbed something to eat before heading back out into the woods, the Sheriff’s deputy who was head of Search and Rescue also appeared at our campsite. He spoke to Gloria, telling her the news: everyone was still searching, but there had been no sign of Christi: not a thread of clothing… nothing. Not a clue. Then he looked across the campfire at the prostrate Jack, looked at me, looked at Gloria, inhaled sharply, and spoke: “Lady, I’ve never said anything like this before; never had to. But I gotta say it now: You’re with the wrong man.”
Gloria stayed quiet, bending her head lower under this new flood of grief.

Dawn brought a reorganization of the search. But it did not bring Christiann. Jack, who had been essentially unconscious all night, began to stir as noon approached, and even to speak a little in quiet tones to Gloria. He’d recovered enough to move himself around some, and he and I were sitting on opposite sides of Gloria, on one of the heavy timbers which constituted the main structure of the bridge across Tumalo Creek. Bob Hendrickson stood beside us as the head of Search and Rescue approached and knelt in front of Gloria and Jack and me.
He spoke to Gloria: “Ma’am, I’m sorry to have to tell you this. We’ve done all we could do, and there’s just been no sign. Not a thread… nothing. A few people will keep searching the woods in daylight, in case something turns up. But we’re formally calling off the search, as of now. I’m very sorry.”

The news cudgeled Gloria and Jack and me and Bob Hendrickson into a long silence. Then Jack spoke softly to Gloria, using some of those words people sometimes use when there are no words, something like, “She’s at peace now...”
Gloria’s grief erupted: “NO! ..NO!..OH PLEASE GOD NO!” Jack and I were on either side of her, both just lending a shoulder as best we could. It seemed to me then, and I remember it now, 41 years later, that the power of her grief was actually making the bridge tremble beneath us.

I stayed and worked in the woods with Bob Hendrickson for two or three weeks. He taught me how to fall a tree with his chain saw, and I would fall snags and buck them into stove lengths and split them with his maul and wedges and haul them to his cabin until we had a load to take to town and sell. For a while Bob and I kept looking in the underbrush as we worked, on the tiny chance that we’d see a colorful flash of child’s clothing pinned under a tree, but finally giving up as we realized that if we found something, it would be something we did not want to see.
A few weeks later Bob gave me a lift to a highway junction, where I unloaded my pack and guitar, shook hands with the man whose friendship I had earned in sadness, and stuck my thumb out in the wind, hitching toward the coast.



I drifted to Astoria and hung around the docks unloading albacore boats for food money, until I met Dick Mathews on an adjacent barstool in the Mermaid Tavern and he took me aboard the Anna Marie, a fifty-six foot converted purse seiner out of Juneau, Alaska.
     Dick couldn't afford to pay me. I worked for meals, figuring that the experience I gained could later get me hired on a different boat for a share of the catch.
     The wolf dream had been the war's long arm yanking me out of graduate school. I guess I thought the war would leave me, or I would leave it, if I quit the situation where I spent so much time thinking about why humans went to war. But the war followed me to the boats - not, of course, in any way I would have expected.

THE LONG ARC OF THE 3/4" POLYPROPYLENE LINE IN THE AFTERNOON SUN AT MORRO BAY

          The Long Arc of the 3/4" Polypropylene Line
               in the Afternoon Sun at Morro Bay
             
