Tell Me a Story - a short story

I've always loved the short story genre. I wanted to create short fiction like Poe, Maupassant, and McCullers. I became disillusioned when I received a rejection on a short story I'd written about the war in Vietnam. I'm paraphrasing the reply because I didn't keep the original rejection letter.

"Your story is good, though little different than the many short stories about Vietnam filling my IN basket."

Taking the editor's criticism to heart, I stopped writing war stories. I wrote one last story about Vietnam before moving on to other subjects. Tell Me a Story isn't about death and dying; it's about life and living and how humans of all sexes and nationalities manage to cope with the hands that fate deals them.

The cover for this story was created by artificial intelligence. I asked it to create an image of a Vietnam War-era Boom Boom girl in a Lambretta. The result isn't exactly what I had in mind, but it's so entertaining that I'm using it anyway.

Tell Me a Story

 “Hey, Mac. You've had enough already. Why don't you drag your ass outa here and go home?”

“Leave him alone, Clancy, why don't you?”

Clancy, the big bartender, turned to see his nephew Tim standing on one foot in the half-opened doorway, bracing himself with an elbow against the wall.

“You want to close for me?” Clancy said. Not waiting for an answer, he threw his bar towel across the counter, removed his apron, and grabbed his coat from the rack in the corner. He dropped the keys to the door into Tim's hand as he passed. “Lock up when you've had all the fun you can take. I'm going home.”

Tim watched Clancy disappear down the deserted sidewalk and then glanced at the drunk sitting alone at the bar. Grabbing a bottle of Clancy's bourbon, he sat on the stool beside him.

The man seemed oblivious to his stained shirt and day-old growth of beard. As Tim filled his empty glass, he opened one eye and glanced up from the table.

“And to what do I owe this honor?” he said, alcohol slurring his words.

“Clancy decided to let us borrow a bottle of his best-sipping whiskey,” Tim said.

Raising himself into a slumped sitting position, the unshaven drunk hiccupped, glanced at the bottle, and grinned. “Well, I'd rather have a bottle before me than a frontal lobotomy.”

Smiling at the tired old joke, Tim raised his glass, and the drunk did likewise.

“Here's to you. What's your name?”

After draining half the liquor in a single swallow, the man said, “Harris. John Harris.”

“Pleased to meet you, Mr. Harris. I'm Tim Sullivan.”

“And a fine Irish name it is,” Harris replied.

After tapping Tim's barely touched glass, he finished the remaining drops of his own whiskey.

“To what do I owe the honor, Tim Sullivan?” Harris said again, refilling his glass from the bottle.

“Curiosity.”

“And what might ye be curious about, lad?” he said in his drunken imitation of an Irish brogue.

Tim smiled. “I'm a reporter. I haven't slept in thirty-six hours and can't remember the last time I ate. I just covered a murder so grisly and sordid my editor's not gonna believe it when I give it to him.”

“If I could make the past go away, I would do it for both of us,” John Harris said.

Tim nodded, and his grin remained acerbic when he said, “I guess you can't. But there is something you can do for me.”

“Name it,” Harris said.

“A story,” Tim said, resting his head in his hands. “Tell me a story.”

Staring with drunken, rheumy eyes, Harris raked five bony fingers through his matted hair before pouring himself another shot of whiskey.

“What story?”

Shrugging noncommittally and glancing at his watch, Tim said, “You name it, John. Everyone has a story. I'm too wired to sleep and too numb to talk. I gave you whiskey; now tell me a story.”

Harris nodded and leaned back in his chair, watching Tim Sullivan light his cigarette. He stared at a point above Tim's right shoulder for a long moment, making him wonder if he’d passed out with his eyes open. He hadn't. He was trying to recall a past moment and the exact nuance and inflection to convey that memory. The cogs in his drunken brain were turning. Finally, he blew a wisp of smoke at the ceiling and began in dreamy, broken sentences.

“Pale, washed-out sky. Butt on a canvas seat and back against a metal vibrating wall. Half-dozen expressionless Vietnamese Nationals across the aisle, staring at nothing with nervous eyes, inside the droning monstrosity.”

Harris's words emanated from a different person. Before three sentences passed his lips, he had stopped talking and held his own cigarette with a palsied grip. Slowly, he sucked at it as if he might never taste another. Tim thought he was done. He wasn’t and soon began again.

“Glanced out the porthole. Endless connecting craters surround a forest of defoliated stumps, many still burning. Wisps of yellow smoke curling up from decimated earth. Pale tropical sky back-dropping freshly churned dirt—like a coffin's velvet lining around an ashen corpse.”

Harris paused again as if remembering the vision with vivid recall.

“Ruined jungle. Rice paddies. When the Caribou banked its wing, I saw the South China Sea for the first time. It looked like paradise.

