Gentlemen II

GENTLEMEN II

Sara L. Jackson

Somewhere in North Vietnam, some time in '69.

It was the same day Richard Nixon locked himself in his little secret room, undisclosed outside the regular American castle, and wrote on his little legal pad on the other side of the world. In Washington, it was raining rather hard, and the President felt a cold coming on in his throat.

Sometimes in the night, the yellow lights of rumbling army trucks would pass under darkness like ghosts or bison. They would pass in a parade, their engines roaring and their tires shaking, their blazing headlights like dragons eyes. Young boys with guns sat inside, some speaking in different languages, and some so scared they could have thrown up their guts a hundred times.

There were young people outside, with long hair and flowers and loud voices.

The sky above the jungle was overcast, and a few drops of rain began to plop into a small clearing within the thickness of green, pointed, exotic plants. All was quiet, except for the distant voices of shouting men, and chirping bug's legs. Six bodies of boys from the states, freshly dead, laid in a disorganized manner all about the place. There was one boy in particular, a young kid of the Vietcong, who had been shot the instant he tripped over a downed tree. His dirty legs hung black with earth, like an upside-down marionette. Another poor kid from New Hampshire sat upright against a tree trunk, shot straight between the eyes, pinned against it. Some kind of peace sign hung around his neck, beside his dog tag. It looked almost as if he was sleeping.

The garden of dead soldiers was silent and still. Yet the plants began to rustle and bounce as rather large raindrops began to hit their leaves. Crickets and dragonflies began to take refuge amongst the wildflowers. The boys would slowly turn into dirt, and begin to melt into the earth if someone did not come to find and mourn for them soon.

A living boy's face was stained with mud and dirt. He had blood on his lips and a crack in his glasses. He huddled like a fetus in a divot, trembling. He was a nice little Catholic boy, the kind of kid that wore his gym socks almost up to his knees, and who had sick, taboo, erotic fantasies about the kids he liked in his school; a building mimicking the shapes of brutalism. He was the kind of kid who really did enjoy those claymation Christmas specials, and working for a good standardized test score eight months in advance; he was a kid who could never attend track meets, as nausea would be a constant weight.

This lanky and weepy kid who loved his mommy, and feared God and his old man as he should, slowly peeked his head from over the divot to see his fire team. A fierce instinct rose inside of his throat, to pull the trigger on himself, and to finally go home. He saw Riley, who never liked him, but that was alright. He saw Billy, with his jaw blown off and away, who not even two hours ago was reminiscing about "the craft", and telling him of the Illuminati conspiracy that surrounds us all. It would never end.

The boy slowly began to stand with his gun to his chest, and looking over the wreckage, the ghosts of his friends somewhere else by now. He noticed once someone dies, the face is gone. At least it was to him; they slipped into the uncanny valley and became eerie human-like animals. His stomach burned, and losing control was on the horizon. He felt by the end of the day, he would be dead by his own hand, and the war would be over.