Death is a Pale Tiger in the Highlands of Dak To

The walk was lonely, and for a time, Perkins came across nothing special. Light waned and refracted around the smoky outlines of scattered clouds as they burned up in the tumescent light of the setting sun. Two more hours into the trek and the sky darkened like a bruise. When Perkins could no longer tolerate the incessant brush of mosquito legs against his face and the faint rustle of fronds through which he could only see impenetrable walls of convulsing bramble, he ducked into a wind-blasted cavern that bordered the river he would have to cross come morning, shrugged off his pack, and swiped his mop of dark brown hair away from his sunburnt face. His cheeks were drawn and his eyes empty.

He set the pack down on the cavern’s cold floor and slipped the carbine off his shoulder, setting it down beside a stack of rocks and fallen shale. From his pack he procured a small metallic zippo lighter, a sheaf of papers tied tightly together with a spool of frayed yellow twine, and a nylon-covered canteen with a large dent in its center. Rifling around deeper inside the main compartment he finally pulled out a crumpled four-pack of Salem cigarettes. Two smokes left—better make them count.

Perkins brought a cigarette to his lips and flicked his lighter open, sliding his thumb downwards to spark the lighter’s flint wheel. A weak flame bloomed before his tired eyes. He kept the fire burning just long enough to light up before flipping the lid shut again, snuffing it out in an instant. Keeping the flame burning longer than necessary meant risking his location. He knew from experience that a sputtering iris of orange, however faint, could be glimpsed from the other side of the river by a keen enough pair of eyes. He pushed the lighter into the deep confines of his front trouser pocket once he was done and tried to comfort himself by thumbing at its familiar warmed edges. 

He picked up the rolled-up stack of papers and pulled the twine away, smoothing out any visible creases in paper before setting it flat on the ground so he could view it clearly. In the waning light of the setting sun, he had to squint. 

It was a map. Perkins had already marked it up extensively, scratching out exclusion zones and territories still bristling with Viet Cong militants, his own route an intricate zig-zag between the outskirts of each region. Most of the path was straight through untamed jungle, the green clot of wilderness he had been hacking through for the past day. He set the map to the side, sifted through the series of documents he had feathered behind the map. CLASSIFIED. CLASSIFIED. CLASSIFIED. Again and again the word showed up—in headers, as footnotes, scribbled with permanent black marker and rubber-stamped between page margins. Having done some light reading of his own back at Long Binh Junction—before his superiors had sent him off with the next outbound Huey—the papers were chock-full of logistic military babble, the kind of talk that made Perkins’ eyelids droop. A man on the other side of the jungle would be waiting in a neutral zone with a merchant stall and a conspicuous limp, and it was Perkins’ job to get the papers to him and camp out in the village until another Huey could be safely dispatched— something that could take months, but also, Perkins had been told, relied on the safe delivery of those classified documents.

For one long and humid week, Perkins had been carrying the papers behind enemy lines, traversing mostly after nightfall and resting during the day. As time went on, however, and Perkins found himself travelling further and further into the remote stretch of jungle, he allowed himself some leeway and would walk in short bursts below the scorching sun before finding shelter by the river—as he was now. 

He was about to lie down on the ground for a nap—using the padded front of his pack as a makeshift pillow, as he had done a dozen times before in the bush—when from the opposite corner of the cave he heard a voice, low and careful and inquiring:

“Mind if I bum a cig, man?”

Perkins’ finger was on the trigger of his carbine before the first flakes of his cigarette ash could fall to the cavern floor.

“Get out of the corner,” Perkins said, sounding more rattled than confrontational, the words escaping his mouth like startled birds. The mystery speaker couldn’t be VC, Perkins thought—Charlie couldn’t speak English (at least, he didn’t think they did). His heart hammered in his chest and the adrenaline coursing through his veins made him feel like he was floating. “Hands off your gun, don’t try anything stupid.” 

A pause. Then, with a tone that bordered on the pathetic: “I don’t want to.”

Perkins responded by flipping his carbine’s safety lever from SAFE to SEMI.

