Machine Gun Jelly (Big Bamboo Book 1)

by Shane Norwood

  Monsoon Parker had dollar signs in his eyes, and for the first time in as long as he could remember he was looking beyond his next score. He had the old man’s case opened on the table in front of him and was gazing lovingly at it, deep in thought. The dog was having his day, everything had come to he who had waited, and the meek were definitely going to inherit the fucking earth. He had opened a safe deposit box in a downtown bank, and had stashed the Machine Gun Jelly and all but two hundred dollars of the money from Crispin. This time it was going to be different. This was his big break, and he was going to be smart and not piss all his money away at the book and the tables. He was moving upscale, uptown, and up the fucking ladder. No more days and nights of worrying, sweating over nickel-and-dime bets, and looking over his shoulder for the crew of some sadistic shyster loan shark to put the arm on him. From now on, the only close shaves he was going to have were going to be with his Gillette, and his only nighttime worries would be whether he should have fucked the redhead instead of the brunette. He was looking at thirty-five, forty grand by the end of the week, and he would stash twenty, leaving twenty or so for investment. Make way for Monsoon Parker, fucking entrepreneur! It was time to think big.

  There had to be more of this stuff somewhere. The way the fat faggot had gushed about it, it was obviously big news to him, and if there was any consciousness-altering chemical substance that was not widespread and generally available in Vegas, then it would have to be fucking Kryptonite. Something that was not already on sale in every high school can in America had to be either very new or old and forgotten. And since it had come out of a case that had been brought from Vietnam thirty years ago, it had to be from that era, and from a generation who would all be old farts by now.

  The first thing was to find out exactly what it was and where it came from. He needed to get it analyzed, to take a small sample down to the lab at UNLV and lay a few bucks on some spotty-faced nerd to buy himself a new PlayStation with and get him to check it out. And he was going to go through this old case like Philip fucking Marlowe, and see if he could come up with a clue.

  The old man’s case. It had to be fate. Some karma shit. His mother had brought it with her when she came to America, just after the last chopper had been ditched into the South China Sea. She had put her childlike Asiatic looks to good use in the world’s oldest profession in the days when Vegas was still Vegas. When family entertainment meant one of the five families entertaining themselves by burying somebody in the desert. When you listened to Sinatra and Elvis, or, if you wanted to see some imbecile in a mouse outfit waving at you, you had to go to California. She had beavered away, literally and figuratively, and religiously saved her money, so that by the time Monsoon was fifteen she had accumulated a stash big enough to open her own joint and decided to split. Before lighting out for Bangkok, she made an important decision concerning her son. She decided that she didn’t like him very much and dumped him with her cousin in Seattle.

  Young Monsoon very quickly decided that dissecting stray cats in the cold room of a waterfront chop house for a bowl of rice every day and a bug-ridden mattress in an attic full of refugees was not his interpretation of the American Dream, and his Seattle residency was short-lived. The years that followed were years of rough living, of wandering from one rat-infested fleapit to another, always on the lam, always one step ahead of the flashing blue lights or the vigilante retribution for whatever burn he had put on somebody. It had been all moonlight flits, and early mornings climbing out of windows, and midnight train rides, floating around like a piece of flotsam in the scum of low-tide America, until he finally washed back up on the dark side of the brightest city in the land.

  The case had been left with one of his mother’s friends, another Vietnamese girl who had married a GI. It was only a battered old army-issue case, containing a few tarnished artifacts from a war that everyone wanted to forget, the only thing that remained of a man he never knew and rarely thought about. But he had kept it nevertheless. It had been as if some vague and ill-comprehended sense of security had been attached to it—as if it were a charm or a talisman, some essential prop, some relic of a forgotten past, or a faint trail leading back to something that might have been if things had been different. As if it contained not the dusty clothes and fading photographs of a man long dead, but the essence of the boy, the secret of who Monsoon Parker really was. As if it encapsulated the childhood he never had.

