A Rare Vintage

Mortuary Affairs Specialist Corporal Alan Donohue knew he was dead.

He felt certain as pulled the zipper up on number 152’s cold, white face, he’d never been so certain about anything in his life.

It wasn’t a clean pull. The tab managed to get stuck on a loose flap of rotting skin, making the Corporal struggle. It took a few tugs for the body bag to close with a squelch.

But his lack of reaction confirmed what he already knew about himself.

Dead.

He tried, Donohue did, to feel more for 152, as matter of fact, for any of them, as he ticked off his name on his cracked clipboard. But when he realized that 152 was so young, the baby fat, not even drained from his round face, his first thought was: Aren’t they all, though?

His second thought was: One more week until leave.

Donohue moved on to the next body and examined the damage.

153.

He hesitated. This one had been a part of a detachment that marched out, single file, from the damp, jerry-rigged jungle camp several weeks ago, just to get chewed up by the green hills that surrounded the valley like jagged teeth.

Donohue’s eyes followed the lines of 153’s body, from toe tag to collar bone.

It was missing half its face, maybe blown out by a sniper or carved out by a large piece of shrapnel. Donohue took note and fished around for dog tags, but he already knew who the man was from the red twine wrapped around his wrist with the plastic letters PAPA threaded through. The “it” was not an “it”, but a fellow Mortuary Affairs Specialist Donohue knew, or rather had known, well.

Gonzalez, Manuel. 17869890. Gonzalez, Ana. 320 South Shady Grove Road. Irvine, Texas. Blood type O positive.

Donohue blinked, waiting for an outburst, for tears. But nothing came. He raised his eyebrows and forced a perfunctory, “Rest in peace, Hermano,” and with three swift pen strokes, he labeled Gonzalez: KIA.

Then, Donohue looked around and listened. The camp was quiet, all but silent.

He reached for an empty body bag and curled into its cradle-like hold. Zipping it from the inside, the tarp folded over him like a musty cocoon. Donohue shut his eyes. Let me be 154, a voiceless plea, he thought and began to drift into sleep. As he did, he felt something wet coiling inside of him, which made him painfully aware of his own labored breathing and braying heart.

“What in the ever-loving corpse-fuck are you doing?” A shadow moved against the tarp. Slowly, it unzipped his bag.

Private Jones’s dark face materialized in the dampness, blocking out the oil lamp dangling from the bunker roof.

“Practicing,” Donohue responded, jaded, with closed eyes, his words scraping like tin on his parched throat.

“Necro foolery?” His word playful.

“It’s necrophilia, Jones, you should know as much.” He opened his red-rimmed eyes and winked at Jones, whose white teeth gleamed Cheshire-like above him in the dim room.

“You know me, the stiffer, the better.” Jones reached into the bag and pulled Donohue up.

The Corporal sat up unhurried and rubbed his eyes. His pale hands shook with fatigue. He slumped over his crisscrossed legs. He’d been working non-stop, without eating, drinking, or sleeping, dredging the red muck, picking up each piece and tossing it in a bag or bin like he would a rotted ear of corn back home in Lawrence, Kansas.

Jones nodded with practiced patience, “Come on, darlin’. You ain’t dead yet.”

“I’m not so sure.” Donohue looked over at Jones with caution.

Jones lit a cigarette and rolled his eyes, “But, for real. Just because you organize death doesn’t mean you’ve turned into some undertaking specter,” before handing the pack to Donohue.

“I commit to my art.” Donohue arched his eyebrows as he took a cigarette butt. Maybe Jones had a point. With each body gathered, he hoped he’d jolt back to life. Ultimately, he found himself standing at a porous border where he found himself straddling two worlds, the living and the dead, unsure at which point he’d become a citizen of the latter, and with each tagged, bagged, sorted and cataloged soldier, a constant, rat-nailed scratching dread moved inside him, burrowing hungrily into his belly, reminding him: you are dead.

“Well, whatever it is, you don’t have to belabor the point.” Jones looked at number 153’s bag and took a long drag. His exhalation was slow and deliberate, and made gray smoke creep over their heads, like an unwelcome apparition.

