by David Rabe
“He was busy. You know.”
“He’s a prick. He didn’t talk because he knew we’d see through him. Why’s he a fucking captain anyway?”
“You gotta tell me where to go.”
“Fuck that.”
“What?”
“Don’t worry. I’m with you.” He sits up, grows focused, leans forward. “You see that big red sign up ahead with the blue letters? Take a right at the corner.”
They go like that, Leahy drinking and offering embittered, grumbling directions, while Whitaker obeys step after step, hoping for the best, and then Leahy looks at him and says, “You’re a good boy, Whitaker. You’re my boy. You’re my horse, if you never win a race. Do you know where we are?”
“Not for sure.”
Leahy guzzles, then purrs and closes his eyes. “This is it, trooper. Highway 1. The road home. You just stay on it and we’ll be there sooner than jack shit.”
Ahead of them, the traffic is advancing steadily into the dazzle of the day. “No kidding. Okay,” Whitaker says. So they should be back by 1430 hours at the latest. Maybe even 1400. Something in the moment inclines Whitaker to think in army time. 1400 hours. 1430. Leahy’s messed-up history, the bodies in the bloody snow, the teenaged Leahy fending off Chinese hordes, even his drinking and useless misery, makes his praise satisfying. Looking half asleep Leahy takes a tiny sip; he raises and lowers his chin in acceptance of some inner, inescapable burden, and then he rests his cheek against the hand guard of Whitaker’s rifle. His damp face is glazed in sweat. Whitaker can feel his own body coming to a boil; droplets trickle down his brow, his cheeks; they fall from the tip of his nose. It’s an afternoon like an explosion sending shock waves all the way to the clouds on the tattered horizon.
“I can’t take it,” Leahy says. “I just can’t take it.” He sounds hurt. “That armada this morning—it was a fucking armada.”
“What?”
“I can’t take it. Did you see ’em?”
“Whatta you mean?”
“The choppers—the 173rd on its way out into—”
“Oh. You mean the choppers, all the—”
“I mean that fucking armada, it was a fucking armada. Wake the fuck up!”
“Yeah, yeah. It was unbelievable.”
“It’s all kids, all kinds of poor kids out there—kids tryin’ to learn what I already know, tryin’ to learn it and gettin’ killed tryin’. It ain’t right. I should be there. I should be with ’em, teachin’ ’em. I could keep maybe just one of ’em alive and he could go home, you know, he could go home and have a date and get laid by some nice round-eyed girl. It should be me in a body bag comin’ back—it should be me in ’em. At least one of ’em. It should be me, and then that one, that kid could go home.”
He wraps his arms around the rifle, hugging it, squeezing; the barrel indents his cheek. He strains violently. “Fuck,” he says. “Fuck, fuck …” He drops the rifle, and wheels around and stands up. Whitaker fears Leahy is going to jump, and then, realizing he is headed for the backseat, Whitaker awaits an accidental drunken tumble to the road. But Leahy lands where he aimed.
Whitaker is holding the rifle, which he grabbed without even thinking while tracking Leahy and steering.
“You think I’m drunk out of my mind, don’t you, Whitaker,” says Leahy. “Don’t you. Admit it.”
“Yes I do,” he says.
“Well, you are right. Give yourself a fucking prize.”
He cranes his neck to find Leahy curling up on his side. “I’m goin’ to sleep.”
The traffic is moving even more swiftly than before. Whitaker sees Vietnamese in trucks, which look like they’re coming apart even as they bounce along, water buffalo trudging the shoulder with some farmer waving a stick, even couples and families dressed up and walking into a kind of picnic area. When he spots U.S. Army vehicles, he takes them as a good sign. But he still wakes Leahy a couple of times to confirm where they are. Leahy sits up, blinking, sweating, and scanning the countryside, before saying, as if the answer is obvious, “Yeah, yeah.” Then he flops back down. Whitaker is glad it’s daylight and hopeful Leahy knows what he’s talking about, but it’s still a kind of shock when the gate to the compound shows up on the right. He tells Leahy to wake up; he better sit up straight.
Once they pull to a halt in their area, he ditches the empty Coke bottles and brings a tray balancing as many coffees as he can carry to Leahy, who sits on the side of his bunk with his head bowed drinking the first one. He smiles at Whitaker; he winks; his dazed, lopsided expression struggles to offer several versions of wordless approval.
“I’ll go get the jeep washed and then come back and meet you here, okay, and we’ll go turn it in.”
