Villa Incognito

by Tom Robbins

  “It’s a bit of a cliché to say it, but when you think of soul, you should think of things that are authentic and things that are deep. Anything superficial is not soulful. Anything artificial, imitative, or overly refined is not soulful. Wood has a stronger connection to soul than does plastic, although, paradoxically, thanks to human interface, a funky wooden table or chair can sometimes exceed in soulfulness the soul that may be invoked by a living tree.”

  At this juncture the reader may be going, “Yeah, yeah, right, and Pinocchio’s semen is the source of the best Italian furniture.” Fair enough. Fair enough. We’ve quoted Stubblefield sufficiently here to establish that he was: (1) erudite, (2) verbal, and (3) a freethinker—and apt to sail a bit over the top in all three departments. This particular display, for example, went on at length, until he rather abruptly stopped pacing and summed up his talk thusly:

  “In the end, perhaps we should simply imagine a joke; a long joke that’s being continually retold in an accent too thick and too strange to ever be completely understood. Life is that joke, my friends. The soul is its punch line.”

  For at least a full minute, Stubblefield stared at his feet, at the way his painted toenails stood out against the richer reds of the carpet. This was not for effect. He was thinking. The room was so quiet you could almost hear the incense smoldering. Finally, he lifted his beard off his torso and said, “Let’s not chisel that last remark in stone. Okay? It may be high wisdom, it could be pure bullshit. There’s often a thin line. I’ll run it by Lisa Ko sometime and let you know what she says.”

  At the study door, Dickie blanched.

  Along the walls of Stubblefield’s study, the spines of countless books advertised their specialties as if they were Patpong showboards:

  BIOGRAPHY SMOKE CIGARETTE

  POETRY EAT WITH CHOPSTICKS

  PHILOSOPHY PLAY PING-PONG

  Etc., Etc.

  “How dear my pupils are,” said Stubblefield, closing the door behind him. “They laughed at my train whistle, although not one of them has ever been anywhere near a train. My God, Goldwire, look at you! It would appear Bangkok has chewed you up and spit you out. Your customary boyish charm could use a good hosing down.” Sensing that Dickie had been admiring his library, he said, “Remember when we first met and you asked to borrow my copy of Ulysses, believing it to be a biography of General Grant?”

  “Yeah, but now, thanks to you, I know who’s buried in Grant’s Tomb. It’s James Joyce.”

  Stubblefield chuckled. “I sure hope Foley brings me some readable new novels. None of that coming-of-age claptrap. None of that dreary, cancer-ridden, lawyer-worshiping—”

  “Dern’s not going to be bringing you anything, Stub. Dern’s been busted.”

  “What?!”

  “They nailed him on Guam. His flight was diverted. I saw him on CNN. In handcuffs. They were hauling your stuff away. It’s been three or four days now.” In Dickie’s tone there was both the pig iron of despair and the stained glass of hysteria.

  Stubblefield whistled—and he didn’t sound remotely like a train. “Holy fucking moley!” he exclaimed softly. Then, when he’d rebounded from the shock, “Foley won’t sing, of course, but they’ll identify him sooner or later. Probably already have.”

  “And that means . . .”

  “That means that the game is about to get very, very interesting.”

  “You needn’t sound so damn cheerful about it.”

  There was, in fact, a kind of fresh sparkle in the older man’s kelp-green eyes. He said, “It’s rotten for Foley, naturally. But maybe it’s what we all needed. We’ve been in an extended rut.”

  “Yeah, well, I liked my rut. Especially when I consider the alternatives. What the hell are we going to do, Stub? What? We’ve got to act fast. We’re on the bubble here. I’m out of money. I’m—”

  “Easy now, Goldwire. Don’t panic on me. Pull yourself together. We’ve got decisions to make, obviously. But first let’s try to look at the big picture. Let’s put the situation in perspective.” He settled a steak-sized hand on Dickie’s shaky shoulder. His fingernails had been spared decoration. “Let’s . . . let’s remember your girlfriend’s words.”

