Years Later, He Continues to Chant the Cold Dirges of the Baffled by Chuck Von Nordheim   

In sleep, the war vet covers the distance from his Ohio bedroom to the jungle he patrolled in three heartbeats. Wet heat enshrouds his body. He lumbers under seventy pounds of gear, each step a feat of balance. Straps slice into shoulders. A chin strap chafes his jaw. In this palm-tinted murk, it seems the vet swims more than he walks. A helmeted Diver Dan. Sweat-sodden Army-issue poplin passes for a diving suit’s brink-soaked canvas. Ginger’s musk replaces the iodine of kelp. The sensation of buoyant achievement, of weightless competence, counts as the joyous part of the vet’s night journey.

The character of the dreamscape shifts from wonder to menace when the war vet sees the young man’s body propped against a fig tree. Trading in squawks for hisses, the calls of the night parrots change. The vet knows his patrol didn’t leave that body posed this way. Seeking another troop to confirm this fact, he looks left. He looks right. No one. Where’s the squad? Has he lost his way?

Lit with the baleful gleam of colonies of bioluminescent fungus, the enemy’s body glows in the green shadows.  A drapery of aerial roots supply the bald head of the corpse with a wild afro and a prophet’s beard. They had pulled the body from the trail. They’d left it face down in bamboo. A wind bust makes the palm fronds clack like chattering teeth.

The clatter of the fronds became the syncopated thunderclap of automatic gunfire. In the vet’s arms, muscles tense in response to the magically manifested weight of a carbine. Who put this foe in my path? Who shoved this gun in my hands? The weapon heaves and jerks like a cat that does not want to be held. Spraining his thumb, the carbine leaps from his grasp. Through the detritus of shed fronds and shed bark, the gun wriggles, its stock and barrel congealing into thick gunmetal flesh. After the aberrant bird call sibilance transfers to the machine-snake’s steel throat, the customary noises of the night parrots resurge. Their squawks and screeches frame the hiss of the machine-snake like the way a clown’s speech frames an assassin’s assertion in a tragedy.

Defying physics, the living metal ascends to shoulder height. Defying perception, the vet watches the agent of his instinctive reaction simultaneously swell to the size of Jörmungandr, the world serpent, and shrink to the size of a 5.56mm round meticulously filed to expose its soft lead core. Spewing cordite breath, the machine-snake rockets toward the posed body. The filigree of fig roots raises the glowing arms of the corpse marionette to shield its maggot-chewed face. Who is the macabre puppet master?  When the dumdum round kisses the foe’s check, the left side of the face explodes like a melon hit by a hammer. Who pulls the strings? Who reroutes me to hell night after night?

   I’m sorry. The words reverb through the green murk, a cupful of apologetic incantation strewn into a sea of regret. In fungus limned fingers, the corpse offers up the pulped sliver of his jaw. Like Pavlov’s dog. Bam-bam. Like I’d been trained. The vet’s excuses echo in dreamtime’s endless accusation. A conveyed contagion, the yellow man now emits the machine-snake’s hiss. Forgive me. Please forgive me. Post-mortem gases geyser from the dead enemy’s maimed form, redolent of rancid butter, of corrupt cheese. I obeyed orders. I had no choice. In clear mockery, the corpse’s ass continues its shrill, pungent whistle.

This grisly whistle, this terrible trumpet, signals the entrance of other players. Along the vet’s sinews, stresses shift, a repositioning of loads. Above, invisible masses now compete with the Earth. The pull of the hidden bulks tears the red, wet wedge of broken bone from the corpse’s fingers and fold its hands into a gesture of prayer. Worse than a rollercoaster or a tilt-a-whirl, the new forces toy with the veteran’s inner ear. He confuses his steps. Kneecaps crack against jungle mud. A spiteful club, the weight of his pack, smites his spine. The yank of dark masses wrench his head upward.

With synced booms worthy of H-bombs, blasts that made the war vet’s teeth thrum like plucked guitar strings, the unseen actors revealed their location. Through the canopy of fronds, two fireballs glare. Their heat stings his face. Lasers? Some kind of particle beams? The corpse of the yellow man smokes. From it, rancid meat stink wafts. An invasion from space? The influx of a quadruple nova?

Goosebumps pimple the vet’s limbs when the two fireballs blink. As their glare lessens, irises solidify at the heart of the fiery globes. In his mind, insight solidifies with equal swiftness. No thinking hand built those. But they’re what guides them. The eyes in the sky lock their gaze on him. You craved our blood. You put us here.

Snapped palm branches flop across the war vet’s pack and helmet when an autonomous anthropomorphic finger—godlike if the divine implies the gigantic—breaches the canopy. White glare bleaches green jungle pale. Sweat courses down the vet’s face. Withered by the heat, the yellow corpse crumbles to ash. In the air, the finger writes capital letters of glittering flame: Of every tribe a thousand, throughout all the tribes, shall ye send to war. Rising to his feet, the vet thrusts a digit at the finger in a gesture all warriors know. “I’ll bow to your boy,” he screams, “the god who loves. You, I reject.”

In the space of two heartbeats, the weeping veteran finds himself in Ohio, bound up in the twisted sheets of his rented bed. “Not my choice,” he whispers. “Not my war.” Hampered by a leaking compressor, the sill-mounted AC unit hisses like a snake. Beyond the cracked window, a whippoorwill cries. “Why are fathers so willing to sacrifice their sons?” But the bead curtain set into clacking motion by the vet’s nocturnal flailing offers no answer to his question.

# # #

Chuck Von Nordheim lives in northeastern Los Angeles County at the geo/biological point where chaparral merges into true desert. An Air Force retiree, he maintains membership in Iraq Veterans Against the War. An MFA recipient, he scours abandoned garages for Highway 66 relics he can sell on EBay to pay off student loans. His magreal/surreal works have appeared in Midway Journal, Artifact Nouveau, Three-Lobed Burning Eye, Ealain, and Twisted Tongue.

Photo credit: Larry D. Thacker  http://www.larrydthacker.com

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