Another Man's Moccasins

by Craig Johnson

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  “Yes.”

  “When was this picture taken, if I might presume to ask?”

  “The end of ’67, just before Tet.” He studied the photograph again, and I could hear the years clicking in his head like abacus beads. I leaned forward. “Third generation; is it possible that this is Ho Thi’s grandmother?”

  “It is not the woman I knew. . . .”

  “Then possibly her great-grandmother? This woman in the photograph, her name was Mai Kim and she died in 1968.”

  He stared into the black-and-white, memorizing the woman’s face and comparing it with his granddaughter. “It is possible. Did you know her well, Sheriff ?”

  “Not in the personal sense, but she was a bar girl at the Boy-Howdy Beau-Coups Good Times Lounge just outside Tan Son Nhut air force base, where I was sent as a Marine inspector.”

  “You were a police officer then, too?”

  “Yes.”

  He thought about it some more. “You think it is possible that Ho Thi received this photograph from her mother or another woman within the family and mistakenly believed that she was related to you?”

  “Right now, it’s all I’ve got to go on and the only connection to Wyoming that I have.”

  “I see.”

  “Mr. Tuyen, I’m going to need you to look at some photographs of your granddaughter for purposes of recognition, see some identification that she was, indeed, your granddaughter, and then we can make arrangements with the Division of Criminal Investigation to have the body shipped back to California.”

  “Yes, of course.”

  “Were you planning on heading back anytime soon?”

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  He was still looking at the photo in the plastic bag and possibly thinking of other things in other plastic bags. “I had intended to leave today, but I didn’t seem to have the energy once I’d gotten in my vehicle.”

  I stuck my hand out for the black-and-white, but he misinterpreted and shook it, so I took the photograph back with my other hand. “That’s perfectly understandable. I can appreciate it if you need some time alone, but if you’d rather look at those things this afternoon, you’ll have to come up to my offi ce in Durant.”

  “I’m not sure if I will be up to that this afternoon, but perhaps I will go back and check into my room again and see how I feel later today.” He stood.

  “That’ll be fine. Tomorrow morning is just as good. You still have my card?”

  “I do.” He stopped at the door and looked back at us. “And you have my granddaughter’s belongings? ”

  “Yes.”

  “I would like to pick up those things.”

  “I’m sure we can release them as soon as we get all the information back from Cheyenne, and I get some documentation on you and your granddaughter.”

  “I will see to it.” He still stood there, and I knew what was next. “I am reticent to ask again, but I understand you have arrested a man for the murder of Ho Thi?”

  I crossed my arms. “We have a man who is being held under reasonable suspicion in connection with her death.

  However, there is not conclusive evidence against him.”

  In the backlight of the glass-paned door, Tuyen’s outline was dark and featureless. “This man was living under the highway?”

  “I’m afraid so.”

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  I could see the outline of his chest rise and fall. “It is diffi -

  cult to remember that things like this can happen, even here.”

  He turned the knob, pushed open the door, and was gone.

  “Jeez, Boss . . .”

  Saizarbitoria had followed me out the door to the playground where I stood with my boot propped up on the jungle gym. I looked out at the flat grasslands leading to the Powder River. There was a low rise to the east of town before the breaks of the northbound water crumpled the plains like an unmade bed. Everything was a dried-out watercolor, and it looked like if you touched anything, it would crumble and blow away. We needed rain.

  “What did you say?”

  He stood next to me, his hand wrapped around one of the bars for an instant, then he yanked it away from the cooking metal. He blew on his hand. “Kind of rough on a guy who just lost his granddaughter.”

  “He didn’t find her that long ago.”

  “Jesus.” He barely said it, but I still heard him.

  I was having a hard enough time thinking about the things I needed to think about without the weight of his judgment.

  “Call up Jim Craft down in Natrona County and get him to go check out the Flying J, see what they say about the stolen card.”

  He cleared his throat, adjusted his wraparound sunglasses, and stuffed his hands into his pockets. “All right.”

  “And then ask DCI if there was anything in Ho Thi indicating drug use.” The brim of my hat hung across my brow, so I pushed it back and continued to look at the horizon for clouds that weren’t there.

  He stiffened a little. “Why?”

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  “Because Paquet was and, most likely, if she was involved in prostitution she was involved in drugs.” I took my boot off the rung and stood there looking at him. He was a handsome kid, and there wasn’t any back-down in him, especially with me, and that’s why I liked him so much. I turned and started toward my truck. “You’d be amazed at what you’d do if you were desperate.”

  Khe Sanh, Vietnam: 1968

  The NVA had found the range of the helicopter pretty quickly, and the mortar fire was singing around us like roman candles in the mon-soon wet.

  I ducked against the bulkhead and forced air in and out of my lungs, unsure if the whistling I heard was my breath or the enemy rounds. I looked over and saw Henry disconnecting Babysan Quang Sang from the webbing and the cargo net in anticipation of the Indo-Chinese fire drill from the helicopter.

