Monkey Brains

by

Kenneth James Crist

It rained the day we buried Freddy Tyrone. It was a cold, windy time, especially for Atlanta. I had driven twelve hundred miles to attend the funeral of the big black soldier whom I had called my brother. He would have done no less for me. In fact, we had both done the same for Couch, Hollywood and Sandoval. We were six men when we started, sharing a bond that only those who have survived combat can know. After Freddy, we were only two.

It was a military funeral, with all the pomp and ceremony due a warrior who had served his country so gallantly. After all the bullshit from the government over Agent Orange and its related diseases, it was good to see that they could at least bury him well.

After Taps had blown and the rifle squad had fired the salute, the officer presented Freddy’s widow with his ceremonial flag and it was over. I stayed around to try and say a few words to her, not that I could really offer much in the way of comfort, for I know my time is coming, too.

But then, when everyone had left the grave site, she did an amazing thing. She stepped up to the grave and threw his flag in with him and walked away clean. Whether this was a form of protest or a way of ending something so that she could begin anew, I never found out.

As I was leaving the cemetery, I heard a familiar, low trilling whistle that instantly yanked me backwards through a tunnel of time into Southeast Asia of twenty-five years ago. As I turned, I felt my skin crawl at the thought of other days of rain in the triple canopy jungle. Then I saw Chessie standing next to a faded blue Monte Carlo. I hardly recognized him, he was so thin and gaunt. The bones in his already lean face stood out, giving him a death’s-head look that was startling and more than a little scary. The eyes were the same though. They still held mockery and still showed his condescending attitude.

“Hey, you fuckin’ REMF,” he croaked. His disease was affecting his vocal cords, I supposed. We shook hands as we drew close together, then found that a handshake wasn’t enough. Not by half. We hugged each other in the rain like a couple schoolgirls, then finally we moved apart and he said, “Just us two now, huh, Cage?” He had always called me that, “cage” being a diminutive of my first two initials, K. J.

“Yeah,” I said nervously, “just us two.”

“Hey, got time for a drink? I saw a nice little tavern on the way out…”

I wasn’t planning to leave for home until next morning, so I said, “Yeah. Hell yes. Why not?”

“Okay,” he said, then he had a fit of coughing and when it had run its course, he smiled that Halloween, jack-o’-lantern smile at me and said, “Well, don’t just stand there, troop, go get yer car. I’ll wait on ya.”

I followed him several miles to what we used to call a roadhouse. Clapboard frame structure painted at least three colors, gravel parking lot, pink neon sign. “Cocktails”, with the little tipping stemware glass.

We sat away from the other six or so customers and as far from the juke as we could get. Bad enough to be drinking in the early afternoon on a rainy day in Georgia without listening to trucker shit on a Wurlitzer.

We hadn’t been there ten minutes before Chessie asked me, “Hey Cage, do you remember the monkey brains?”

It was a subject I had been afraid he would bring up. How could I forget?

I think the worst thing about the jungle was the smell. Everything dies and everything decomposes, but in the jungle the heat and humidity make it happen much more quickly. Often it was like the air was a solid rather than a mixture of gases, that had to be forcibly dragged into the lungs, and the oxygen wrenched from it. It would be so still that one of the guys could fart, way back at the end of the line and somebody up front would giggle. The humidity was a constant cloying drip of moisture that promoted fungal growth and all its related discomforts. And there were the bugs. Things that whined and chewed, flew and stung, scuttled and bit. And some that just sat and looked stupid.

Snakes and “fuck-you” lizards. Even the occasional tiger, so they say, not that I ever saw one. If you see one, you’re probably meat. You kind of get used to all of it, in a tight-assed, on-edge sort of way. You walk on the balls of your feet and you learn to always look for cover, so that when you start taking rounds you have somewhere to jump.

Long-range recon was a bitch. We couldn’t wear our own uniforms, so we made shit up. I had German boots and a French pack. No I.D. at all. They called it recon. Actually, we just went out after Charlie and the NVA, in the jungle, on their terms. We got to know our way around almost like the natives. And we met the Montagnards. The people of the mountains. They were as different from the other Vietnamese as they could possibly be. Primitive. Uncivilized, according to the Viets of the cities and the farms.