  At the mention of his girlfriend, Dickie blanched once more. He’d been wondering, wondering hard, if he’d ever lay eyes on that girlfriend again. It was, frankly, his greatest concern. (There was no way he could have known, of course, that Lisa Ko, after being held up for a couple of days in Vientiane, due to socialist bureaucracy and passport questions, was at that moment bearing down on Fan Nan Nan and would arrive there before the sun set.) Dickie stared at Stubblefield. “What words?” he asked.

  “Oh, you know. You know.” Stubblefield had concerns of his own and was becoming a trifle impatient. “Lisa’s family motto.”

  Dickie closed his eyes then. And the words came back to him:

  It is what it is.

  You are what you it.

  There are no mistakes.

  Neither wholly believing nor completely rejecting that there was any salvation in that litany, Dickie repeated it for the Lisa that was in it—while deep in the gorge below Villa Incognito, below the singing circus wire, where the mist was so thick it felt like fur on the eyeballs, a pair of tanukis who had escaped Madame Ko’s traps were barking wisecracks at the tiger who fancied them for lunch.

  PART III

  If you won’t meet me in Cognito,

  Baby, I’m apt to go out of my head.

  But if you really can’t handle incognito

  Meet me in Absentia, instead.

  San Francisco. The City by the Bay. Bootsey thought the fog was cute.

  They weren’t shown the prisoner right away. After cabbing to a nondescript federal office building in the downtown area and riding a silent elevator to the seventh floor, the Foley sisters were questioned for nearly an hour in one of those windowless rooms that used to give Franz Kafka the willies.

  Their interrogators were a military intelligence officer—a tall African-American name-tagged Col. Patt Thomas—and a tweedy, bespectacled civilian introduced as Mayflower Cabot Fitzgerald, who, judging from his name and demeanor, must have been representing the Central Intelligence Agency. Handsome Colonel Thomas was genial to the point of being flirtatious, while the dour Fitzgerald was sort of a steel eel, speaking in one of those official governmental I’m-privy-to-things-you’re-not-fit-to-know monotones that seem to rise, resentful all the way, from deep down inside a refrigerated silo.

  There was nothing threatening nor accusatory about the questioning, but it was definitely thorough. And all the while, as Bootsey and Pru tried to call forth details about a brother they’d always worshiped but had not seen in nearly thirty years, they sat facing a row of two-foot-high, grainy photographs (obviously blow-ups) pinned to the phlegm-green wall behind the desk where one would have thought a window ought to be. There were three photos in all, head-and-shoulders shots of a trio of young men in U.S. Air Force uniforms, complete with visored caps. Beneath each portrait, in large, neat type, were lines identifying the man’s rank, name, age, and hometown.

  LEFT: Maj. Mars Albert Stubblefield, 30, Millard, Nebraska.

  Major Stubblefield had a full, jovial, almost puffy face, whose ostensible softness was overridden and reversed by eyes that were like tracer bullets of piercing intelligence; and by a curl, a twist at the corners that gave an ironic, slightly mocking cast to an otherwise thoughtful smile. He made observers think of the young Orson Welles.

  CENTER: Capt. Dern V. Foley, 25, Seattle, Washington.

  One could guess from his neck, from his brow even, that Captain Foley was a burly man, not overly tall, probably, but giant of muscle; a fellow apt to sprout coarse whiskers and thick nails. Battered of nose, flat of mouth, there was both a roughness and an ephemeral quality about him, like a moth made from unmilled lumber. His expression seemed to say, “I couldn’t be here in spirit, so I came in person,” a detached expression his sisters had come across ti
me and time again in their family albums. It unsettled them.

  RIGHT: 1st Lt. Dickie Lee Goldwire, 23, Mount Airy, North Carolina.

  Here, from all appearances, was a rangy, sweet-tempered, small-town heartthrob; a country-club party boy, a former homecoming king, perhaps, though not the sort to get all high-and-mighty about it. It was easy to imagine him cruising sorority row at UNC in a spirited little sports car, snapping his fingers to Sinatra, blithely enjoying the world, yet secretly, if vaguely, concerned that he might ought to be doing something to help those less privileged than he. There was a natural, easy aristocracy about him, in contrast to, say, the Ivy League haughtiness that Mayflower Fitzgerald wore like a one-size-too-small suit of armor. Pru found Lieutenant Goldwire rather appealing in his old photograph, while in Bootsey’s view he was as adorable as, say, the year’s first robin.

