A Rare Vintage

Mortuary Affairs Specialist Corporal Alan Donohue knew he was dead.

He felt certain as he 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.

“Looks like he drank himself to death,” Sanders muttered, handing Friedl a bag for the bones.

“Yea, looks like one of theirs,” Friedl observed, “Do we need to?”

“Call me superstitious, but I think everyone deserves to get buried,” Sanders said, shoving the bag into Friedl’s hands. Swearing under his breath, he wrapped his hand around the left tibia and tore it from the vines that had coiled themselves around the bone. He tossed it into the bag with annoyance. He shook his head and approached one of the crates and stuck a knife into a seam. It flaked away like burned skin, covering his glasses with brown dust, “Termites,” he grumbled, brushing his face, “Let’s get this over with.”

Donohue and Jones nodded. The men trained their guns on the crate. Sanders slipped the blade into the wedge where the box had been nailed shut and pried it open.

When the crate finally cracked, Donohue and the others looked inside.

“Definitely, not the reds I was expecting,” cracked Jones.

The opened crate contained twenty-five wine bottles.

Donohue pulled one out, “1961 Château…Châteauneuf…du…Fucking French. I’m guessing this is fancy.”

Sanders tilted his glasses down his straight nose and nodded, “One of the fanciest.”

“God bless the civilizing force for having its priorities in order,” Donohue shook his head in disbelief.

Across from him, Lyman uncorked a bottle with his utility knife. The cork came out with a satisfying PLOP, making the men turn their heads in his direction, in time to catch the boy take a hearty swig.

“What?” he asked, wiping his mouth on his sleeve, his words defiant. Even from that distance, the scent of wine curled into Donohue’s nostrils, making him salivate. It was a strange urge. He hadn’t felt the need to drink, or eat, in days.

Lyman passed the open bottle to him. Without hesitating, Donohue squeezed his eyes and wrapped his lips around the mouth of the bottle. Earth, tobacco leaf, and dried fruit exploded on his tongue. A tingling burn snaked its way down his throat and into his stomach.

Donohue’s eyes opened wide, pupils deep and black. His smile ferocious, he took another deep swig. His heart hummed, and his limbs felt electric, saturated by a feeling of normalcy. Of life.

“Are we sure that these bottles haven’t been tampered with?” Jones asked. His voice sounded far away.

“Looking at the wax seals, I’d say they’re good to go. And with all due respect, if you don’t, then I will,” Friedl said.

Jones shrugged, “Go for it. I don’t drink.”

“So, what do we do with all this?” asked Sanders, examining the bottle he’d just drank from.

By the time they emerged from the cellar with three of the wine crates, the Huam Long looked like a gold thread. They placed the crates on the roots of the Banyan and drank as they sawed through the bark to remove the bodies from the tree.

Violently, they hacked through wood and bone. Nothing was made whole or left intact. Banyan sap and oozing flesh mingled and glistened in the twilight.

Even Jones, who drank none of the wine, said or did nothing to correct their carelessness, although Donohue could tell he disapproved.

It was late when they finished bagging the last of the body parts. With the truck loaded and remains secured, there was no reason to stay.

Still, the men armed themselves with more bottles and marched down to the edge of the river to wash themselves from the mess, stripping off their uniforms and boots. Their bare pink and black bodies convulsed with hoarse, wine-soaked laughter.

Donohue watched from a flat rock located in the center of the current as they splashed in the Huam Long’s evening tide like savage children. Waving his undershirt at them like a conquering flag, he barely noticed the battery of empty bottles drifting past him like green submarines on a mission to sink memory, their labels peeling back bit by bit, the ink fading away.

Jones came into the deep water with his ever-present cigarette pressed in between his yellowed teeth. With a grunt, he dog paddled out inch meal to where Donohue sat. He pulled himself up and sat back on his bare heels on the flat rock. Under the silver cast of the moon, with his tags chiming between his thighs and smoke curling around his nostrils, Jones looked like an obsidian idol. “It almost feels normal,” he said, in wonder.

