In Pharaoh's Army by Tobias Wolff

Author:Tobias Wolff
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9780307763754
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2010-09-01T10:00:00+00:00

DOC MACLEOD AND I went into My Tho for some fish soup that evening. As we drove in from the airfield it started to mist up and by the time we finished eating rain was falling in sheets and the sky was black. The hot soup, together with the rain pounding on the roof, made me heavy-limbed and thoughtful. I stared out the window while Doc Macleod worked on a model plane he’d produced from his bag. He always had a model going; he said it kept his hands steady. A column of Vietnamese soldiers walked down the street, rifles slung upside down beneath their glistening ponchos.

I said, “I wonder what made his hair turn white like that?”

“What unbearable experience, you mean? What terror too great for mortal man?”

“Something turned his hair white.”

“I’ll give you the short answer, laddy. That’s the one you’ll think you understand. Genes.”

“I know that’s the usual explanation.”

“The only explanation, boyo.”

“The only scientific explanation, you mean.”

“Don’t be a silly cunt.”

“There are cases.”

He put down the model. “You can’t be serious.”

“There are.”

“Christ!” He threw himself back hard against the chair and looked around at the waiter as if to call him as a witness to my stupidity.

“I know of one personally.”

“Oh you do, do you? You didn’t see it happen, did you? No. How curious. Every mother’s son personally knows of a case, and nobody has seen it happen. You know what I fucking hate?” He leaned toward me. “More than anything else, sonny, I hate the condescension of ignorant sissies with all their more things in heaven and earth Horatio bullshit. It’s too much to bear. You want a mystical explanation? Call it fate. Say, ‘It was written.’ That would be the whole bloody truth.”

“It happened to someone in my ex-fiancée’s family. Not an actual family member—”

“Don’t!” He put his hands over his ears.

This conversation passed from my mind until just after Tet, when I was searching through one of the makeshift hospitals in My Tho for some people who had disappeared without trace. I was dull from the smell of carbolic and sepsis and from the sight of all these bereft, mutely suffering people with their terrible wounds and lopped limbs. It was odd to feel the wholeness of my body as I made my way among them. And then I saw Doc Macleod across the room, walking regally between a row of cots. He saw me at the same time and stopped short. “My God, man,” he said. “Your hair! It’s white as snow!” He caught me completely flat-footed, and before I could stop myself I felt my hand fluttering toward my head. He smiled and shook his finger at me and moved off down the aisle, trailed by a fussing retinue of Vietnamese doctors and nurses. He was in his glory.

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