“The plane began a downward spiral, and I saw a short stretch of man-made gray surrounding an eternity of tropical green. Heat devils danced on the concrete runway. Greenhouse heat and outhouse stench hit me when they opened the door.

“I was soon in a green army bus winding down a seaside road surrounded by endless vegetation. They let me out at an Army base by the sea.

“I hit the base on Friday for a three-day stand-down, and the place was jumping. Stowing my duffel in one of the tents, I followed the noise to the beach. I thought I had died and gone to heaven, standing on the whitest sand, beneath the bluest sky, beside the most transparent water I’d ever imagined.

“Half-naked Vietnamese girls with seamless copper skin and flowing black hair were everywhere, and they all had sensual lips and dark eyes that could burn a hole through your heart like a cutting torch.

“G.I.'s were also everywhere. Young, drunk, and laughing. Grunts, straight from the jungle, wearing cut-off fatigue pants. Bodies the sun hadn't touched in months—bleached by sunless, triple-canopy darkness. Martha and the Vandellas blasted from a quad-speaker radio in the background.

“I pulled off my boots and shirt and tossed them behind a concrete wall. A squeal behind me. A beautiful Vietnamese girl walked by, and I watched her tanned legs and bikinied ass. She left the beach with a lifeguard and my heart.

“Drunken, dancing Aussies. More girls. Tropical colors, loud music, and alcohol. I should have felt happiness, but the throes of melancholia entangled my neck with icy fingers. Still, after an hour in paradise, I had yet to speak. Feeling strangely invisible and ignored, I changed clothes and took a Lambretta to Vung Tau, the village beside the sea the French called the Vietnamese Riviera. Tall palms, tranquil breezes, and long stretches of white beach were everywhere. I met a grunt on a back street that swarmed with bicycles, buffalo, and little yellow people. No more than nineteen, the man had the hard edge of someone who had already experienced more life and death than most ninety-year-olds. With him, I went to a whore house in an old French villa with a red tiled roof, surrounded by creeping greenery. A mama-san, her tongue and lips black from chewing betel nuts smiled.

“Got two baby-san,” she said. “Number one. You like?”

She wasn't lying. Neither of the girls looked older than thirteen. When I shook my head and backed out of the room, the young G.I. grinned and took both girls. I never caught his name.

After returning to the base, I slept till late the following day on a cot in a muggy tent, returning to the village that afternoon. I visited a bar and met Hoa. G.I.'s and boom-boom girls crowded the bar. A smiling Vietnamese waitress approached me through the throng when I sat down.

“You buy me tea?”

Dark hair. Tight yellow sarong slit almost to her waist. Ruby lips and amethyst mascara surrounded dark eyes that glowed in the dim room like coal in a hot furnace. She was beautiful, and I was in love, at least in lust. I nodded and patted the empty chair beside me, waiting as she signaled someone across the noisy bar before putting her arms around my neck.

“G.I. alone?”

“Not now,” I said.

A little man brought her a glass decorated with a single cherry. ‘Saigon tea’ was just that—tea. Holding the cherry by the stem, she touched it suggestively to her tongue and closed her red-painted lips around it.

“What name?”

“Harris,” I said.

“Glad to meet you, Harris. My name is Hoa,” she said in broken English.

Between patron noise and jukebox blare, I drank a half-dozen gin slings while she consumed several Saigon teas.

“You spend the night with me, Harris?” she said.

“How much?” I asked, not naïve enough to believe she was offering charity.

“Ten dollars, MPC.”

I'd already paid twice that much for drinks, and ten dollars in military payment certificates were about all I had left. “Five dollars,” I countered.

Folding her arms tightly, she crossed her legs and shook her head. “No way, G.I.”

“All right,” I conceded. “Ten dollars.”

When I gave her the money, her oriental smile returned. “How many rubbers do you need?”

“Ten.”

“G.I. number one bullshit. Give me a dollar,” she said, holding out her hand.

I dug a dollar out of my shirt pocket, handed it to her, and watched her disappear through the crowded bar wearing a mile-wide grin. Checking my wallet, I found I had less than twenty dollars left. Five minutes had elapsed when I spotted Hoa standing by the door. She motioned me, and I followed her outside to the dark street.

“Give me a dollar,” she said. “Taxi man charge you five dollars. I talk.”

I fished in my pocket for another dollar.

We weaved a circuitous course through the ville to a three-story apartment complex and then walked to the second floor. Holding my hand, she led me to her one-room apartment. Inside, sweating plaster was peeling off the walls from the humidity. There wasn't a single couch or chair in the room, only a large bed.

“You hungry, Harris? Give me a dollar. I get food.”

She took the money and disappeared for ten minutes, directing me when she returned to the bathroom. “Brush teeth,” she said, handing me a well-used toothbrush and tube of toothpaste. I wondered how many G.I.s had used the same brush.