  Ah, fuck it! Something like that. In truth, he didn’t really know why he had kept the damn thing. What he did know now, however, was that while he had schlepped through every West Coast city, burg, and hayseed Hicksville between San Diego and the Canadian border for the best part of fifteen years, most of the time without a pot to piss in or a window to throw it out of, he had been sitting on forty fucking grand every step of the way. The irony was almost too much to bear.

  He grabbed the case and tipped the contents out. Nothing had changed. Medals, Russki camera, photographs, a regimental tie, a dress uniform, clothes, some old letters. Not much of a fucking inheritance. Monsoon flicked through the photos again, turning them over to read the handwritten inscriptions on the back.

  The Ia Drang. Hue. A ride on the big bird. Eddie goes home. Zonker, Grisbo, and No Nuts. Zipperhead firelight party. Ooh lah lah. R and R on Waikiki. Back to the shit. C’mon baby Light my fire. Pissing on the peninsula.

  He tossed them back into the case, and picked up the letters. They had weird stamps, some from places Monsoon had never heard of, and were dry and flaky, and some of the writing was illegible. He set them aside. He would read them all later. Maybe there would be something in them, some sign, some message from a hand long stilled, to point him in the right direction. He took the dress uniform jacket out and shook it. The dust made him cough again. Sweat marks had discolored the lining under the armpits. On a whim, he slipped it on. It was at least three sizes too big for him, and the sleeves reached past his fingertips. There was something heavy in the side pocket, and his fingers closed around the cold metal of a Zippo. There were words engraved on it. Monsoon held them up to the light, and read: If you find this, I am dead, so shove it up your ass, and light it. Phil Parker.

  Monsoon grinned. At least the old bastard had had a sense of humor. He felt through the other pockets, and in the breast pocket found small canvas bag with a zipper. Inside was an envelope. On it was written, To my son, Monsoon Poontang Eighty-Second Airborne Purple Heart Parker.

  Monsoon’s jaw dropped open. He turned cold. With shaking hands, he thumbed open the envelope. Inside was a photograph and, on yellowed paper, a single typewritten sheet—faded, but just about readable.

  Dear Son,

  I am planning on being around to see you grow up, and teaching you all the things I know. Charlie has got other plans for me. Charlie has got other plans for all of us. If you are old enough to read this and I’m not there, reading it right along with you, then Charlie’s plan probably worked. If this is so, don’t hate Charlie, son. Don’t hate nobody. There is enough pain and shit in the world as it is. Charlie sees it his way, we see it ours. You’re half Charlie yourself, son. Half Charlie, half nigger. Shit, son, you sure as hell drew the short straw. People are going to despise you for it, son. Charlie because you ain’t yellow enough, the brothers because you ain’t black enough, an ol’ honky because he just hates everybody who ain’t a honky and most of them that is. Maybe bringing you into the world is a way of making up for all the other little Charlies who ain’t never going to be here, because of what I did. Because of what we all did. I don’t know. This is a bad business, son, and I hope you never have to go through it. I hope a lot of things. But hope don’t mean shit out here. Before I go, I want to say sorry about the name, kid. At the ass end of a three-day furlough, looking through the bottom of an empty JD bottle, it seemed like a pretty cool name. One more thing, son. Keep this picture and take care of it. The one on the left with all his teeth is me. The other one is the finest human being I have ever met.
His name is Woolloomooloo Wally, and he is from Australia. If it wasn’t for him, I wouldn’t be here, and neither would you. I don’t know how, but I just know that he is going to make it out of here. If you ever get in trouble, son, baaaad trouble, so you don’t know what to do, look for this man, at the address on the back of the photo. Well, so long, son. I’d like to say I love you, but how can you love what you don’t know? I would have, if there had been time.

  Stay Frosty, son,

  Your father,

  Phil Parker. (Cap.)

