Jungle Rules Page 5

  Celestine Anderson had spent the past nine days pounding holes in his boots, walking patrol in those dangerous suburbs with catchy names. Now, as his chopper descended onto home turf, he couldn’t remember the last time he had closed his eyes and really slept. Slept with a good dream ending. Slept like a Saturday night cold beer and hot steak dinner.

  Chu Lai looked awfully good to him as his tired eyes gazed out the back hatchway of the long, green grasshopper-shaped twin-rotor CH-46 Sea Knight helicopter when it finally set down at the Marines’ base, letting off his bedraggled security platoon. He thought of how satisfying a real meal would taste as he bounded down the rear ramp. So instead of going straight to his hooch and crashing for a long and badly needed sleep, he ambled up the dusty jeep road that led to the headquarters complex’s dining facility.

  He had stood listening post duty the last night on patrol, so he hadn’t even gotten to shut his eyes in two days. As the afternoon sun baked his shaved head and bare arms, he kept his face turned down, following the tracks in the road, shielding his bloodshot, sandpaper-feeling eyes. Just something warm in his stomach. Something to make him sleep good. That’s all he needed now.

  “Yo, bro,” a familiar voice called from ahead. Celestine cupped his hands along his forehead, shading his eyes, and squinted to see which of his few friends shouted at him.

  “Hey, blood,” Celestine called back when he saw the Marine, a buddy named Wendell Carter, from Houston, his own hometown. He hadn’t known the guy there, but knew of his neighborhood. Just a bit south on Jensen Drive from Celestine’s own set of blocks. Since they lived so close to each other back there, both on Houston’s rough North Side, they called each other “homey.”

  Carter stood in a cluster with two other Marines whom Celestine also knew well. The four of them worked at the wing’s communications section, a unit in Marine Wing Support Group 17.

  Although fully trained at coordinating air and ground communications, and performing basic maintenance and repair on a variety of radio and telephone equipment, Anderson and these three other air wing Marines of African heritage had found themselves mostly relegated out to security patrols, humping the backache PRC-25 radios and carrying rifles.

  “Celestine, my man,” Wendell called to his pal, and put out his right fist.

  Anderson put out his right fist, too, and rapped it first on the top of Carter’s, then he tapped the bottom, and after that knocked each side, and finished the greeting by butting his knuckles against those of his friend. To complete the ritual, each man then took his clenched fist and struck it across his own heart, and lastly raised it defiantly above his head.

  Dapping, they called it. Its meaning mimicked that of the African Masai warriors’ ritual greeting of his fellow Moran, and symbolized that neither man held status above or below the other, that both were equal, side by side, brothers in spirit and in blood. For Celestine, the greeting represented solidarity among his cohorts who shared his African roots, and his heritage of slavery in America from which his people still struggled to emerge today, even though the chains had been legally broken now for 102 years.

  “Look at those fucking niggers,” a skinny, darkly tanned Marine named Leonard Cross said to three of his buddies standing with him in a small circle near the chow hall. The surly crew of four had spent the better part of the day filling sandbags and burning shitters downwind from Chu Lai’s population.

  Laddie, as Cross preferred that his friends call him, wore no shirt, and had on scuffed-white combat boots and a pair of filthy utility trousers with the seat ripped out, but showed a failed attempt at a ragged patch job on the pants ass-end and at both knees. As he spoke, he let fly a stream of tobacco-brown spit that landed between his feet, making a small, dark lump in the dust.

  “Fucking niggers,” two other shirtless grunts wearing similarly ragged, dirty trousers and scuffed-white boots mumbled in agreement with him.

  Harold Rein, the fourth man in the group, who also dressed in the same filthy, disheveled fashion, said nothing, but visibly fumed, staring hotly at the quartet of dark green Marines dapping a dozen yards away from him, also waiting for the chow hall to open for early supper.