Tim Sullivan waited for Harris to continue. Instead, he slumped in his chair. Thinking him too dry to talk, Tim refilled his glass. Harris didn't seem to notice. Producing a crumpled pack of cigarettes from his shirt pocket, he fished one out. It was only slightly bent. Smoke wafted slowly from his nostrils. Although he stared at the ceiling, his green eyes glazed as if he envisioned something far away. After a long, unbroken silence, he stubbed out the cigarette and stared at Sullivan.

“Have you ever gone five months without seeing a woman?”

Tim Sullivan shook his head.

“I had thought about having sex so long when it finally came to pass; the act paled beside the dream.”

“No problem, G.I. Happen always,” she assured me.

“Someone knocked on the door, and I almost came unglued. Hoa patted my shoulder and got out of bed, not bothering to dress. An old man, unmindful of her nudity, handed her a steaming bowl of fishy soup through the door. We shared the spicy soup and rice with a single spoon.

“You married, Harris?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Wife very pretty?”

“We were only married five months when I got here. I can barely remember what she looks like.”

“You love her?”

“Don't know,” I said. “Are you married?” I said, changing the subject.

Shaking her head sadly, she said, “I have a lover. He beaucoup love me.”

Hoa pointed to a glossy 8 by 10 on the stand beside the bed—she and a young American airman holding a tiny baby.

“Is he stationed at the air base?”

Again, she shook her head. “He went home six months ago. He send for me soon.”

“And the baby?”

“He our baby-san,” she said, smiling. “Leonard, take us to America. Baby-san grows up to become rich, very smart like a father.”

My heart skipped a beat and almost seized up. While I longed for a woman far away whose face I could barely remember, Hoa longed for a man who’d fucked her, taken her love, and gone away, never to return.

“The war will end soon, Hoa. All the G.I.'s will go home. What will you do then?”

Even as I mouthed the words, I knew they sounded cruel, though I couldn't stop saying them. She stared back at me with sad eyes darker than ten years of war.

“I check on baby-san,” she said. “You stay. We make boom-boom again when I come back. Better this time.”

After ten long minutes of waiting naked and alone in the dark, paranoid thoughts overloaded my brain. What was I doing in a Vietnamese village swarming with Viet Cong, with no weapon, alone in the middle of the night? What if Hoa returned with a little black-garbed man armed with a demon-spitting AK-47? I got dressed and peered out the door, seeing nothing but darkness.

“Fear is strange,” Harris said, smiling at Tim Sullivan.

When Tim topped up his drink, Harris continued his story. “I abandoned the apartment and hurried down the stairs to the deserted street, finally hailing a surprised Lambretta driver passing in the night. When I reached the base beside the sea, I fell into a fitful sleep in the airless tent.

Lingering guilt overcame me the following morning. After checking my wallet and finding it nearly bare, I took the army bus back to town and waited in the hotel lobby that housed the bar where I’d met Hoa. Although the place seemed deserted, she soon appeared through a door from the bar. She was wearing a lime green sarong and looked exotic and beautiful.

Glaring at me with accusing eyes, she said, “You leave the door unlocked. Why not tell me you go? I very much worry for you.”

When I reached for her, she pulled away, shaking her head.

“I'm sorry, Hoa. When you left, I got frightened. I didn't mean to leave the door unlocked.”

Hoa's features softened, and she touched my hand. “You miss wife very much?”

Cradling my face in her hands when I nodded, she stood on her tiptoes and kissed me.

“You remember me always, Harris?”

“Always,” I said.

Though she turned away, attempting to hide the tears streaking her amethyst mascara, I saw her sorrowful smile.

I never saw her again.

I found it nearly deserted upon returning to the base, with all the Aussies and Line Company grunts gone. Despondent, I took a walk on the beach, alone with only an old papa-san picking up yesterday's litter using a nail protruding from a broom handle. I sat on the concrete wall, feeling like the last man on earth.

All alone, listening to a whistling ocean breeze and watching distant gulls, I sat there.  A G.I. dressed in camouflage fatigues, walking along the beach alone, smiled when he saw me, joining me on the cement wall. He was a sniper, trained to lie in wait for the enemy and kill him with a single shot from his specially modified M-14.

He asked, “How far away do you think you can kill a man?”

Shaking my head, I answered, “I don't know.”

“I killed one once from nine hundred meters. Believe me?”

I shrugged.

“I was on a hill overlooking a rice paddy when I saw a papa-san plowing behind a water buffalo. He was so far away he looked like an ant. I raised my sights and squeezed off a round.” Raising his arms to show me, he added, “A second later, papa-san dropped and never got back up. I killed him from nine hundred meters.”

When I nodded appreciation for his feat, the camouflaged man acknowledged my silent praise with a smile and walked away down the beach without speaking, relieved for the moment of more guilt than one person should ever have to bear alone.

“People do things, you know. Sometimes, terrible things. They may live long enough to regret it. They never live long enough to forget about it.

