Another Man's Moccasins
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“Sir, but my orders from HQ . . .”
“You mean those orders about an investigation that you ignored because you were out joyriding in Khe Sanh?” I didn’t say anything, so he stood up and walked around his desk. He looked at my arm, still in the sling, and the sutured split on my eyebrow where I’d run into Henry. “How’s that investigation going, Lieutenant?” I started to speak, but he cut me off. “The job you were sent here to do? How’s that going?”
My head hurt, and I figured informing him that drugs were ram-pant in every part of the country and that I’d been warned off by his own personnel wasn’t going to make my situation any better. “Not so good, sir.”
He folded his arms and sat on the edge of his desk. “In the remaining time period in which we are to be blessed with your pres-ence, you will confine yourself to this investigation and to this air base.” He shook his head at my incompetence. “Do you read me?”
I thought about those comic book manuals for the M16s. “Yes, sir.”
“Dismissed.”
It was late in the afternoon—that point in the Asian day when the sun seemed like it just wouldn’t die. I walked out to Gate 055
and to the Boy-Howdy Beau-Coups Good Times Lounge with the explicit idea of getting epically hammered. There weren’t too many people in the place, so I got four beers from the bar and retreated to my weapon of choice. I took off my sling and tossed it on top of the piano, doodled a little in the key of F and then attempted to slide into some Fats Wal er.
Mai Kim came over and pulled up a bar stool to watch me play.
The Stars and Stripes was folded up under her arm, but she didn’t ask for a lesson. I guess my mood was evident. She hovered there, though, looking at me. “Hey, Mai Kim.”
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She smiled and crossed her legs. “Hi, you back?”
“For a little while.”
She looked concerned. “You go to America?”
I sipped the first of the second brace of beers. “Eventually, but for now it will just be BHQ in Chu Lai.”
She leaned forward to look at my face and the bandages on my forearm. “You hurt?”
I looked up and was struck by the symmetry of her China-doll face, framed by the black silk hair. “Not so bad.”
“You sad?”
“A little.” I continued to look at her and noticed she seemed down, too. “How ’bout you?”
She smiled a flicker of a smile that died before it could catch.
“Tennessee boyfriend, he no write.”
“He rotate home?”
“Yes.” She nodded. “What you think about?”
“A girl.” I thought about the blonde back in Durant and wondered if she was still around.
She seemed even sadder. “American girl?”
“Yep.” I continued to vamp the stride piece “A Good Man Is Hard to Find,” my left hand alternating between single notes at the lower portion of the keyboard and chords toward middle C.
She made an attempt at brightening, the smile catching a little at the corner of her mouth. “This my favorite song, you play.” I kept the title to myself, even though I think she knew it, and continued playing. “You tell me about America?”
“Big subject . . .”
She reached out and stroked the side of my brow, careful to avoid the stitches. “Tell me favorite place again.”
“Back home?”
Her fingers brushed through my hair and then settled on my shoulder. “Yes.”
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The words flowed like the stream I was thinking of, and I smiled back at her. “There’s a spot in the southern part of my county in Wyoming, by the Hole in the Wall down near a place called Powder Junction.”
“Hole in the Wall?”
“Yep. I told you, remember? It’s a famous spot where the outlaws used to hide out.”
“Outlaws.”
“Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.” She nodded her head in recognition. I thought about how, after serving three-quarters of his sentence, George LeRoy Parker had been brought before Governor Wil iam H. Richards and declared that he would never rob another bank in Wyoming. He was released and, true to his word, never robbed another Wyoming bank—nobody said anything about Colorado. “They took cover near where Buffalo Creek spills out of the canyon just as you get to these gigantic red wal s that run fifty miles.” I thought about the big, wary trout that swam in the sun-sparked cold waters below the narrow-leaved wil ows. “There’s an old ghost town cal ed Bailey, and near there, it’s the best fishing in all the Bighorn Mountains.”
“Bailey, Bighorn Mountains.”
“Yep.”
“Mai Kim!” Le Khang’s voice called from the other side of the room. She turned and looked at him and at the ready airman with the mustache who stood by the counter.
She looked at me, smiled, and got off her stool. “You go back there?”
I set my bottle back on the piano and stared at the keys. “I don’t know . . .”
She slipped her hand from my shoulder onto my wounded arm and carefully stroked the gauze and bandages that were wrapped there. “This girl, she there?”
I laughed a short exhale. “Yep.”
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She gave me one last pat on the shoulder before walking away.
“You go back.”
I drank steadily through the afternoon, the weight of my wounded arm sloping my shoulder farther and farther down until it was all I could do to continue raising my one hand to play.
I’d probably gone through an entire case of beer by the time I noticed it was full night; the crowd was pushing in against me. I’d also noticed that Le Khang hadn’t brought any more beer over for a while, a sure sign I had been cut off.