They had resisted the occupation of the French and the Chinese and the Catholic Church, and God only knows who else. Largely they had been left alone to practice their own culture of strangeness back in the very depth of the dripping dark closet that was Vietnam and Laos. Theirs was a stone-age culture in a turbo-jet world, surviving through isolation and superstition and plain toughness.

We spent a lot of time stoned. I offer that not as an excuse but as a reason why we did some of the things we did. Like taking the ears of the soldiers we killed. We should have known better, but we were kids and most of the time we were scared shitless. The ears were a form of bravado, I guess. Showing everyone, ourselves mostly, how tough and cold we were. What a bunch of stone killers we had become. We strung the ears and wore them as medallions. In the stink of the jungle, you could hardly smell them at all.

Chessie’s real name was Charles Rogers. He came from Chesapeake Bay and he was a hell of a soldier. He was on his second tour when I joined the company and he had no use for REMFs or office pogues. Rear Echelon Mother-Fuckers. That took in almost all officers, most of the Army and all of the Air Force. He would walk point as much as everyone else, even though technically he was our leader and he didn't have to.

Freddy Tyrone Jackson was the M-60 machine gunner when we were on regular ops. He could hump that heavy gun all day like it was nothing and carry a shitload of other stuff, too. When we went on long range ops, though, he carried a Chinese AK-47 like the rest of us. We did things for the CIA, although they don’t admit it, and we never carried American weapons when we did.

Couch, whose name was pronounced “cooch” was small, red-haired and vicious. In a firefight, he had the coolest head and used the least ammo of any of us and he still got his share of kills.

Hollywood was James Vine. He came from California and he had a thing for sunglasses. Must have owned thirty pairs. He was stoned a lot and he supplied most of the company with weed. Sandoval was his buddy and they hung together really tough, back to back against whatever came to us. It’s good, in those conditions, to always know your back is covered.

We were within a few miles of the Laotian border on one of our ops. Trouble was, we weren’t real sure which side of the border we were on. There was no reference point anyhow and Charlie didn’t care, so why should we? We weren’t politicians.

We had seen a lot of signs indicating Charlie was in the area and we were being damned careful. One thing about being stoned on weed, you can do it and still be alert and cautious. I found that when I smoked, the jungle colors became more vivid and anything that didn’t belong stood out more. I think it also augmented my hearing and maybe my sense of smell. I got to where I could smell Charlie anyway. It was their diet, I think, all that hot shit they ate, sweating out of their pores.

We had just waded a small stream when Chessie raised a hand and everybody squatted and froze. There was a trail right there and we had almost stepped onto it, but now he was holding us up. Behind me, I heard Freddy’s safety click off.

Then, I saw Chessie slowly stand and lower his weapon and two Montagnards stepped out of nowhere and into our midst. Their garb consisted of loincloths and cast-off bits of uniform and gear. Soon we were joined by six more tribesmen and Chessie actually began to converse with them, using signs, a few French words and some of their own strange dialect, filled with clicking consonants and sounds I couldn’t hope to duplicate. We were invited to come to their village and stay for supper. They said their hunting had been good this day and there would be a feast. By the time we reached their village, it was getting dark and there was little to see anyway, just a few primitive huts and some cooking fires. Kids running around entirely naked and as comfortable in their nudity as the pigs that were always rooting around and underfoot.

We sat with the village elder, or father and they passed around some of their own liquor. It was potent shit and after we had already had a few swigs from the old skin, Chessie told us they made it by chewing up leaves and spitting the result into a bottle to ferment. Hollywood got out his stash and we passed around smokes until dinner time. By the time we ate, everyone was pretty well in the bag and it wouldn’t have mattered what they fed us.

We ate off of big dark green leaves that we laid across our laps. There were no utensils, other than fingers. We had given them what rations we had, so there was a strange mixture of things like tiny slices of pound cake alongside huge beetle shells stuffed with a gruel made of rice and spices. Eventually, some roasted meat was added, and Freddy Tyrone asked what it was. He knew they sometimes ate dogs, and he was being distrustful.