***

Tim Sullivan waited as Harris became silent. When he reached for his glass, he found no single sip missing from the last pouring. Returning to the bar, he watched John Harris drag himself sullenly off his stool.

With a wry smile, he left Tim alone with his thoughts, never speaking another word as he opened the barroom door and vanished into the dim morning light.

###

Born near Black Bayou in the little Louisiana town of Vivian, Eric Wilder grew up listening to his grandmother’s tales of politics, corruption, and ghosts that haunt the night. He now lives in Oklahoma, where he continues to pen mysteries and short stories with a southern accent. He authored the French Quarter Mystery Series set in New Orleans, the Paranormal Cowboy Series, and the Oyster Bay Mystery Series. Please check it out on his Amazon author page. You might also like checking out his Facebook page.

A Gathering of Diamonds - an excerpt

Epilog

Louisiana Mental Hospital 1984

Ain’t nothing good gonna last forever. The words to the song played in my mind backdropped by the metallic drone of a medical device dripping mental comfort into a vein in my arm. It meant I didn’t have to think or face reality.

I’d lain on the same bed for more months than I cared to remember, my reality reduced to the metallic drip, which had become a mantra to my mental pain. Only one thing helped me maintain my sanity: the pretty nurse who I could never really see because my eyes wouldn’t entirely focus, never failed to check on me when she came on shift. This particular night, she whispered something in my ear.

“Open your eyes. I have something important to tell you.” I heard her, subliminally as much as anything. I didn’t want to think about what she had to say. “Please, open your eyes for me.”

I struggled to speak, and she gasped when I asked, “What’s your name?”

“Julia,” she said.

“Thanks for taking such good care of me, Julia.”

“You are alive,” she said. “The other nurses said you never speak.”

“I had nothing to say until now. What do you have to tell me that is so important?”

“A package arrived for you a while back. I think it’s from your brother,” Julia said.

“Why didn’t someone give it to me?” I asked.

“The other nurses think of you as a dead man.”

“I’m not dead,” I said. “Just a little drugged up.”

“They keep you that way instead of putting you in a padded cell. I turned off your psychotropic drug drip when I came on shift. Nothing is going into your veins right now except water.”

“You’re not afraid of me?” I asked.

“I don’t believe you’re dangerous. I brought the package with me. I opened it for you.”

“What’s in it?” As I struggled to focus my eyes, she placed something in my palm. “I can’t see it. Please tell me what it is.”

“I think it’s an uncut diamond. A black diamond,” she said. “There’s a note with it.”

“From my brother?”

“Yes,” she said.

“What does it say?”

“It says, ‘I need your help.’ Bill.”

I pulled the needle out of my vein and struggled to sit upright. “Why would my brother be in trouble?”

“There’s a letter in your file from the Fayetteville, Arkansas police department,” Julia said.

“Fayetteville?”

“The location of the University of Arkansas.”

“Please, open it and read it to me,” I said.

Julia extracted the letter and began to read. “Dear Mr. Logan, I’m sad to inform you that your brother Tim has gone missing in the Ouachita Mountains. The region covers many miles of wilderness in the Ouachita National Forest. Local police have given up on the search and believe there is a good chance your brother is dead.”

“My God!” I said.

“What do you want to do?” Julia asked.

“I’ve got to get the hell out of here,” I said. “Tim needs me.”

“You can’t just leave. It’ll take a week before the hospital will let you go.”

I rolled off the side of the bed, promptly falling on my face. Julia put her shoulder beneath my arm and leveraged me to my feet.

“That’ll be too late. Do I have clothes?” I asked.

“Your belongings are in storage,” she said.

“Here at the hospital?”

“Yes.”

“Can you get them for me?”

“I’ll lose my job,” Julia said.

Clasping her hand in mine, I stared into her big blue eyes. “I don’t want you to do that. Can we somehow make it look like I escaped?”

“They’ll know I helped you. Someone other than you would have to turn off your drip.”

“If the electricity goes off, how long will it take before someone from maintenance checks on it?” I asked.

“A backup generator comes on automatically,” Julia said. “It’s only happened a couple of times since I’ve worked here. It doesn’t take long before the place is swarming with electrical workers.”

“What if just the electricity in this room were to malfunction?” I asked.

“It sets off an alarm at the nurse’s desk. The nurse on duty would buzz me to check on it.”

“Then I have an idea,” I said. “Please get my clothes. I promise not to get you into trouble.”

I waited alone for ten long minutes in the dimly-lit room. Julia finally returned with a suitcase and a box of my personal belongings. My wallet was intact, complete with driver’s license, an unexpired credit card, and about a hundred dollars in cash.

“You won’t get far on foot,” she said. “Please don’t steal a car.”

“How far is the airport from here?” I asked.

“About ten miles.”

“Is there a phone I can use?”

Julia pointed to the phone by my bed. “I don’t think anyone has ever used it. Who are you going to call?”

