The Brides

Vietnam - A Shau Valley - July 2nd 1967

The other guys are complaining about the heat. I'm lucky that I'm from Cut Off. I never thought that raking oysters with Dad while the sun beat down on me would pay off. I remember the sweat rolling down his wrinkled sunburnt neck. The water glittering like rhinestone church brooches around our aluminum boat. Seeing the girls heading down to Grande Isle with their smooth arms and fine hands holding cigarettes out of their car windows as the wind plucked their hair from the pins and scarves. They giggled when I saw them at the gas station in town. Their lips smoothed with pink lipstick. Their eyes hidden under the dark lenses of their horn-rimmed sunglasses.

I think about those girls a lot now in The Suck. After the rain comes down in cool sheets and the jungle creaks back to life, steam rising from our bare backs as we emerge from our strung-up tarpaulins like pale underground creatures, we pat our breast pockets for our Salems. I think about splitting a cigarette with Gwen in Ms. Mary's store. The only store in town with air conditioning. Her nipples poking through her blouse under the sheen of the thin skin of her chest. A cold IBC root beer pearled with condensation clutched in her hand.

I would give my left nut for air conditioning right now. I would kill a man to taste Gwen's smoky mouth. To press her under my body and slide into her. I would marry Gwen right now even though her letters are non-committal and bored. She's fucking some senator's son from Kentucky at college. She doesn't say that, but she talks about him. He'll never have split skin between his fingers and toes, leeching and burning pink as a newborn baby's mouth. He'll never carry a ruck that cuts into his shoulders or have a bullet tink against his steel pot, reminding him that he is going to die.

I guess it doesn't do me much good to be mad at him. I should be happy for this stranger. I should be happy for Gwen that she's found someone who can take care of her forever. I'm tired of all this.

Vietnam - A Shau Valley - July 3rd 1967

I was so tired last night that I swear I saw something in the sky. I was on fire watch, smoking a joint and dripping Tabasco sauce into my eyes to stay awake when through a break in the trees, I saw what I thought was meteor. The rain had let up, but the night sky was still dense with cloud cover. It seemed to hover and spin above the tree line and then darted back and forth in a zig zag pattern before it shot up and disappeared. I blamed it on the weed, but the more I think about it, the less I think it mattered. Reefer never made me see things. Not once.

I told Dippy about the meteor. He's from somewhere in California. It's hard to remember where exactly, but somewhere where he sees a lot of hippie tits. Can't be too cold, I guess.

He said that he saw a UFO once in the desert. He and his friends took their rabbit rifles out to shoot beer bottles and they drank more beer than shot bottles when a shining white tube appeared above them. He said the air around it wavered in clearish rainbow translucence, like oil on water. He and his friends couldn't look away, he said. The thing just hovered there, humming a perfect F note around them. The ground under their feet vibrated like a tuning fork, lifting tiny pebbles into the air. There was a flash and pure suffocating silence and there they were, standing in a perfect circle, their hands clamped to their ears. Dippy said that they all had something like a terrible sunburn on their cheeks and ears and arms, the skin peeling away. The beer had evaporated from all of the bottles and a searing flat burn ran up each of their palms where they held the brown glass.

They went to the hospital where the doctor told them they had radiation burns.

Now, Dippy is pretty colorful and sometimes tells tales, so I suppose I should take all this with a grain of salt. His eyes sort of glazed over when he told me about it. And the shape of the UFO sounded like what I had seen. I don't know. My paper is getting wet again and I need to help the other guys set up camp. All I ate today was one of those tropical Hershey's bars. Like Ovaltine on a sponge. Fucking disgusting.

Vietnam - A Shau Valley - July 4th 1967

The fourth of July. I'll bet Gwen is looking sleek in a little bikini by the lake with all her college friends. I'll bet they are all drinking cold beer and eating hamburgers. I'll bet Mama is frying red fish and Daddy is grilling sausages and my little sisters are sticky with ice cream. I'll bet that they are going to see the fireworks by the bay, saying a rosary against any storms churning up the brown gulf waters. My tags say Catholic, but I'm not so sure right now.

We're so far out in the field, the resupply won't be here for another few days. We are stuck with our C rations.