Donohue looked down at his boots, “That last one was Gonzalez.”

Jones winced, “Shit. Rest in Peace. Always M.A.S. Never Menos.” He looked around the piles of bags, long and short, shipshape and stacked one on top of the other like lumber for a pyre, “At least it wasn’t you.”

“Maybe it should have been,” Donohue lamented, “I don’t feel right.”

“Three bucks and a pack of cigarettes says I go first,” Jones snorted, tapping his jacket pocket, “Anyway, we got our next pickup location coming in through the radio.”

“How far?” Donohue asked, rubbing his eyes.

“Oh, it’s only about two miles or so from here. Parts and scraps. Last one before we’re out from rotation.” Jones slung his rifle across his shoulders and held his fist out, “Easy Peasy?”

“Never queasy,” Donohue responded, bumping in response.

Above all things, Donohue hated the Banyan trees.

To him, the buttressing clefts of the aerial roots looked like a descending curtain of gray viscera searching for something to wrap themselves around. More than the pythons that snuck into their kits, the endless rains that soaked through their gear and puckered their skins with sores, or the endless rattling din of the war, the trees terrified him.

As he walked with the detachment of ten through the abandoned estate, Donohue prayed that whatever they were there to salvage wouldn’t involve picking from between Banyan roots. It was nasty business, pulling body parts off the bark like rare flowers. He stepped around the grand staircase, no doubt carved from the finest teak wood. Black vines coiled themselves, suffocating the plump, wood cherubs holding up the wrought iron candelabras that once illuminated the foyer. The balustrade cracked under the weight of the summer humidity.

Solemn, they walked past a broken baby grand piano, blasted through by a hand grenade. It sat in the living room, alight by high, glassless windows. The tessellated white panes, blown out no doubt by the same explosion that had taken the piano, made the soldiers look as if they were navigating through the rib cage of an exotic carcass.

Donohue held up his hand. The men stopped. He moved ahead and raised his binoculars.

Through the back patio, the hushed, columned whisper of palm and banana trees filled the air with a conspiratorial breeze laced with carrion. But just Donohue, who was so intimately familiar with the scent of fermented death, could smell it.

“There,” he whispered. 

Two bodies swayed from their distended necks off the sinewy branch of a single, massive Banyan.

“Fuck,” Donohue muttered. 

Their blue and black tongues, overshadowed by the tree’s prop roots, flapped like reclaimed banners.

“Are we gonna cut ‘em down, man?” Jones whispered in Donohue’s ear.
Donohue hesitated. The two hanged bodies weren’t their priority.

What was scattered at the base of the big tree, however, was a smaller detachment that appeared to have been claimed by landmines and splattered across the branches.

Donohue sighed and rubbed his unshaven face as the rest of the men came up behind him, Part pick up. From between the branches, and then some.

“We have to. Or else someone else will walk through the path and try some shit.” Donohue set his rifle down. “Fucking trees.”

“Sir?” Lyman, a skinny redhead from Peoria, asked.

“Boss man here isn’t too keen on the local flora,” Jones explained with a dry tone.

“I read those things are massive parasites that suck everything in their path to survive. So yeah, I feel some way about those trees,” Donohue shot back, “But fuck it, I’ll go. No one’s calling me a bitch tonight.” He clutched his rifle close to his chest.

Jones shook his head, “Never seen someone so eager to die,” as he motioned to the man behind Donohue, “Shit, I should give you three bucks and a pack of cigarettes right now.”

“We’re still surprised?! From the man who swallowed a bullet from a shot glass?” Lyman asked  as he stepped into Donohue’s position, his voice acrid.

But Donohue, already several steps ahead, no longer heard the men. He’d started his walk in the direction of the Banyan tree.

Unspooling a coil of rope behind him, the Corporal tracked a safe path for the men to follow to the base of the tree. As he stood under the vertical, tangled maze of roots, the dark canopy above shivered, anticipatory in the wet breeze. It made Donohue’s heart thump unexpectedly.

