Machine Gun Jelly (Big Bamboo Book 1)

by Shane Norwood

  But if it came down to it, if this thing grew into something so black and implacable that there was no way to get out from under it, then he was going to have to go after the Don. Even as he thought it he felt the rage, the stirring of the dragon, the absolute outrage that such people thought they could reach into your life and threaten to take away everything that you had and everything that you wanted. That they thought they were entitled to do that. Baby Joe didn’t know for sure how much firepower he had left—if he still had enough to mock the boar in his lair, and walk away from it—but he knew that the creepy fucker would be shy a few soldiers by the time he found out.

  After the little dance in the parking lot of the Crown and Anchor the Don would not be underestimating him, but there was one thing—and it might be a big thing. It might make all the difference. Not so much an ace up the sleeve but a whole deck of cards, a calculator, and a copy of fucking Hoyle. Something about the Don, about the way he moved his hands, about the way he held his head. If Baby Joe didn’t know better, he’d swear the fucker was blind.

  “They haf try to steal me, ja,” Bjørn Eggen was saying, “but they focken pick wrong old man, sure. Wrong old man vith big focken dog. Focken stealers. Ve show dem. This Viking not so focken old, ja.”

  They were at the bar at the pool terrace of the Mirage. The house dick had called Baby Joe after talking to the old man. The two clowns had split before the cops and ambulance could arrive. Baby Joe had Bjørn Eggen explain everything that had happened. He didn’t like it. Something was very wrong with the scenario. Poolside gardens at five-star hotels in broad daylight are not your average mugger’s prime choice of venue. He looked at the old man—drinking his beer, watching the children, Behemoth lying at his feet.

  “I’m sorry this happened to you,” he said.

  “For vhy?” replied Bjørn Eggen. “I not sorry. Best focken fon I haf in years. This one enjoy it too,” he added, indicating the dog.

  “Can you think of anything else, anything that they did, anything that they said, that might give me a clue?”

  “Only maybe this guy Don.”

  “What?”

  “I don’t know. Some fella called Don. When I haf leave, the one with the broke nose say to the one with the bit arse that Don not going to like it.”

  Shit, thought Baby Joe, as the penny somewhat belatedly dropped. The Don had somehow made the connection between Bjørn Eggen and Monsoon and had tried to snatch him to use as insurance, to make sure that Monsoon played ball. He was almost relieved at the simplicity of the decision he had to make.

  “Bjørn Eggen,” he said, “Monsoon has already gone to Vietnam. I am going too. I think it will be best if you go home.”

  As he said it, he already knew what the old man’s response would be.

  “Fok that. If that no-good, useless grandson has gone der, den I go find him, ja? He is in trouble for sure. I vil try to help.”

  “Okay, then we go together. I know some more of what is going on now. I will explain everything to you on the plane.”

  For some reason, Baby Joe loved airport departure lounges. He always had. So, despite the circumstances, he found himself enjoying himself. He was enjoying the prospect of the flight, enjoying his drink, and enjoying immensely the fact that he had paid for Bjørn Eggen’s ticket with the advance the Don had given him, using the Don’s own bread to stick a spoke in his wheel. It felt like getting the first jab in, in what was sure to be a twelve-rounder.

  Bjørn Eggen was on his third beer and locked in earnest conversation with a sweet little gray-haired lady next to him. You kept expecting her to whip out an apple pie from her knitting basket and start handing it round. Bjørn Eggen was busy explaining how you distinguish the lead dog in a team, and how important it was to have him at the front, and the old lady was looking at him as if she had waited her whole life to discover this piece of information.

  Baby Joe was thinking about what the old bastard had said, about the oak tree. He figured it was something to do with Asia. He could try to figure it out later. In the meantime it would be behoove him to keep his mind on the job at hand. He could call her from the ‘Nam, and make sure she was okay and that the locals had not used Crispin for gator bait. He heard their flight announced and nudged Bjørn Eggen, who had graduated on to the joys of ice fishing and how to stop your ass from sticking fast to the ice.