“You’re my boy, Whitaker. You’re my horse,” Leahy says. “We’re not dead. We’re not dead.”
It’s funny, but without thinking about Lan he has become eager to see her. He knows she’ll be there; he has the same lucky feeling he had the first time he ran into her. He tries to remember, tries to see it again, the road, the dark, that faint headlight on her.
The gravel area at Madame Lieu’s is packed with a deuce and a half and a jeep getting soaked and scrubbed, while another jeep waits, so he parks a little farther on. It’s a dry bumpy pocket of dust in front of somebody’s house. He left his rifle at the compound; he turned in the ammo, so he’s free of those worries. He tosses and catches the key before tucking it away. He feels almost nervous. The yard teems with kids piling on and off the vehicles, scurrying around, shrill and shirtless. A GI sits smoking in the jeep that’s waiting. There’s a lot of noise coming from the bar. A whore in red pedal pushers steps out, and though her build is similar to that of Lan, he knows it’s not her. They all have black hair. A rawboned corporal is right behind her, pushing her along. Mysteriously, the corporal glares at Whitaker. They’ve never met. The guy staggers, sends a bullshit salute in Whitaker’s direction. He corrals the whore’s waist with both hands and makes her go faster.
At least two radios are blasting inside the blue building, one of them with that bouncy Up on the Roof. The other is this bunch of black guys wailing away about reaching out, they’ll be there. He knows to prepare, to get ready in case he finds her busy, maybe on somebody’s lap. It’s not to give her the compact that he’s there, he realizes. Or is it? Why is he there? And he laughs. To get laid, like everybody else.
Maybe six GIs—a mix of blacks and whites—and four whores crowd the sweltering space, their rambunctious, fidgety bodies making a forbidding impression, as if they are triple that number. First he recognizes the whore with the strange eyes, and then he sees the chunky one. The other two he doesn’t know. It seems that nobody is tending the washtub of beer, so he plucks out a bottle.
“Don’t steal from these little fuckers!” one of the GIs sneers. “Because we are guests in their fucked-up country.”
Whitaker smiles and shows the money. Ai sees him and calls, “Okay, numba one. You give one hundred twenty, okay?”
“We got to respect their customs and traditions no matter how sick and fucking perverted they are!” the GI says. He looks about fifteen, peach fuzz and disbelief at how angry he is; he has his hand on the chunky whore’s shoulder, her collarbone. Like everyone in the room except Whitaker, he wears a 1st Division Infantry patch above his Pfc stripe. This whole bunch is probably just back from the boonies. Maybe a squad with their corporal out back. Whitaker takes a long pull of beer, and the kid tells him, “You want to get laid, you got to wait your fucking turn. Ain’t that right, Carter.”
From behind the whore who straddles him, the guy who must be Carter says, “What?”
The kid isn’t really paying attention. He’s fixed on his whore, putting one hand on either side of her head and staring drunkenly into her eyes. He lifts her hair on both sides until it extends outward like wings that he lets fall.
Whitaker slips outside. He’ll come back some other time. Lan isn’t there, or if she is, she’s working in
one of the shanties. He really has no idea why he’s there anyway. Did he have something in mind? If he did, he no longer knows what it was. He can stop and get the jeep cleaned at some other place along the way. He’s seated behind the wheel ready to turn the key when Madame Lieu steps out of a door just below where he parked. She sees him and stops; she stares strangely before retreating inside. Her look, the flash of her eyes as they found him, has left something maddening behind. He has no idea what it is, and even less of an idea what is prompting his irritation, but he can feel his temper rising. He’s marching down to talk to her when he realizes that the orange house he’s approaching is the one in which he saw Lan sitting in the window. It’s right there in front of him with its wooden shutters wide open. He can hear Madame Lieu jabbering behind the wall. He steps up, his fingers on the orange stone of the sill, as he peers in. She’s only a few feet away talking to someone he can’t see. “Hello,” he says.
She squints at him. “Lan say talk you short-time Ai. Lan say Ai numba one. Lan numba one. Ai numba one.”
His impulse to respond is confused by doubt that he heard right. “Mamasan. Lan an di dow, okay?”
Looking annoyed, she starts jabbering, heatedly, but it’s not to him. Dressed in black slacks and a neatly white buttoned dress shirt, a young man steps forward and stands beside her. “Hello,” he says.
“Hello.”
“Lan gone to Vung Tau,” he says. “You know Vung Tau? Vung Tau ocean. Water.”
Whitaker nods. “Okay.”