  Although his mother in Dothan, Alabama, had named him Harold, after her father, nobody here called him by that handle. If they did, he generally let the offender quickly know his dislike for it in verbally harsh and sometimes physically brutal terms. Officers and senior enlisted he let slide, but still set them straight with some strongly worded slurs between “sirs.” People who didn’t want a hard kick in the nuts from Private Rein, or at the very least an earful of profanity, called him Buster.

  The nineteen-year-old, already twice promoted to private first class, and likewise twice demoted back to buck private, sported a cartoon bulldog wearing a Marine campaign hat tilted over his eyes and then under-struck in a crescent below the bulldog’s jowls the letters USMC tattooed on his right forearm. On his left shoulder he had a rebel flag tattooed above a poker hand that held three aces and two eights.

  Like his father, Buster Rein’s skin didn’t tan. It just burned. Then it mostly freckled and peeled. Constantly peeled. Even his scalp pealed beneath his brush-cut red hair.

  Rein sported a brawler’s knuckles—dry and hard and heavily calloused. Black grease filled the many cracks that laced over his hands’ thick skin, and embedded deeply under and around the fingernails on both of his meaty, pink, and freckled paws.

  “Who the fuck do those porch monkeys think they are, standing there all high and fucking mighty, beating their nigger fists and shoving their black power, Mau Mau bullshit down my throat?” Buster finally bellowed, making sure his voice carried to the group that offended him.

  “Fuck you niggers, you motherfuckers,” Laddie Cross then called to them, not to have Buster outdo his racist zeal.

  With his thumbs hooked in his waistband and his chin jutting upward, Buster Rein bellowed, “Jigass coons. Think they own the whole fucking world since Lyndon Johnson freed ’em all!”

  Then Rein laughed hard and looked over his shoulder for agreement from his buddies. They nervously cackled and flashed toothy grins to show him that they supported his bravado. He took another step forward, scuffing through the dust, and growled, “Fucking black power! I ain’t scared of no black power bullshit.”

  “Hey, man, don’t let those peckerhead chuck motherfuckers mess in your head,” Wendell Carter said to Celestine Anderson, seeing the anger immediately flush bright red across his normally deep honey-gold cheeks. “Don’t let those fucked-up slices of white bread get to you, man. I mean it!”

  “Shut the fuck up, and leave me to it,” Anderson growled in a low voice, pulling his arm out of the sudden grasp of his hometown buddy who wanted to stop any trouble before it broke out.

  “It’s no good, man. Not here. Not right now. We can get those motherfuckers later on,” Carter said, again grabbing for Celestine’s arm as Anderson now stepped toward the redneck quartet and glared. He dared any of them to lock onto his eyes.

  “Leave me the fuck alone!” Anderson said to Carter, yanking his arm again from his buddy’s grasp, and now exchanging napalm stares straight on with Buster Rein.

  “Watch this,” Rein said to his now silent cohorts as he cockwalked arrogantly toward Anderson.

  Wendell Carter stepped in front of Celestine Anderson, and looked at him nose to nose and whispered, “You got to walk away from this shit, man. Right now! These fuckups is all bad news. Bad all around, and not even any of the other white boys around this camp likes any of them either. Let it go, man. Let it go!”

  “Hey!” Buster Rein called out, seeing Carter trying to block off his buddy from a certain fight. He clenched a cigarette in his teeth and bit down on its filter while smiling widely as he spoke. “Hey, hey, you coons! You boys hear me? Any you niggers got a light?”

  “Sho!” Celestine called back, and shoved Carter out of his way. Then under his breath he said to himself, “You dead motherfucker.”


  “What’s that, boy?” Buster called back.

  “I said, sho, man,” Anderson bellowed. “I gots a light.”

  While Buster Rein spread a wide smile, clenching the cigarette in his teeth, rolling in a spring step off the balls of his feet, his fists both clenched ready for battle, Celestine Anderson bounded straight at the cocky redneck.

  Reaching in his left trouser pocket, the shaved bald Houston Marine pulled out his Zippo lighter and flicked open the lid. He thrust it toward Buster Rein’s nose and struck a spark that licked out an orange fireball that leaped into the white boy’s nostrils.