  “Hey, Casanova, time to get your skinny, prehistoric butt on the plane.”

  “Ja, ja. I come vith now. This lady is Mrs. Mary Rose Muffin. She also is going to Vietnam. This is the coincidence, ja.”

  Baby Joe smiled at the old lady, who beamed back. He had a mental image of her and Bjørn Eggen joining the mile-high club somewhere over the South China Sea. Well, it was a long flight. The old bastard might just have time to crank one up.

  “We’d better go,” Baby Joe said, as Bjørn Eggen offered Mrs. Mary Rose Muffin his arm and escorted her to the plane.

  The ‘Nam. He had never expected to go back, and the spirits were already calling to him. He expected to find it much-changed, but he knew that what was there now would only be laid over what was once there, and that underneath hotels and freeways and lights, shadow warriors still called out as they exchanged blood in streets and fields of ether and giant dream birds yet fell from the skies.

  Part 2. The ‘Nam.

  The Red River flows down from China, through northern Vietnam, and reaches confluence with the sea in the Gulf of Tonkin. Archaeological evidence suggests that humans settled its fertile banks almost half a million years ago. It further suggests that some of the earliest known human agricultural activity took place in its silted floodwaters, and that a distinctive culture has existed for twenty thousand years.

  Vietnam is a country of spectacular natural beauty, of long sensual beaches, of verdant lush valleys, and majestic forested mountains. Of course, the lush valleys and majestic mountains are not quite as verdant and forested as they used to be, but then Agent Orange will do that.

  If you include the western seaboard of the Zhanjiang peninsula across the Chinese border, start at a point near its tip across the strait from the island of Hainan, and follow a line along the coast of Vietnam, down through the Gulf of Tonkin, and around the South China Sea littoral past Ho Chi Minh City to the Mekong Delta, you will describe the approximate shape of an enormous letter S.

  The S stands for the shit end of the stick, which is what the people who inhabit the region have been getting since the first Annamese prince lit a candle to his deity. The original inhabitants thought their country was a wonderful place to bring up the kids. Unfortunately for them, so did everybody else, and a whole succession of people started muscling in, including but not limited to the Hans, the Wus, the Jins, the Songs, the Suis, the Chams, and the Tangs. Not to mention the Mings, Mongols, and Manchus.

  After a thousand years of feeding the Big Yellow Dragon to the North, the French bureaucrats moved in for a hundred years or so, which made all the previous occupations seem entertaining by comparison. At least the Mongols didn’t bring Edith Piaf. During WWII there were some complications and the Japanese moved in for a while, but pretty soon the tricolore was gaily flapping in the oriental breeze once again.

  After the Vietnamese had finally had enough of the French and persuaded them to leave at Dien Bien Phu and the frogs of Vietnam could breathe easily once again, the Domino Theory showed up and some gung-ho American politicians and top brass—who didn’t actually have to go and fight, themselves, you understand—decided that a twenty-thousand-year-old civilization was in need of some real civilizing, Uncle-Sam style, and so introduced the locals to an interesting new cocktail of gasoline and palm oil, and made them listen to Beach Boys records.

  After which, they got Communism and Oliver Stone. The poor little bastards just couldn’t seem to catch a break. And it was about to get worse.

  Chapter 12.

  Nobody knew for sure how old Woolloomooloo Wally was, especially Wally. But everybody w
ho knew him knew that he could remember things from the before-times. The time of dreams, when things had been very different. They knew that he had the dreams, and that he knew what they meant, and that underneath his gray, grizzled curls and behind that wizened, puckered leather face, there resided profound and ancient knowledge, the wisdom of ages that heard things in the winds and saw things in the shapes of the flight of birds and took meaning from the light in the eyes of wild creatures.

