The Bottom Feeders and Other Stories by Aaron Polson Page B

to throb. Albert pried off
the lid and peered inside. He scanned the black earth, started
clawing at the dirt, and only found a few, fat worms. He dropped
the lid and dug a clump out with one fist, a writhing thing just
visible between his fingers. “Not the boy…me…my turn…” he muttered
before shoving the fistful into his mouth.

    9: The Surgeon of An Khe

    His name was Gerard
Karnowski, and he hailed from Hoboken, New York. Legend held that
some of the guys in the platoon tried to drop the nickname
Carney—as in carnival sideshow freak—on him, but that happened
before he was dubbed The Surgeon. Before he earned the name. I met The Surgeon
during my time in-country, stationed with D Company,
1 st Infantry, 22 nd Regiment outside of An Khe, Republic of Vietnam.
Regulars, by God.
    During my first few weeks in the bush, we
walked. We walked in the rain, in mud, orange creeping mud that
sucked at your boots as a reminder that you walked on a foreign
planet. The insects, especially the mosquitoes the size of
hummingbirds, swarmed and buzzed, harassing us day and night. We
sometimes walked in the thick, humid night to set up an ambush,
waiting for the invisible enemy. When we weren’t walking, we dug
into that red-orange mud, trying to create a small pocket of
security in an alien jungle. While on patrol one day, I
unexpectedly stumbled on The Surgeon at work.
    He hunched over the body of a lone Viet
Cong, a sniper killed by a foreword unit in our column. Our platoon
commander, Lt. Terry Wucker, this scared twenty-two year old fresh
out of ROTC, squatted under a tree with the radio operator, calling
in the enemy KIA by the book. A few of the men fanned out to keep
watch on the perimeter, some whispered low, maintaining noise
discipline, but I watched The Surgeon as he sliced into the dead
flesh, removing the left eye from the body with the fluid motion of
his bowie knife.
    “ What the hell is he
doing,” I whispered to Tallman, a short-timer who had humped the
boonies with The Surgeon for almost ten months. Tallman once said
that ten months was long enough to sweat in Vietnamese for the rest
of your life.
    “ Cutting the fucker’s eye
out,” he said. “What the hell does it look like?” Curiosity, like
strange but powerful gravity, pulled my eyes back to the body. The
Surgeon’s hands worked quickly. His wide, flashing knife didn’t
have the precision of a scalpel, but his fingers carried a swift
and special skill.
    “ Why?”
    “ He collects them.” Tallman
spat on the ground and rubbed his saliva into the dirt with the toe
of his boot. “He fucking collects them,” he repeated, shaking his
head.
    I watched in silence as The Surgeon pulled a
glass jam jar from his rucksack, a jar filled with clear fluid and
a few floating horrible things—other eyes with small bits of flesh
clinging to them, bobbing like bleached olives. After unscrewing
the lid, he held the new eye in his palm, rinsed it with a splash
of water from his canteen, and dropped it into the jar.
    “ Rumor is, they help him
see,” Tallman said, laughing.
    The Surgeon looked up and smiled at me as he
rubbed the thick blood from his knife on a tuft of elephant grass.
After he slipped the clean, glinting knife back into its scabbard
and stood, I thought the man was a giant. He looked at me, and his
mouth fell open in a wide grin.

    When The Surgeon walked point, he wore the
jar on a small leather cord around his neck like a special charm,
and we never made contact with the enemy. He led us through dense
underbrush, often hacking our way through the humming thickness of
the jungle, but none of the grunts complained. He kept us safe.
    One day, the lieutenant lost it. His college
education blocked common sense—wisdom that even I, a straw-headed
farm kid from Kansas—could comprehend. After stopping the column,
the thin line of green men snaking through the leaves, Lt. Wucker
steamed past me and moved forward, approaching The Surgeon as he
knelt