C-123s beached on the desert playa. A two-foot square of aluminum, white with red block letters, clasped to the fence at
shoulder height, reads authorized personnel only, meaning Air Force specialists wearing hazmat suits. I must make do
with the view from the fence line, which is fine with me, since
the nearest contaminated aircraft are less than fifty feet away.
I climb out of the van and gawk. Forty years before, these
olive planes, arranged before me now like neglected toys on the
top shelf in a child’s bedroom, unloaded over 10 million gallons
of dioxin-laden herbicide on a countryside halfway across the
world, the same countryside my father tromped through with a
gun at his side for one full year at the peak of the spraying. And
now, on the edge of the desert metropolis, beneath wisps of
cloud shifting and breaking in the morning sky, in the checkered shadow of the chain-link fence, as much as I would like to
deny it, I find myself looking for catharsis—a burst of emotion
that will finally and emphatically wash it all away.
I know how lucky I am—that things could be much worse.
I’ve seen the pictures of the Vietnamese tending the earth after
the fire. The parents who cut and burned the trunks of leafless
trees to keep their children warm in winter. The beautiful young
girls with jet black hair and loose blouses trimming grass for
baskets. The peasants planting saplings in barren ground.
And I’ve seen the photos of jars filled with the stillborn at the
Tu Du hospital in Ho Chi Minh City. Babies born with two faces
and three ears. Dead babies with limbs like ropes, long, slender,
twisted like pale pretzels in formaldehyde. Siamese twins with
melting heads, gathered in a lovers’ tangle, the lips of one
pressed to the neck of the other in the softest kiss. Shelves full
of pickle jars holding the rawest fruit.
And the living, the children of the damned. Children with eyes
like marbles, huge and rolling and blank. Children with skin like
birch bark, skin that peels and flakes in small squares, covering
their bodies in checkerboards of dying flesh, pushing up from
scalps like duff on a forest floor. Children with alien heads, their
skulls ten times the size of their jaws. I’ve seen the feet turned in
on themselves, the blackened arms, the hands like clamps.
I look down at my hand in its present state, nearly three
decades after the last surgery, after I finally said no more—no
more casts, no more stitches, no more IV needles, no more
Darth Vader masks spewing anesthesia into my lungs. I look
down at the rumpled flesh, the grafts sewn between the spaces
opened up to give me fingers, grafts of crotch skin, grafts that
grow hair, and the lines of scars from the stitching, and the two
tiny inner digits, and the middle knuckle that bears no crop, and
the pinky that juts straight out, and the short, thick thumb, and
I am glad that at six years of age I finally said no. They wanted
to do more surgeries, wanted to cut a little more here, tweak the
bone structure a little more there. And I said no.
A gust of wind rakes an old Pepsi can along the base of the
fence. It rattles to a stop on the crown of an anthill, teeters for a
moment, and rolls to my feet like an empty shell. Out here on
the scabland of memory where scorpions scurry under B-52s,
jackrabbits bound over chopper blades in tufts of never-green
grass, and the sun burns through everything, there are no
epiphanies. There are only dirt and space, dreams and loneliness, and—I realize with a start—confrontations with the past
that will never quite fill the gaps. Taken with an incredible urge
to urinate, I snap one last photo and hop in the van, trying hard
not to look back. a
Join the discussion about Ben Quick’s story and other Orion articles
at www.orionmagazine.org.
Doctrine
I love the church
of the osprey, simple
adoration, no haggling
over the body, the blood,
whether water sprinkled
from talons or immersed
in the river saves us,
whether ascension
is metaphor or literal,
because, of course,
it’s both: wings crooked,
all the angels crying out,
rising up from nests
made of sticks
and sunlight.