The smoke wafted around them.

Donohue nodded with sleepy contentment, “I haven’t felt so alive in a long time,” he looked at Jones stone face, the corners of his eyes glowing like waxing gibbous slivers, “Why so se-serious?”

“None of what we’re feeling right now is real. I’d hate to disappear in a place like this because we confused a drop of normal among the horrible, fucked up sea of the real,” Jones said, tossing his cigarette into the water.

Donohue frowned as he curled up on the rock, “No one is disappearing. We did our job. We’re taking a break, we’ll head back in an hour, and we’ll be on leave in a week. Easy Peasy. And I only feel a little queasy.”

Jones snorted. He looked over at Donohue, who had laid back on the rock. The empty bottles circled above the Corporal like a halo, “One hour. I’ll be back.”

Donohue nodded, “Ok, baby, bring me back something to drink,” half-awake, he called out as Jones dog paddled back out into the current, “And don’t be engaging in any necro foolery while I’m gone!”

“It’s necrophilia,” Jones called back, unamused.

And amid the black and blue stillness of the sky and the water, dotted by the pale constellations of fireflies, Donohue finally slept.

The shrill call of howler monkeys blasted overhead like air raid sirens. The multi-legged shadows of hand-sized spiders darted across the tree-trunks, misdirecting their gun fire. Little by little, the men from the platoon disappeared. Until only Donohue and Jones were left, and they were hungry.

From the void, a tree emerged. It was full of massive, yellow fruit.

Despite Jones’s admonitions, Donohue stepped up to it. Enthralled, he pulled one down from a branch.

It was as big as a toddler. Setting it down, he took no time sticking his knife in it, his mouth watering at the sight of the white pulp.

Until it began to seep a bright pink discharge.

Until the fruit began to scream.

Donohue recoiled. He stuck his hands into the slit he’d carved and opened the fruit.

A man, perhaps an enemy soldier, perhaps one of their own, was encased like a pit in the center. But Donohue was too hungry to care. He reached in and began to eat, first around the man, then the man himself. Fruit and flesh were spongy, warm, and indistinguishable. He gave some to Jones, who refused.

Donohue looked back at the tree, grinning, his face bright red like a child who has eaten too much jam. The rest of the fruit began to quiver and scream. The smell of rot and the sound of weeping filled the air.

And a white, burning light clattered around him.

“Doc—”

Clink, clink, clink, like bottles falling off a high shelf.

“Doc, wake the fuck up. Something is happening to the men.”

The dust from the dream cleared. Donohue shot up, clutching his rifle. The atmosphere crackled in time with the heavy beating of his heart. It had been a long time since he’d dreamed.

Empty and half-drunk bottles surrounded him and twinkled at the base of the flat rock where he’d been napping.

Despite all he’d drank, he had no hangover and felt as if he could run all the way back to his farm in Kansas, if necessary. He reached out and grabbed an open bottle. But as he was about to take a drink, a rank odor wafted out. Gagging, Donohue tipped the bottle over.

A coagulated red mess oozed onto the rock, like blood or sap which had congealed after being left in the open air for too long.

“What the hell was in that wine?” He mumbled to himself. He reached for another bottle, with the label half-peeled back. Gently, Donohue pulled on it, only for it to disintegrate into a mush rice paper. The ink streaked the green glass like dark tears.

Forged.

“I don’t know, but it was something bad. They’re all sick,” Jones stammered.

“What?” Donohue sat up on the rock confused.

“Donohue?!” He heard him. It was Lyman. He was crossing the river in the direction of Donohue and Jones, and he looked bloated, disfigured, and yellow.

Like a fruit that’s ready to be picked, Donohue thought.

But before either of them could tell him to stop, Lyman began to vomit a spindly, black mass.