He leapt on the first set of roots and followed their twisting ascent, hoisting himself with vines and onto branches, until the two hanging bodies were below him. At a quick glance, they appeared shriveled, their eyes pecked clean. One was a man, the other a woman. Maybe. He moved quick, eager to get off the Banyan and continue the examination on the ground. Whoever had lynched them had used a thick, black, strangler vine instead of rope.

 It took him several attempts to cut through it. When he did, it leaked a sticky red sap that dripped all over his hands, burning his fingers. Wiping his hands on his fatigues, he watched as the couple thudded like overripe fruit in between a root cleft.

“What the fuck did they do, to get strung up like this?” Lyman called out, already pulling out a body bag below.

“Probably just owned this plantation,” Donohue bellowed from above, examining the vine, “Revolution isn’t so friendly to the land-owning class.” He began his climb down.

“Sir, we looked at the others, but uh, I don’t really know what to tell you,” Sanders, a medic from Houma, called out in a reedy voice.

Donohue leaped off the final branch and landed on a small knob wide enough for his left foot. He pinwheeled for a moment, then jumped onto the dirt, limping back to where Sanders called from. When he got there, Donohue felt the hairs on the back on his neck stand straight. He took out a cigarette and got down on one knee to examine the parts.

Because they weren’t parts, Donohue realized. They were bodies, half swallowed by the dirt and ensconced by the tree bark. Mud and blood caked on their indistinguishable dark green uniforms. Almost imperceptibly, roots coiled out of their white mouths and into their clouded eyes.

As if they were feeding and producing a full-bodied, terrible harvest.

Well, that’s just a dumb fucking thought, he thought. Donohue flicked his cigarette. It splintered into a tiny orange explosion against the black trunk.

“They look like they’ve been here a long while,” Lyman observed, “Who got the radio call?”

Donohue dropped to his knees and examined one of the bodies, “Jones.” A vine wrapped itself around one of the dead soldier’s necks. It had tangled itself up with the thin ball chain on which the man’s dog tags swung. Not that they would be any good. The vine had perforated the steel, making the name illegible. Donohue pulled the tags with care and placed them into a leather pouch slung around his hips. One by one, he did the same with the others. “We need to take them in and figure this out. Let’s try and separate them from the roots,” he said, “For the other two, wrap them up in the extra bags, dig a hole, and mark the grave.” Donohue stood up.

The cold, churning sensation he’d felt earlier welled up again inside him like an angry river. To steady himself, he stared at his mud and blood caked boots. They were covered by the Banyan tree’s shaking shadow, which seemed to whisper something to him. He stared, lost in the dark, dancing shapes swirling underfoot until he heard his name as clear as a bottle shattering on a stone floor, “Doc.”

Donohue’s tired eyes looked up. It was Jones, running through the banana rows.

“Doc—” he yelled again, coming to a gasping stop several feet away from Donohue.

“Careful where you run, private, or you’ll end up as blast mark on these roots,” Donohue said, his word matter of fact.

“Yeah, fuck that. You’re going to want to see this,” Jones said, placing his hands on his knees letting his head drop in between his legs.

The trap door had disintegrated under Jones’s feet, sending him tumbling five feet down into a hidden cellar. When the dust settled, at first glance, Jones counted maybe fifty massive wood crates. It was hard to tell in the dark.

Propped up against one of the crates was a pile of bones surrounded by empty bottles.

Unsure of what he had found, Jones began to holler until he was heard by one of the men. With the assistance of a vine, he clambered out of the cellar and gone back for Donohue and the others, who now stood puzzling over the crates.

“Maybe it’s those Russian mortar shells everyone is talking about?” Lyman whispered.

“I bet it’s a stash of Commie Gold. Ho Chi Bling. Living large while the people starve,” another of the men snorted.

“What the heck happened to him?” Friedl the redhead, nudged the pile of bones with the tip of his rifle.

 An empty bottle rolled toward the feet of the men, leaving a dusty trail in its path. The skull grinned at them in bleached silence.