“A taxi to take me to the airport. If this credit card still works, I’ll rent a car.”

“But then they’ll know where you’re going,” Julia said.

“I’m not a fugitive, or guilty of any crime I know of,” I said.

Julia watched the door as I changed out of my hospital gown into familiar clothes that no longer fit me. She was a handsome woman, six inches shorter than I was, with curly blond hair and a slightly crooked smile that went perfectly with her big blue eyes. A metallic pitcher of ice water sat on a wheeled tray near the bed.

“What’s the story on the pitcher of water?” I asked.

“Maintenance puts them in every room, even if there are no visitors.”

I used the phone to call a cab, then grabbed the pitcher of water. An electrical outlet sat beside the bed, six cords plugged into it.

“Give me twenty minutes, then pour water on this connection. It’ll short out the drip and all the other instruments. Toss the pitcher on the floor near the connection. It’ll look like I accidentally knocked it off the tray by the bed. By the time you report me missing, I’ll be on my way to the airport.”

“Oh, Tom, are you going to be okay?” Julia asked.

“I’ve never been okay a day in my life. Why start now?”

Julia put her arms around my shoulders, her hug the most reassuring mental stimulus I could remember feeling in many years.

“I’m going to pray for you, Tom,” she said.

Grabbing her shoulders, I kissed her forehead. “Thank you, Julia.

“Where will you go?”

“Though I’m not sure, for the first time in ten years, I’m excited to be on my way.”

Chapter 1

A white-tailed doe racing across the road roused me from a flashback and sent adrenaline buzzing through my brain. Slowing the red Mustang I’d rented at the airport, I clutched the wheel as pain behind my eye nudged me back to reality. Beyond the hood stretched the foothills of northern Arkansas. It was early autumn, the colors around me as bright as a fresh coat of paint.

I’d left Mandeville at dawn, stopping only once in Little Rock for gas and a cold drink. Though the last few miles were missing from my memory, the narrow highway forced me to concentrate on driving and forget the reason I’d come here in the first place.

Heat devils rose off the blistered blacktop. Early October sun warmed the skin on the back of my neck. After cresting the next hill, I saw a tall building topped off with a clock tower crowning the horizon. Its windows glimmered in the afternoon sun, and I didn’t have to check the map to know I’d reached Fayetteville.

The college town lay nestled in a bowl-like valley in an ancient range of rolling hills. It had weighed on my thoughts for the past thirty days as I pulled into a filling station to stretch my legs and top the gas tank.

A massive sandstone courthouse occupied one corner of the town square. Shops and stores rimmed its periphery, people in shorts and casual clothes browsing store windows and soaking up the late afternoon sun. A man clad in overalls and clutching an oily red rag interrupted my thoughts.

“Help you?” he asked, his hillbilly twang making his question sound foreign.

“Fill it up,” I said, leaning away from his black-toothed grin.

He used the oily rag to dab his sweaty neck, a rumpled welder’s cap crowning his bald head. I could smell his breath, stale from last night’s whiskey when he rested his hairy forearms on the door of my car. The dagger tattoo on his hand looked as if he’d put it there himself.

“Where you from?” he asked, likely as curious about my accent as I was of his.

“New Orleans.”

“Kid in school here?”

“Something like that. Which way is the college?”

“Down the road a piece,” he said, pointing his nicotine-stained finger.

“Is that the courthouse next door?”

“That and the police station.”

“I wouldn’t think you’d have much crime around here.”

“About the same as the hair on a mangy yellow dog,” he said.

I waited for him to smile. He didn’t. Instead, he stole a cockeyed glance at me to see if I had. When I obliged, he rubbed his chin and spat a glob of tobacco juice on the concrete.

“What’s the population?” I asked.

“Bout thirty thousand when school’s out. Twice as many counting college kids,” he said, wiping his mouth with an oily hand.

“Is there someplace nearby to get a sandwich and cold drink?”

“College strip around the corner,” he said. “Can’t miss it.”

“Thanks,” I said, saluting him as I drove out of the parking lot.

I cruised down the brick pavement. It didn’t take long to find the bustling square that reminded me of a similar area near the LSU campus in Baton Rouge. Fall semester had begun, scores of students in cars, on bicycles and more on foot, crowding the four-block quadrangle. After parking in a vacant alley between a tee shirt shop and barbecue joint, I went inside for a sandwich.

Boisterous students were still pouring into the café when I exited a half hour later. Though late afternoon heat remained, the sky had begun turning the color of turquoise, the humidity so high it almost felt like a kick in the groin when I took a deep breath. I had only a moment to think about it as I noticed a uniformed woman gazing into my car, frowning as she scribbled something on a notepad.

“Problem, officer?”

“Your vehicle’s in a no parking zone.”

She had a pleasant voice and spoke in neutral Midwestern tones instead of the pervasive twang of the man at the filling station.