  When the investigators were satisfied that Bootsey and Pru were, indeed, the siblings of Capt. Dern Foley, and willing to accept, for the moment at least, that they’d had no contact with him since before he and his fellow crewmen (whom the girls professed never to have met) were shot down over the Lao-Vietnamese border in the winter of 1973, the two men led the two women down a long gray corridor, near the end of which was a room with a wall of one-way glass. Behind the glass, a solitary figure sat on a bare cot, reading a Gideon Bible. Instantly and simultaneously, the sisters were struck by the fact that the man in the cell was as bald as a boiled potato, although it shouldn’t have surprised them since even as a high school fullback, Dern’s hairline had been inching arcticward.

  Impatient with the sisters’ silence, Mayflower Fitzgerald turned on them. “Well?”

  Still they did not speak. “Well?” he repeated, staring at them over the top of his wire-rimmed glasses. “Is this or is this not your brother?”

  Tears had been blistering Bootsey’s eyes, and now she began to blubber in earnest. Colonel Thomas and his civilian counterpart nodded at each other, ready to take Bootsey’s sobs as an affirmative answer. Pru, however, was not so forthcoming. May-flower Fitzgerald, frankly, was getting on her nerves.

  “Hmm,” Pru said, pretending indecisiveness. “Hmm. He does have some of Dern’s characteristics. I can see that. But . . . I’m not really sure. He kinda looks like Dern, all right, but he also looks like somebody else. Yeah, you know . . . he also looks a lot like Bozo. Bozo the Clown? I mean, without the honker nose and the sexy orange hair.”

  Pru smiled innocently, as if trying her best to be helpful. The CIA man emitted a purplish fume. Colonel Thomas fought to maintain cordiality. Even Bootsey regarded her sister with disdain.

  The following afternoon there was a family reunion. Of sorts. How much reuniting can relatives really achieve when separated by three inches of shatterproof glass, whose density their voices can only breach with the aid of a closed-circuit telephone? No kissy-kissy huggy-huggy here. The warmth of reconnection was further diminished by the presence of Colonel Thomas and Operations Officer Fitzgerald, who sat together on a wooden bench at the rear of the small visitation room.

  “Dern, Dern, Dern,” said Bootsey. She said it over and over, as if the name was a mantra that had gotten stuck in a groove in her larynx. There was wonder and disbelief, grief and elation in her voice.

  “Where the hell have you been?” asked Pru.

  Into the phone on the opposite side of the glass, Foley said, “Southeast Asia, Sis. Keeping the world safe for democracy.”

  “Dern, Dern, Dern.”

  “Dern, the war’s been over for a quarter of a goddamn century.”

  “Not for everybody. I got an extension.”

  “Dern, Dern.”

  “I’ve been on special assignment, Sis. Top secret and all that.” He put a stubby finger to his lips.

  “It’s not so damn secret, brother dear. We saw you on television. We got us a good look at your ‘special assignment.’”

  “Now, now. You know better than to believe everything you see on TV.”

  “Oh, Dern, Dern. I don’t give a darn what you’ve done. I don’t care. Dern, Dern . . .”

  “Shut up, Bootsey!” Pru snatched the receiver from her sister’s hand.

  “Why, Pru, I can remember the days when you were absolutely convinced that Howdy Doody was a real little boy.”

  In spite of herself, Pru smiled. Bootsey commenced to blubber.

  “We thought you were dead,” Pru said.

  “O ye of little faith! I guess that explains why you haven’t written.”

  “Boo-hoo-hoo.”

  “Everybody. Everybody thought you’d been killed.”

  Dern Foley shook his honeydew noggin. “As someone once put it, ‘Only the survivors are dead.’ How’ve you girls been? God, it’s great to see you. You haven’t changed one bit. Do I have any nieces and nephews? No kids? Poodles, then? Parakeets? White mice?”

  “Boo-hoo-hoo.”

  “Shut up, Bootsey!”

  And so it went. On their bench, Colonel Thomas and Operations Officer Fitzgerald looked at each other as if in agreement that there were screws in the Foley family badly in need of tightening.

  When you accept an invitation to a war, you expect to get shot at.”

