‘So you’re missing four years. And Ninh Phuoc is a long, long way from Sai Gon.’
‘Particularly in the middle of a war, wouldn’t you think?’
Condley laughed cynically. ‘I couldn’t have gone a hundred meters outside my company perimeter by myself in that area without the risk of being killed. What the hell was this guy doing in Ninh Phuoc?’
‘Other than dying, you mean?’
‘Oh, that,’ He thought about it some more, staring at the bones that lay before them. ‘So what do we do with the remains of a deserter, Professor? We don’t just wrap them up in the American flag and fly them back to Dover in a C-141, do we?’
‘That, as they say, is above our pay grade.’ Muir’s disdain was palpable as he surveyed the remains before them on the gurney. ‘We do our job, which is to make a positive identification. And then we turn the matter over to the powers-that-be.’
‘Stand by for a fucking parade, right up Pennsylvania Avenue.’
‘Stifle yourself, Condley.’
‘Another victim, coming home from Viet Nam.’
‘We do our job, they do theirs.’
‘I remember that drill. The way they do their job. I learned it about fifty-eight thousand dead guys ago.’
‘Fifty-eight thousand and one.’
Condley grunted. He was beginning to feel claustrophobic. ‘Call me when you get his file. Hanging around him makes me sick.’
Muir put a hand on Condley’s shoulder, guiding him toward the door that led to the hallway. It was a fatherly gesture, from a man only five years older than he himself. But Muir, despite his flights of emotion, was far older in his soul than Condley.
‘Get some rest, Brandon.’
‘Maybe.’ Condley knew what he needed, and he knew just where to find it. ‘If I’m not in my apartment, call me at Maria’s.’
Chapter Six
‘Never get drunk before noon in the Philippines.’ Condley’s perpetually sunburnt face was filtered by the bar’s dim light, making him seem twenty years younger as he continued his fruitless lecture. ‘It’s too hot. You get sick and then you get robbed.’
Yes, this was Hawaii, but Maria’s bar was in a heavily Filipino enclave just west of Honolulu that the locals called Little Manila. The four sailors sitting across from him were on their way to a deployment in the Philippines, so they had decided to drop in on the neighbourhood for a little ethnic warm-up. And it was ten minutes to twelve. And they were already drunk.
The four weren’t actually sailors. They were Navy SEALs, special-operations-capable fighters who trained to the edge of masochism and liked to fly around the world and blow things up. They had muscles right out of a bodybuilding magazine. Their faces carried an aura of untested invincibility. The biggest one, whom Condley had nicknamed ‘Statue’ an hour before, now raised a finger into the air and made a circle, summoning the Filipina barmaid. Statue’s huge biceps hung like a ham hock as he twirled his finger.
‘Hey, Maria, one more round! Give our friend two.’
‘I’ll take one more, then I’m done.’ Condley studied the huge man, then shook his head. ‘I’m telling you, Statue, Little Manila isn’t San Diego. You’re taking your life in your hands getting drunk around here.’
Maria winked sleepily at Condley as she placed a new bottle of San Miguel in front of him. ‘Brandon Condley, you got one more beer.’
‘Sweet Maria. My little Dulcinea.’
She touched the back of his hand, giving him a smile filled with old memories and new promises. He smiled back. She was almost like a wife, except that he did not live with her and she slept with other men for a living. Truth to tell, he had actually been married to Maria for about five minutes a few years before so that she could get her green card and follow him from Manila after he’d been hired for the CILHI job. The marriage had been a perfunctory courtesy, like leaving a large tip for someone after years of outstanding service. And the divorce had been just as perfunctory as the marriage. Condley remained proud that neither the divorce nor the marriage got in the way of their friendship, because he genuinely liked Maria. He knew the tones of her voice and all the secret movements of her body. She was as comfortable to him as the bed he slept in as a child. She idly stroked the back of his hand for another second, then walked to the rear of the bar and continued wiping empty tables.
The sailors were the only other customers in the bar. Condley toyed with the beer bottle as he almost insolently continued to eye Statue and his shipmates. Condensation from the hot dank air had made a quick puddle on the bar.