  Rein automatically blinked his eyes shut and yanked his head backward, putting the tip of his cigarette into the four-inch flame, and then sucked hard on the filter.

  In the same fluid motion that Celestine Anderson had brought out the flashing chrome lighter and ignited it with his left hand, he had reached behind his back with his right hand and found where his field ax dangled from its pouch on his utility belt. His thumb popped open the snap that closed the pouch over the ax head, and his fingers lightly lifted the knife-sharp blade from the pouch and found the tool’s short, curved handle.

  While Buster Rein sucked happily on his cigarette, satisfied that he had humiliated this uppity coon, and had shown everyone standing around the chow hall’s entrance, watching the exhibition of his white superiority over black power, his courage and his boldness over what he regarded as black rebellion, Celestine Anderson dropped the ax head toward the ground, letting it slide down his palm, along the side of his leg, until his fingers slipped down the grip where they took a firm hold at the end of the handle’s curved hilt.

  Then in one long, arching swing, the African-American Marine brought down his field ax onto the top, front, center of the Alabama Marine’s skull, and split it open clear past his eyebrows.

  Buster Rein never felt a thing. Then, or ever after.

  Chapter 3

  RAYMOND THE WEASEL

  “IN THE NAME of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, amen,” the tall, skinny Marine, built like a man wearing stilts, said in a solemn voice, kneeling at the foot of his single-level military bunk, his mantislike arms folded beneath long, tendril fingers reverently interlaced under his chin, his elbows resting on top of a green, wooden footlocker. Seven other similar beds, each flanked by two gray steel wall lockers, alternating to the left and right sides, formed an open cubicle around each pair of beds, with an olive drab storage box at the end of every rack. With a center aisle extending from the front door to the back, the two-bunk billeting spaces lined each side of the all but deserted squad bay that housed First MAW Law’s defense section.

  The gangly captain had just finished praying while looking up at a crucifix centered high on the bulkhead at the head of his bed, a few inches above a color photograph of Pope Paul VI, hooked on a nail an inch beneath the cross on the left, and a black-and-white photograph of President John F. Kennedy, draped with black bunting, fastened on the wall to the right of the pope. As he teetered clumsily to his feet, rising like a dizzy stork, while turning away from his bed, he moved his long and bony right forefinger from the center of his forehead to the center of his chest, then to his left shoulder and to his right, blessing himself.

  “Spectacles, testicles, wallet, and watch,” Terry O’Connor mumbled with a smirk to Jon Kirkwood. “I swear I knew this guy back in Philly when I was a kid in Catholic school. Just a little bit on the creepy side, if you catch my drift.”

  “Oh!” the man gasped, seeing the pair of newly joined lawyers standing at the main entrance to the barracks, holding ajar the inwardly opening, double-wide screen doors so they would not bang shut, waiting respectfully for him to finish his devotionals before invading his sanctum.

  “Sorry, Mack,” O’Connor said, letting go of the screen, allowing it to slam against the frame, and then striding forward to where the man stood and thrusting out his right hand. “We just barged through the doors and there you were on your knees, talking to God, so we thought we ought to give you a moment before we imposed our company on you. I’m Terry O’Connor, and this steely-eyed devil here on the port side is my all-around best friend and cohort in sin, Jon Kirkwood.”

  “I am totally embarrassed,” the lanky captain said, taking O’Connor’s hand and shaking it, and then grabbing Kirkwood’s, too. “You must think I am some kind of a religious freak.”

  “Not at all,” O’Connor said, unconsciously wiping the clammy sweat from the handshake on the seat of his trousers. “You have my utmost respect.”

  “Mine, too,” Kirkwood said, pulling his hand from the damp and cold-as-death grip. “Didn’t catch your name, though.”

  “I am so sorry,” the ghostly complected man said, his long, narrow face immediately flushing red, causing the shaggy blond tangle of thinning hair atop his head, fanning in every direction above his close-cropped temples like the fronds on a coconut palm, to take on a pink cast from the reflection of the blush glowing off his scalp. “I am in such a fluster this afternoon, totally out of sorts. Michael Carter here, Harvard Law, class of 1962.”

