Were we starting from scratch?
“Just you, Joe,” she said, reading my mind and kissing my cheek.
Perhaps it was just
me
now or perhaps Colonel Jakie Lanyard was temporarily unavailable. Everyone at the 803rd was working long hours, as I would have been too today if I weren’t presently AWOL.
I could’ve pressed her for specifics, but I quit while I was ahead. I didn’t know what I could believe. I did know what I wanted to believe.
I nuzzled her. She giggled, punched my gut, and shoved me into the kitchen to get to work. Recalling the sequence of my fabulous army spaghetti, I busied myself with the meal. I’d forgotten to buy grated cheese. That was fortunate. Dairy products were as palatable to many Vietnamese as peanut butter.
The dish didn’t turn out badly. It was a seminal meal too, a subconscious trigger to my eventual profession. Mai cleaned her plate and proclaimed it a feast.
We left the kitchen mess and made out primly on the edge of the bed, as if we were nervous teens on her parents’ living room sofa after the prom. Mai groped my crotch and confirmed that erectile dysfunction was a thing of the past. Mai went into the bathroom and emerged in her red Dragon Lady dress.
Oh, boy, she had my number. Call it a fetish, call it kinkiness. I didn’t give a diddly damn. I removed the dress, carefully lifting it over her head, my hands grazing her sides.
In her underwear, she retired to the bathroom. Water ran. I went to the window, to pull the curtains entirely shut and the shutters too. Across the street, sitting at a p
hỡ
café smoking a cigarette was CWO R. Tracy. I think it was him.
We
were all beginning to look alike to me.
A dim bulb finally flicked on. Tracy and the CID weren’t hounding me. Not me individually. Not her individually. Tracy was bird-dogging Mai
and
me, a spy and her stooge. CWO Tracy was building his dossier for my arrest and trial.
Let him prove it, I thought. He was facing our way, L. H. Oswald smirk on his puss. I flipped him the bird. If he saw my middle digit, he pretended not to.
Mai came out of the bathroom, my evil Dragon Lady. I dropped to my knees, lifted her negligee, and kissed her between her legs, tasting honey. If I had it, I’d’ve given her the H-bomb secret if she asked, not caring if she was Uncle Ho’s daughter.
She lifted me by the hair and shoved me onto the bed. I was all over her, she all over me. I was embarrassingly quick. If I wasn’t a limp noodle, I was hair-trigger.
I apologized. Mai pinched my butt and said not to. She said we had all night. Sure enough, the second and third times, she beat me to the moon. We fell asleep in each other’s arms.
There was no probing on Cerebrum 2111X and CAN-DO and statehood for
South Vietnam
, then or throughout the night.
Nary a word.
Why not?
I’d mull that later.
KNOCK ME over with a feather, I have a
dream
.
In it, I wander off my cul-de-sac not on to another, but to what can best be described as a Hooverville. It is a filthy dirt street lined with tarpaper shacks with roofs of scrap tin. A ditch alongside the street is a lazy creek of piss and shit.
“Refinance your mortgage?” someone calls out from a hovel.
“Don’t have a mortgage,” I say truthfully.
“Have you researched gold futures, friend?” a slicky boy across the way asks. “Come on in and we’ll talk. We can double your money in fifteen days.”
The scent of greed and cologne makes my eyes water. I walk faster.
“By golly, before I repair your TV, the first thing we have to do is fix you up with a service contract.”
It’s becoming stereophonic. Where is the elevator when I really need it?
“Free investment seminar, lunch on the house, choice of chicken or fish.”
“I’m not a spammer. I provide information.”
“All we need is a credit card number.”
“No, friend, it isn’t a time share. It’s interval ownership. View of the ocean. This offer is good only today.”
The last is the scariest and creepiest of all. A recruiting sergeant in a booming voice: “Mr. Joe, enlistment gets you the school or duty station of your choice. Choice not chance. Get drafted and you’re at their mercy.”
I run out of there and wake up.
***
“Your shit is flaky, Private Joe. Get your shit together or I’m gonna jump all over your shit,” our Basic Training platoon sergeant had advised me in triple-digit decibels.
This had been directly following a barracks inspection. Our bunks were mandated to be made so tightly that a quarter would bounce on the blanket. My bedding had no elasticity whatsoever. It was the texture of cottage cheese. Forget a bouncing quarter. A Ping-Pong ball would’ve landed on it with a dull thud.
I’d considered telling the sergeant that housekeeping wasn’t my long suit. If he didn’t believe me, ask my mother. I’d had the good sense not to, but thanks in large part to my pathetic effort, our platoon failed the inspection. The sergeant had “jumped all over my shit,” doubling my KP duty.
