He said I should have gone back to Vietnam with him, because it would have given me closure. I told him I couldn’t and never would be able to go.
Then he brought up Clayton Fire Bear, which sort of caught me by surprise, since I didn’t even really remember telling Frank about that no-good red Indian motherfucker. I mentioned him to you a few times already. Fire Bear was the one who used to scalp Vietcong.
“You really still have Fire Bear’s knife in your possession?” Frank asked when I didn’t say anything. “You kept saying his name in the hospital when you first woke up. You asked me to locate Fire Bear when I visited you postsurgery. Do you remember telling me about the knife?”
I didn’t remember telling Frank to locate Fire Bear, nor did I remember anything else about my postoperation experience, but I sure as shit still had that big Indian’s knife, and I told Frank so.
“Don’t you think you should give it back?” he said. Frank was always harping on closure when it came to me and all things Vietnam, so this conversation didn’t surprise me one bit. And yet he really didn’t understand the full scope of what he was asking me to do.
Back in Vietnam, you could smell death and decay wherever Clayton Fire Bear went, because of the crusty Vietcong scalps hanging from his belt. I don’t even think his kind of Indian used to scalp people back in the day, but Indians sort of got lumped together in the jungle. I don’t mean that they stuck all the Indians into separate Indian platoons, but that non-Indian soldiers said the same shit to every Indian they saw in the jungle. We called them all “Chief,” which I’d later learn was offensive, and often times Indians would be given more dangerous jobs, like walking point, because everyone thought they had a sixth sense, when they didn’t have shit and could die just as easily as your average white soldier who had bought the bullet. And I would later learn that this wore on the Indian soldiers and made them feel low and excluded. So not only were they dealing with all the stress of fighting yellow men in the jungle, they also had to manage the misinformed expectations of their fellow US soldiers who had watched too many Hollywood cowboys and Indians on TV.
I’m not going to tell you what tribe Clayton Fire Bear belongs to, nor am I going to tell you his real name, because he and I now have an understanding that I will not violate.
I really did have the hunting knife Fire Bear used on his Vietcong victims. It’s housed in a beautiful leather sheath with his real last name written on it in what looks like fading green Magic Marker. It has a bone handle. Six inches of silver shine like a mirror. Out of habit, I always kept it sharp enough to split a hair. That knife had been with me for almost fifty years, and here is the official story of how it came to be in my possession:
Back in the Vietnam jungle, when everyone finally got sick of the putrid smell of rotting human scalps, my superiors, in all their infinite wisdom, one day put me in charge of disciplining Clayton Fire Bear. From above came these orders: “Break the wild Indian.”
On the particular base where this all went down, there was a raised platform of sorts where all of the men used to play cards and smoke. This wasn’t top construction, to say the least. The cracks were wide, and cigarette butts would fall through between the wooden boards.
After I confiscated Fire Bear’s weapons, I made him strip. Then I tied the big Indian’s hands behind his back and, at gunpoint, made him slither around in the sand like a snake, wearing nothing but tighty-whities, picking up with his teeth—one at a time—all of the butts under the platform. Fire Bear had to lift his head high enough to deposit each butt into a metal bucket that the Vietnamese jungle sun had heated up enough to burn lips and cheeks. There were hundreds of sandy tar-filled butts, and the nipple-chafing task took all day. By the time he was done, Fire Bear was caked in sweat and dirt, his lips were crisscrossed with burns, and he couldn’t even stand without help.
On his feet again, Fire Bear—gasping for breath and half delirious—asked for his knife back.
I examined the weapon more closely.
Rumor was, it was a genuine bear-bone handle. From the first bear my Indian nemesis had ever killed. His father made the knife for him to signify he had officially stepped over the thin line that separates boys and men, or some such mystical Indian shit.
“What kind of bear?” I asked.
“Fuck you,” he said.
I had my orders, and so I kept the knife. Everyone was sick and tired of Fire Bear scalping pajama wearers, myself included. Plus he had disobeyed direct orders from above and needed to be put in his place. I did what I did for his own damn good.
Fire Bear looked directly into my eyes and threatened to kill me if I kept the knife. He said he was going to do it in the future, when I least expected it—maybe even after the war ended, so the soil of his ancestors could drink my blood.
His Indian mumbo-jumbo didn’t scare me one bit. Using the bear-bone knife, I cut the rope that bound Fire Bear’s hands and offered him a drink of water. He guzzled the entire canteen, spit on the ground, and, after he finally caught his breath, he again promised to kill me.
That big Indian pulled his hair straight up, raised a finger to his forehead, and made the scalping motion. I stared him right back in his dark evil eyes and said, “I’ll be waiting for your red ass. Scalp me if you can. But you better make sure you finish the job, because I’ll end you if you don’t.”
When I released him, Clayton Fire Bear immediately went AWOL—vanished into the jungle foliage—and I never did see him in Vietnam again. But that didn’t mean the gooks got him. A lot of soldiers disappeared in the jungle from time to time, only to reemerge when we least expected.
Regardless, Fire Bear took up full-time residence in my mind. Sometimes he whispered death threats; other times he’d plead his case. He hadn’t done a goddamn thing to me. Without explanation, my superiors told me to break the Indian, and I obeyed, just like I followed orders when they said kill all the yellow men. I didn’t ask questions in the jungle. Little did I know I’d be asking questions for the rest of my life.
I next saw Clayton Fire Bear in Kansas, right before they threw me into their secret loony bin. Like I said before, he was at Fort Riley. I saw him off in the distance—I was sure it was him on account of how fucking tall he was, and there weren’t a whole lot of Indians around, let alone tall ones. So I knew he had made it back alive to the States.
“I spent decades wishing I had killed Clayton Fire Bear when I had the chance,” I told Frank as we sat on his mistress’s balcony, overlooking the City of Brotherly Love. “I used to see him in the shadows everywhere I went.”
“Yeah, well, I located him.” Frank put the nub of his cigar into the crystal ashtray, which signified that he was finished, because he never puts his cigar down until he is done. “Like you asked me to do. I think the surgery reminded you that we’re all running out of time.”