Donohue jumped into the cold water, right behind Jones. The shock sent tremors that racked his back and arms, which persisted until he reached the still-vomiting Lyman.

“What the fuck,” Jones muttered, shivering but not from cold.

By the time they got to Lyman, he was dead. Roots extended from his mouth burrowed deep into the mud. Thin lines of blood ran down the bark.

Donohue and Jones ran up the embankment, where they heard the chorus of retching and heaving.

Jones tried to pull the bark out of one of the men’s mouths, so bloated and misshapen that it was impossible to tell who he was. With each piece removed, more came tumbling out like a violent waterfall of wood and blood.

Donohue stood frozen and watched, unsteady, as Jones scrambled. For whatever reason, Donohue couldn’t move.

“Help me, man!” Jones called out.

Then, a bullet whizzed past Jones face, “Incoming!” he yelled and dropped to his stomach, pulling Donohue down with him.

The gunfire increased in tempo, they crawled on their stomachs to the edge of the banana crop, “We need to go into the jungle, now!” screamed Jones.

Donohue agreed. He understood now. For the first time in months, he felt fear. A raw, primal fear of dying. It flapped in a screeching panic at the base of his throat, soaked by the acidic rise and fall of the wine that grouted the lining of his stomach. He shivered and looked at the chittering tree line, full of horror and hesitation, “We need to find another route,” he whimpered and rolled into a patch of nearby reeds.

“What?!” Jones yelled at him.

All at once, the truck they’d parked at the front of the estate exploded. The blast was followed by a great roar. Donohue shivered and dug himself deeper into the reeds. As much as the gunfire above allowed, he turned his head.

The Banyan tree writhed, twisted, and extended some of its aerial roots out into the jungle. It dragged out one of the men shooting at Donohue and Jones from the tree line. Ignoring his screams, it wrapped itself taught around his neck until, like the couple they had cut down, the man was drained arid and half absorbed into the bark.

Jones, who had dropped to his belly next to Donohue in the reed patch, blinked and rolled over onto his back.

With his thin fingers he pulled at Donohue’s uniform and whispered, “Buddy, I know this is some shit we’ve never seen before. But we need to go. On three?”

Donohue nodded, knowing what that Jones meant, “One!”

They ran until the jungle closed around them with its green belly. And for once, Donohue ran faster than Jones because he very much wanted to live. He ran until Jones voice was an echo ricocheting high off trees. Yet, despite being so very far ahead of Jones, he still managed to hear the click of the rusted spring.

A white scalpel slit the landscape with a shriek. It knocked the Corporal off balance, sending him sprawling stomach-first into a cluster of rattan vines. When he opened his eyes, a curtain of brown smoke clouded his field of vision. He reached up and touched his left earlobe. His fingers came away wet and red. Blast must have perforated my eardrums, he thought.

Donohue moved in the direction where he last saw Jones.

But all that remained was his top half, balanced on the lip of a crater, looking like a red ulceration on the jungle floor. Jones viscera threaded from his torso into the dirt like a Banyan sapling.

Donohue sucked air through his teeth and nodded. He fished around his pants for three dollars and a pack of cigarettes and tucked them in Jones’s jacket, “Always M.A.S., Never Menos.”

He yanked Jones’s dog tags and put them in his pouch and stood up shaking, disoriented. The silence that enveloped him was like a damp wool blanket that trickled from his ears down his neck.

Suddenly, a zinging pain pierced through his shoulder and made him flop face-first into the mud.

When he woke up, he was sitting alone in the wine cellar. Donohue tried to stand up but couldn’t.

Something pinned his legs down into the dirt, right in the exact spot where they’d found the pile of bones.

Next to him was a full wine bottle.

Donohue flailed and reached for it. But he was too weak to grasp it. Then, he looked up and flinched.

An enemy soldier bent down to pick up the bottle, waft it, and press a cork into it. He turned around and looked at Donohue. Smiling, the unnamed soldier shook the bottle in his face and spoke in broken English, “Dead who refuse to die make strongest drink.”

