Visions

Richie sat on his front porch smoking a cigarette and drinking a cup of coffee, listening to the birds cackling from the trees lining Maple Street. Smoke curled up around his nostrils and over his face as crows (always crows, loud and raucous birds with feathers of midnight black) swooped over the street dropping walnuts from their taloned feet and landing on the pavement in a flutter of feathers to see if they'd cracked. The sun shone from above thick, crowded grey clouds and the light that filtered down was almost grey as well, still heavy with morning mist.

He took another pull, feeling the hot, dry smoke coat the inside of his lungs, and as he blew out he heard a sound. A noise, coming up the street. Richie tipped his coffee cup to his lips swallowing a quick, hot gulp, and set the cup back on the porch, watching the light swirls of smoke curl around his fingers. He waited patiently for it to come. It always came.

This morning it came in the form of an older man, his long hair tangled and knotted over his shoulders. His black hair and beard, wild and untamed, harbored wide streaks of dirty silver. His feet flapped like clown shoes as he stutter-stepped up the middle of the street, past the neighbors shrubs and into Richie's view. His black hooded jacket hung open allowing his sagging stomach to hang out, wrapped in a red sweatshirt like a partially deflated balloon that hung over the waistband of his black sweatpants. The man's mouth worked furiously, a torrent of words pouring out and meant for ears that Richie couldn't see...ears Richie didn't think he wanted to see. Every couple of steps the old man turned and shouted at something behind him before he resumed his flapping progress up the street.

There it is. That's what I heard. Just a crazy old man out for a walk and a shout at the crazy old demons on his tail.

Don't drop that butt, Richie old boy; you seem to have picked up a slight tremble in your lips.

Mid-drag, the old man looked up and locked eyes with the young man on the porch. Suddenly his lungful of smoke burned, (oh god it's burning, everything's on fire and it's in my hands) and he coughed, great gasping coughs that hurt at the very root of his lungs and tore at the back of his throat. He knew, he saw across the yard, over the fence, and in the eyes of the crazy, old street-shambler, Richie knew the old man would leave the street, flap up to his front gate and begin to scream. Scream at him, in words incoherent but familiar, a great, rushing river of crazy flooding his front walk and crushing him against his front door. He would die here this morning, drowned in a flood of insanity.

He was saved by a truck, (and salvation always comes at a price, doesn't it? This is my body and this is my blood, let's toss'er on the grill and have a big ole hallelujah cookout, saith the Lord) puttering up behind the old man staring at Richie. The driver put on his brakes and swung onto the shoulder, and his front tire dropped into a pothole. The front end dropped and jostled up the other side of the hole with a bang like a sledge hammer on a blacksmith's anvil.

Richie jumped as the old man, the man with dirty silver in his beard and crazy in his eyes, screamed and dropped to a crouch in the middle of the street. Then it came. Then everything changed.

His lips parted and the cigarette fell to the porch unnoticed but...

I'm not on the porch any more.

He looked down at his feet and didn't see them. Baby palm fronds closed in gently around his waist and fluttered in a hot, sticky breeze. Their older siblings waved overhead, tangled in vines dangling from hardwood tree cover above them.

The old man had been replaced by a young man with short, matted hair and stubble, and dirt, and fear on his face. Holes showed dirt on his skin through green fatigues disintegrating slowly with jungle rot. He crouched in the baby palms, barely a foot from a well-worn brown footpath cutting through the undergrowth like an old scar.

An explosion picked Richie up and threw him onto a thick carpet of soggy leaves and fronds and he lay there for a moment, dazed, as realization dawned. He could smell the rice paddies--old water and mule shit, the rank, heavy smell of vegetation that's always wet--and cordite, hanging heavy in the air from the mortars and the...

Sounds began to hammer into his ears as machine guns pounded a rhythm in his head, (welcome to the jungle, baby) and the rifles fired their single shots as fast as the trigger could be pulled and sounded like cannons. (Do you know where you are?)

He rolled over and crawled on his belly toward the trail toward the young man crouched in the palms, the barrel of his rifle wet from water on the plants.

Because this is where the magic happens. This is where the boy I see now becomes the old man I saw before. Somewhere in the middle of nowhere, they don't know, all they know is Hill 52 is up there ahead and they're going to take that hill, by god; they're going to climb that hill and get their medals, some before, some after they've been planted in the ground. First they have to live; they have to live through this jungle of death that pours a horizontal rain of lead that cuts through the plants like garden shears going a mile-a-minute.

