On the Road, May 1970
a scene from King of Soul, my novel about what happened to America during the Vietnam War. In this scene from chapter 23, Donnie and Kevin are on the road in Tennessee, bound for Kent, Ohio. They pick up a hitchhiker.
. . . this odd fellow sat comfortably in the back seat of Kevin’s Ford. It was weird, Donnie thought. The man’s cloaked identity covered — and at the same time, exposed — a delicate vulnerability that resided within his eyes. Revealed now as a child of the universe, though an overgrown one, he appeared to be a sojourner who had, alas, seen too much of this world, and had heard more than he signed up for. Yet somehow the ole guy had lived to tell about it. And tell about it, he would, come hell or high water.
Forsooth, he were a very special man, a country mile apart from your accustomed house guest of the tumbling-at-you 1970’s. His personality is positioned a full city block beyond the normalcy you might expect from any other run-of-the-mill world traveler in these here parts of Tennessee, or even Kentucky, whence he was bound. So a back-seat stage, it seemed, had been set for the man, because all the world’s a stage, and here the dramatis persona would be observed, brought forth in full hitchhiking raiment, sharing space for a certain time and place with Donnie and Kevin, for purposes of exposition, or elocution, or both. Now cometh his soliloquy.
“You go traipsing into a village,” Ed continued, “I’m sayin’. . .these people have lived there all their lives, in their little corner of the jungle that they’ve carved out for themselves, with papa-san and mama-san, and great-papa-san and great-mama-san. They been scratchin’ a livin’ out of the mud, the rice paddies, tryin’ to. . . just, you know, trying to make it, but they don’t have all the shit we got, no color TV, no garage with a car. It’s another world, man, like a hundred years ago. . .” Ed’s voice drifted away.
“Where were you?” Donnie asked.
“Quang Ngai province, mostly, up near the DMZ,” said Ed. Gazing out the window, his voice had dropped its intensity a notch or two; eyes focused on something faraway beyond the car window. “You go in there like you own the place, waving the M-16s around, like swingin’ your dick around at ’em. You feel like you got total control, like, the power of life and death over them. You look into their eyes; they’re just deer in the headlights man. I don’t know how in the hell we ever got dragged into it.”
Kevin and Donnie were dumbstruck. Outside the car, Tennessee landscape rolled by in thoroughly American Saturday afternoon sunshine, forests, fields, a farm here, a barn there, a tractor disking up fresh earth for spring planting, cars zipping, going and coming. A sign said Holiday Inn 7 miles ahead. Then another, on a fence post: Burma Shave.
Ed’s lips were moving.
. . . and the vortices or pits are of such an extent and depth, that if a ship comes within its attraction, it is inevitably absorbed and carried down to the bottom . . .
“Say what, Ed?”
“You look into their eyes, and it’s absolute . . . fear. They’re scared as hell. All the men are gone, except for ole Papa-san. It’s just mama-san and the kids, and ole Papa-san, and then us damned Americans, whose visitation signifies a fateful appointment.”
“Are the men gone to the VC?”
“Maybe. See that’s the thing. You don’t know. You don’t know where the men are, They could be a hundred yards outside the village watching as you speak. They could be assembling’ weapons in a VC firebase somewhere on a nearby hilltop; they could be swimming away in the river, silent as damn catfish. The women and children, you can’t talk to ’em. There might be one among them who speaks a little English, and you got your one platoon guy who speaks Vietnamese. You just look at ’em. I mean, I speak the truth, you look at those little women and they look pretty damn good, if you know what I mean. It’s a hell of a predicament for a soldier to be in, especially when you’re supposed to be representing the by gawd United States of America. But then you got orders; you can’t even be thinking about one of those women. They look at you, pleading, the kids clinging to their legs, like hanging onto life itself. You feel like you could just have your way with ’em. But they don’t know how the hell to tell you anything, and you don’t know how the hell to tell them anything, and there’s only one thing, when you get right down to it, that they understand” —
“What’s that?”
“The gun, that M-16 in your hand. You just move the thing — it’s like casting a spell. They go crazy in their eyes. You can see it in their eyes, in the eyes of them good people of the village of Song My, Vietnam.”