“I didn’t see a no-parking sign,” I said.

“Because there isn’t one. You’re blocking an alley,” she said. “I could have had you towed.”

“Sorry. I’m from out of town.”

The young cop stared at me and shook her head. “You know what they say about ignorance of the law?”

Glancing away from her cool stare, I read the tag on her uniform that said her name was Armstrong. Officer Armstrong was no taller than five-three, her short hair sun bleached almost white. She had expressive eyes the same hue as the darkening sky. I marveled at how every straight seam of the young woman’s uniform defied the heat and humidity.

“Uncle,” I said.

 Officer Armstrong didn’t smile. “Can I see your driver’s license?” I fished it out of my wallet and handed it to her, waiting as she made a notation on her pad. “Is this your car, Mr. Logan?”

“I’m renting it.”

She returned the license to me, along with a traffic ticket.

“The courthouse is closed for the day. You can pay this tomorrow when it reopens.”

“Thanks, Officer Armstrong,” I said.

She didn’t react when I used her name. Ignoring my eye contact, she said, “Next time watch where you’re parking.”

I watched as she strolled to a tan and white police cruiser, her tires spinning in loose gravel as she hurried away and disappeared over the hill. Raising my car’s canvas top, I switched on the air conditioning full blast.

It was late when I reached the hillside college, shades of crimson and pink already draping the surrounding hills. Though the person I was looking for had likely left for the day, I decided to give the place a look. As I parked and walked toward the largest of several stone buildings, hazy clouds began masking the sky and a sudden chill permeated the air.

Overhead, a hawk floated in a thermal updraft as cyclists, laboring up the steep grade, passed on the street. A jogger brushed past on the sidewalk, almost knocking me down. It wouldn’t have taken much. After thirty days flat on my back in a hospital bed, my muscles labored from the strain of the hilly campus. Finding the front entrance locked, I found an open door in the back.

Down a darkened hallway, someone hummed as he pushed a broom across the floor. The tune echoed inside the empty building, reminding me of the interior of a cave. For a moment, it threatened to overload my fragile mental state.

The cleaning person could have been on the third floor or ten feet away. It didn’t matter. The drifting sound caused a predictable reaction. I began to feel the madness starting to return. Against my will, my thoughts started racing back to distant murky memories. This time, it didn’t happen.

The red glow of a nearby fire alarm returned me to reality, though it left me with a throbbing head. I was looking for a water fountain when a light radiating from an open door revealed a name on the glass that read Dr. Theodore Fridel. I rapped on the window to get the attention of the man sitting behind a desk.

“Help you?” he said, opening the door.

Dr. Fridel looked nothing like I had imagined. Instead of old and gray, he was probably on the front side of thirty. Didn’t matter because he seemed older as he gazed at me with myopic eyes trapped behind thick-framed glasses. His hair and mustache were coal black, the same color as his eyes. They clashed with his peach-colored sports jacket and zigzag tie he’d probably bought at a garage sale.

“I’m Tom Logan,” I said. “You were my brother’s thesis adviser.”

Understanding replaced Fridel’s initial disbelief as he pointed to a chair in front of his desk.

“Your brother?”

“Half brother. Much younger.”

“I see,” he said. From the way he blinked his eyes and frowned, I could tell he didn’t. “How can I help you?”

“I’m trying to find out what happened to Bill.”

“I’m sure you read the police report. . .”

I held up a hand to stop him. “I was hoping you could add something. Explain why my brother seems to have vanished without a trace.”

“Regrettably, it’s as much a mystery to me as it is to you. Though I was Bill’s thesis adviser, we were never close. Your brother was quite secretive.”

Our father and both our mothers were young when they’d died. Old enough to be Bill’s father, I was present during most of his formative years. Secrecy was only one of his unusual traits of which I was well aware.

“Maybe you can tell me something about this,” I said.

Reaching into my shirt pocket, I pulled out a small leather pouch. Professor Fridel’s mouth opened when its sparkling contents rolled across the desk.

When he regained his senses, he said, “Is this a diamond?”

  

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Born near Black Bayou in the little Louisiana town of Vivian, Eric Wilder grew up listening to his grandmother’s tales of politics, corruption, and ghosts that haunt the night. He now lives in Oklahoma where he continues to pen mysteries and short stories with a southern accent. He is the author of the French Quarter Mystery Series set in New Orleans and the Paranormal Cowboy Series. Please check it out on his Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Kobo and iBook author pages. You might also like to check out his website.