Richie didn't know how or why, but he knew. He locked eyes for a moment with a twenty-year-old boy on the other side of the world from home and knew that this was a place of broken hearts, and broken bodies, and broken minds.

White smoke drifted by, set free by the mortar teams as they launched their deadly payloads over their heads.

Shit, you can't use mortars in the jungle, you'll bounce them off of tree limbs and right back on your own heads. If they're shooting mortars that means they're really desperate. That means...

His body chilled in the heavy, humid air with the thought.

This is a last stand.

Over the staccato bark of the machine guns and the pounding concussion of the mortars, a rumble grew in the distance. Unnoticed at first, it soon roared over the confusion on the ground and the GIs crouched behind palm trunks and humped, rotting hillocks on the jungle floor began to cheer.

"It's the fast-movers, boys," one of them called, "they're gonna pound those commies right back into the ground."

The rumble circled overhead and was once more drawing closer. Richie saw it in his mind's eye: the mechanical release snapped back and the heavy metal case with fins on its back (green, weren’t they always green?) dipped its nose and plummeted toward the earth. It plowed through the top of the trees and hit the ground, exploding into a crater big enough to fill with water and use for a lake.

Instead, a long, silver canister tumbled through the trees and exploded, throwing a long smear of liquid fire over the jungle floor. The fire ran everywhere, and Richie heard the screams of the enemy in the distance.

"Napalm!" A soldier shouted, his voice giddy, "We're gonna burn those fuckers to ash!"

Another silver canister and another. Richie expected them to stop, to veer to the left or right, but they didn't. He saw, and he stood but his feet seemed to be glued to the ground, those deadly cylinders of liquid fire walk in large, staggered steps directly toward the soldiers.

"Call them off, somebody call them off," somebody yelled as a final canister tumbled through the trees and exploded.

Painful heat hit Richie's face and he closed his eyes and turned his head, not wanting to see, trying not to see what was happening. The liquid fire had missed him, and the boy in front of him, but twenty yards beyond him the jungle was burning to ash.

He heard GIs screaming now, their pain exploding out of their lungs as their lives burned like flash paper and snuffed out into piles of charred embers. A soldier, the right half of his body dripping fire, ran out of the blaze, the fire spreading across his body like hot cancer, leaving a trail of burning palms behind him. His screams were cut off as the fire crawled over his face and down his throat.  He fell, setting a ring of undergrowth on fire around him.

The young man in front of Richie stood up, his rifle forgotten on the jungle floor. "Ahh god no, Jimmy!" He shouted and ran through that ring of fire to the pile of fire on the ground. He began digging, his hands flinging damp, rotting leaves and palm fronds away from him until he hit dark, wet earth. He threw the mud, in great handfuls, onto his friend, the fire steaming and hissing as it died.

Richie heard the roar of the fire as it reached the treetops overhead. He heard the boy (man) sobbing and saw the shiny tracks his tears cut down his sooty face. A wave of smoke washed by and Richie saw him bend down and pick up the soldier's hand. He leaned back to pull, to drag him out of here, and the fallen man's arm broke off at the shoulder with the sound of breaking, crusty bread.

The young man looked stupidly at the charred arm in his hand for a moment, (this is my body, given for you, take and eat. Oh god it's on fire, everything's burning and it's in my hands) then collapsed to his knees, raised his face to the sky and began to scream.

Richie jumped up and ran to (help comfort save) do what, he didn't know, but he stepped in a hole and suddenly he was falling. Falling swift and smooth through the dark, the wind flapping his hair and cooling his skin.

He opened his eyes, sitting on his own porch and watching an old, crazy man kneeling in the road and screaming at the sky. There was a half-smoked cigarette lying on the porch at his feet, and he picked it up with trembling fingers and popped it between his lips. He had trouble lighting his lighter, and it took quite a few tries to get the tip of the cigarette to catch.

He pulled long and hard, his lungs still aching, and the man in the street stopped screaming. He lurched to his feet and continued his flappy, stuttering walk to the corner, and out of sight.

Richie sat on his front porch smoking a cigarette and drinking a cup of coffee, listening to the birds cackle as they flew back to their trees on Maple Street. He plucked the cigarette from his lips and tossed it into the yard. As he closed his front door behind him, Richie felt it would be awhile before he wanted another one.


Author's note: This story was written today (1/7/15) and is largely unedited. I'm thinking about entering it into a contest and the deadline is fast approaching. I'm not really interested in reviews concerning how many more commas I should or shouldn't use...I'm more concerned about what you think of the story. What works for you and what doesn't. If you feel like dropping me a note and letting me know, I'd greatly appreciate it.