  They knew, too, that if you dropped him naked into the bush, a hundred miles from anywhere in any direction, and went back a year later, he would have built a village, started a herd, fathered a half a dozen kids, and painted every rock for miles around with elaborate and arcane symbols.

  Wally was sitting on a junk at the mouth of the estuary of the Saigon River, surrounded by beer bottles, dogs, chickens, geese, pigs, and a multitude of dark-skinned, fuzzy-headed kids of varying ages. He wasn’t really sure which were his kids, and which were his grandkids, and which ones had just wandered onto the boat. They all looked the same to him, and since he called them all son or daughter and valued them all equally, what was the difference? On the lower deck of the junk, five women in their late thirties and early forties were cooking, washing clothes, changing babies, sewing, and feeding pigs, respectively. Wally knew that one was his wife, and that the other four were her sisters, but he couldn’t remember which was which. They all looked the same to him, but since he called them all Mrs. and valued them all equally, and impregnated them impartially and without preference, what was the difference?

  Wally had been in three wars, and each time he had ended up fighting Asian people and, as is generally unavoidable in three wars, he had killed more than a few. But in the years between the wars, and in the intervening period since the last one, Wally had made it his duty to try to replace as many of the Asian people that he had killed as possible. Of course they weren’t, strictly speaking, Asians, but they were close enough.

  It was only nine o’clock in the morning, but the sun was already hot and reflecting back off the river in blinding volleys of light from the wakes of the small, motorized junks that constantly whizzed up and down. Wally’s junk was moored at one end of a vast flotilla of similar vessels, all crowded with people and animals, and all with laundry waving in the breeze like the banners of some war-bent armada. Planks and rickety bamboo bridges connected the junks, and over these children raced, and people carried bundles and baskets, and some rode bicycles, and some even rode actual motor scooters, on which they zipped and zoomed over the precarious, narrow boards with nerveless and impressive skill. Over all lay an intricate and complex symphony of talking and yelling and singing, of shrill whistles, of obscure arguments that had continued unabated for decades according to some mysterious and inviolable set of rules, of bells and gongs and chimes, of the barking of dogs, the squeal of pigs, the honks and grunts and farts of a whole menagerie of creatures, bizarre and commonplace. As counterpoint was the competing blare and static of countless radios, all, by some unstated social contract or agreement, apparently tuned to different stations. And opposite, across the wide, slow-flowing muddy water, was the green line of the jungle, timeless and imponderable, like a vast, green army camped out at the very gates of the city.

  Woolloomooloo Wally’s skin was midnight black, so black as to make him appear almost a shadow on the deck of the boat where he squatted, finishing his breakfast beer; skin which, except for the folds over his belly, was still taut and glossy over his wiry frame. The toned muscles of a lifetime of physical toil still rolled beneath it. He wore a pair of ratty shorts that had been red at some point in their history, but which had faded over the years to an anemic pink, and an ancient T-shirt with an illegible logo and more holes than the Belfry. A green baseball cap, balanced atop the invincible mass of steel wool that he used for hair, completed his ensemble. As for footwear, no cobbler on earth could fashion a pair of shoes to fit those gnarled and scarred roots at the end of his ankles, the impenetrable, horny soles impervious to nail and thorn alike.

  Wally had had a strange life, born at some undetermined time to the Ngadjonji people in the remote forests in the far north of what the Gumaring called Queensland, not far from where the Yarra had once fought with them at the place they called Butcher’s Creek. Then, he had been Birring Barga. Birring had grown up living the way his people had lived since they wandered across the narrows before Australia was even a continent proper. He had hunted, and fished, and run with the animals, and learned their voices until they could speak to him of their lives, and he had listened to the stories of the dreamtime, and learned the songs of his people. He had learned to read the land, and to understand its meaning, and to respect and revere it, and to take from it what he needed and nothing more.

  And one day, when he was little more than a boy by the standards of the West but already a man in the eyes of his tribe, and already a father, he had taken his woomera and his boomerang and spears, and gone walkabout. The moon became fat and then hungry again many times as he walked at right angles to the trajectory of the sun, stopping now and then to camp with people like himself, but whose languages he did not understand.