I try to make the best of it. It's very strange that most of us Louisiana boys know how to cook and the rest of them don't. That's why they call me Chef. I made toasted cheese sandwiches with canned bread and cheese. You just take that canned bread from the B-3 unit and the pimento cheese from the B-2 unit and make a few holes in the lids before you put them in an empty B-unit box and set it all on fire. Then you pour that melted cheese all over that bread and you have something warm. Something closer to home.

The rain came down in sheets today. We took off our clothes and rinsed our stinking bodies in the downpour. We are as thin and wiry as the enemy now, our ribs showing through the tops of our chests.

I am surprised that I still want to fuck. Sometimes I wake up with my dick in my hand, hard and ready. But for what? For who? I dreamed about the UFO, its lights flickering a white-gold halo in the humid air. I felt myself being lifted, weightless and clean in the white light. I was transported through an opening. It wasn't a door. It wasn't like that. No more than a mouth is door. There I felt a gentle pressing against my skin and I was surrounded by eyes and pale skin. Soft hands stroked me and a strange sound like starlings chittering on a line rose and fell in my ears. The heat in my belly and tension wrapped around my cock. The lights gleaming above me golden and mute. My heart a trapped bird.

Then I woke up.

The Suck contracting green and wet over me as the tatter of gunfire ticked through the heavy foliage.

My feet were bare and healed. Not a trace of trench foot. They were as smooth and dry as they were when I lay sprawled out listening to the Lone Ranger on the radio, my father nearby in his orange velveteen chair, smoking a cigarette.

I grabbed my M-16 and rolled out of my tent.

Vietnam - A Shau Valley - July 5th 1967

Am I going crazy? Is this it? Is this what they meant in our safety briefings?

They took us last night. It wasn't a dream. I don't think it was a dream. The streams of light flooded through the trees and drenched us in bleaching luminescence. Erasing our shadows so that we were nothing. Our shadows providing the backdrop for our continuation of this odd existence. Pure light is nothingness.

Some men are content here. They see the enemy. They smell the enemy. The enemy drives them to spray the jungle with bullets and torch the little huts with children streaming away from them like minnows from a lake-dipped hand. Not me. I cannot understand why we linger here. This is not our country with its purple mountains majesty. It is not my sun-warmed gulf with the infant sharks that nudge you as you swim to the bobbing orange buoy. It is not Dippy's gold drenched afternoons cut through with cold wind blowing from the river. It is not the flatness of the wind-swept plain bursting with the crisp early spring bloom. It is not ours to decide.

I think this is why they took us up up up into the ether. I think they know that we don't belong here. We are the lab rats that escaped their enclosures.

They took me and Dippy and Greener.

It was like the dream I had the night before, but I was certainly awake. Greener and Dippy and I found ourselves two miles from base camp, all wearing the others' uniforms. The smell of Greener's carefully rationed Murray's pomade on the collar. His dark hand tucked under my elbow, guiding me back to camp. My eyes jerking around in their own cold darkness. My sight came back within a few hours. I don't know if it was because of the experiments they ran or because it was like when Saul met God.

I want to be clear. I am in rapture. I am in love with these beings. Greener and Dippy are too. All we talk about is getting back to

them.

We have started calling them brides, because of their strange innocence, though we aren't sure if they are female or male. They seem to warp and shift according to your own desires. The darkest fantasies that you have never told anyone for fear of disgust or retribution, they know those. They fulfill those.

When they took us, we were up smoking and playing Gin Rummy while everyone else slept. It's hard to remember anything but the white light and the complete absence of sound. My body and arms were drawn upwards and the leash of gravity was unhooked. Like dragging socks off after a wearing them all day. Static and ozone smoothed over my skin and then I was there. On their ship. My back flat against a swath of some kind of cooling fabric. My camis had been stripped off me and the brides hovered around my prone body carefully dragging off my skivvies with fingers that flickered in and out. It's hard to explain. They looked almost like human women, but it was closer to featureless beings that had human features projected onto their pale skin. They wore gauzy dresses that slipped down over their strange high breasts, revealing purplish nipples.

