Thrown-away Child

and adjusted the front pieces to fit my face—vinyl goggles, rubber snout. How could I forget the last time I had occasion to wear such a thing?
     
    Bombs bursting in air...
    On the ground below the bombs is young Neil Hockaday, special commando of the United States Army — giving proof through the night that our flag was still there and all that crap.
    I rise in moonlight from the muck bed of a blue-black river. I have hidden there for hours, submerged in tangled reeds and fetid water, sucking air from the surface through a bamboo shoot, waiting for Charlie. I am equipped to face the foe with a belt-load of murder instruments, courtesy of my government. I am frightened beyond what I ever believed fright to be. / want to scream for my mother, Mairead. But no—I must not make a sound. I must do the duty for which I have been trained. As my Alabama lieutenant has lectured me a thousand times, “Life’s cheap to these fuckin’ gooks; you got to give them a taste of their own fuckin’ throat-slashin’ medicine.” Here comes Charlie. I swing hard and swift my U.S. Army cutlass machete, whomping it surely and deeply and quietly into the surprised yellow neck of a sloe-eyed Vietnamese. I see as he gasps and dies that he is a boy, another boy. So many are. They tell me that Charlie boy, sinking into the river ooze, is the enemy. Night after night in such moonlit streams where I am waist deep in water thick with silt and fresh blood after doing my duty, I whisper my devotions to the Virgin Mary and Glory Be to the Father. And I ask myself, How in the name of Holiness can somebody called Charlie be my enemy? I decide that anyone who answers is more stupid than myself. Stupidly, I pretend my cutlass is a rosary, and run my fingers up and down the slimy blade. I whisper the devotions all over again, before I resume hiding and breathing through bamboo and waiting for another Charlie. And I beg forgiveness for murderous sin after murderous sin after murderous sin. But I know that if I were God I would never forgive the likes of me.
     
    I hear again what Ruby told me—twenty minutes ago when I walked back into Mama’s house and found her at the kitchen with the city telephone directory and some Big Chief notebooks, and her head in her hands. I recognized Ruby’s handwriting on the cover of one notebook—the name “Teddy” and a phone number.
    “Are you all right?”
    “Just dizzy.” Ruby pushed aside the directory and notebooks. I poured her a glass of ice water from a pitcher in the refrigerator. Also I soaked a dishtowel in cold water and made a compress. “Daddy... Perry... the cottage in the dirt lane…” Her voice was breathy, as if she had just awakened from a dream. “Mutants, orphans, and misfits... All of it and all of them. Don’t you see, Hock?”
    “I’m beginning to.”
    “One event connects with another.”
    “Ruby—?”
    She interrupted, to urgently relay Claude’s telephone message, about something bad I had to go see for myself. She said nothing about my disappearing act that morning.
    “You’ll need a taxi.” Ruby told me to dash out in the street and flag down Huggy Louper before he reached the corner. Which I did. But I told Huggy to keep the engine running while I ran back to the house, worried about Ruby.
    “Help me,” I said. “Your father grew sick over time from a snake bite, then died—this connects with Perry?”
    “I’m not making perfect sense, Hock. Women’s intuition, it’s like that.”
    “Nobody should question women’s intuition.”
    The telephone rang.
    “It might be Claude again,” Ruby said. “Answer it.”
    It was not Claude. “It’s me, keeping in touch,” Perry said.
    “Hold on, I want you to hear something,” I told him. I walked with the phone away from the wall, stretching the cord to the table. I held out the receiver and said to Ruby, “Tell us about your women’s intuition.”
    “Who’s us?”
    “As if you didn’t know. Go on, talk.”
    “All right. Perry’s on to something about that day the snake got Daddy, he’s got all these notebooks full °f memories and impressions about the lane off Tchoupitoulas Street, where the family started out.” Ruby stopped. I nodded for her to go on. “The notebooks are beautifully written, Hock. You’ll see. The stories all connect, from the beginning right up to now—with Perry being hunted for Clete Tyler’s murder, and somehow it involves MOMS. Don’t ask me bow, I just feel it from