E Michael Fisher & James Clifford Bird Aliens, the Other White Meat

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and eating at the local burger joint.
Returning to camp after his leave, Private Stool felt like he d been in heaven and got on the transport
plane with a smile on his face. He arrived in Vietnam at the height of the Tet Offensive in 1968.
Clay and his fellow raw recruits were immediately sent forward to reinforce a beleaguered position
near Hue that was under intense assault and had taken heavy casualties. His platoon soon came under
mortar fire, and Clay watched as one by one Charlie walked rounds into the shell holes where his buddies
had taken shelter. Sitting alone in his hole, Clay closed his eyes and willed himself into invisibility.
He fantasized that he was back in Delaware at Rehoboth Beach with Plucky, but couldn t hear what
she was saying because of the roar of the surf. The sound of the ocean in Clay s hallucination grew louder
until it was a deafening roar, and when the roaring jet dived and laid a belt of napalm on top of the Viet
Cong position, Clay was already catatonic.
He didn t hear the screaming enemy soldiers as they ran like flaming scarecrows and didn t witness
them falling to the ground like smoldering matchstick men. Clay didn t know that his comrades were
masses of bloody pulp.
He just laid in the fetal position in the bottom of his hole.
* * * *
Six months later, Clay awoke. Sergeant? Sgt. Brunswick&
Sorry, son, but your Sgt. Brunswick ain t here, the grizzled Korean War veteran in the
neighboring bed spoke kindly. You been hollerin that name for half the year now& it s the only sign of
life you ever showed till now. My name s Seth, Seth Poole.
Clay turned to look at his neighbor and beheld a dark face with a benevolent smile that reminded him
of Uncle Ben. He sat upright and was surprised to be in a bed and not in the shell crater. Looking down at
his hands lying atop the bedclothes, he realized he was visible again. He made weak attempts to lift his
arms, but his muscles had atrophied and he had motor control problems. The ultimate horror was when
he discovered he was wearing a diaper and it needed changing.
Where am I?
You re right where you ought to be, in the sigh-key-at-trick ward of the VA hospital, in Elsmere,
Delaware.
Holy shit.
Clay had finally come to his senses in a manner of speaking.
A nurse rushed to attend to the tangle of hoses. Don t worry about being disoriented; they all wake
up that way. She smiled, leaned him back, and put a cool compress on his head. It takes a long time to
get over something like what you went through.
But he never quite did.
When his doctor had prescribed exercise, the orderlies put him to work pushing a broom through the
labyrinthine hospital. He took to the janitor trade. For the better part of his waking hours each day, Clay
roamed the halls in an apparently random fashion, slowly pushing the broom ahead of him.
He became a familiar sight in the institution. Though obviously disturbed, he was diagnosed as
harmless, so no one objected to his having the run of the place. And he was grateful for belonging
somewhere.
After spending most of his adult life, over twenty years, as a ward of the hospital, he was finally
released and turned out of his beloved home. It wasn t that he suddenly became capable of living on his
own, but federally mandated budget reductions had forced the closing of the psychiatric wing.
In one way, Clay was lucky to have gotten out of the hospital alive, for soon after awakening from his
coma, he was accidentally given a triple dose of a powerful tranquilizer.
A resident on his rounds discovered the mistake and called a code blue. The cardiac cart and
defibrillator were wheeled in, and as the doctor was preparing a syringe of adrenaline, Clay protested,
You ain t fixin to poke me with that thing are you?
The doctor was astounded that his patient was so surprisingly alert. You ve been given a lethal
dosage of a strong sedative&
Hell& I feel fine, Clay was keeping a wary eye on the needle, and I ll stay that way if you keep
that thing to yourself.
Extensive medical tests revealed that Clay had two livers. This rare condition was the reason for his
improbable resistance to the drug, for this mutation rendered him able to metabolize massive amounts of
drugs and alcohol.
Once expelled from the hospital, he took advantage of his condition to process the cheap liquor he
bought with his meager disability pension. Clayton Stool found himself on his own for the first time. Over
the next few weeks, he wandered gradually southward until he was back down state in Mumford,
Delaware. At least there the terrain was familiar, even if he didn t expect to see anyone he knew.
Delaware is a schizophrenic state, for it is actually two states in one. Above the Chesapeake and
Delaware canal, the state is an industrialized urban population center that sprawls across the state line
from Philadelphia. Below the canal, the state spreads out into sparsely populated farmlands. Like Siamese
twins joined at the canal, the rolling hills and yuppified subdivisions of the upstate region are at constant
odds with the bucolic flat lands and Mayberry-esque towns down state. When two Delawareans meet, the
first order of business is to determine if they are AC or BC above the canal or below the canal .
Clay returned to the site of the Stool residence, but his childhood home was no longer there. Had he
bothered to look for his mother, he would have found out that she had died. Few people in Mumford
remembered him, but those who did were not surprised to hear he had been in a mental institution since [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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