  Monsoon’s hand shook as he read through the letter three times. His eyes brimmed with tears. He placed it almost reverently on the table, and picked up the photograph. It was of two men sitting in a bar somewhere, under a bamboo roof. On the table in front of them was a platoon of empty beer bottles and a half-full bottle of bourbon. The two men had their arms around each other’s shoulders and they were smiling broadly and holding glasses towards the camera. The man on the left, the handsome light-skinned Negro, he recognized as his father. The other seemed older and was much darker. He had wild bushy hair, and his eyes glittered from wrinkled sockets. His front teeth were missing, and he had broad white lines smeared on his face. He looked like an inebriate and unhinged clown. Monsoon flipped the picture over and read, With Wal. Saigon. 68.

  And beneath those words, Woolloomooloo Wally. Care of the proprietor. Big Blue Billabong Hotel. N. Queensland. Australia.

  Woolloomooloo Wally! The same dude whose name had been on the MGJ package. Monsoon picked up the letter, carefully folded it, and slipped it, together with the photo, back into the envelope. Going to the refrigerator he took out a bottle of Wild Turkey and a Corona, and went over to where a tattered chair stood by the window. He topped the beer bottle, killed the light, and sat in the chair, sipping the bourbon from the bottle and chasing it with Corona, illuminated only by the occasional flashing lights from the squad cars passing on the street outside.

  An undefined ache gripped him. A sense of longing for something forever out of reach, an embrace he had never had and never would. These were completely alien sensations to Monsoon Parker. For a while he sat, not knowing how to handle them. Then the old anger and resentment came flooding back.

  Fuck it, he thought. Get your head out of your ass and back into the real world.

  He had made a pretty good score, but there had to be more where that came from. There just had to. And since it was in the old man’s case, it was a cinch that it had to have come from the ‘Nam. Since nobody seemed to have heard of it, it had to be either very rare or some shit they cooked up during the war that had been forgotten. And this character, Woolloomooloo Wally, had something to do with it. Anybody with a mouthful of handle like that had to be into something. But could the jungle-looking fucker still be alive? In the photo he looked a good bit older than the old man, and the old man had been in his late twenties when he’d bought the farm. That was close to thirty years ago. So even if the old man was right, and the old bastard had survived the war, there was no guarantee that he hadn’t croaked since.

  Monsoon decided to have a good look at Woolloomooloo Wally. He switched the light back on, went back to the case and took up the pictures, and sat back down. He sorted the photos as one sorts out a deck of cards, turning them all face up and the right way around. He then sifted through them one by one, placing the ones that depicted Wally on the arm of the chair, and flicking the others onto the floor. When he had finished, he had a stack of about twenty pictures. He examined them carefully, one at a time. The first thing he noticed was that in each and every picture, Woolloomooloo Wally had a beer in his fist and an indefatigable grin on his face. Except for one. In this one, Wally had a beer in his fist, but you could not tell if he had an indefatigable grin on his face or not—although the chances are he did. The reason being he was in flagrante delicto with a young Asian girl, against the wall of what appeared to be an outhouse. She definitely had an indefatigable grin on her face, but all you could see of Wally was his bushel of hedgehog hair and his narrow black ass.

  Monsoon allowed himself a grin, and went back to studying the photos. You could tell from the way the other people in the pictures looked at Wally that there was something special about him, something that set him apart, as if he was there but not there. Not there in the same sense that the others were there. There was something else. In the pictures with Wally the others, the young soldiers, did not look so lost and afraid as they did in the pictures without him. Monsoon went through the pictures again, and selected those that showed only Wally and his father. There were just three. One was taken in a clearing in a jungle, by a tank. On the front of the turret was written “Waltzing Matilda” in big red letters. In the photo, his father and Wally were pissing against the treads of the tank. In another, they were in a paddy field with a buffalo. Wally was pretending to hump the buffalo. The buffalo was pretending to enjoy it. In the third they were sitting in bamboo chairs outside a bar. Wally’s grin was more than usually indefatigable as he pointed at a crude, hand-painted sign above his head that read, “Wal’s Outback.”