From above the open cellar door, Donohue heard someone call out in the local tongue. Whatever was said made the soldier in the cellar move quicker. Then he looked down.

Black roots had woven into his thighs and ribs, stripping away his green uniform and pink flesh like grape skin, absorbing him into the Banyan’s system. The ends of each dark tendril dumped a thick, red liquid into a waiting bottle.

“Come on, man”

The enemy soldier stopped what he was doing and looked at him perplexed, “Come. On, man,” he parroted back.

Donohue gritted his teeth, “Cut me lose. We didn’t kill anyone. We clean up the dead.”

The soldier shook his head, responding in clipped English, “Tree lives. We live.”

Donohue looked on, exasperated, “It ate one of your own, maybe more. Why don’t you burn it down?”

The soldier shrugged, “Tree is tricky. But mostly good. To us. Not you. And you are all same.”

Donohue squeezed back tears and plopped on his back. Then, with difficulty, he propped himself on his elbows. “Wait,” realizing his situation was terminal, the Corporal fished around his jacket pocket. He plucked out a piece of paper and pencil.

Frantically, he began to write down the names of his dead friends.

Jones, III Jerome.

Lyman, Richard

On and on, he scrawled the ten names.

“Wait,” he called out to the enemy soldier, who had started to walk toward the vine which led out of the basement.

Donohue waved the small square of paper at him, “Please. At least, just tack it to the frame of the house.”

With thin, dirty fingers, the soldier took it, looked at Donohue and then at the list. Then he walked up to a cluster of collecting bottles, “This? Lyman. This. Friedl. This? Maybe. Sanders. No Jones.” He crumpled the paper and tossed it to the side. Then he walked up to the vine, he looked at Donohue one last time, “Too much drink bad for you,” the soldier called out laughing, “and all of you drink much!”

Enraged, Donohue threw a full bottle. It ricocheted on the cluster and hit the stone wall, exploding in a red and green mist.

Clink, clink, clink.

The soldier swore and disappeared up the vine.

Donohue sat alone in the dark cellar. He stretched as much as he could to reach for more wine, and as the roots made their way through his flesh and organs with a mechanical indifference, Donohue drank, and drank, and drank, until the faces of those he’d lost were no longer smudges, but a clearly defined circle of grins.

That wondered, “What the heck happened to him?”

That inferred, “Termites.”

That laughed, “Son of a bitch, drank himself to death.”

Donohue wanted to respond to each of them. But the Banyan had left him with no throat with which to speak and, eventually, to drink. He realized that he was as hollowed out and nameless as the unlabeled bottles that continued to bob and drift like shiny, green flotsam on the golden Huam Long.

He closed his eyes and let himself be carried further downstream and on his last breath, which seemed to take decades, he opened his eyes. A thin, gauzy sheet fell over his face with a blinding starkness. The scent of isopropyl alcohol and lemons blanketed his failing nostrils. He lay flat on his hospital bed. The endless tubes coiling in and out of him made him look like a plastic patch of jungle. But within him, the endless coiling and churning he could only define as a roiling thirst had begun to settle.

Jones’s dark hand placed three dollars and a cigarette into Donohue’s striped pajama pocket. Leaning on his cane, his leg permanently damaged from a shrapnel injury sustained almost fifty years ago, he got up.

He’d been sitting next to Donohue for days until he’d finally passed. The poor fucker’s problem had never been combat injuries. It had always been spirits, human and distilled. The same could be said for a lot of the other men. At least they’d had each other’s miserable company for as long as they had.

Jones patted his front shirt pocket and pulled out a cigarette. Suddenly, he began to cough, choking. Wiping his lips, he struggled to chuckle, and it’s not like I’m too far behind either. And before setting Donohue out to drift forever, he whispered, “See you soon, Corpsefucker.”

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