I was back in the luxury of our hotel room with Ziggy recollecting that experience. Our room
was
luxurious compared to those World War Two wooden barracks, the worst part being the latrine. Toilets were not partitioned. Of all the indignities to which low-ranking enlisted soldiers were subjected, boys and girls, communal shitting was rock bottom.
I was recollecting communal shitting as I read a letter from Mother, a bland, one-page litany of information, as if
a wire service release
--the weather, her job, Jack’s unsuitable new girlfriend. No mention of Estranged Husband/Stepfather or Wendi with the bubble above her “i.” I hoped Mother was starting to recover from the betrayal, but there was no indication in these sparse words.
A Sunday
Terry and the Pirates
strip was enclosed and much appreciated. The Dragon Lady was not featured, but I imagined her behind the scenes, conniving and seducing. I missed my fictional Dragon Lady as if she were real. I hoped she was being careful.
Our superiors were so consumed by their secret computing machine project in the Annex that they didn’t notice that Ziggy and I were out scrounging when there was nothing to be scrounged. We billeted in the supply room only when we felt like it. There’d been no shopping list for several days, so I presumed we were at the final assembly stage of whatever they’d wrought. When I wasn’t with Mai at 421, I was in our digs with Ziggy, plowing into my newest reading material as he devoured his sci-fi.
I was so irretrievably smitten that trifling worries such as joining Mai as a co-guest of honor at a firing squad for espionage was water off this duck’s back. Our lovemaking had blended the cartoon fantasy and the flesh-and-blood woman into one.
Insane as it was, I had no intention of cooperating with snoops and spooks of any flavor, should they contact me. I’d take a
swim in the
Mekong
River
before I’d get Mai in a pickle with the higher uppity-ups and anybody’s secret police.
Besides, what had we done that was so heinous? What solid evidence was there that she was a commie spy? The one question she’d asked of late came within seconds of my arrival at
421 Hai Ba Trung Street
.
“Joe, why do you still have pants on?”
Judging by her actions, Mai wanted my body and she wanted my companionship.
Period.
That didn’t jibe after my third degree on the first date. Over time, I became more and more suspicious and less and less able to let go. Even without my comic strip fetish, ours was not a normal American-Vietnamese romance. The majority of those romances were fraught with non-romantic concessions, usually with a quid pro quo of money and a ticket stateside.
So what did she really, really want?
I was sorely tempted to demand she
lay
it on the line. I mean, how come the skip from unrelenting interrogation to unadulterated intimacy?
But challenging her probably meant the end of extramarital bliss. Sigh.
Heavy sigh.
If my brain hung between my legs, so be it.
I yawned and looked at the books I’d accumulated from the Tan Son Nhat Library. Piled willy-nilly along the wall as if sandbags, they’d transformed my side of the room from a berm to a full-fledged bunker. I did plan to return them.
Someday.
The heftiest volume of all was one of my two latest, a tome known as a coffee table book. Coffee table books were mostly pictorial. They outweighed a cinder block. They were pricey, costing upwards of ten smackers. You gave them at Christmas to loved ones who didn’t like to read but wanted others to think they did. You laid one out on your coffee table by the ashtray and candy dish. Instantly, your living room had class even if you didn’t.
This coffee table book presented the works of Piet Mondrian in luscious color plates. I’d checked it out in a futile attempt to jog my memory, to dredge from my pickled brain why and how I wore a map of the State of Montana instead of his
Composition 1921
. No luck.
I added it to my literary heap, took a pull of Johnny Red, and delved into my second new tome,
People’s War People’s Army
by General
Vo
Nguyen Giap, North Vietnam’s answer to Douglas MacArthur. Giap processed into The Great Beyond not long after me, by the way. He was an old timer, over one-hundred.
Vo Nguyen Giap was the architect of Dien Bien Phu, in charge of the ants who humped the artillery up the surrounding hills and pulverized the French. He went on to spring the Tet Offensive in 1968 and remained the military boss when NVA tanks rolled into
Saigon
in 1975.
I’d hardly begun the book when I realized it was a how-to manual for doing what Giap had done to the French and was doing to us. I wondered if a single, solitary American general or Department of Defense whiz or military intelligence guru had read a single, solitary page of
People’s War
.
I tossed it atop a JFK biography, which reminded me of Lee Harvey Oswald cum CWO R. Tracy. It’s said that we all have a twin. I was no conspiracy paranoid, but I didn’t know anyone who swallowed the Warren Commission Report hook, line, and sinker. As far as I was concerned, those fuddy-duddies and politicians on the Warren Commission had swept the dirty deed under the rug mighty fast.
If you believed Oswald hadn’t pulled the job alone, and I had severe doubts, who was he working for? Possibilities ranged from the Mob to the Cubans to the Russkis to LBJ to the CIA. You could make a case for any of them, and who’s to say they didn’t reward Oswald for his work, by faking his murder, and switching a double for Jack Ruby to plug.