He absently drew little circles in the puddle. Finally he raised the bottle in a mock toast.
‘You guys do steroids?’
The SEALs had noticed Condley’s faded Marine Corps tattoo when he walked into the bar an hour before and had bought him one drink and then another. But now they laughed loudly and elbowed one another, sharing a secret joke or maybe a kind contempt. Condley persisted, eyeing the squared muscles of their chests and the large deltoids that flared out of their loose-hung, sleeveless T-shirts.
‘No, really. When I was in the Marines we worked out like crazy and none of us got bulked up like that. Got to be steroids. Does your skipper know? I mean, they don’t actually allow you to do that, do they? That shit’ll tear you to pieces in a few years. You’re going to be walking around on canes, calling for a nurse to help you pump up your dick so you can get laid.’
Statue’s main sidekick, a squared-off, no-neck slab of muscle just taller than a dwarf, scratched a new tattoo and shook his head unbelievingly at Condley. ‘You really were a Marine? In the Nam, huh? Come on. What the hell happened, they put your body through a shrinking machine when you got back?’
The other three laughed uproariously, as if No Neck were a stand-up comedian. Then they drained huge gulps of beer straight from their bottles. Some trainer or maybe officer had taught them that they were royalty, fit to come down from the mountain every now and then to mingle among the mortals.
Condley laughed with them. It seemed to disconcert them. Then he leaned around the bar and stared at their feet. ‘How many pairs of running shoes do you guys own? I’ll bet you’ve got a different pair for beach running, road running, sidewalk running, cross-country running. I’ll bet you’ve got a special pair you spit-shine for goddamn inspection. That is, if you still spit-shine shoes in today’s kiss-ass, aerobic Navy.’
‘Yeah, we got running shoes,’ said Black Goliath, now deciding to directly taunt Condley. ‘When’s the last time your narrow ass ran a mile, Home?’
‘Last time I ran further than a hundred feet was when somebody was shooting at me, trying to kill me dead.’
‘In the Nam?’
‘Hell, no. Right here in Honolulu. A very unhappy guy. He thought I was in the rack with his wife. They can shoot you for that in Hawaii, you know. At least that’s what they tell me.’
‘Were you?’
‘In the rack with his wife? Not when he was trying to kill me.’
Condley watched them carefully as they elbowed one another again, raising their beers to him in an approving toast. It had become a standoff of disbelief. They were trying to decide if he’d really been a Marine, and he was trying to decide if they could fight.
‘Sorry. You guys look too pretty, like some kind of recruiting poster. Did they send you to modeling class? I know you’ve been to all the right schools – SCUBA school, Ranger school, Airborne school. But do they teach you how to take pain? Do they mess with your minds?’ He grunted, a dismissal. ‘Probably kiss your ass every payday, thank you for taking their money.’
‘Why, you want to fight, old man?’ Black Goliath laughed, giving off a look that bordered on pity.
‘I’ll give you a hint, Goliath. If I was going to fight you, you’d be the last one to know. You wouldn’t find out until the knife was sliding along your throat.’
Statue seemed mystified by Condley’s unbending composure. He peered boozily at Condley, his huge head
waving from side to side as if buttressed by a gentle, changing wind. ‘Any one of us could beat the fuck out of you.’
‘I’m a lot meaner than you think.’
Grinning, Statue made just the slightest move toward Condley. Before he made it off his bar stool, a banana knife had appeared from nowhere and was making a dimple in his throat. Surprised, Statue turned slowly to see sweet Maria, her feet apart like a boxer, pressing the knife forward.
‘No fights in my bar,’ said Maria. ‘And you don’t ever hurt my lovely Brandon. He is my prince.’
Statue’s arms were up in the air, his hands open in surrender. Condley laughed quietly, dropping his own banana knife onto the bar. ‘Could have come from over here just as easy, Statue. Forget what they taught you in all that aerobic training. This is a fucked-up world we live in and people don’t like to be pushed around.’
