Ch 2
CH 2 -The Knight, Sad Cosita and the Senator
Dr. Robert Bellini was a good man. Decent by any standards, brave and a provider. He also had a deep dark secret on top of his inability to keep his dick in his pants. Lt. Bob was a surgeon and a private polygamist. Private to all save his own wife. Devoted to her husband and their son she bore this knowledge for the better part of their marriage, and though she kept his secret she had help. The beauty of the smallest little demons was well known to her. For in the life she had led as a singer in California had been one inspired and then wrecked by a little rascal that grew up in the mouth nose and veins.
The beige haze of that life had been extinguished and love for her homeland and her man had returned. Bob took her in his arms and swept her away to a brilliant white castle in the La. He kept her right through the marriage and the birth of Abel and the pain of his infidelities. He kept her until the day of the wreck. When the misses was reintroduced to morphine sulfate. Those little green pills. Abels little brother was adopted the next year, the product of darkness. He kept his family name. Fallin. Fell in. FELLINSTO'uggirth. The Demon of Mirth.
The real truth is Dr. Robert hated everyone. Why his deep hatred of people caused all around him to hold him up in adoration is one of the great mysteries about the man. One of the mysteries but certainly not the only one. He was a benevolent tyrant, thriving on the misery of all things and people on whom he imposed himself, but never showing his true colors save in his stone grey eyes. His wife Carmelia loved him, his 3 daughters, one real son and one fake son lived for his attention and the people of Louisiana voted him into the office of Senator. The only truly human emotions he exhibited was envy and lust and these with alacrity. There were only a handful of people who suspected.
Vietnam
The sprawling set of huts and shanties could hardly be called a town nor a village. The population was in constant decline and numbered around 130 the day the Americans came to liberate. Coule played in the puddles of muck and excrement. She had a small dog that pushed itself around minus the two front paws and lived off the insects and garbage that surrounded the small lean-tos. Her mother spent most days in the small rice paddies that the men no longer could work as they had been conscripted into the hill tribes pro-American war. Coule saw them first, the grimy soot covered features of their faces obscured, in shadow. They came low out of the rain helmets on, straps dangling, weapons on-line like pointing limbs; wraiths of politics and new order. They came walking toward her, yet she moved little and not a word was echoed from her dirty lips. In the front one could be seen marking movements with his hands, the headman she supposed. Knowing the power of her small smile one evolved on those same small dirty lips that held in the cry for help. Lt. Robert Bellini had been up for 3 days and 4 nights running on the desire to see this mission completed and an amphetamine driven calm that robbed him of sleep. Behind him the men of his platoon chattered like chimes in the wind. Tired and nerve ridden they had seen no action on the outing and it had begun to eat at the collective psyche. Robert had faith in his outfit down to taking on point himself, though he knew it to be an offense of military code and logic. Kle Quian Duc was the name of the village, at least so it said on the laminated grid map kept rolled in his pack.
The women of the village slowly began to emerge from the huts. These men were large and had a edge that was telling even without the aid of understanding the language. Behind the last bamboo structure in a crawl space sat a solitary figure fingering a Russian made radio and a RPG. He sat enraptured by the voices coming to him from the box. Friends were coming and they were to murder the small host of men strolling with ownership through Kle Quian Province.
Something went wrong as the soldiers spread out across the township. The normal order of a search was not being followed. The small boy Francis Flagler from Flagstaff, Arizona noticed it but just assumed the LT knew what he was doing. As the bicycle chain cut off his airway he became fully cognizant that this was Vietnam and no one knew a mother fucking thing. He should have died there but he didn't. They all should have died, but somewhere in-between the first gun report and the dazed reaction of the American soldiers a generational curse was conceived, fucked and born burnt into the spirit of Lt. Robert Bellini.
The billowing blue-red smoke of flares used to hide the numbers of the North Vietnamese mixed with the low lying fog caused chaos and all of the little order to dissipate. The gunfire deafened both enemies and American soldiers alike. The slow staccato and the chainsaw sang together. Crouched, screaming wordless warnings and taunts Robert lost all the collective cool of his 22 years. A prayer went out and was answered damning and delivering in its genesis. With the strength of ten thousand laughing demons he stood eyes white blobs of madness and the M-16 a limb of intolerance and reckoning. Walking to the outside of the village magazine after magazine dropped smoking in his tread. The soldiers fell in behind his example and elongated flashing shadow exposed with the guns bright yells.
Coule was hidden as the Americans in a goose flight pattern filtered around trees and huts beautiful and terrible. To her lips a thought of terror lifted by song issued forth.
Hence they came to devour
Flashing silver from under green boughs
Only to prey and eat
Collective singularity.
That enemy of my mother's mother
The white tiger under the clouds
The dragon of old, full of rest, now hungers again
Breath fetid and teeth gnashing in the Day Sun
Power from across the blue
In that city across time
Pours out its soul
Over and over upon us.
Their mantra
And with them came the death of the Land
Though the verse came out clear and bright the song was never heard. For on its first verse Coule took a round the the throat and the folk song only was gurgled and spat. On the right and left of her still warm body the Americans now running and screaming flew. With a united front the captain of the Enemy held his position, his soldiers hearing rather than seeing their end. The clash of the approaching and the dug in was hideous. Brick on flesh, knife to granite, entrenching tool to skull; the grind of the gears of war regressed in the muck and blood. Lt. Robert was possessed, feeling nothing save the need to crush and move. 15 feet from a forest of Aks and assorted weaponry he finally beheld his adversary as his last shell dropped to the carpet of green. He slowed now chancing a look behind. There they were to a man flanking their leader to death and glory. Raising his weapon above his head, the Viking warrior in his moment of full release, Lt. Robert wooped a primal utterance. A call to his ancestors, to his own powers and the line caught it and returned it 29 fold. As they poured around his shaking body the Lt. leapt forward, covering the remaining ground in leaps. Bullets swept by him swirling in and around his vision like raindrops. Ever before his men he slew the shapes appearing in his sights then with a click click the fury was transferred to his arms fists boots and teeth. Screaming now with a mouthful of hair and scalp the rage he swept across the line of men in his stead.
Mister Bellini, Lt. Bellini stop, stop, their all dead sir.
His head turned owl-like looking down on his hunting ground, on his killing fields. His body followed suit, slowly grinding his boot heel in the beaten grass, a 180 in military form. His cheek twitched spasmodically and droll cleaned a line stupidly down his chin. Clicking his heels he raised his right hand, still holding the empty weapon. His ring finger flicked forward. Ticking and pointing
Now for that fucking village.