     Weather had been nasty and Ella was tired of riding it and was feeling bad about having to confine Christina and Alec to the wheelhouse and about Christina's seasick spells, so she had taken the kids ashore in Monterey and they had all gone to visit friends in Bolinas, north of San Francisco, while Dick and I went back out alone.
     The wind was up again - out of the northwest, which is typical for this coast -  so, since we had no fish reports from anywhere to the north which would have made it worthwhile for us to buck the weather, we turned "downhill" (common language in the fleet for running before the weather, which is a gentler ride, or for traveling down the coast to the southeast. Usually, on this coast, down the coast and down the weather are the same direction) and slid before the seas, hoping that either the wind would let down before we got too far away from Monterey, or we would find fish.
     We picked up only a few fish - those larger, green water albacore which usually run alone or in small schools - and the wind got stronger and blew us faster and farther down the coast than we wanted to go, so Dick turned around and we bucked the weather for a few hours back to the northwest. The wind kept picking up until the seas were so high and abrupt that we would have to watch each wave, gauge its size, and, for the biggest ones, goose the throttle hard as we plowed into each sea in order to maintain our momentum and steerage, hold that, then cut the throttle sharply just as our bow broke through the crest. This so we would slide down the back side of the wave to the trough, rather than breaking through the crest too fast, leaping out over the trough, and falling several feet before slamming into the water.
      The Anna Marie was broad and shallow: good in a following or a quartering sea, but not a good bucker. Dick decided that making Monterey wasn't worth the punishment the boat and we were taking: "Let's see what's happening in Morro Bay," he said as he disengaged the automatic pilot and spun the big wheel of varnished oak and brass.
     The massive jarring stopped; each sea now would whistle and foam up behind us, lift our stern a few feet, slide beneath our keel, drop us gently in the trough, and hurry on ahead. The ride was easier, but our slow speed relative to the water made for poor steerage. The automatic pilot made what felt like long, wallowing corrections; we had to watch it constantly in case it disengaged or needed a human to get it back on course.
     We ran all night and all morning, taking shifts at the wheel with the off man sleeping, and slid past the big rock into Morro Bay in the early afternoon.
     A feeling of relief comes over every seaman as his vessel slips from noisy water to quiet; it came over us. It often happens on this coast that heavy winds occur in sunny weather, and so it was this day. But as the tension that comes with riding heavy seas dropped from us on the way into the harbor, we noticed the brightness of the day for the first time, as if it had been raining at sea and the cloud had just rolled away. And right away our voices lost a certain edge and our faces relaxed and brightened.
     The harbor was full of boats that had beat us in out of the weather; each boat with a position along the dock had at least two or more boats tied up abreast of it, with old tires or those Norwegian fenders that look like bright orange balloons with blue nipples on top, hung between the boats' rails to keep them from bumping together.
     We sold our fish and took on new ice and pulled up alongside the outermost of three boats staggered out from one berth at the dock. I jumped aboard the third boat and made our bow line fast to its bow cleat, leaving enough slack for Dick, who had cut the engine as soon as I'd nodded to him from the bow of the other boat, to get aboard our neighbor's stern. He pulled Anna Marie's stern over with another line, pivoting her on the fender we had between the boats amidships until the bow line came taut. When it did, he tied his own, and I ran a springline from our rail near the stern to our neighbor's trolling pole amidships; this keeps the two boats from seesawing back and forth against one another.
     We were now four boats abreast. The other three were all smaller and lighter than the 56 foot Anna Marie, which was far enough out in the channel to be partially in the tidal current that was running there, and was being pulled by it and was in turn pulling the whole line of boats toward the line ahead of us.    
     "Too close," Dick said after he'd watched the boats work against their lines for a minute. "We need another line...." He paused and looked at the 3/4" polypropylene line that I'd coiled at the very stern, near the trolling cockpit. "Let's try for that finger," he said, and indicated a finger of the floating dock that jutted out into the channel a little less than fifty feet off our stern. "That's a fifty foot line..." -  he nodded toward the coil - "...might just make it. I'll go around; you throw." He scrambled over the decks of the three boats, stepped onto the dock, and walked around to the end of the finger.
     As he was moving around, I picked up the coil. I liked it. It was clean and new and, with its one bright red strand twisted around its two white strands, cheerful looking in the sunlight: Christmas candy, minus sticky and sweet, plus the squeaky sound of synthetic fibers grabbing each other like lovers' legs. I slipped some of the coils around until they were all just the same size, and made sure that none were crossed. The line would be barely long enough when fully extended; any snarl would cause it to drop into the water short of where Dick was standing, and it would have to be retrieved, re-coiled, and thrown again, this time wet and heavy.
     I took most of the coils in my right hand, and two in my left to pay out when the rest of the line was extended in the air. This would give me more height and control, and would eliminate the jerk the line would have felt if I'd thrown it all out from where it was eye spliced into the stern cleat. I left a slack loop between my left hand and the cleat and another, longer loop between my two hands, so that there were four stages: two loops, and two hands full of coiled line.
     I looked across the water at Dick, who stood on the end of the finger grinning his little league baseball star grin, and something quick and light and wordless passed between us about the movement from noisy to quiet water, about the wind-scrubbed brilliance of the afternoon sky that settled down around both our heads as if we were two pillars supporting it, and about the throwing of this line which was needed to connect the boat to the land.
     He cupped his hands around his mouth, leaned back, and yelled, "Okay, Queequeg, let's have the line!" We both laughed and the throwing upward of my head to laugh and the raising of my left foot to the rail and the swinging upward of the coils in both hands were all one motion; then the motion reversed: my face and eyes came to level, my weight settled back solidly onto both feet, both hands with their coils of line dropped. Left hand stopped between my knees, my body dropped lower, right hand with its clean red and white coils dropped nearly to the deck and swung out behind me, and the loop between the cleat and my left hand, and the loop between my two hands, were almost taut.
     Then quick! we started up and forward again, the coils and I, in a being that was born as the coils in my right hand swooped down past my hard planted right foot to gather speed, then climbed out along the sky, at first in an unwinding spiral, then in a long, lumpy red and white arc against the blue. With all my weight forward, now, my whole right side a part of the description of the arc, all the right hand coils were straightened, the loop between my two hands joined the flight and departed, the arc grew flatter, the two left hand coils followed, the arc lengthened and flattened again, the last loop raised its head, I leaned and strained and pointed at Dick's hand, which was stretched out as far from the end of the finger as mine was from the stern rail of the Anna Marie. The last bit of the momentum of my throw entered the line and it swept out and down like a falling sapling and just, just before it reached that point of full extension where it would snap back on itself and fall into the water, the very end fell, plip! into Dick's hand.
     We both whooped at the sky, and he took up all the slack there was: just enough to throw two figure eights on the cleat at the end of the finger.
     I climbed over the boats and we walked along the dock, under the sky, past the quiet water, onto the land.
                 

                                                                            (c) 2012 Dean Metcalf