Machine Gun - a short story

I was in graduate school working on a Master’s in geology in 1969 when the first Vietnam draft lottery was held. Having already graduated with my bachelor’s degree, I no longer had a 2-S deferment from the military. My draft number was 38, and I was called to the military shortly after the lottery in December. I believed in our country but didn’t believe in what I considered an absolutely senseless war. Because of this, I declined repeated offers to go to OTS. I went instead to basic training and advanced infantry training at Fort Polk, Louisiana, and was on my way to Vietnam by the summer of 1970 as a private. I spent just short of six months in the boonies patrolling the Jolly Trail system near the Cambodian border. During my months in a “free-fire zone,” I made 52 combat assaults out of a helicopter. I was neither killed nor wounded. Since I was and still am a crack typist—a skill that serves me well as a writer—I got a job back in the rear as a clerk-typist when an opening came up. After coming home, years passed before I told anyone I was a Vietnam vet because Vietnam vets were considered drug-crazed baby killers and other nasty things. I don't remember everything that happened to me in Vietnam. This is one I do.

Machine Gun

I watched a program on the cable channel Encore about Jimi Hendrix and the Band of Gypsies.  On the show, he played a song called Machine Gun, and it evoked a memory of Vietnam that I hadn’t thought about in years.

I went to Vietnam in 1970 as an infantry mortarman.  In addition to my M16, I humped the base plate of an 81 MM mortar in the mortar platoon of an infantry line company.  I was in Charlie Company, 1^st of the 8^th Cavalry, First Cavalry Air Mobile.  We were operating off a hill bulldozed bald amid a jungle of green that could literally swallow you whole.  The Cav had just made their first sanctioned incursion into formerly off-limits Cambodia, and we had dealt a near-mortal blow to Charlie.  For the following months, Charlie played a game of duck-and-run while we tried desperately, and with little luck, to finish him off.

After several months of fifteen days in the jungle, five days on the firebase, and almost no success in encountering the enemy, Brass devised a new tactic of having us fly around in helicopters until we started taking ground-to-air fire.  Once we did, the choppers would swoop down and drop us off in hopes of making contact—something that rarely happened because of Charlie’s weakened state.

During this time, Brass also decided the 81 MM mortar was too unwieldy for rapid deployment, and all of us in the mortar company suddenly became infantry foot soldiers, grunts, 11-bravos, or 11-bullet-stoppers.  I was given a twenty-three-pound M-60 machine gun since I already had experience toting a twenty-three-pound base plate.  I had never shot an M-60, even during basic training at Fort Polk in Louisiana. This is because mortar men weren’t ever supposed to use the gun.

Around this time, artillery began shooting sophisticated listening devices into the jungle using specially designed 105 MM rounds.  Intelligence mapped the locations of these devices, and we soon had a good idea of where there was movement—of a military nature—in the jungle.  The devices weren’t always correct, and we once found a large family of monkeys instead of Viet Cong or North Vietnamese regulars.  This wasn’t always the case.

Reports of intense enemy troop movement in a nearby swamp had the Brass salivating.  My company was soon loaded into choppers, flown to the area, and dropped out of the birds. I mean this, literally.  With no landing zone cut into the jungle for us to land, the choppers hovered 10 feet above a sizeable swampy pond while we jumped out.  This was no easy feat while carrying 100 pounds of gear.

We soon found ourselves in a maze of trails and something very anomalous— there was movement all around us.  Charlie wasn’t even trying to cover it up.  This could only mean one of two things: Either we had caught the enemy very much by surprise, or else they had us outnumbered and knew it.  We were all pretty nervous because one thing we had never really done was catch Charlie by surprise.

Our company had about 100 men divided equally into four platoons.  We set up a camp, and then my platoon started out on patrol.  Soon as we were out of sight from the rest of the company we began hearing even more movement.  After months in the boonies, we were all attuned to the sounds of the jungle. Now, there was no doubt in my mind that there was a large number of enemy soldiers very close to us, and that they were paralleling our movement through the jungle.  This bothered me and everyone else because we were on Charlie’s home turf—likely smack-dab in the middle of a large enemy camp and staging area.  We could hear movement in every direction, and if I told you that I was anything but piss-in-my-pants scared, I’d be lying through my teeth.

Jungle warfare is like no other.  You can be 10 feet from the enemy and never see him.  You have to rely on your nose, your ears, and your wits because otherwise, you may as well be blind.  My nose, ears, and wits told me we were about to have the living shit kicked out of us and I expected, any minute, to be shredded by AK 47 bullets.  The platoon leader decided on a quick ploy.

I was the machine gunner, the “Gun.”  When Super Sarge tapped my shoulder and pointed to a slight concave just to the side of the trail, I knew my time had come.  We quickly prepared for what we called an instant ambush.  Charlie was following close behind.  My assistant gunner and I set the M-60’s bi-pod and started stringing every round of ammo we had into the gun’s chamber, locked and loaded, ready to kill—and just as likely, I knew, to be killed. It didn’t matter that I’d never pulled the trigger on an M-60. What mattered was that I was getting ready to.  Just as quickly as the sergeant tapped my shoulder and motioned what he wanted, he left the two of us alone on the trail to mow down anyone coming up from behind.  From the sounds we heard, we wouldn’t have long to wait.