“Very nice. Good. She go Vung Tau. Not coming back. Go live Vung Tau. Very nice. You know. Sand. Ocean, water.”
“Oh,” says Whitaker. “Oh.”
“Yes. Very nice.”
The old woman drifts deeper into the room. At a doorway with curtains, which she holds partly open, she chatters for a few seconds. A small boy in shorts and bare feet comes out, crossing the brown, square tiles of the floor. He emerges from the door, and runs, following a path that climbs behind neighboring homes in the direction of the bar. Madame Lieu is talking intently to the young man; she seems to be offering a small white envelope for him to take.
“Okay, okay,” he says to her.
She scuttles in her crooked way to a position just inside the window, where she delivers a singsong speech aimed right at Whitaker. Finished, she looks hopefully to the young man, who eases up and shows Whitaker the envelope he took from her. “You see?” he says. “Lan say give you. Lan say you—she say Whitaker.” He scribbles his finger under his own breast pocket, then aims the finger at Whitaker’s nametag. “She say, ‘Whitaker come Vung Tau. See her sometime. Okay? You understand?”
“Okay.”
“She say give you.” He slides out a black-and-white photograph of a girl in a long tunic that falls to her ankles. “She say you numba one. Give you.” It’s Lan in the picture, and she is all dressed up. It takes him a second to realize that her clothing is similar to what he saw those young girls wearing in Saigon earlier, those slim white outer garments slit up the side to reveal white slacks. Though he can’t identify the actual color of Lan’s dress because the black-and-white photo makes it merely dark, he knows it’s not white. “You see?” says the young man, and he carefully touches the image of the dress with his finger. “Ao Dai. Numba one. Very pretty. Okay? She say give Whitaker.” He eases the photograph back where it came from, and busies himself fixing the clasp. “She say you look, you see her. You can think her Vung Tau.”
So it all comes clear; Lan has moved to Vung Tau. As he accepts the envelope, he tries to remember the words for thank you, but all that comes to mind is “Xin Loi,” which is “sorry.”
Savage, hair-raising shouts startle them. The deuce and a half is loading up the last of the First Infantry squad. One of them stands shirtless, drumming on the roof of the cab. As the truck pulls out, they sprawl on the benches along the sides; they lean over the rails, hooting like wild men. Some of them see Whitaker looking, and one of them gives him the finger. Quickly, the truck gathers speed, and in the plume of dust it leaves behind, their cries fade. The kid Madame Lieu sent off is coming down the path, leading Ai by the hand.
“Ai numba one,” says Madame Lieu. “Lan say you short-time Ai.”
The young man smiles. “Nice we talk you, okay?”
“Okay.”
His dark eyes brighten. “Lan say you short-time Ai. You no be sad.” He smiles in a different way, adding a nod before departing for the other room.
As Ai gets closer, she looks past Whitaker to Madame Lieu. The old woman is coming out the door, gesturing impatiently. The kid scampers up and she bends to him with a high-pitched jab of a sentence, then shoves him toward the road. Whitaker’s jeep is being surrounded by a crew of kids with buckets and rags. The kid sprints to join them.
Watching the GI walk off with Ai, Madame Lieu thinks how much trouble this has been. Doing what’s right has been very difficult for her. But he will go home soon. The sadness of life will find him there, or here. Who knows? Only Heaven can say. She feels lucky, though, even blessed by the good fortune that brought her son for a visit, when his English was so necessary, so useful. By helping his mother, by making her task possible, Du’s presence seems to confirm the rightness of her actions. She did as she was taught when a child, as she fervently believes people should do, as she taught her children. Manners require that a decent person conceal news of misfortune whenever possible. Since nothing could be done to change how Lan died, what benefit was there in speaking of it? In their hearts, people want to be reassured, to have their minds put at ease, even if what is kept from them is very bad. Other GIs had asked for Lan, but this one asked and came back. It was too many times. The others asked, but when Lan could not be found, they forgot about her. Now he will forget, too. Everyone will suffer in time, as Heaven sees fit. Should Lan’s uncle appear, she will protect him in the same way, explaining that his niece brought the photograph just as he requested, but it was stolen by a drunken GI.
In the shanty where Ai takes Whitaker, she holds out her hand for the money, and then makes it clear she doesn’t want to remove her blouse. Her hair is thick, black, almost shoulder length; the ends curl inward to her neck and have a final tiny upward swoop on each side; her bangs, almost long enough to cover her eyes, part unevenly the first time she brushes them aside, and then exactly in the middle the next time. It takes a while for him to get going, but it happens eventually. Looking up, she has those high cheekbones and drastic eyes. This is what he came for, he thinks, and after a while it is.
