Year of the Monkey by Ronald Argo

Author:Ronald Argo
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Cliff Edge Publishing via Indie Author Project
Published: 2013-06-03T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 15

Payne sat on his ankles on the rack, the AK-47 across his knees. He traced a finger along the length of the rusted side plating. He wondered if it was louder than a sixteen and if it jammed as easily in quagmire terrain, if its impact really did tear out more flesh. He tried to picture the man on the other side whose weapon this had been, how many of the imperialist enemy he’d snuffed and how much pain those Americans might have gone through, what thoughts occupied them in their dying moments. He wondered, too, why the Montagnard calling himself Sergeant Mike so freely had given him the weapon, if it were as valuable a trophy as Willingham made out. The Indian had all kinds of rifles and this one didn’t work; it probably meant nothing to him. The AK wasn’t as streamlined as the sixteen but it was about the same weight and handled similarly. He could fit only the very tip of his little finger into the muzzle.

Lolita was showing in the clubhouse next door. It was the closing scene with Quilty sadistically riding Humbert, playing him for the fool with yet another sinister deadly game. Their maniacal voices exploded through Payne’s window like staccato gunfire. They were fighting over the girl. No longer the nymphet, the young woman was now a wife and mother, struggling to have a normal life after the bizarre and abused merry-go-round of a life she’d been through with these two men. Both men would die because of the girl, because of their lust for her. Payne had seen the movie twice in the world. He had liked it even though it didn’t stand up to the book. It was not a popular movie at Headquarters and Headquarters Company; it wasn’t James Bond or a spaghetti western; only a handful of troops were watching it and they were quiet.

He wasn’t in the mood to see the movie again, for he felt a debasing sense of empathy for Humbert, whose perverse abuse of the child was all too freshly familiar to Payne. Presently the gunshots sounded and the movie ended and chairs shuffled in the clubhouse.

He put the weapon away and settled back with a new paperback. It had a prologue and prologues irritated and bored Payne, usually because they were preponderantly stuffy and unnecessary to the actual story. The first paragraph of this one confirmed it and he snapped pages to Chapter One. It was one of those recondite novels that shuffled time and tense and points of view like a deck of cards, for no better reason than to prove to the pissed-off reader that The Novel as we knew it, sure enough, was in its death throes. Fuck this shit. He sent the paperback flapping to the waste pile under Kink’s empty bunk, where it belonged, and dug out his battered copy of Huckleberry Finn.

But neither did he feel like reading of boyhood adventures.

The hootch was noisy; he could

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