I turned my head to see Dippy and Greener strapped to their own paper-thin floating platforms surrounded by brides. The room we were in was shaped like a bowl and the walls seemed to be made of the same fabric as the gurneys we were laying on. Greener mouthed my name and I his, but we were unable to to hear one another. Hands rushed over my face, hushing me with odd fragrant flutterings.

A silver cylindrical tube was brought to my mouth and the brides motioned for me to drink from it. I shook my head, fearful of the strange opaque liquid that sloshed up toward my lips. It smelled like vanilla and liver. The tallest one slid her finger into my mouth and drew my jaws apart to drip the strange drink into my mouth. It slid down my throat, cool and sweet and I felt my bone-tired limbs empty their soreness and the fetid fungal infections on my groin and between my fingers shrunk into healthy skin. My aching back eased and the blisters on my shoulders sealed and knitted together. The brides cooed and petted me, each of them stroking my hardening dick with feather-soft hands.

I moaned as they leaned over me, their breasts brushing against my naked skin. I turned to see Greener being led to the center of the concave chamber. The brides whispering around him and turning his hands upward to peer at and trace his palms. He was sporting a thick erection that bobbed under their touch as they drew their fingers up and down the shaft.

An opening like the one we were brought up through appeared in front of Greener and another bride stepped through. She was different from the others, more human. Her hair stood in a black halo of kinky curls and her amber eyes tipped upward at the corners. Her unusually long arms draped over Greener's shoulders as she leaned toward him with her full lips parted so that he could slide his tongue into her moist, soft mouth. His hands hovered over her upper arms, hesitant until she slid her palm over his member and stroked him. He gripped her and pulled her close; the hunger of The Suck pouring from him.

The brides that hovered above me chittered and moaned, tangling their long fingers in my past-regs hair. They pulled at my arms and motioned for me to get up and join Greener in the center of the room. The brides were sliding Dippy into a blanket and knotting the ends, swaddling him and working together to lift him toward a giant bride, who gathered him in her arms and pulled out her breast to nudge against his mouth until he took it greedily. She reached her giant hand into the blanket and rubbed his naked skin. He writhed and struggled against the tight silken bindings as the giant caressed him, still sucking on her huge pale blue breast.

I must have sighed or moved because suddenly all of own fantasies stood around me. Touchable. Real.

When I was about twelve, I found a paperback novel tossed away to the side of the road with two men on the cover, their hands entwined on the ripped cover. They stood over a prone, gently curving woman whose breasts poked through some gauzy fabric as she strained toward them, her fingers long and slender. They were laughing at her or smiling at her. I am unsure. I held the book in my hands and thumbed through the water-thickened pages, the ripple of of the soft yellowing paper against my fingertips.

The words turned into images in my mind as I devoured the text with the familiar fervor for reading that my father wished I had put into church or working on the truck or raking oysters.

Women with parted lips, watching men drive into one another before they turned to her. I think they were policemen. I think the women were of a profession I had no concept of since Daddy never let us go to New Orleans. Now I know.

I found myself transported into the role I longed for all those years ago.

By some miracle of technology I suppose, I felt the starched shirt of the policeman's uniform before I looked down at the dark cloth that covered my chest, startled by the glint of the gold star pinned above my heart. The brides changed into those darkest fantasies that I relieved myself of in the complete isolation of my own thoughts, while I stroked myself to a burst of pleasure.

The closest bride was no longer a bride, but a groom. His throat and jaws roughly shaven, as he reached for his shining black baton. He was, like the other beings, not quite human. His green eyes lacked pupils, and his fingers were strangely feminine, tipped with clean white fingernails. Like an odd copy. But the masculine smell of his skin was overwhelming as he neared me, swinging his baton and nodding at the bride sprawled on the floor, her knees clenched together as she feigned fear. Her skin was very creamy and fine, though it was oddly hairless.

"What should I do?" I asked my fellow policeman.

He nodded again to the woman. I shrugged, though I knew. I knew what he wanted me to do. Just like in the book, he gripped the back of my neck and forced me down to my knees in front of her and parted her legs with the baton. I felt my body responding, my heart beating, my cock stiffening at the sight of her. I reached to stroke her inner thigh with my knuckles, the police officer standing above us tapping his baton against his palm. The feel of female skin, silken and plaint glided under my hands as I reached up toward her breasts.