Maria pulled away her knife and started laughing. ‘I can hook off my jab too,’ she said, shadowboxing for him and proving it, throwing a jab toward his stomach and coming up with a quick hook that just grazed his chin. Then Statue started laughing. Within seconds they were all best friends. Maria’s banana knife and quick hands had magically brought them closer together. After five beers the reddening strawberry on Statue’s throat was a treasured little prize.
Statue sat back down and slapped Condley on the back. ‘What do you do, man?’
‘I’m a bone picker,’ said Condley.
‘What does that mean?’ asked Black Goliath.
‘I go wherever they tell me to go and do whatever they tell me to do. Yesterday I was in Viet Nam, now I’m here, tomorrow I may be in Borneo. Picking up bones.’
‘You’re a spook!’ No Neck sounded triumphant, as if he had finally solved a puzzle.
‘I did that once, a long time ago. But I am now totally legit. I find the bones of dead heroes and I bury them. That’s it. Mostly in Viet Nam.’
‘Sorry about that. Sounds boring as shit, man,’ said Black Goliath.
They grew quiet, as if embarrassed for him. Maria finished wiping the tables and now walked lazily to the jukebox and punched in a dozen numbers.
‘It has its moments,’ said Condley, absently watching Maria at the jukebox. ‘And it keeps me in Asia. I like that.’
The front door opened, causing a flash of hot sunlight to intrude on their retreat, bringing with it fresh smells of a city cooking in its own noonday juices. Whoever was at the door had thought twice about it and quickly retreated back onto the street. The jukebox suddenly surrounded their reverie with a blast of drum-pounding disco music.
‘I hate beer,’ said Statue. ‘It’s like a thousand little flies buzzing in my stomach. And every one of them wants out.’
Condley kept watching them. They were growing uneasy under his stare. The heat and the beer had made them woozy. They were in their early twenties, but now they looked like children acting out a grown-up game of war and bravado. Finally he smiled. It was as close to feeling paternal as he could come.
‘You’ll change. Just wait. You stay long enough in Asia and it takes over. It doesn’t have any answers, and after a while you stop asking for them. That’s what I like about it and that’s what I hate about it. In the States everything is, “What’s the bottom line?” There isn’t any bottom line in Asia. There’s always one more paragraph, two more choices. The problem is, none of the choices are for good, because tomorrow there’s a different reason and maybe it totally contradicts today.’
He was enjoying the confusion his words were bringing to their faces. ‘Try Java. I was there for six months once, on a security job for an oil company. In Java they tell the story of a fruit called the simalakana. It kills your mother if you eat it. It kills your father if you don’t. That’s Asia. Get it? You look at something and it’s clear as a bell. Just a little problem, right? But no matter what you do, you may end up paying. And you see as much or as little of what’s in front of you as you dare to. If you see too much, you kill your friends. If you see too little, you kill yourself. Simalakana. ‘
‘Semilock on your what?’ No Neck, the tough little bastard, had come up for air. He grinned triumphantly at his joke as the other three laughed again.
‘On your brain, No Neck. If you had one.’
They didn’t have the slightest idea what he was talking about. They’d gone through tough training and they were physically hard. Somebody had convinced them that they could run through a brick wall if it came down to it. But they didn’t have any idea what was on the other side of the wall. Maybe a fifty-foot drop-off. Maybe the mayor, with the key to the city. Maybe somebody sitting in an easy chair, waiting to shoot them. Who the hell knew?
‘I’ll tell you what, let me buy you a round. How’s that? Are you up to it?’
‘The ancient veteran, not to be confused with the ancient mariner, who at least rhymed, is buying us a round,’ said the fourth SEAL slowly, looking at the others. Condley had nicknamed this man Plato because he didn’t talk very much and seemed to weigh his words when he did speak. Condley hadn’t decided whether Plato was extremely drunk or extremely smart.
‘That is, if you can hang with me for one more round?’
‘Hell, yeah,’ said Statue. ‘If you’re up to it, we’re up to it.’
‘Right,’ said No Neck.
‘I hate to take the man’s money,’ said Black Goliath. ‘But if you feel like you gotta do it, go ahead.’
Condley stood up and walked toward the front door.
Statue called to him. ‘Where you going? The head’s over here, man.’
‘I don’t need to take a leak.’