I could tell you that we ambushed Charlie, wiped most of them out and sent them dropping their weapons and running for cover.  That didn’t happen.  What did happen is almost as strange but still true.  It was monsoon season in Vietnam.  Every day the skies would part, and rain would fall in torrents—almost like being under a waterfall.  My finger was on the trigger of the M-60, my heart in my throat when it began to rain.  My assistant gunner and I lay there on our bellies for an interminable time, rapidly flowing water soaking our fatigues.  When the rain stopped, there was no sound.  I mean none.  Charlie had taken the opportunity to clear out, and we never heard him again.

 That night we camped in the middle of the swamp, mosquitoes, and leeches sucking our blood.  It rained so hard that Charlie could have gotten close enough to cut our throats and we wouldn’t have seen him.  The next morning the Captain let me shoot the M-60, for practice, while we waited for the choppers to extract us. We stood single file, knee-deep in a wide pool of stagnating water. With five-hundred rounds locked and loaded, I stood like Rambo, the big gun at my waist, and began mowing down vegetation across the pond. I didn’t take my finger off the trigger until the sound of imminent death finally ceased and the pungent odor of spent rounds wafted up into my nostrils.

It was the first and last time that I ever shot the big gun, though I’ll never forget the sound it made or the power of life and death I felt, and that will never leave me for as long as I live.

Tonight, while watching the piece on Jimi Hendrix, I remembered that sound and that feeling, and it chilled my soul.

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Born near Black Bayou in the little Louisiana town of Vivian, Eric Wilder grew up listening to his grandmother’s tales of politics, corruption, and ghosts that haunt the night. He now lives in Oklahoma, where he continues to pen mysteries and short stories with a southern accent. He authored the French Quarter Mystery Series set in New Orleans, the Paranormal Cowboy Series , and the Oyster Bay Mystery Series. Please check it out on his Amazon author page. You might also like checking out his Facebook page.

Grunt

I was at the barber’s the other day. The barber shop, located in a strip shopping center near my office, is part of a national chain. The barbers don’t seem to stay around long. They always do a credible job, although I’ve only had the same hair cutter on one or two occasions. This time, my hair cutter was an older man of Vietnamese heritage.

After inquiring how I wanted my hair cut, he asked if I had been in the armed services. I told him that I had.

“Navy or Air Force?”

“No, I was in the Army.”
He asked if I served in Vietnam and smiled when I told him I had.
“What did you do there?”

Tiny hairs on back of my neck abruptly rose at his question. The last time I was in a barber’s chair with a Vietnamese barber was on the Army base in Bien Hoa, South Vietnam. Even though I knew the man was friendly, I had a difficult time not reacting when he shaved me with a straight razor. After all, the Vietnamese were our enemy, and I couldn’t help but fret that the man so close to my jugular vein with a straight razor might be a barber by day and Viet Cong by night.

“Infantry,” I answered.
“Oh, what weapon did you carry?”

“M60 machinegun,” I said.

“Then you weren’t an officer.”
“No, a private.”

"When were you there?” he asked.

I had to think a minute before answering, “Parts of 1970 and 1971.”

“I was an officer from 1971 to 1975,” he said, still not offering if it was for the North or the South. “Where were you in Vietnam?”

“We operated in triple canopy jungle off of Firebase Betty, not far from the Cambodian border. At least during the six months or so I spent as a grunt patrolling the Jolly Trail System. Later, I got a job as a company clerk on Firebase Buttons, near Song Be. Did you lose friends or family in the war?”

“My family survived. I lost a few close friends. I was drafted into the Army after two years of college. Following the war, I was imprisoned for three years. When I got out, I escaped the country on a boat. The journey took fourteen days and there were many of us on board.”

“I’m glad you made it,” I said. “Sounds like you should write a book.”

“A book, yes,” he said, smiling, his accent making his words hard to understand. “America lost many men—58,000.”

“Vietnam lost 1,500,000 people,” I said.
“Yes, from both the North and South.”
The half-grin on his face looked contrived, almost as if he were trying to keep from crying.

“No one even remembers the war anymore,” I added. “It was a senseless conflict. I didn’t believe in it, even then, and that’s why I refused to be an officer.”

“I hate war,” he said. “I worry about our involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan.”

After dusting loose hair off my shoulders, he led me to the cash register, nodding when I said, “Nice talking to you.”

As I walked out the door, I realized we’d never exchanged names.

I was shaking when I reached my car. More than forty years have passed since boarding a jet plane leaving Vietnam. I’d almost forgotten. Funny how old memories come flooding back when you least expect them.
Eric'sWeb

  The story above really happened. Some of my Vietnam stories were fictionalized in my novel A Gathering of Diamonds. Tom Logan, a Vietnam vet suffering from PTSD, battles his demons as he participates in an epic adventure and the romance of his life, high in the Ouachita Mountains of Arkansas.