Rescue came in the form of a familiar powder- blue arm, which reached across and placed another beer next to all the empties on the flipped-up cover of the zebra-striped, grained piano.
“How you feelin’, Hollywood?”
He smiled and sat on the edge of the bench, and I noticed how little room he took up in comparison to Henry Standing Bear. Hoang had been released only two days after the incident at Khe Sanh, had already been reestablished to active flight duty, and had flown three more missions since the beginning of the week. “I buy you beer.”
“Thanks.”
He continued to smile at me. “You drunk.”
“Stinking.” He looked puzzled. “Stinking drunk.”
He brightened, always game for another piece of American slang. “Stinking drunk?”
“Stinking. Drunk.”
He held his beer up to mine as he chanted the phrase to himself. I picked up the bottle, wet with condensation, and tipped his.
The English lesson made me think about Mai Kim, and thoughts of her battered away at the waves of alcohol that kept rolling onto the beaches of my mind. “Where’s Mai Kim?”
He looked at me blankly. “She not here.”
“Where is she?”
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“She gone.”
I drank my beer. “Oh.”
I scratched my head and watched as my hat slipped off and fell on top of the foot pedals of the piano. Hoang reached down and snagged it and placed it back on my head backwards. “You stinking drunk!”
I pushed back and stood, none too steadily, and waited for the world to stop moving. It was getting late, and I decided t
o make the long trek back to the other side of the airfield where they’d lodged me in the visitors’ barracks. Hoang was next to me and put an arm on mine to help me steady a persistent list. “You go home?”
“Yep.” I stuck a hand out to grip the piano, which provided a little more support than the compact pilot. “If I can.”
“I help you.”
I half tripped over the piano bench and watched as everyone moved away. There was a brief upsurge of nausea, and I belched, which made me feel a little better. “I’m okay.”
As I turned and shambled toward the open doorway, Hoang raised one of my arms and slipped under to help me navigate what now appeared to be the pitching deck of the Boy-Howdy BeauCoups Good Times Lounge. I pulled away and fell down the two wooden steps that led out of the bar.
I rolled over and stared up into the hazy star-fi lled night. “Ouch.”
Hoang’s face was above mine. “You fall.”
“I guess I could use a little help.”
The Vietnamese pilot grabbed an arm and helped me get to my feet. He was surprisingly strong and half led, half supported me as I wavered down the deserted red-dirt road. He nodded his head. “You save my life.”
I looked at the ludicrous figure of the tiny man in the powder-blue jumpsuit and white silk scarf. “When?”
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“You funny guy.”
I stopped and saluted the two air policemen who were stationed at Gate 055. The APs asked Hoang if I was going to make it or should they call a patrol with a jeep or maybe a forklift. Hoang shook his head and explained that we would walk the perimeter to the next gate to give me a chance to sober up. He also explained how I’d saved his life.
They said that was great.
He then explained how I’d saved other people’s lives, too.
They said that was great, too.
I puked.
I don’t think they thought that was so great.
Hoang supported me as we walked along the fenced boundary and looked at the moonlight casting down on the high whitewashed walls of the old French fort—Hotel California, as the locals referred to it. It didn’t look real, or it looked too real, and I felt like I was on some movie set where we would walk behind the structure and see the two-by-four bracings that held up the naked backs of the walls.
The nausea was creeping up in my throat again, and I stopped, leaning against something and sitting on a hard surface. “Hey, Hollywood, you ever see Beau Geste?”
“No, but need to talk to you.”
“One with Ronald Colman?”
He looked a little worried. “No . . .”
“Gary Cooper?”
“No.”
I looked at Hoang, who was blurred and wavering in the close strangeness of the Vietnamese night. “How about Gunga Din, did ya see that?”
“Lieutenant . . . need to tell you something.”
“What?”
He looked around. “Need to tell you something.”
I ignored him and started reciting Kipling.
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You may talk o’ gin and beer
When you’re quartered safe out ’ere,
An’ you’re sent to penny-fights an’ Aldershot it; But when it comes to slaughter
You will do your work on water,
An’ you’ll lick the bloomin’ boots of ’im that’s got it.
He edged away. “Lieutenant . . .”
I shook my head and immediately regretted it. “Doesn’t matter.”
I looked down and saw that my hand was resting on a cemetery headstone. I focused and saw more of them around me; they stretched into the late- night mist, thousands of them, and with the moonlight it was as if they were glowing like teeth. A dog barked in the distance, the sound rolling toward me like the cutting edge of harsh whispers.
When I looked up, Hoang was gone.
Quincy had gone back to work, and I’d made the march across the VA parade ground with my boots on.
It was Ranald Slidell Mackenzie that the fort was named after, and it was his residence to which the Doc had sent Cady.
