Girl by the Road at Night

by David Rabe

  “We are not gettin’ laid.”

  “No, no. It’s just a good place.”

  “What’s good about it?”

  “You know.”

  “If I give in to you and take you where you want, we’re not gettin’ laid, okay? We don’t have any leeway. I got to get this vehicle turned in on time and spit-polished clean. Sergeant Emlin’s got his eye on me. All of a sudden he don’t like me—he’s this vulture every move I make.”

  “No sweat. I don’t have time either. I got to get back for some early chow and then I’m riding shotgun for Leahy on a run to Saigon.”

  “Who the hell do they think you are, Whitaker?”

  “Whatta you mean?”

  “You’re shotgun with me and then with Leahy. Do they think you’re some kinda gunslinger?”

  “They just don’t know what to do with me. That’s my guess.”

  Other car washes start showing up long before Madame Lieu’s. Doland eyes each new opportunity as it whizzes by, like he knows he should veer into the next one he sees. Whitaker keeps saying, “It’s just a little farther.”

  The midmorning sun is fierce, the sky a flat, empty blast of blue. Lots of military vehicles are cranking along in both directions, and so are Vietnamese on bicycles, motor scooters, and on foot. Whitaker doesn’t know exactly what he’s doing. He doesn’t have the compact on him. He’s not even sure he wants to give it back, because that would let her know he took it. He’s just curious, is how it feels to him.

  “Can I ask you somethin’, Whitaker? And you can’t laugh.”

  “Why not? What if it’s funny?”

  “The doc says I got to get circumcised. Do you think I should? What would you do if you were me?”

  “How come you’re not circumcised, Doland?”

  “What do you mean? How do I know? They didn’t do it. But the doc says that’s why I keep getting the clap, and if I get circumcised I won’t get it as often.”

  “That’s a rock and a hard place, man.”

  “I hate gettin’ those shots in the ass. But gettin’ circumcised has gotta hurt, too.”

  “Are you gonna do it?”

  Making a dangerously wide exit out of somewhere, another deuce and a half is broadside in front of them, and Doland honks and steers almost onto the shoulder and then back to safety. The shiny truck, water dripping off the running boards, shoots past. The car wash it just departed flies by on the right. “What’s wrong with that place?”

  “It’s just a little farther.”

  “You keep saying that. Why am I doin’ this?” Doland asks, sounding sad.

  “It’s just around that corner up there.” He’s claiming more certainty than he has, but the dust billowing up and swirling away, the bedraggled palm trees bunched close to the road look like things he’s seen before, and he probably has. But they could have been anywhere along this miserable road. He undergoes a funny excitement as the gentle bend clears the drooping fronds and the little blue building comes into view. A soap-splashed jeep sits on the dark, damp gravel, kids with buckets and rags are running around. “That’s it,” he says. “We’re here.”

  There’s room beside the jeep, and almost before the engine shuts off, kids emerge from behind the building where they were probably gambling or goofing off. They smile at Doland and Whitaker and jabber at one another, scampering around to get their buckets. “Keep your eye on my weapon. I’ll get us some Cokes,” says Whitaker.

  He’s hoping that Lan will simply appear, that he will turn and see her the way he did when she was inside that window watching him. He goes up to the blue building and peeks in the window. There’s a chunky girl with pretty big tits on the lap of a GI, and he can hear another girl, who doesn’t sound like Lan, tittering. He steps in and the GI smiles at him. The tittering girl is nestled across the thighs of a big roly-poly soldier. She has her back to Whitaker, but he can tell she’s giving the guy a hand job. A third girl looks up from her magazine. “Hey, GI,” she says, and the roly-poly guy peeks around his whore; he’s flushed and looks confused.

  “Gimme two Cokes,” Whitaker says to the girl whose wide face and bright black eyes have a kind of dazzle that she lets him see, then takes away, aiming her butt cheeks at him as she bends to the washtub full of melting ice chips and Cokes.

  The roly-poly guy sputters and kind of bounces on the wicker chair. “Troi oi,” says the girl; the chair wobbles and creaks; she wraps both arms around his big head and gives him a squeeze. His buddy is laughing and standing up. “You had enough, Pollard?” he says. He has a clean-cut look to him, Whitaker realizes, neat blond hair, clear blue eyes, tailored fatigues, like he thinks he’s an officer.

