Black Maps Read Online Free PDF

footlocker and dangled the slab in front of his squad. “What am I bid for this hunk of heaven?” he said.
    Duckwalk was sitting on his rack, cleaning an AK-47 he’d souvenired from an NVA. He shook his head. “The LT’s gonna fuck you, Freeze,” he said.
    â€œYou’ll have his steaks for supper, but he’ll have your ass for breakfast,” Jackson agreed. “He’s gonna know you swiped his meat.” He took another drag on his joint and went back to playing solitaire on his footlocker.
    Everybody was trying to act uninterested, but Freeze knew better. He knew how long it had been since anybody’d had a steak. To them, even the warm Cokes they got every stand-down were bennies.
    â€œLet’s start the bidding at a bag of el primo no-stem, no-seed, shall we?” he said and grinned. He was having fun. He had crossed over the edge of hatred and now he was having fun. He could barely keep from laughing.
    â€œAre you nuts?” said McKeown. “We buy that hot cow and we’re in as much trouble as you.”
    â€œSmoke my pole,” Boswell said.
    â€œShit,” Clean Machine said. “I wouldn’t give one joint for your sister and your mother both.”
    But before long, McKeown offered a pack of Park Lanes and soon they were all bidding. When it was over, Clean had shelled out four packs of Park Lanes and a handful of military payment certificates for the steak. Freeze stashed his loot under the floorboard beneath his rack, then ditty-bopped out to the perimeter where nobody could see him and hunkered down in some brush to broil his steak. He lit a tin of Sterno and set it over a little stove he’d made by puncturing an empty C-rats can. Then he started to broil the steak on a steel plate he’d ripped off the back of a Claymore mine.
    Smelling the steak browning on the plate, he forgot the stench of the burning shit for the first time that day. He leaned back on one elbow, lit a Park Lane, and inhaled deeply, holding the smoke in his lungs. As he smoked, he looked out over the brush at the lead-colored sky and tried to daydream about going back to the world. He imagined he was back in Little Rock, lying on a lounge chair beside his apartment pool, catching some rays and checking out the talent. But the daydream began to unravel as soon as it started. First he couldn’t remember what his pool had looked like. Then he wasn’t even sure whether he’d had a pool at Cromwell Court or if that was earlier, at the Cantrell Apartments. And the girls that strolled by in their bikinis were faceless, vague. He tried to remember Mary Ellen, the girl he’d dated the fall before he enlisted, but nothing would come to him. He wasn’t sure of the color of her eyes or hair, the sound of her voice. He laughed. Then he listened to himself laugh. It was such a strange sound. He wondered why he’d never noticed how strange it was. He tried to remember Mary Ellen’s laugh, but it was no use. Ever since he’d come to Nam he’d been forgetting things, and now almost everything was gone. And what he did remember seemed more like something he’d overheard in a bar, some dim, muffled conversation. He couldn’t have seen Perkins holding his plastic yellow guts, or C.B.’s brains in his mouth, the top of his skull turned to pulp. He couldn’t have seen these things. It was impossible. Wasn’t Perkins transferred to another company? Hadn’t C.B. gone back to the world?
    By the time Freeze finally remembered to turn over the steak, it had burned black.
    After lights out, a heavy monsoon rain began to beat against the ponchos nailed on the outside of the hootch. The wind whipped the water against the green plastic, battering the hootch like incoming.
    Then it was incoming. Duckwalk sat up in the rack next to Freeze’s. “You hear that?” he asked.
    Freeze sat up, his poncho liner wrapped around