As I passed my hands over her chest, I realized that she had no heartbeat. I squeezed her breasts in my hands, kneading them, nuzzling against the high nipples, sliding each one into my hot mouth to suck and knead. Her breath quickened as she pushed me away and then drew me back into her slender arms, back and forth, back and forth until she drew me to her soft mouth lined with small teeth. I kissed her. I hadn't kissed a woman in years. Light bloomed behind my eyes with the sensation of it. The pressure of her lips and the riffle of her smooth fingertips up and down my sides.

Her body was lean and sinuous and her eyes almost aquamarine. She only had four fingers on each hand and smelled faintly like roses and turpentine.

I lingered here, terrified and aroused at her smell. She struggled against my thigh, rubbing her warm slit against me. I slid my hand toward the silky, wet crease, but stopped short. The policeman was stroking me with his baton, running it down my spine. My erection stiffened and bobbed as he leaned down to stroke my naked back with his hand.

His uniform crackled against me as our mouths met over the woman's sprawled form. She reached between us and slipped her hand around my cock and glided her hand down into his dark slacks. His tongue slid over mine, almost glassy in its smoothness. It seemed to fork and diverge in my mouth, touching the roof, the palate, the cheeks. Her hand twirled and stroked me, flicking the tip of my cock with her tongue, as the policeman cradled the back of my head in his hands.

He released me and nodded again at the woman.

Remembering the novel, I knew what came next and I was excited. I felt the color rise in my cheeks and looked around to see if Dippy and Greener could see this display of my innermost shame. I realized that they were wound up in their own. Greener was crawling across the glossy floor strung together with golden threads that wove around his muscular arms as the darker bride held some kind of gun to his temple. Her large maroonish nipples were pierced with large gold hoops that attached to the golden threads draped over Greener. Each move he made stretched the skin, which sent her into convulsive ecstasy, the gun pressing into his temple like an accusation as she writhed.

Dippy was being crushed between the giantess' breasts as the other brides took turns taking his stiff cock into their strange wide mouths as he dangled naked above them. They gripped his calves as he arched toward them, one of them pressing a silver cylinder against his anus as she sucked him.

The bride beneath me squirmed and sighed as the policeman handed me his baton and grinned a strange imitation of a human grin. His gums and teeth were all the same shade of blue-gray. Opaque milky tears dripped down the bride's cheeks as I held the baton across her chest and pressed her to the floor. Her hair spread out behind her in a pale halo as I held her there, feeling the blood rushing to my belly, feeling my cock throb and harden.

"You are being detained," I whispered.

The policeman pulled down the zipper of his dark slacks to reveal a very large member and kneeled over her her gasping face. He drove his cock into her mouth and put his hands on the baton as he pumped into her. I slid down her body and pulled up the gauzy fabric and bunched it around her middle to expose her what I knew was hiding under the clothing. A fully erect cock and a warm slit beneath it. The best of both worlds.

I took the member into my mouth and sucked, savoring the salty smoothness of it against the roof of my mouth. The bride pushed up into my mouth as I probed her gushing cunt and slipped two fingers inside. I reached up and felt for the baton, still drawing on the deliciously stiff cock, my lips wrapped around the head. My fingers closed around it and pulled it from under the policeman's grip, as he drove faster and harder into the bride's mouth.

I parted her with my fingers and slid the baton inside of her. The baton slipped in and out as I worked her and sucked her. She bucked under me and fluid rushed from her slit as she arched into orgasm. My mouth filled with briny liquid as she came, my own excitement mounting.

I kneeled between her spread legs and drove my cock into her slit and gripped her already hardening cock with my hand as I rode her. The police officer rocked backward for a moment as I drove into the hot wet crevice. Her sinewy body thrashed under me as I fucked her, her long elegant fingers pressing into my sides. The pressure built until I couldn't stand it any longer. The policeman dismounted from her mouth, noticing my building tension.

I turned her so that she was on all fours as the policeman strode around behind me, his cock glistening and smooth. His hands caressed the back of my neck as I slipped back into the bride, gripping her hips. Her skin was so smooth and hairless it felt almost false. The policeman breathed hot against my scalp, as he bent me and the bride forward together.