  “Oh, man, Blake, I’m feelin’ kinda faint,” says Pollard. “What is wrong with these girls?”

  Off him now, the girl is giving her palm a wincing, disgusted look. “Numba ten,” she says, then swirls her hand in the washtub so the ice chips and bottles rattle around.

  Pollard grabs a magazine to shield the dark stain near his fly as they go. “That was crazy, man. Blake, did you see what she did?”

  “She gave you a hand job.”

  The bright-eyed girl has moved close to Whitaker, holding out the bottles. “Name me Ai,” she says. “You want short-time?”

  He shakes his head. “Maybe later.” As he pays her for the Cokes, he looks around. “Lan? Where?”

  The girl smiles and shrugs. “Five hundred Ps.”

  “Lan,” he says. “You know Lan?”

  “Lan di di,” says the chunky one, withdrawing her hand from the water with a dripping Coke of her own.

  “Di di?” he says.

  “For sure.” She dries her hand on the leg of her slacks.

  “An dee dow?” Whitaker says. “Lan go where?”

  “Toi khong biet.” She makes a hapless gesture, takes a quick drink.

  “Lan work Madame Lieu?” he asks. “Maybe tonight, maybe tomorrow?”

  “Maybe,” says the girl close to Whitaker. “For sure.”

  The chunky one gives an annoyed grunt and starts babbling. It’s clear she’s scolding the girl next to Whitaker, who shrugs and talks back. Whitaker sees how her strangely exaggerated features give her a kind of drastic beauty. But as the two of them keep squabbling, he wonders if they even know Lan. He’s never seen them before. The third girl, looking fed up, goes out the door.

  The truck is almost finished. He can see kids with rags on the roof and fenders. Doland stalks into view carrying the M14. Whitaker takes the arm of the girl at his side. She turns her eyes on him and they’re so unusual he almost looks away. “You talk Lan. Me Whitaker.” With his finger, he underscores his nametag. “Whit-a-ker. Okay? You talk Lan—Whitaker come back. Today.” He’s thinking that, if he’s lucky, he can bring the jeep in for a quick wash after the Saigon run. “You talk Lan, Whitaker come back.”

  “Okay,” she says.

  The deuce and a half honks loudly. Doland is on the running board, leaning in the open door to punch the horn.

  “Okay?” he says to the girl. “Same-same today.”

  The other one brightens and chimes in, “Okay. For sure.”

  The instant Whitaker steps into the yard, Doland piles into the cab, and Whitaker catches sight of Madame Lieu walking with the third whore along the path that leads back from the shanties. “Mamasan, mamasan.” He hurries to her, towers over her, “Lan,” he says. “Lan work tonight?” The rumbling deuce and a half is ready to go. Madame Lieu is scrawny and a little crooked the way she stands, her hair pulled so tight over the top of her head it’s like a rubber mat. She wears black pajama bottoms and a faded purple shirt that droops down her flat chest and flatter belly. Her face is furrowed, with wrinkles like claw marks. She stares at him. Whitaker points to his nametag. “Name me Whitaker.”

  “Okay. For sure. You want short-time Ai? She boucoup dep. Dep, dep.”

  “Maybe later.”

  Doland honks three more times.

  Mamasan pats th
e forearm of the whore at her side. “You short-time Ngu?”

  “I talk you Lan. You talk Lan. Me come back. See Lan. Same-same today.”

  “Toi khong biet.”

  “For sure.”

  “Ai numba one short-time girl. You do fuck-fuck Ai.”

  Doland has enlisted some kid to help him back out safely onto the road. Whitaker turns and runs. He bounds up and into the truck as it starts forward. “You weren’t really going to leave without me, were you?”

  Doland is shifting into second gear. “Don’t talk to me, you idiot. I don’t want to talk to you. You make me feel like a jerk.”

  “Whatta you mean?”

  “Just shut up! I mean it! Not another fucking word!”

  So they drive in silence the whole way back to the base. Doland lets him out and Whitaker barely hits the ground before Doland says, “Shut the damn door.”

  He slams it.

  “And you forgot the Cokes, too. You didn’t even bring me my fucking Coke, man.”