  That was the way Stubblefield saw it. To Stubblefield it was elementary. “You sign up to go to war, there’s a clause in the contract that says, ‘I agree to get shot at.’ It’s not hidden in the fine print, either. It’s right up front. ‘In consideration for engaging in combat against parties of the first part, the undersigned hereby assigns to parties of the first part the right to aim bullets, bombs, grenades, mortar shells, rockets, and heavy artillery at his miserable ass.’ Land mines, booby traps, and bayonet charges are covered by a separate clause.

  “So, what happens when you’re shot at? You get hit or you get lucky. You’re killed or you’re wounded or you escape—either to go home or else to get shot at some more at a later date. Sometimes, of course, you may be captured. And sometimes, in the chaos of shooting, nobody is quite certain of your fate. You go missing. And you can go missing for a long, long, time. Maybe forever.

  “Granted, for your spouse, your parents, siblings et cetera, it must be terrible not knowing the fate of a loved one, or, if resigned to his death, imagining his remains scattered in disrespect about some filthy foreign cow patch. But it’s not appreciably more terrible than any of the other fruits of armed conflict. There’s nothing deliberately personal, barbaric, unfair, cruel, or perverse about it. It’s just a perfectly natural feature of the mad game of war, a possibility that should be weighed before you sign that contract or accept that invitation. Closure is no more guaranteed than survival. I fail to understand all this widespread public hand-wringing and continuous bellicose puffery regarding MIAs.”

  Needless to say, Stubblefield’s view was not the popular one. It may have been logical, it may have had a ring of moral authority—considering that Major Stubblefield, himself, was Missing in Action—but it was not generally shared.

  As late as the summer of 2001, it was common to see bumper stickers that read “Bring Home the MIAs”; Congress was still regularly lobbied by MIA relatives and support groups; while on the Internet the electrons piled up in burying drifts, a ceaseless MIA blizzard, some of it in the form of heartbreaking anguish and lament, some of it no more than chauvinistic posturing, the old don’t-fuck-with-God’s-republic yankee doodle strut. The MIA issue—1,966 of America’s Vietnam combatants remained unaccounted for in August, 2001—was a potato that never entirely cooled, although with the establishment of the Joint Task Force-Full Accounting office in 1992, sincere efforts were being made by the U.S. government to comb every Southeast Asian battlefield and excavate every reported crash site. Teams of military forensic experts and civilian archaeologists searched for bone fragments, teeth, dog tags, class rings, faded letters, and so forth, and though most sites had been systematically scavenged by enterprising locals, they occasionally yielded definitive human remains and personal effects. As a r
esult, the cries of bereaved relatives and professional patriots were becoming somewhat less shrill.

  But now, Capt. Dern V. Foley, traveling incognito, carrying a small fortune in narcotics, had popped up like a jack from the MIA box. Boo! Suddenly, there was a new wrinkle in the folded flag, a disturbing wrinkle that Col. Patt Thomas and Mayflower Cabot Fitzgerald, on behalf of their respective agencies, had been assigned to iron out.

  On the one hand, the appearance of Dern Foley was likely to ignite in families fresh—and doubtlessly false—hope that their long-missing loved ones might be alive. (Rumors periodically surfaced that American military men had been spotted in slave labor camps from Hanoi to Moscow.) On the other, the fact that Captain Foley had been arrested for drug trafficking was a black eye for everybody concerned, a buzzard that took the sky away from hawk and dove alike. The buzzard was so ugly, its droppings such a potential contaminant, that its possible extermination had been discussed by men who are paid to discuss such things.

  But buzzards seldom travel alone. And, like even the tweetiest little songbirds, buzzards lay eggs. Who were Dern Foley’s confederates? What was the source of the contraband he’d carried? How long had he been involved? Where were the other airmen who had gone down with him in his B-52? What else had Foley been involved in, what did he know that might drop a fetid plop of buzzard poop into the regal nest of the American eagle?

  Foley refused to answer such questions. Foley refused to answer virtually every question he was asked. The single significant question he did answer only made matters worse. A lot worse. “I don’t get it,” an exasperated Colonel Thomas had complained. “Since the war was over, since you were healthy and no longer being held, why did you choose to stay over there in that gook shithole? For the drugs? The loot? The Commie politics? Or what?”