  Monsoon looked again at the images, each in turn, searching for something, anything, that might help him. The photos told him nothing. He threw them to the floor in disgust. The one of Wally and the girl in the outhouse fluttered down and landed, face up, on his shoe. He bent down idly to retrieve it, and looked at it again. He smirked again, took a belt from his bourbon, and was just about to fling the picture away, when he saw something…or thought he did. He stood up abruptly, knocking over the bottle. Dashing into the kitchen, he wrenched open a drawer and grabbed the chipped magnifying glass with no frame that he kept there. He stood directly under the light and peered at the photo through the lens. He moved the lens backwards and forwards, trying to make the image as big as possible. He froze. He stared. He dropped the lens, shattering it on the bare floor.

  “Holy shit!” he exclaimed. “Holy fucking shit!”

  Behind the girl that Wally was holding against the outhouse, and behind the indefatigable grin on her face, the wall was built with bricks of Machine Gun Jelly.

  Monsoon righted the bourbon where it had fallen and quaffed a serious portion of the remaining contents. He sat down until he had recovered himself somewhat, and then reached for his phone and dialed Information. He put on his best please-help-me-kind-sir voice.

  “Excuse me, but you wouldn’t perhaps be able to get me a number in Australia. Yes, that is correct. Queensland, in fact. It is called the Big Blue Billabong Hotel.”

  “Please repeat, sir,” said a weary voice.

  “The Big Blue Billabong Hotel.”

  “Please hold.”

  Monsoon held.

  When Asia emerged from the apartment several hours later, in a state of considerable disarray and on wobbly legs, she had been fucked from midnight to Washington. Not to mention being borderline amazed by what had just happened to her. She hadn’t thought the old fucker had it in him. At first she had been scared, but she had been reassured to find the man beautifully spoken and impeccably well mannered—until they got into the bedroom, at least. He had given her a glass of champagne and, when she had complained, apologized for the rough handling she had received from his men, promising to remonstrate with them. He had complimented her on her looks, had allowed her to draw a hot bath in his huge marble-tiled bedroom, and had let her take the bottle of champagne with her.

  When she had emerged from the bath he was standing naked at the foot of the bed with what, if she hadn’t known better, she would have said was a giant spliff smoking in his hand. He looked so pale and thin and frail, as if a quick glance at the centerfold of Playboy would be enough to kill him stone dead. If you discounted the fact that he had an erection so proud that he looked like he could hit a home run with it, that is. So stiff it seemed to vibrate—it was huge and made to seem even bigger by the diminutive stature of its owner.

  And the man had been transformed. Instead of the suave, debonair sophisticate
, he had become some kind of leering, grinning satyr, an insane priapic gargoyle from the roof of an ancient gothic cathedral. His eyeballs were flicking backwards and forwards erratically, like he was trying to watch two jai alai matches at the same time, and he began to giggle, a soft bubbling that swelled and grew until it became a high hysterical cackle. Crabbing over the deep carpet with a disjointed gait he went to a drinks cabinet, from which he pulled a bottle of Moët and opened it, firing the cork at her like an actual weapon. He scuttled over to a stereo in a corner, and turned up the music to an earsplitting volume. Asia recognized “The Flight of the Valkyries.”

  And then, drinking from the bottle, the man advanced, purposeful but ungainly, like a rampant zombie, with his threatening member poised and presented as if he intended to impale her upon it. The only problem was, he was headed the wrong way. Confused and nervous again, Asia giggled, and the man instantly turned towards the sound. His hands waved like antennae in front of him, as if he were playing some perverted form of blindman’s bluff. When his hand brushed against her breast, he howled like a banshee and leapt at her like a corsair.

  Three hours later her twat felt like the bottom of a birdcage, her rectum as if she had shit an anvil, and her mouth as if she had stopped a left hook from Iron Mike. She felt as if she had been keelhauled, so fervently and unremittingly had the man pursued her around the room, stabbing her in every aperture, from every conceivable angle, an entirely unfeasible number of times. Finally, he had gone abruptly rigid, and then convulsed and keeled over backwards onto the bed, with his tongue hanging out and his eyes staring fixed and vacant into space, as limp as a defrosted squid. For a dreadful second she feared that his ticker had given out.