There was an animated conversation, then Chessie told us the meat was monkey brains. Tyrone was going to set his aside, but Chessie quietly warned us that what we had before us was several day’s worth of meat for these people and to refuse it would be a dire insult. So, that night, we all cheerfully ate monkey brains. I didn’t think it was too bad, really. A little undercooked, maybe.

Late in the evening, I stepped away a few feet into the jungle to piss and I saw the skulls of the monkeys, roasted and broken open to get at the brains, then discarded. Pretty damn big monkeys, I thought, but then I was pretty well stoned and not everything I saw that night really sunk in until later.

We slept there in the village that night and got up and moved out in the first gray light of morning. The humidity was thick enough to see as a thin fog between the trees. Also between the trees, a sight we hadn’t seen the night before. Seven North Vietnamese bodies, hanging upside down, minus their heads.

“I see those fucking Dink bodies in my dreams, man.” Chessie said, deep into his third shot and beer.

“I think we should talk about something more pleasant.” I said.

“Do you have the dreams?”

“What dreams?” I wasn’t admitting anything at that point.

Chessie leaned across the table, bringing his cigarette smoke closer and staring into my eyes. “The dreams about the jungle and running from the Montagnards.”

“No,” I lied, “I never have those.”

“Yeah, bullshit. Freddy Tyrone had ‘em. Sandoval had ‘em. They told me so.”

“Freddy Tyrone had brain cancer. Agent Orange got him.”

“Yeah, maybe. Maybe not.”

“What’re you tryin’ to say, Chessie? Spit it out, man. Don’t play with my dick.”

He leaned back and huffed out a lungful of smoke, then glared at me. “We ate their fuckin’ brains, man! Are you stupid, or what?”

“Those were monkey brains. Nothing more.”

“Then why are we all fuckin’ dyin’, man?”

“I told ya. Agent Orange. Goddamn defoliant shit they sprayed over us.”

“Then why do I dream in Vietnamese, with the Montagnards chasin’ me through the forest? Huh? You got an answer for that?”

“I don’t know, Chessie. Nam was a traumatic time for all of us—we were young, and away from home for the first time…”

“Yeah, maybe it was your first time, ya fuckin’ REMF.” He signalled the barmaid for another round. “I’m tellin’ ya, we got some kinda curse or somethin’.”

“Bullshit.” It was all I could think of to say.

The dreams have become more frequent now. You’d think that the longer a guy was away from that place, the less he’d see it in his dreams. It doesn’t work that way.

Chessie was right, I’m afraid, and for that reason, I didn’t go to his funeral. I used the excuse that the pain was too bad for me to make the trip, but like my opinion about the monkey brains, it was all bullshit. I knew what we really had for supper when we dined at the pleasure of the Montagnards. I guess I knew it the morning after we ate there.

When I dream now, I’m a small, frightened Viet Cong guerrilla and I’m always running. The Montagnards are back there, somewhere in the jungle, stalking, chasing, whistling and calling in their soft voices, closing in, always getting nearer. My terror is complete.

I’ll just be glad when it’s all over. And I most fervently hope the dreams can’t follow me to my grave.

Kenneth James Crist is Editor of Black Petals Magazine and is on staff at Yellow Mama ezine. He has been a published writer since 1998, having had almost two hundred short stories and poems in venues ranging from Skin and Bones and The Edge-Tales of Suspense to Kudzu Monthly. He is particularly fond of supernatural biker stories. He reads everything he can get his hands on, not just in horror or sci-fi, but in mystery, hardboiled, biographies, westerns and adventure tales. He retired from the Wichita, Kansas police department in 1992 and from the security department at Wesley Medical Center in Wichita in 2016. Now 80, he is an avid motorcyclist and handgun shooter. He is active in the American Legion Riders and the Patriot Guard, helping to honor and look after our military. He is the owner of Fossil Publications, a desktop publishing venture that seems incapable of making any money at all. His zombie book, Groaning for Burial, has been released by Hekate Publishing in Kindle format and paperback late this year. On June the ninth, 2018, he did his first (and last) parachute jump and crossed that shit off his bucket list.