“Fine.” From the corner unraveled a cluster of shapes and shadows, the silhouette of a man hastily gathering his belongings. “Fine.” Then the stranger was dragging himself forward—back half-bent—out of the darkness and into the reddish evening light, his shoulders hunched and his head bowed. 

Perkins almost dropped his gun. 

He was staring at a dead man. Not in the prescriptive sense, as was the case whenever medics who had been in the jungle for too long would remark on the emaciated state of a soldier so delirious from malaria or hemorrhagic fever that he refused to eat or drink or move. Those were the lost causes—husks of what were once soldiers that rotted through the top sheets of their cots long before they were actually moved to a quiet corner of the tent to die alone and in pain. Out of sight, out of mind. “He’s a dead man,” a combat medic would often remark to a passing assistant as they carried fresh bandages and a jug of antiseptic through the sick tent’s entry flap, and it was a condemnation as swift and judicious as the sword of an angel.

No, the man sitting squarely across from Perkins was dead—he did not have the fresh face that the newly deceased often shared. There was a difference, and the necrotic glaze of crepe-like skin stretched across the side of his cheek and what remained of his nose was far from fresh. He wore a soldier’s uniform that looked like it had been passed through a shredder, barely recognizable as a G.I. uniform. His hands were black, the nails long, black rings of grime and dead skin hidden just underneath the chipped keratin. The man sat with one leg crossed over the stump of what remained of his right foot.  He wore no boots—not that he needed them. His other foot was a mess of tendons and bleached bone and one of his toes looked like a melted wax replica of what a toe should be. 

Perkins attempted to locate the man’s eyes and could find only one, peering back up at him from the gloomy confines of an empty socket that threw the rest of his face into abyssal shadow.

Perkins inhaled sharply and was rewarded with a heady surge of nicotine. He supposed that this was, as any reasonable man would first assume, a hallucination, some product of his demented (or drug-addled) imagination. It was entirely plausible that he was delirious with fever, lying face-up on some random riverbank, laughing and weeping and spiraling into a hallucinatory state as the sun baked his skin off and swarms of bugs bit his face. But Perkins couldn’t recall ever feeling sick – there were no gaps in the mission timeline that he could not explain, and his memory was, as always, reliable: he could, for instance, clearly recount the past several days he had spent lugging his stuff through the jungle, hacking away at ferns with his steel machete, fording rivers, tugging blood-swollen leeches off his ankles. His memories were uneventful but concise, and that was all that mattered.

Ultimately, Perkins did what he thought any man would do in his shoes: he re-opened his carton of Salems, shook out the last cigarette, and offered it to the dead man in front of him.

The dead man took it without hesitation. A quick flick, spark, and shut of Perkins’ lighter and they were both holding lit cigarettes, taking nervous drags (or attempting to: Perkins wasn’t sure the man could even keep the cigar in his mouth without any actual lips to purse around its filtered end) and politely ignoring each other. 

“You can go away now,” said Perkins at last. 

The dead man paused mid-drag. Ash formed a dusty heap across the expanse of his shredded green jacket. “Why?”

“You’re not actually here right now, man,” replied Perkins, setting his carbine back up on the rocks and taking another lazy puff. “You’re a figment of my imagination. Maybe I stayed out in the sun too long or something.” He wiped the side of his face, acutely aware of the sweat sticking to his forehead and lower cheek. “And I don’t want you to be real, because if you’re real, that means I’m all out of cigarettes.”

The dead man looked back down at the cigarette in his hands and returned it sheepishly to his lips (if the cracked and rotting strip of black flesh below his exposed nostrils could be called such a thing), each slow, indulgent exhale producing a cloud of smoke that escaped from both his gaping nose socket and from between the slits of his open ribcage. 

“Also, you don’t smell dead,” continued Perkins. “And I’ve smelled dead guys before. I think everybody in this godforsaken jungle has. In the bush and in the infirmary tents and in the villages and all that. You don’t smell.”

“Maybe you’re dead,” replied the dead man.