  Eventually he had come to the place that the old ones had told him about, with houses made from flat trees, and machines that growled at him as they passed. Some Gumaring people had taken him, and made him sit in hot water, and given him a strange coat that was hot and stopped you from moving properly. They had given him the words of their tribe, which he remembered in case he ever had to speak to them, and they had given him a book, with little animals walking all over it, and they had made him understand that these animals, too, could speak to him. So he studied them until he understood, and the animals told him many wonderful stories of faraway places.

  But the people kept making him listen to the same animals, who told him about a dead Gumaring with a hairy face who you were supposed to love without question, and about the way that you had to live, which was the only right and proper way. And in this right and proper way you had to sing boring songs all the time, and you weren’t allowed to jump on any Sheilas.

  So he climbed out of the window one night, and followed the river. At the end of it, he came to a place where all the people of the world all lived together in one big camp. Here buildings were made of square stones, and you could see the sea, and there was a huge bridge that you could use to climb into the sky and see the edge of the world. This was a cruel place, and he had been beaten and abused and spat upon, and so he wandered until he found the place where all the Yarra people lived together, and here he had learned about the white ones, and their machines, and about the pieces of colored paper that were so important to them that they even swapped them for food. And in time Birring Barga became Woolloomooloo Wally.

  Wally did many things in those early years. He worked on the docks, and he had a job on the ferry to Manley, and one year he got work on a sheep station and all he had to do was ride around on a horse all day, mending the fences, and this was good because he was out in the bush, and when his work was finished he could go into the trees and do the old things. And the next year he went back, and they taught him to shear the sheep, and soon he could do it better than all but the very best of them. And he came back to Sydney with a lot of the colored paper that year, and he drank a lot of beer and jumped on a lot of Sheilas and went to a lot a races, where he always won because he understood the horses and knew which ones would win if the jockeys didn’t interfere, until one day they chased him away. But life was still good anyway.

  Then one day it said in the papers that a big war had started, and that Australia wanted all able-bodied men to join up and go overseas to fight the enemy. So Wally and some mates went, and they joined the army, where they made him wear a uniform and taught him to shoot a rifle, and they put him on a big ship, down in the hold where they stayed for days and days, pitching and rolling on the sea, and everybody being sick, except Wally, who just went to sleep. They were sent into
a hot, steamy jungle, and small yellow people—like the Chinese merchants he had seen in Sydney, but much fiercer—shot at him, and so he killed a few of them.

  One time he was sent with a group of white men as a scout. The white men were encircled, and they ran out of ammunition and became lost, and a lot of them died, and many more were wounded and sick. So Wally took off the stupid boots, which were heavy and noisy and no good to anyone, and he took off the sweaty, itchy uniform, and he painted his face in the old way with some white stuff that they used to clean the webbing, and he went out into the night, into the jungle, and he killed a lot of Japanese, and they never knew he was there. And then he went back to the white people and showed them the way to go back, and they followed him across a river at night, to where all the other white people were. And after, when they were back in Sydney, they gave him a lot of coins to wear on pieces of cloth, and his picture was in the paper, and smiling white people shook his hand, and nobody called him a boong, or told him to fuck off.

  And after that, every time there was a war, some men in uniform would come and find Wally and ask him to go with them, to fight whoever it was that they were fighting, and Wally always went, because he liked the white people now and felt sorry for them and did not want them to get lost again.

  The last war had been really bad. He had not felt the same way about it, because nobody was really sure why they were fighting, and so he had stopped fighting and opened a bar for the soldiers to drink in when they came in for R and R. He called it Wal’s Outback. And when the war was lost, it did not feel like losing, and Wally was just glad that it was over. When the Americans left, he gave the bar to his Vietnamese Sheila and went home and decided that he wasn’t going to fight in any more wars.