‘You buying us a drink or what?’
Condley smiled mischievously. ‘Don’t go away.’
The sun was white-hot, right out of hell, and the street was filled with garbage. Rotten banana peels made a stinking little pile near the curb, black in their ferment. Flies were everywhere, like smoke. A new green Mercedes was parked next to the curb. Maria had bought it from the money she made whoring and running the bar, which she now owned outright. Across the street a boom box was blaring disco music from inside an apartment. The windows and curtains of the apartment were pulled up, revealing three young women who were awakening from morning naps after a night of dancing and turning tricks for Maria. One of the girls waved automatically to Condley as she stretched away her nap. An old woman slept between two trees in the garden outside the apartment, having made a makeshift hammock out of a set of sheets. That would be Maria’s mother who managed the apartment on behalf of her upwardly mobile, well-invested madam of a daughter. Near the tent, a small boy lay dozing on a wooden bench, as ignorant of the noise and rot and flies as a languid dog. That would be Maria’s nephew, recently arrived from the real Manila under the Immigration and Naturalisation Service’s famous family-reunification plan.
Condley saw it all but took none of it in. In a way he had created the whole scene before him by enabling the ever-industrious Maria to obtain her green card. But that had been several years ago. Now it was simply a midday view of Little Manila, hardly as nice as Waikiki but a whole lot healthier than the Philippines. Sometimes it was pretty, often it was ugly, and every day it changed. So it didn’t do any good to think about it.
Finally he saw the balut vendor. Condley called to the frail, sandaled old man. ‘Hey, hey! Baluts! You gimme five!’
The old man trotted immediately toward Condley, balancing a tray full of duck eggs on a strap that went over one shoulder. Condley waved him on, turning back toward the bar.
‘This way!’
The four young SEALs had not moved from their seats. Their bottles of San Miguel sat empty before them as they awaited Condley’s free round. They peered curiously at the balut vendor, who smilingly urged each of them to take one of the eggs.
‘What the fuck, over?’ No Neck fingered his egg, mimicking an old military phrase for confusion in combat.
‘You never had a balut?’ Condley cracked the top of his eggshell, h
olding the rest of the egg like a shot glass, just below his chin. ‘Gentlemen’ – he raised the egg, as if offering a toast – ‘to your success in combat.’
They followed Condley’s lead, cracking the top of the egg. Then all four froze, peering inside the shell. Plato looked back up at Condley, his eyes gone hollow. He swallowed hard and licked around the edges of his lips.
‘There’s a baby duck in there.’
‘Well, not quite. Another three or four days it would have been. Cheers, guys.’ Condley downed the balut. The placenta squirted inside his mouth as he chewed the full-grown embryo. Finally he swallowed and raised the eggshell in another mock toast.
‘Good protein. Kind of like oysters, huh? Go ahead. This is a Navy tradition! I made a toast to your future. So, down the hatch. What’s the matter, you need some salt?’
The four young men looked at one another again, sharing a secret dread. Statue went first, tipping his balut into his mouth and then delicately mulling it around with his tongue, as if he had just inserted a hot rock. Black Goliath followed suit, followed by No Neck.
Plato stared at the other three, then ran toward the head. Condley heard him retching as he reached the toilet. Black Goliath walked quickly to the front door. In the shaft of bright light that followed the opening of the door, Condley saw Black Goliath spit his balut into the street and then stand at the curb, spitting and spitting. Statue attempted to swallow, and then puked onto the floor.
No Neck, the little bastard, was smiling comfortably as he finished chewing the balut. He swallowed with satisfaction.
‘Not bad,’ said No Neck.
‘The perfect warm-up for a pro-life rally,’ answered Condley, warming to No Neck.
‘I think it would go on a pizza,’ said No Neck.
‘Shut up, man,’ said Statue. He was on his knees now. Maria had begun screaming and clucking her tongue as she trotted toward him with a bucket and a mop. ‘Just shut the hell up.’
‘Pepperoni, unborn baby duck, and provolone,’ said No Neck, who now waved toward the balut vendor. ‘I’ll take another one.’
Lost Soldiers Page 8