I thought about him and the history of the place as I crossed the foyer and climbed the steps to the upstairs ballroom.
Mackenzie graduated West Point in 1862, number one in a class of twenty-eight. He fought in the Civil War and, before it was over, he’d been wounded four times, received seven bre-vets, and was a major general in charge of an entire division.
In our part of the country, however, his fame arose from the defeat of Dull Knife, the Cheyenne chief, and his village.
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Cavalry, along with four hundred Indian scouts, took the Cheyenne chief and his 183 lodges by surprise. He destroyed the village and their supplies and effectively ended the nomadic lifestyle of the Northern Cheyenne nation.
Henry Standing Bear liked to remind anyone who would listen that Mackenzie died in his sister’s home on Staten Island, New York, in 1882, victim to the later stages of syphilis and, as Lucian would say, crazy as a waltzing pissant. It was, Henry also noted, not an unpleasant enough death.
Cady was standing in front of one of the large casement windows and was looking out at the last thin remains of snow that clung to the shadowed crevasses of the rocky heights. She was still barefoot. She turned and the broomstick skirt swayed as the wide- planked oak floor popped and echoed under my approach.
She raised her arms. “Dance with me?”
I smiled and took her hand. “There isn’t any music.”
“Sure there is.” She placed my other arm behind her back and led me in a fanciful waltz, her face tucked against my shoulder. We wheeled around the empty and silent ballroom, and I thought about Virgil White Buffalo and watched my daughter as her head rose and she smiled. After a full sweep of the dance floor, I bent down to kiss the U-shaped scar at her hairline and attempted to keep time to the counting of my blessings.
9
“Forty-two charges of manslaughter?”
“At the least.” I could picture the California native, born in the high desert up near Edwards Air Force Base, and sheriff of a county that had eighteen times the populace of my entire state. “They brought ’em in through Long Beach, and we got an anonymous tip from down at the municipal pier; container vessel out of Belgrade, Yugoslavia.”
“Why Yugoslavia?”
“The Vietnamese don’t need a visa to go there. About 40,000 Chinese go through the place every year, and they can blend. Not everybody can tell the difference, like you can.”
I took a breath and played at pulling Dog’s ear, his head resting on my knee. “What happened?”
“The traffickers had told the illegals on board the container ship to not make any noise and had packing crates of fruit pushed against the walls to help insulate any sound. The assholes closed the air vents, gave them four fi ve-gallon buckets of water, and told them they’d be transferred in a matter of hours.”
I’d met Ned at the National Sheriff ’s Association meeting in Phoenix, where we’d both avoided the social hour by hiding in the hotel bar and lamenting about our grown daughters.
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He liked to fly-fish and had made the trek out to the Bighorns twice in the previous eight years. He was a good man, and I could hear the pain telling the story was causing him, but I needed it all. “Didn’t happen?”
“No. They loaded the container onto an eighteen-wheeler and headed up to Compton.” I waited. “This jaybird, Paquet, parks the truck in a lot
behind his apartment and goes in to have lunch, watch a movie and, while he’s at it, shoot a little smack. He misjudges the product and ODs, leaving forty-two people in an airtight container on an asphalt parking lot in Southern California in July at 103 degrees.”
I slowly exhaled, and Dog looked at me.
“They stripped down to their underwear, tried drinking the juice from the tomatoes, and tried to pry open the vents.”
After a moment, he continued. “We figure they started pan-icking after about six hours and began pulling the cases from the walls and pounding on the doors. I guess there was a lot of screaming and shouting, but nobody came. . . .” There was another pause. “Walt, I’ve never seen anything like it in my life.”
“All of them?”
“All but one. I had a freight supervisor from the DOT, Danny Padilla, with me late that afternoon and we were the first ones in after we got the doors open. He said it was strange that it was a produce truck and not refrigerated; then we got the smell. I shined my fl ashlight, the floor was covered with bodies, none of them moving; like something out of Night of the Living Dead. Then I saw this young girl in the back. She was tapping the side of the container and trying to get our attention. She had to crawl over the bodies to get to us.”
“What happened to her?”
“Took her to County General, ran her through INS. Then A N OT H ER
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she got a sponsorship from some group who deals with that sort of thing.”
“What was her name?”
“Not Paquet.” I listened to him rustling the papers. “Ngo Loi Kim. The poor kid. . . . Hell, I thought about adopting her myself.”
“Did you say last name Kim?”
“Yeah, ring a bell?”
I stared at the blotter on my desk and watched my hand write the name. “An old one. There was a girl I knew in Vietnam with that last name.”
The phone was silent for a second. “Walt, you know what the English translation for Kim is, don’t you?”
“Smith?”
He chuckled. “That, or Jones.”
Ruby appeared in the doorway, but I held up my hand and she disappeared with Dog trotting after her. “What else did you get on this Paquet?”