  He looked at me only once. “Run, and do not stop until you reach something.”

  The generators along with the Willie Petes, or illumination rounds, from inside the wire lit up the area with a blinding sideways glare that threw dramatic contrasting shadows on the wet, rain-slicked surface of everything— as if the situation needed it.

  We were coming in hot, and the big Kingbee followed the con-tours of the valley as we made the final approach, skimming in about six feet off the hard ground and stalling our movement at the LZ, with the gigantic circles of water imitating the interlocking revolution of the rotors.

  Everybody moved at once. Hollywood Hoang gunned the engine with a roar as we piled off on one side, the two corpsmen 118 CR A I

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  following Henry and Babysan Quang Sang out of the helicopter’s side door and into the pouring rain and incandescent night.

  I came out of a crouch and shot after the receding images of the running men; the two corpsmen had slanted right, toward the burned-out hulk of an M47 tank, and Henry and Babysan disappeared into a trench about fifty yards away.

  I felt like a buffalo chasing antelope.

  As my foot came off what pretended to be the landing strip, I felt the chopper begin its hurried ascent like it was falling from the earth instead of rising. Hoang had given us all the time he could and was now on his way out. I ran the first twenty or so yards from the helicopter when something pushed me to the red mud with a tremen-dous outburst of air and an immediate loss of oxygen, along with an explosion much louder than the rest. The impact of the overpressure forced my helmet onto my nose and pushed me forward, and I slid diagonally in the raw scarred mud.

  I was pretty sure I was burning. It wasn’t th
at I felt like I was on fire, but the smell was so close that it had to be me. I couldn’t hear anything, just the sound of my breath and the coursing blood in my temples. When I moved, it was as if I were viewing myself in slow motion; even my head pivoted like it was on some long boom.

  I forced myself to get up but fell to one side in the muck, and I half turned toward all the light. My eyes closed with the fury of it but, when I half opened one, I could see someone lying in the distance. The fire backlit the outline of a hand, and then an arm reached out into the night air. I stumbled up through the smoke and slanted sheets of rain.

  There was wreckage everywhere, and the acrid taste of the fire filled my throat and pushed itself back out from my body. I gagged but staggered forward, looking for the arm that had reached out to me. I fell over smoking debris and could make out part of the helicopter’s fuselage as the drops sizzled on the superheated metal.

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  Hollywood Hoang’s uniform was singed but still mostly powder blue. I reached down and grabbed him, fell back, but held on, still trying to get my ears to clear the shrieking.

  He didn’t weigh much, so I carried him, slowly pulling him the distance toward the trench and wondering what had happened to everyone else.

  That’s when I saw the other bodies.

  One of the corpsmen hadn’t made it. For some reason, the majority of the explosion had blown to the left and had taken him with it.

  The rotors, the engine, or just the sheer ferocity of the blast had caught him, and he lay there in three pieces. The other was crawling through the burning oil and was screaming. At least I assumed he was screaming since his mouth was open.

  I got to the man, picked him up by the front of his flak jacket, and leveraged him onto one of my muddy knees. I grabbed again and got a better hold of him as his face rolled up toward mine. “Don’t leave me.”

  I lifted Quincy Morton from Detroit, Michigan, put Hoang over my shoulder, and turned, starting toward the trench again. The smoke enveloped everything, and it was as if we disappeared. I slogged forward into the darkness; the heat pressed against my back like a steam iron, and the weight of the two bodies slowed me down to a crawl in the mud that collected under my combat boots.

  I remembered the blocking sleds at USC and the grueling two-a-days under the California sun, squared my shoulders, put my head down, and pulled.

  I had taken a good seven steps when somebody ran into me.

  He bounced off and must have fallen to the ground, so I released the swabo corpsman only for a second to try and help whoever had fallen, but the swabo misinterpreted the movement and grabbed my arm just as I saw the barrel of the AK-47 rising up and into my face. It didn’t matter. I didn’t have my rifle.

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  He fired, the cicada sound of the machine gun coming unwound as I fell with the whistling rush of the bullets flying beside me; I came down on him hard and could feel him trying to get the automatic loose from under me, but I’d yanked a hand free and could feel his throat. Everything was wet, and we slithered there against each other.

  He was kicking, but the weight of all three of us didn’t allow for much movement. I tightened my grip on his larynx and felt the cartilage begin to give as his voice box collapsed and pressed into the air cavity of his esophagus. I couldn’t hear anything since the explosion, but I could imagine that I could still hear the spittle. He must have gargled like a baby working itself up for a full-blooded scream.

  It never came.

  He wasn’t moving and wasn’t breathing, but I still wasn’t sure if he was dead.

  I lay there on top of him, retching, coughing, and finally vomiting.

  I spit and cleared my mouth and felt for the two men who lay beside me, feeling the corpsman’s hands grabbing my arm. I got to my knees and then my feet, picked them up again, and staggered forward into the smothering rain. I gathered momentum, realizing that if we stayed out there in the open for much longer, we were dead.

