The Throat Read Free Page B

within. He must have seen that
I had just decided I preferred the company of Ratman, Attica, and the
rest to his own, because he told me that I would be working with the
body squad until my orders came through.
    On the second day, the intensity of my new comrades' disdain had
relaxed, and they resumed the unfinishable dialogue I had interrupted.
    Their stories were always about death.
    "We're pounding the boonies," Ratman said, shoving another wrapped
corpse into the back of our truck. "Twenty days. You listening,
Underdog?"
    I had a new name.
    "Twenty days. You know what that's like out there, Underdog?"
    Pirate spat a thick yellow curd onto the ground.
    "Like forty days in hell. In hell you're already dead, but out in
the boonies everybody's trying to kill you. Means you never sleep
right. Means you see things."
    Pirate snorted and tossed another body onto the truck. "Fuckin'
right."
    "You see your old girlfriend fuckin' some numbnuts fuck, you see
your fuckin' friends get killed, you see the fuckin' trees move, you
see stuff that never happened and never will, man."
    " 'Cept here," Pirate said.
    "Twenty days," Ratman said. The back of the truck was now filled
with bodies in bags, and Ratman swung up and locked the rear panel. He
leaned against it on stiff arms, shaking his drooping head. His
fingertips were bulbous, the size of golf balls, and each came to a
pointed tip at the spot where his fingerprints would have been
centered. I found out later that he had earned his name by eating two
live rats in a tunnel where his platoon had found a thousand kilos of
rice. "Too fat for speed," he was supposed to have said.
    "Every sense you got is out there, man, you hear a mouse move—"
    "Hear rats move," di Maestro said, slapping the side of the truck as
if to wake up the bodies in the green bags.
    "—hear the dew jumpin' out of the leaves, hear the insects moving in
the bark. Hear your own fingernails grow. Hear that thing in the
ground, man."
    "Thing in the ground?" Pirate asked.
    "Shit," said Ratman. "You don't know? You know how when you lie down
on the trail you hear all kinds of shit, all them damn bugs and
monkeys, the birds, the people moving way up ahead of you—"
    "Better be sure they're not coming your direction," di Maestro said
from the front of the truck. "You takin' notes, Underdog?"
    "— all kinds of shit, right?
But then you hear the rest. You hear like a humming noise underneath
all them other noises. Like some big generator's running way far away underneath you."
    "Oh, that thing in the ground," Pirate said.
    "It is the ground," said
Ratman. He stepped back from the truck and gave Pirate a fierce,
wild-eyed glare. "Fuckin' ground makes the fuckin' noise by itself . You hear me? An' that
engine's always on. It never sleeps."
    "Okay, let's move," di Maestro said. He climbed up behind the wheel.
Hollyday, Scoot, and Attica crowded into the seat beside him. Ratman
scrambled up behind the cab, and Picklock and Pirate and I followed
him. The truck jolted down the field toward the main body of the camp,
and the helicopter pilot and some of the ground crew turned to watch us
go. We were like garbagemen, I thought. It was like working on a
garbage truck.
    "On top of which," Ratman said, "people are seriously trying to
interfere with your existence."
    Picklock laughed, but instantly composed himself again. So far,
neither he nor Pirate had actually looked at me.
    "Which can fuck you up all by itself, at least until you get used to
it," Ratman said. "Twenty-day mission. I been on longer, but I never
went on any worse. The lieutenant went down. The radio man, he went
down. My best friends at that time, they went down."
    "Where is this?" Pirate asked.
    "This is Darlac Province," said Ratman. "Not too damn far away."
    "Right next door," said Pirate.
    "Twentieth day," said Pirate. "We're out there. We're after some
damn cadre. Hardly any food left, and our pickup is in forty-eight
hours. This target keeps moving ,
they go