  “Glad to know you, Mike,” Kirkwood said, offering a friendly smile to the strange-looking man.

  “Same here, Mickey,” O’Connor said, chopping out the words with his rapid-fire, Philadelphia-born-and-raised manner of speech.

  The man beamed a wide smile filled with tartar-caked yellow teeth spreading from puffy, pink gums and said, “I am equally glad to know you both.”

  Jon Kirkwood suddenly took two steps to one side and pretended to look for his bunk, where he had left his seabag and valise. The full brunt of Michael Carter’s breath had assaulted him.

  Not losing a beat, Terry O’Connor pulled a roll of peppermint Certs from his pocket and popped one in his mouth. Then he tore back the paper and motioned for Michael Carter to take one.

  “Oh, thank you,” Carter said, fingering the mint from the pack.

  “Ah, here’s my gear, right where I left it,” Kirkwood said, thinking that the last time he had smelled anything so foul as Carter’s breath, he had stumbled on the carcass of a dead goat at the mouth of a drainage run while hiking at Big Sur in August.

  “Harvard Law, no shit,” O’Connor said, sucking on the peppermint lozenge.

  “My undergraduate work was at Haverford College, in Pennsylvania, where I graduated summa cum laude,” Carter said proudly. “I applied for Harvard just on a lark, and what do you know!”

  “I was Columbia all the way, both undergrad and law school,” O’Connor said. “Jon did the same at UCLA. Nothing like Harvard, but not exactly community college either.”

  “I had also applied at Cornell, and was accepted,” Carter then beamed, “but who can turn down Harvard if you get in?”

  “Very true,” Jon Kirkwood said. “While Terry and I will end up scraping nickels from the gutters, you’ll be up there in some Park Avenue high-rise stacking the long green.”

  “Not at all,” Carter said, frowning. “I have dedicated myself to the poor. I intend to do legal aid in Boston when I finish my military service. The plight of the poor is no laughing matter, gentlemen. Money does not interest me at all. Justice is my cause, and my reward shall be the satisfaction of righting the injustices heaped upon our brothers and sisters who struggle against poverty.”

  “Politics, I get it,” O’Connor said with a smile. “You’d really get along with this Swedish lady I know back in New York. I think she’s read some of the same crap that you did.”

  “No, I am not political,” Carter said, stiffening and then looking back at the photograph of JFK on his wall, after seeing Terry O’Connor’s gaze travel to the pictures of the pope and the dead president.

  “So you have Kennedy up there, draped with black bunting, for sentimental reasons?” O’Connor said, a tone of sarcasm lilting from his voice.

  “Exactly!” Carter said. “I have ties with the Kennedy clan.”

  “You’re related?” Kirkwood sai
d, pulling a khaki uniform from the suitcase he had unfolded on his bunk, and then neatly hanging the garment in the wall locker.

  “Philosophically related, if you will,” Carter said. “I greatly admired the president, and I subscribe to his philosophy of asking not what my country can do for me, but what I can do for my country.”

  “You didn’t even get a draft notice then, did you?” O’Connor said.

  “No,” Carter said. “I joined the Marines straight out of school. My duty to my country.”

  “Your family must have a lot of money, pal,” O’Connor then said, grabbing his seabag and dumping its contents on his bunk, spilling half of it across the floor.

  “Why would you say that?” Carter said, surprised.

  “Guys like you are either completely crazy or filthy rich,” O’Connor said. “Crazy people don’t make it through Harvard. Don’t even get an interview to get in Harvard, or Yale, at that matter. Rich does. I peg you as filthy fucking rich, with a capital F.”

  “Filthy or fucking?” Kirkwood asked, laughing.

  “Take your pick,” O’Connor said, throwing his boots into the bottom of his wall locker. “Don’t get me wrong, Mickey, I like filthy fucking rich. I want to be filthy fucking rich one day. I admire filthy fucking rich. I’ll take the corner office with the big leather chair any day of the week over camping in a slum with a soap box as a desk.”