Afterburn by Colin Harrison Read Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Colin Harrison
bombs.
----
THEY WERE KEEPING HIM ALIVE, he did not know why. They made him eat. He remembered his children. A little girl and a little boy. He was glad they would never see him like this. They would grow up and never know their daddy, and if Ellie had any sense, she would marry again as soon as possible. She would know he wanted her to do that. Have more babies, sweetie, as soon as you can.
HE SAID MANY THINGS about many things and they gave him water and tried to write it down and he kept saying everything and perhaps this made sense to them. One day the complete three-dimensional diagram of the F-4's electrical system came into his head and then it left and he knew he had forgotten it forever.
THEY TRIED TO WAKE HIM so that he could feel what they were doing.
ONE MORNING an American prop plane flew over, dropping loose bales of surrender leaflets. They pattered to the ground, several through the slats of his cage right in front of him. He'd seen translations of such leaflets. This one would have fit easily into his palm and showed a picture of a B-52, cargo doors open, a stream of bombs dropping from the plane's belly.
The village children gathered the pamphlets and burned them.
THEY MOVED HIM to a hootch. They took off his old ropes, but he did not change his position. They tied his arms together and the new rope to a pole. Shit softly bubbled out of his ass, a great relief to him.
HE SPENT AN ENTIRE DAY straightening his leg. When he finally looked at the leg, it was not straight, not even close.
ONE MORNING they laid a board across his shins and put three rice sacks filled with stones on it. By the afternoon he had told them Ellie had signed a mortgage for forty-seven thousand dollars and that his life insurance was thirty-five thousand. They were interested in such large sums and wrote them down. You very rich man. What else you own? He saw no benefit in withholding now. They were killing him, he knew. What else you own? Shares of IBM, he whispered, eight hundred shares. What is IBM? International Business Machines, a company. What is shares? That's a piece, a small piece of the company. How many pieces in all of company? they asked. I don't know. They whipped his back with the flat inner tube of a bicycle tire. Maybe ten million, he cried. This number was far too high for them to believe, and so they whipped him again.
HE LOOKED AT HIS LEG . He had no fat on his body anymore.
SHELLING ROCKED THE VILLAGE, pounding the earth. It was night. Helicopters hovered in the distance, black gnats under the moon. At dawn a flight of F-105s zoomed at low altitude across the jungle, dragging a sonic boom behind them. Seconds after they passed, the sun boiled up from the earth. Skyraiders dropped in low. Antipersonnel bombs, clusters of smaller explosives. He had to be in Laos or South Vietnam. Soldiers ran back and forth in front of his hut. A woman hurried by with a small bloody bundle of arms and legs. He smiled. Commotion in the village. He heard chopper blades slapping the air, automatic-weapons fire. Between the slats of the hootch he could see soldiers running over the mud, some carrying rice bags. A jerky, spliced motion. He looked at his leather baseball glove, waiting to be picked. There was a little box on the left thumb with the words Owns This Genuine Rawlings Glove underneath. You were supposed to write your name in the box.
Now the Vietcong receded from the village into the jungle. He wriggled over the earth to the edge of the hootch, the rope pulling tight against his wrists behind him. Three Marines moved slowly from hootch to hootch. One would fire a few rounds into each, then go inside. Sometimes he came out clutching documents that he folded into a satchel. Most of the times he brought out a villager at gunpoint. After the men checked each hootch, one of the others burned it with a flamethrower, hosing fire from a shoulder cylinder through the air onto the thatched
----
THEY WERE KEEPING HIM ALIVE, he did not know why. They made him eat. He remembered his children. A little girl and a little boy. He was glad they would never see him like this. They would grow up and never know their daddy, and if Ellie had any sense, she would marry again as soon as possible. She would know he wanted her to do that. Have more babies, sweetie, as soon as you can.
HE SAID MANY THINGS about many things and they gave him water and tried to write it down and he kept saying everything and perhaps this made sense to them. One day the complete three-dimensional diagram of the F-4's electrical system came into his head and then it left and he knew he had forgotten it forever.
THEY TRIED TO WAKE HIM so that he could feel what they were doing.
ONE MORNING an American prop plane flew over, dropping loose bales of surrender leaflets. They pattered to the ground, several through the slats of his cage right in front of him. He'd seen translations of such leaflets. This one would have fit easily into his palm and showed a picture of a B-52, cargo doors open, a stream of bombs dropping from the plane's belly.
The village children gathered the pamphlets and burned them.
THEY MOVED HIM to a hootch. They took off his old ropes, but he did not change his position. They tied his arms together and the new rope to a pole. Shit softly bubbled out of his ass, a great relief to him.
HE SPENT AN ENTIRE DAY straightening his leg. When he finally looked at the leg, it was not straight, not even close.
ONE MORNING they laid a board across his shins and put three rice sacks filled with stones on it. By the afternoon he had told them Ellie had signed a mortgage for forty-seven thousand dollars and that his life insurance was thirty-five thousand. They were interested in such large sums and wrote them down. You very rich man. What else you own? He saw no benefit in withholding now. They were killing him, he knew. What else you own? Shares of IBM, he whispered, eight hundred shares. What is IBM? International Business Machines, a company. What is shares? That's a piece, a small piece of the company. How many pieces in all of company? they asked. I don't know. They whipped his back with the flat inner tube of a bicycle tire. Maybe ten million, he cried. This number was far too high for them to believe, and so they whipped him again.
HE LOOKED AT HIS LEG . He had no fat on his body anymore.
SHELLING ROCKED THE VILLAGE, pounding the earth. It was night. Helicopters hovered in the distance, black gnats under the moon. At dawn a flight of F-105s zoomed at low altitude across the jungle, dragging a sonic boom behind them. Seconds after they passed, the sun boiled up from the earth. Skyraiders dropped in low. Antipersonnel bombs, clusters of smaller explosives. He had to be in Laos or South Vietnam. Soldiers ran back and forth in front of his hut. A woman hurried by with a small bloody bundle of arms and legs. He smiled. Commotion in the village. He heard chopper blades slapping the air, automatic-weapons fire. Between the slats of the hootch he could see soldiers running over the mud, some carrying rice bags. A jerky, spliced motion. He looked at his leather baseball glove, waiting to be picked. There was a little box on the left thumb with the words Owns This Genuine Rawlings Glove underneath. You were supposed to write your name in the box.
Now the Vietcong receded from the village into the jungle. He wriggled over the earth to the edge of the hootch, the rope pulling tight against his wrists behind him. Three Marines moved slowly from hootch to hootch. One would fire a few rounds into each, then go inside. Sometimes he came out clutching documents that he folded into a satchel. Most of the times he brought out a villager at gunpoint. After the men checked each hootch, one of the others burned it with a flamethrower, hosing fire from a shoulder cylinder through the air onto the thatched
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