Kent Anderson - Sympathy for the Devil

This edition contains the complete text
of the original hardcover edition.

not one word has been omitted.

SYMPATHY FOR THE DEVIL

A Bantam Book

publishing history

Doubleday hardcover edition published 1987

Bantam trade paperback edition published / September 1999

Bantam mass market edition / August 2000

All rights reserved.

Copyright 1987 by Kent Anderson.

Preface 1993 by James Crumley.

Cover illustration copyright 1999 by Larry Lurin.

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 87-630.

No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. For information address: Bantam Books.

ISBN 0-553-58087-6

Published simultaneously in the United States and Canada

Bantam Books are published by Bantam Books, a division of Random House, Inc. Its trademark, consisting of the words Bantam Books and the portrayal of a rooster, is Registered in U.S. Patent and Trademark Office and in other countries. Marca Registrada. Bantam Books, 1540 Broadway, New York, New York 10036.

The author is grateful for permission to quote from the following: As Time Goes By copyright 1931 by Warner Bros., Inc. (Renewed) All Rights Reserved. Used by permission. California Dreamin, words and music by John Phillips and Michelle Phillips. Copyright 1965, 1970 by MCA Music Publishing, a division of MCA, Inc., New York, NY 10022. All Rights Reserved. Used by permission. John Wesley Harding, words and music by Bob Dylan. Copyright 1968 by Dwarf Music. All Rights Reserved. Used by permission. Magical Mystery Tour, words and music by John Lennon and Paul McCartney. Copyright 1967 by Northern Songs, Limited. All Rights for the U.S., Canada, and Mexico Controlled and Administered by April Music Inc. Under License from ATV Music (Comet). All Rights Reserved. International Copyright Secured. Used by permission. American Woman by R. Bachman, B. Cummings, M. Kaye, G. Peterson. Copyright 1970 by Dunbar Music Inc. and Six Continents Music. All Rights Administered by Unichappell Music, Inc. All Rights Reserved. Used by permission. Cuchulains Fight With the Sea and The Lake Isle of Innisfree from The Poems of W.B. Yeats: A New Edition, edited by Richard J. Finneran (New York: Macmillan, 1983).

A sheet of paper was tacked to the wall over Hansons bunk:

Every day in the world a hundred thousand people die. A human life means nothing.

General Vo Nguyen Giap,
Commander-in-Chief North Vietnamese Army

In order to despise suffering, to be always content and never astonished at anything, one must reach such a state as thisand Ivan Dmitrich indicated the obese peasant bloated with fator else one must harden ones self through sufferings to such a degree as to lose all sensitivity to them: that is, in other words, cease to live.

Anton Chekhov

Hanson stood just inside the heavy-timbered door of his concrete bunker, looking out. There was no moon yet. The only sound was the steady sobbing of the big diesel generators, but Hanson heard nothing. Had the generators ever stopped he would have heard the silence, a silence that would have bolted him wideawake, armed, and out of his bunk if he were asleep.

He stepped from the doorway and began walking across the inner perimeter toward the teamhouse, a squat shadow ahead of him in the dark. His web gear, heavy with ammunition and grenades, swung from one shoulder like easy, thoughtful breathing. The folding-stock AK-47 in his right hand was loaded with a gracefully curving thirty-round magazine.

As he got closer to the teamhouse, he could feel the drums and steel-stringed guitar on the back of his sunburned forearms and against the tender broken hump on his nose. Then he could hear it.

Hanson smiled. Stones, he said softly. He didnt have enough to pick out the song, but the bass and drums were pure Stones.

He slid the heavy, light-proof door open and stepped into the bright teamhouse. The song, Under My Thumb, was pumping out of Silvers big Japanese speakers.

Quinn was pouting and strutting to the music, one hand hooked in his pistol belt, the other hand thrust out, thumbs down, like Caesar at the Roman games sending the pike into another crippled loser. His small blue eyes were close-set, cold and flat as the weekly casualty announcement, as he mouthed the words.

Hanson shrugged his web gear to the floor, shouted, Let me guess, and pressed his hand to his freckled forehead. He pointed at Quinn and shouted into the music, Mick Jagger, right? Your new Jagger impersonation. His snub-nosed combat magnum glinted from its shoulder holster.

Quinn ignored him, pounding the floor like a clog dancer.

The battered white refrigerator was turned up to high in the damp heat, and gouts of frost dropped to the floor when Hanson opened it to get a Black Label beer. The seams and lip of the black&red cans were rusty from the years they had been stockpiled on the Da Nang docks. Years of raw monsoon and swelling summer heat had turned the American beer bitter. But it was cold; it made his fillings ache when he drank it.

Hanson took a flesh-colored quart jar from the top of the refrigerator, screwed off the top, and took out two of the green&white amphetamine capsules. He knocked them back with the icy beer.

Beats coffee for starting the day, he thought, smiling, recalling the double-time marching chant back at Fort Bragg: Airborne Ranger Green Beret, this is the way we start our day, running the sandhills before dawn, the rumor that one team had run over a PFC from a supply unit who had been drunkenly crossing the road in front of them. The team had trampled him and left him behind, never getting out of step, chanting each time their left jump boot hit the ground, Pray for war. Pray for war. Pray for war.

He sat down on one of the wooden footlockers and began thumbing through the Time magazine that had come in on the last mail chopper.

The Stones finished Under My Thumb, paused, and began Mothers Little Helper. Quinn turned the volume down and walked over to Hanson. He moved with ominous deliberation, like a man carrying nitroglycerin. People got uncomfortable if Quinn moved too close or too quickly.

Keepin up with current events, my man? he asked Hanson. Hows the war going these days?

This magazine says were kicking shit out of em. But now, Hanson said, tapping the open magazine, what about the home front? Theyve got problems too. Take this young guy, a Cornell Senior it says here, Im nervous as hell. I finally decide on a fieldeconomicsand then I find out Im number fifty-nine in the draft lottery. Rough, huh? Just when he decided on economics.

Hanson thumbed through the magazine, singing softly, ... My candy man, hes come an gone. Mah candy man, hes come an gone. An I love everthing in this godomighty world, God knows I do...

To the west a heavy machine gun was firing, the distant pounding as monotonous as an assembly-line machine. Artillery was going in up north. Three guns working out. They were good, the rounds going in one on top of the other, each explosion like a quick violent wind, the sound your firestarter makes when you touch off the backyard charcoal grill. Normal night sounds.

Hanson read the ads out loud. Theres a Ford in your future. Tired of diet plans that dont work?

Then come to Vietnam, fat boy, Quinn shouted, and get twenty pounds blown off your ass.

A short, wiry man came into the teamhouse. He wore round wire-rim glasses and had a thin white scar running from his lip up to the side of his nose like a harelip.