  The NVA had overrun the garrison and were headed for the wire; we were only a few steps ahead of them. I could feel my boots digging into the goose-shit ground, and what adrenaline I had left propelled me as we blew through the swirls of the remaining smoke-and mist-clogged night.

  I continued to push off with each stride growing just a little bit longer, and with the mantra I will not die like this . . . I will not die like this . . . I will not die like this. . . .

  Men rose up ahead, but I didn’t have time to fight them all so I just continued on, blasting forward and taking them with me. The biggest was at point and tried to shrug down like a running back A N

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  looking for a hole in the line, but I was too much weight with the two bodies I carried and took him as I lost my footing and carried us over the edge of a flat world.

  We fell, and I could finally hear the weapons firing around me and the curse words, thankfully, in English. I opened my eyes but could only see the reddish rainwater that filtered between the stacks of soggy sandbags and Henry. He was cradling his brow with blood filtering through his fingers as he laughed and shook his head with that bitter secret-survivor smile.

  He spoke out of the side of his mouth as he fired the CAR-16

  over the lip of the trench, the flame from the 5.56’s barrel extending from the black metal like the eyes of some deflated jack-o’-lantern.

  The blood was still seeping from his head where I’d hit him, when he looked at me.

  “When I said run till you reach something, I did not mean me.”

  She tossed part of a crust to Dog, who was sitting in the hallway to my left. We watched as the beast took the baked dough and swallowed it in two bites.

  “Because it’s your turn, and there isn’t anybody else.” She didn’t look satisfied with my answer, but she was relatively happy that I’d brought dinner before I headed back to the ranch to check on Cady.

  Vic sipped her Rainier beer and watched as the giant folded the last slice of his pizza, stuffing it into his mouth behind the impenetrable curtain of black hair, and chewed. He had eaten all of his own pie and all but the one slice Vic had picked at and the three slices I’d devoured of another. He’d chugged the liter of pop that we’d provided and finally lay back on the bunk and covered his eyes with his arm.

  Vic studied him for a moment and then spoke. “So the one night I’m going to sleep in the jail, you’re going home?” I didn’t 12 2 CR A I G J O H N S O N

  say anything. She watched me as I took a sip of my beer. “Sure you don’t want to stick around?”

  “One of us can’t leave this room.” I glanced at the prisoner, now snoring softly. “And under the circumstances . . .”

  She shrugged. “This is the shittiest pizza I’ve ever eaten.”

  I continued to watch the Indian. “He seemed to like it.”

  “He lives under the highway; I’m not so sure his culinary sensibilities are all that refined.”

  I peeled the R on the label of my beer bottle with my thumbnail. “Saizarbitoria thinks I’m a racist.”

  “That’s okay. I think you’re a slave driver.” She pushed her ball cap back; the hat was a sign that she was having a bad hair day—something that I had learned not to mention. “Why?”

  “I was kind of hard on this Tuyen fellow today.”

  “Really?”

  “Yep.” I looked at the glue strip where the label had peeled away. “I don’t know, maybe it is prejudice. He was in the Black Tigers
and STRATA.”

  She stared at me. “And for those of us who weren’t born until after the Age of Aquarius, what the fuck does that mean?”

  “Black Tigers were the South Vietnamese version of our Special Forces, and STRATA was a program that dropped these guys behind enemy lines. There were, I think, about a hundred of them and about a third never made it back.”

  “So this guy’s one bad motor scooter?”

  “Could be.” I took a deep breath. “His English is good, better than any Vietnamese speaker I’ve ever heard. . . .” It was silent too long, so I changed the subject. “Anything from Quincy, over at the VA?” She lowered her beer bottle and looked at me as I stood and gathered the detritus, setting the two empty pizza boxes and bottles on the counter.

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  “He’s on vacation in the garden spot of garden spots, Detroit, and won’t be back until first thing tomorrow. I told them somebody would be by.”

  “Did you ask them if they were missing a seven-foot

  Indian?”

  “I did, but the twit I was talking to didn’t really come forth with much.”

  “You want to ride over to Sheridan with me tomorrow morning? ”

  “No.” She stood, considering me as I stopped in the doorway, and then leaned back against the minifridge door. “Not after sleeping on the jail floor all night . . . alone.” I watched her as she approached me—the way the uniform hung in all the right places, the lush, hanging-gardens-of- Babylon quality of her general physique. “It’s the uniform, right?”

  “No, it’s not the uniform.”

  “I mean . . . because it’s okay. I mean some guys are freaky, and they like a woman in uniform, but you’re not.”

  We were standing in the doorway, just out of the giant’s line of sight, and somehow the conversation we’d been meaning to have was even worse here. “Not what?”

  “Freaky.”

  “No, I’m not.” She was standing close, and my back was against the wall in more ways than one. She put a hand out and touched my sleeve, running her fingers up my arm and feeling the embroidery at the sheriff ’s patch. Those eyes turned up to me. I could smell her, all of her, and started remembering that night in Philadelphia again. “Look . . .”