Perkins’ eyebrows knit together. Then he laughed—a weary chuckle that filled the smokey cavern—and shook his head. “Nah. If I was dead, I’d be smoking Marlboros. Not this dried-out surplus shit. I’d rather smoke resin out of a hose pipe than buy a carton of these again.” 

“Maybe you’re going to be.” 

“What, smoking resin out of a hose pipe?”

“No—dead.” 

Perkins wafted a pillar of smoke away from his face. If the hallucination wanted to hang around for a couple more minutes and act foreboding and impart some words of otherworldly wisdom, so be it. It wasn’t like he had anything better to do. When morning arrived, he would pack up his few belongings, sling his carbine over his shoulder, and forget all about this delusory jungle séance. He would ford the river and maybe even stand in the warm current for a moment and plunge his head beneath its expressionless waters. A nice wake-up call. No more peyote, no more “enhancement drugs” shared between barracks. He obviously could not handle the strain.

The dead man leaned forwards and Perkins’ heart dropped.

Now the dead man had a sort of presence: something Perkins couldn’t exactly explain, but a form that filled the cavern space and had real, tangible weight to it. Perkins almost wanted to reach out and touch the man (if he had been more convinced that it really was a hallucination, he would have), but something held him back. 

For the first time since he met the dead man, Perkins felt a creeping sense of unease.

“There is a tiger in this jungle,” said the dead man, the bloated remnants of its tongue spilling over his mandible in chunks. “It is outside right now. It is waiting for you.”

“Okay,” said Perkins. “Now you can go away.”

“You aren’t listening.”

Perkins flicked his cigarette to the side and picked up his carbine. “You’re right. I’m not. And this isn’t like any hallucination I’ve had before, and you’ve got me all jumpy. That is to say: I’ve got myself all jumpy. I’m paranoid. And I know I’m talking to myself, so you just take my advice and fade back into the shadows. I’ll consider it a lesson learned. A lecture from my inner guide, or my superego, or something. Yeah, that’s it. That’s all this is.”

“I am warning you about this tiger,” the dead man persisted. He was sitting up now, the tattered remains of his uniform flapping in the warm evening breeze as it billowed through the cavern opening, circulated through the chamber, and was dragged back out into the waxing dusk. “It is not like other tigers. It has been hunting you your entire life. You just didn’t know. I didn’t know, either. But nobody told me. Nobody warned me. I thought you should know.”

Perkins thought he spotted movement on the other side of the river. Without thinking, he pushed past the man and scrambled forwards, trying to get a better look between the wall of cattails separating him from the river’s muddy shore. He saw nothing. 

“Thanks for the cigarette,” said a voice behind him.

By the time Perkins turned around, the dead man was gone.

With his back to the wall of the cavern, Perkins watched the last rosy traces of evening fade from the river as if sapped away through a liquid siphon. Eventually the surface of the water was nothing more than a black winding ribbon cutting through the waist-high grass that sprung up all across the clearing of abandoned paddy fields. Full dark marched across the green landscape—a thick glut of shadows swallowing the forest whole.

Perkins listened to the river and tried to forget the dead man. He surrendered his thoughts to the distant buzzing chorus of palm-sized dragonflies swarming just above the face of the water and watched fat cobbler trout bubble up beneath the river’s black surface, always watching for some kind of terrestrial movement on the shore, a brief shadow caught between land and water for him to gun down. He did this for some time, absentmindedly tracing patterns into the soft clay floor of the cavern with his right index finger, attempting to distinguish the sounds of the river from those of the swaying grass and tree limbs: what sounded like whispers but what were really the malingering ghosts of days past. 

But the memories found a way in. He never sealed his brain tightly enough, and they crawled into his ears and down his throat and began to fester with visions. The slow tic-tic-tic of a mounted machine gun, cooling. The gap-toothed smile of a young door gunner as he slung another ammunition belt over his shoulder. 

His late lieutenant gunning down a woman holding a straw basket. A flock of birds passing overhead. A puddle of mud and blood. 