When he walks to his jeep, the sky has darkened, and the kids are working on a truck in front of the bar. A jeep sits waiting. One of the whores runs up to the guy behind the wheel. She hands him a Coke, then leans in close. She giggles and scurries away, and Whitaker feels that he’s at a Dairy Queen with girls running around bringing burgers and fries, and the whores are carhops. Back at the compound, he finds Leahy sacked out, violently snoring. Whitaker shakes him for a while before Leahy finally sits up, looking desperate, almost panicky. His eyes are bloodshot, his skin pale. Whitaker explains that Leahy signed the jeep out, so he has to sign it back in. Leahy struggles to pull on his trousers and loses his balance. He sits down on his bed, then rushes outside and bends over a trash barrel, but he doesn’t puke. Whitaker notices that dark clouds are visible now, gathering, thickening. By the time they’re done with the jeep, the sky is black. Beyond layers of mist odd figures are taking shape. Leahy looks lost; he has stopped walking. They’re in the middle of the road. Whitaker stands beside him. Leahy puts his hands on his hips. He says he feels half dead; he says that a Mongol horde is marching through his mouth with only their dirty socks on. He weaves and wobbles as they cross over a corrugated metal strip bridging a drainage ditch. When he gets to the other side, he says that he thinks he needs to eat something. He wants Whitaker to go with him. Just before they enter the mess hall, Whitaker’s backward glance shows a sky in disarray, gigantic inky splotches, towering fun
nel-like spirals, beams of falling light being beaten back, swept aside. Leahy thinks he ought to start slow, maybe just some bread and tomato juice. He asks one of the cooks with whom he goes back a long ways to toast the bread for him. Whitaker loads his tray with beef stew, string beans, some cooked carrots, French fries. Leahy thinks the stew smells okay to him, so maybe he’ll try it. He gets to his feet and smiles, as if standing is a huge accomplishment. Past him Whitaker sees Sergeant Emlin a few steps inside the door. Emlin scans the mess hall, his eyes roving from table to table in a determined manner that makes Whitaker know to duck and hope to go unnoticed. He remains stock-still, eyes averted, until he hears signs of someone approaching. Sergeant Emlin stands over him. “Whitaker. We need a replacement on gate guard. Collins is puking his guts out. He hadda go on sick call.”
“Aww, Sarge. C’mon.”
“C’mon what? Let’s go. Eat up and get a move on.”
“I had a long, hard day.”
“Listen to this asshole,” he says to Leahy, who has come back with a little stew on his tray. “Tell him, Leahy. He thinks he had a hard day.” He offers a disgusted momentary silence, a righteous stare. “A hard time is those troopers from the 173rd getting dropped into a fucking kill zone. A hard time is the ones coming back on stretchers or in body bags—the ones headed to the evac or the morgue. They’re the ones got it hard.”
“Ain’t that the damn truth, Sarge,” says Leahy.
Emlin eyes Leahy’s tray. “What, are you on a fucking diet, Leahy?”
“Little upset stomach, Sarge.”
“Cut the crap, Whitaker,” Emlin says. “Report to me in twenty. You’re my volunteer.”
He watches Emlin all the way out the door. “Shit,” he says. He glances to Leahy, who seems suddenly to dislike him.
The rain starts as he gathers up his gear. He doesn’t have much time, and so none to spare, but he deserves a fucking minute, he thinks. He digs the little white envelope out of his footlocker. He sits on his bunk and looks at the photo. It’s neat how sexy she is in that fancy dress. Something about the slits up the side and the high collar. He doesn’t really understand it. But she seems taller, too, looking off with this kind of flirtatious expression, serious though, prim and proper, holding that flower in her hands. There are all those other flowers in vases around her. But it’s the high collar that gets him, and her hands folded around the stem, like she’s a prude or a bride. Except for the sexy slits up the side. That’s when he knows what he’ll do. It makes him laugh. He’ll send it to Roger. He’ll write a note telling his brother how often he gets laid and how this one is nuts about him. How he sees her all the time. How she fucks him crazy, how she does whatever he wants. He hurries to get it ready, addressing the envelope, affixing the stamp. He works carefully, writing out the note. He can just see his brother opening the envelope and being stopped in his tracks by Lan, thinking, What a hot bitch! At the last second he decides to print WAR IS HELL! across the photo, and adds his signature.