  What an asshole, Whitaker thinks, standing at the side of the company street watching the truck drive off. He shakes his head. “What the hell.” But he doesn’t have any time to waste worrying about Doland. There’s a lot he needs to get done. He has to turn in his two magazines of rounds to Sergeant Cross, then get over to the mess hall for early lunch. He has to find time for a shower, too, because he reeks of burning trash. He’s supposed to meet Leahy, ready to go at eleven so they can pick up the officer they’re chauffeuring to Saigon. And he has to be sure to remember to get back to Cross and pick up the two magazines when it’s time to go.

  The cooks have been notified to feed him early, so he has no trouble there. He downs two cheeseburgers with tons of catsup and piles of fried potatoes, piles of pickles, some orange juice, and several cups of coffee. The shower is rushed, but he’s thankful to put on clean fatigues. He sticks the compact into his pocket and remembers to stop back for his ammunition. He’s cutting it close, but on time, even a few minutes early when he arrives where Leahy told him to wait, just above the evac hospital’s officers’ billets. Leahy isn’t there. But that’s okay. Whitaker’s early. He checks his watch. A few minutes go by. He starts to worry that he’s in the wrong place, even though he knows he isn’t. Another few minutes go by. Still, no Leahy. He looks down the road in one direction and then the other. The guy’s a boozer. Everybody knows it.

  He hears a faint motor sound overhead. A chopper is coming in from the north. It speeds toward him, the thump-thump of the blades increasing. The red cross on the side means it’s a Dustoff. Whitaker is on slightly higher ground, so he’s looking down at the landing pad. The medevac is looping south and reversing. That morning when he and Doland were collecting barrels to take to the dump, they saw a formation of helicopters going north in the otherwise empty blue sky. They stopped what they were doing and stood, heads tilted back, hands shielding their eyes. One or two at first and then more and more came on, the noise building, until a long column of choppers filled the sky floating side by side, with others above and below, each loaded with troopers, like a squadron of greenish insects advancing slowly. It went on like that, while Whitaker and Doland traveled around to different sites picking up trash. They were straining to lift a particularly cumbersome barrel, when Whitaker glanced up just as the last of the choppers, looking forsaken by the others, struggled from view, and the empty sky was silent again. Word spread that it was the 173rd Airborne headed out on an operation. This Dustoff must be casualties coming in. It plummets in a small storm of wind and debris, then halts, swaying above the gigantic red cross painted on concrete so sun blasted it looks white. Down comes the dark, slow shadow. A flurry of smaller shadows skate and scurry. The skids touch, lift, and settle.

  Hatless litter bearers scramble from under the awning at the entrance to the hospital. Ducking low, dark sweat blotching their backs, they plow into the wind thrown up from the churning rotors. One of the bearers, a Pfc, motions in the direction of the awning. A stocky Spec Four hurries out. There’s no sound other than the motor, the whistle of the blades. The Pfc and Spec Four come out from behind the medevac with a stretcher bearing a blue-green body bag. KIA. Some poor dead fuck. The next casualty looks dead, too; he’s that limp, just this green blob of tattered fatigues with a little pink face, his chest wrapped in stained bandages, and a medic carrying the IV hooked to his arm. They’re hurrying and he bounces. The helicopter roars; the tail rises, settles. Transporting a second body bag is causing problems; they don’t have a stretcher; the weight keeps shifting, almost pulling the bag out of their grasp. It drags along the pavement, until the Pfc runs back out and grabs it under the middle. The chopper bounces, then leans and lifts through a hundred and then two hundred gleaming feet of sky, and leveling there, it turns to run, nose at a slight downward pitch, back to the north.

  It’s another fifteen minutes before Leahy pulls up. He tells Whitaker to get in and that the officer was delayed by some bullshit. “This doctor is a shrink,” Leahy says and rolls his eyes. They’re supposed to pick him up over by the mess hall where he went to grab something quick. “From what I hear, some colonel at MACV has gone off the deep end, so this captain is going in to babysit him. Can you believe it? I can’t.”