Better to listen than to think. Better to think than to know. What was the difference between knowledge and idle thought? Hell if he knew. But it was possible to think about everything and know nothing—not so easy to know everything while thinking of nothing. 

That, Perkins knew—but it did not make the thinking come any easier. Unwanted thoughts had to be extracted like teeth, and regardless of what one did with them, there would always be that phantom ache.

The puddle. He washed his hands in it. The blood.

The night passed slowly. Eventually, a warm fog drifted down from the slope of the mountain, hovering above and across the river. Perkins did not try to sleep, but he drifted off anyways. Stripes of gold and lilac clouded his field of vision.

It was through this thin veil of dreams that Perkins glimpsed the tiger. 

It crouched on the far side of the river, watching him behind a curtain of fronds and waving cattails. In the dream, the tiger had eyes like two mildewed suns and a flat, wide face. Threatened by its yellow stare, nearly consumed by it, Perkins gazed back, sweat dripping down his brow as the night’s humidity grew on itself.

The tiger pushed a paw into the dark water and began to wade across. As it reached the other side of the river, it briefly ducked its massive head underwater, then lifted it again. It stepped onto the opposite shore, its striped fur coat dripping. Perkins observed the tiger’s whiskers droop with the water’s weight. He did not move to pick up his rifle. 

The tiger continued to amble forwards until it was only several feet away from Perkins. It sat on the cold floor of the cavern and stared at him. Perkins could do nothing but stare back. He could not speak. His lungs were filled with ice. 

All this time, the tiger had waited: in the crevice of Perkin’s heart, behind his eyelids at night while he slept, in each twitch and jump of his delicate blue veins. Since he was born, the tiger had prowled in his shadow and eclipsed the light of each morning; Perkins just hadn’t known it. He hadn’t known when he was a child, kicking a ball against the flat and simmering tarmac of the school’s new parking lot; he hadn’t known when he shared his first kiss behind the cinema concession stands and the girl ran away immediately after, her eyes shining with tears; he hadn’t known when he showed up to the nearest induction center to report for active duty and was later shipped off to Vietnam with the freshest batch of acne-ridden boys, nervously scratching at his sparse facial stubble. 

Flying above the paddies and the charred villages and the dark, tangled jungle, he thought he spotted some stripes between waving stalks of elephant grass, but at the time, he didn’t think much of it. But now he knew, and the tiger was in front of him, mere inches away from his face, no longer bothering to hide. This time, he met the tiger beneath the white glow of the moon, and he was no longer afraid of what the night revealed to him.

“Are you ready?” it asked, wrapping its heavy tail across the top of its front paws. It spoke; of course it spoke. The voice was precise, punctuated, slow. It spoke in the voice of his late lieutenant. The tired drawl was so familiar to his ears that it made the hair on the back of Perkin’s neck stand straight up. 

“Ready for what?” replied Perkins, although he knew damn well what the tiger meant.

The corner of the tiger’s black lip twitched upwards, froth building around its lower mouth. It looked at him, then stared past him, almost through him. The tiger licked at the side of its wet jowls as if waiting for Perkins to testify, for him to say I’m sorry, for him to throw up his arms and wrench the tiger’s jaws wide open, for him to stick his head in and be done with it.

“All right,” said Perkins at last, not without some weariness. “I’m ready.” A kind of numbness had spread throughout his body. His hands did not shake, and he had no desire to grab for his gun. It was his time to die.

Before it could lunge at Perkins, he woke up, shivering as he hugged his carbine close.

The blistering rays of the sun were already burning a hole into the tapestry of the midday sky, so Perkins tried to move quickly. The jungle no longer felt like a coveted sanctuary of flowers and leafy fans, a landscape that was willing to hide him from prying eyes and send him speedily on his way. Perkin’s hands grew slippery along the sides of his carbine whenever he heard a soft rustling in the brush ahead of him.  The jungle was a green mouth, and he was helplessly locked between its jaws – the ground moved, the trees killed. Sometimes he thought he heard the heavy pound of white pads against the forest floor, just behind his shoulder, keeping steady pace.