I nudged Ziggy. He put aside
The Devil’s Dictionary
by PFC Bierce’s granddaddy Ambrose. He’d found it in the Tan Son Nhut “libarry.” Grin on his face, moving his lips, turning pages, damned if he wasn’t memorizing
Devil’s
. At least Bierce’s quotes would be jazzier than those in the Little Red Book by that fat ChiCom with the wart on his chin.
And speaking of the devil, where was PFC A. Bierce? His appearance at the Fighting 803rd was now intermittent. Once he’d cranked out the morning report, he seemed to come and go as he pleased.
I asked Ziggy his opinion on the JFK assassination. He sure did have one. Naturally, it was a unique theory.
“Hit squad from the Planet Clarion, Joey,” he said. “I seen this story in a magazine and there’s no proving it ain’t true.”
It was my own damn fault for consulting him, toppling him to yet a lower ledge of unreality. “Where’s Clarion, Zig?”
“Clarion’s in Earth’s orbit on the exact other side. You never see it cuz the sun’s always in the way.”
“Okay, sure, right.”
“Oswald was a Clarionite who was teleported here. They was afraid of our space program, the
Clarionites
were. They listened in to Kennedy saying we’d have a man on the moon before the end of the decade, so they
was
afraid we’d discover them.
Them
and the fake Oswald had to do what they had to do to Kennedy. But JFK or no JFK, we’ll be on the moon when he said.”
“A man on the moon by December 31, 1969?
C’mon, man.
Fat chance.
The odds have to be a trillion to one.”
“
There’s
times you don’t know shit from Shinola, Joey. You ever hear of them Mercury and Gemini satellites we went and launched?”
“Who hasn’t?” I rebutted lamely.
Ziggy then rambled on about Alpha Centauri, our nearest star. At 4.4 light years distant, it was practically across the alley. Little green men in a yarn he’d read lived there. He said Alpha Centauri was actually three stars, one orbiting a second that both orbited the third. He said the Alpha
Centaurans
were in cahoots with the Planet
Clarionites
.
I couldn’t wait for Mariner 4 to ride into
Marsville
. Maybe
Ziggy
would snap out of it. I got off my bunk and said I’d see him at the 803rd, where we were supposed to be anyway.
I walked in as Captain Papersmith double-timed out of General Whipple’s office in
a frenzy
. Before I could confide that a cabby had told me that South Vietnam’s state color was gonna be red, Papersmith blurted, “Private Joe, are you familiar with Saigon’s finer restaurants?”
Captain Papersmith was irritable and depressed, routine for him. I rocked a hand.
“Can you recommend an establishment that will accommodate a banquet-sized party?”
“How big’s banquet-sized, sir?”
“Fifty.”
Roughly the number of warm bodies at the 803rd, the oddballs, and cooks and MPs who had lent a hand.
“Factoring in security, sir?”
“Pardon me?”
“You know, sir, security against
plastique
. Fifty’s an attractive target. Nice round number.”
“Security is irrelevant,” he said.
Where were we,
Elm City
,
U.S.A.
? “Excuse me, sir?”
“Security is irrelevant. Clean the wax out of your ears, soldier.”
I described a nice rooftop restaurant a couple of blocks off
Le Loi Boulevard
. Ziggy and I had eaten there once. It offered a good mix of quasi-American, Chinese and Vietnamese cuisine. In my humble opinion, Victor Charles was not irrelevant, and a roof was safer than street level. You’d have to have Sandy Koufax’s arm to sling a satchel charge up to it.
“Is there a separate meeting room with ample space for us?”
“Don’t remember. I think they can probably partition off a section.”
“Would there be adequate privacy?”
How the hell would I know?
“Sure, no problem.”
“Are they flexible?
Available on a day’s notice?”
Did I publish the town’s restaurant guide?
“Enough grease on the palm and anybody’s flexible,” I said, shrugging.
He said to drive him there. So off we went in the rattletrap Jeep. In front of the restaurant, he ordered me to occupy myself while he negotiated with the restaurateur. The captain was gone an hour, came back, and said he had a deal. Then he asked for the name of a reliable printer that did no business with, to my knowledge, any USMACV organization.
A peculiar proviso.
Again, I wanted to ask how the hell
should I
know, but said sure, no problem, pulled over at the next print shop we came to, and said they were the best in town. He told me to wait in the Jeep and was gone half an hour.
On the return trip to the 803rd, I caught a glimpse of a sketch on Captain Papersmith’s order that he hadn’t completely slipped inside a binder. He’d written in 1965 and left the day and month blank.
Also written on it:
USMACV VV Day Celebration
and the name of the rooftop restaurant.