  “No,” Whitaker says. He tries to get a whiff of the air between them just in case there’s alcohol on Leahy’s breath, but all he smells is spearmint from the gum Leahy’s chomping. He’s hawk faced, with long black eyebrows, a thirty-five-year-old Pfc who saw the worst of it in Korea as a rifleman when the Chinese infantry poured across the border. Everybody knows his story, because he tells them, how he was half frozen, dead guys all over the bloody snow. He stayed in and made it to staff sergeant, but some kind of friction with a captain got out of hand and he was busted to private. And, oh yeah, he likes to drink.

  “That’s him,” Leahy says. Their passenger is round shouldered and heavyset, with pale skin and big ears. He’s standing beside a briefcase reading some documents, probably the 201 file for the MACV nut job; he has a cup of coffee and is still chewing his food when he looks over the rims of his glasses at Whitaker, who is standing beside the jeep. “Hello, son.”

  “Yes, sir. Hello, sir.”

  “Let’s take Highway One,” he says to Leahy.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Do know how to get to MACV that way?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Is there another way you’d prefer?”

  “No, sir.”

  As they cruise out the gate, Whitaker figures he better stay sharp, so he plants the butt of the rifle on the seat, angles the barrel to the sky, and sits up straight. The captain doesn’t say another word, and his presence seems to make Leahy tight-lipped and uneasy. They go a while, nobody making a sound, and then Whitaker, curious about what’s going on behind him, pretends to stretch. The captain has stopped reading and sits with his hands folded on his belly, like he’s praying or maybe sleeping behind the big sunglasses he’s put on.

  The traffic gets crazy. It’s honking, pedaling, careening mayhem. Whitaker thinks they must be in Saigon. He’s seen loony traffic before, but never anything like this. Leahy stays calm, handling the chaos with a steady, straight-ahead stare until he slides to the curb in front of MACV headquarters. The captain says nothing, climbing out and busily fussing with the sweat-stained, sticky seat of his pants. They’re free to go, so they head out. Within a block, Leahy starts ranting about having to deal with primitive drivers and arrogant officers. He says something about a shortcut, then starts cursing, honking, tailgating, and cutting in between scooters, and then he pulls to the curb. “Fuck this,” he says and jumps out.

  “Leahy, what are you doin’?”

  “I gotta take a piss. Just sit tight.” He walks straight in to a bar.

  Stuck at the edge of stampeding traffic honking and screeching in what seems like a dozen directions, and surrounded by street signs he can’t read, Whitaker has no idea what to do other than just sit there
and drip sweat. But then a Vietnamese cop car crawls by and the two white mice in their white uniforms eye him and then appear to discuss him. He clambers over to the driver’s side. That way he’ll look like he’s waiting for somebody. And he can take off if he needs to. But take off where? Fucking Leahy. Is he supposed to track him down? He can hardly walk away and leave the jeep sitting there. And he’s got his M14; he sure as hell can’t leave it, and the idea of carrying it into the bar doesn’t seem too bright.

  The sidewalk is almost as hectic as the street, kids and old ladies, papasans pushing carts, ARVNs in uniform, gooks in business suits, and a bunch of young girls in white outfits, slacks under dresses that go down to their ankles but have slits up the side, and Leahy plowing through their ranks. Veering and reeling straight at Whitaker. He piles in, carrying two big bottles of Coke. “Let’s go. You think you wanna drive, then drive.” He’s flushed, his eyes red rimmed and bleary; the guy is totally trashed after being gone a few minutes. “I said, ‘Let’s go,’ Whitaker. So go. Did you hear me?”

  “You gotta give me directions.”

  “Go straight. Here,” he says, handing over one of the Cokes. “I’ll drive if you want.”

  “No.” The bottle is cool to the touch, and the first swig a godsend. He checks behind them, but there’s no such thing as a break in the onslaught, so he waves his hand as if to force space between a battered truck and the scooters passing it as he takes the plunge. Everything squeals and honks and adapts to accept him.

  “Get into that circle coming up, stay on the right, and when you get to the far side, bear right.”

  “What’s the far side? It’s a fucking circle!”

  “I’ll tell you.” He puts the bottle to his lips, and Whitaker notices that Leahy’s Coke is reddish rather than dark. Not merely diluted it must be mostly bourbon.

  “What you got there?”

  “Just drive.” Leahy leans back, closing his eyes and cradling the M14 so it rests across his chest and shoulder. “That fucking captain couldn’t say a word to us, could he? Not a fucking word. Whatta prick.”