Machine Gun Jelly (Big Bamboo Book 1)

by Shane Norwood

  He opened a hotel in Queensland with his friend, and it was all right for a time, but he became tired of the despair and hopelessness that he saw in his people, who drank not as Wally did, because he loved the beer, but because they couldn’t remember who they were and because they couldn’t be Muramba anymore, and couldn’t be Gumaring either. So he began to think of Vietnam, and of the mountain people they called the Montangards, in the hills, when it had been like being back in the old time, and of the good people that he had known, and how it was not like losing something but like finding something, and how easy it was to jump on the Sheilas. So when the time was right, he packed up and went back, and Wal’s Outback was still there, although it was not a bar anymore. So he reopened it, and met Rodney.

  Rodney could steal the wallet from your pocket and the sandwiches from your lunchbox with equal facility, and with a touch so subtle and gentle as to be barely felt. This was all the more remarkable for the fact that Rodney was only seven, and more remarkable still for the fact that Rodney was a four-ton elephant. Furthermore, Rodney was a she. Wally understood that Rodney was just naturally inquisitive and did not discourage her. Rodney and Wally made a decent living together. They did weddings and parties, and religious ceremonies, and sometimes they did shows for the tourists, and all the time Rodney’s soft subtle trunk wandered, as she probed and poked and sniffed, slyly stuffing things into the little bag on her neck. When they got home, Wally would always find Rodney’s sack filled with a cornucopia of goodies, some donated on purpose, and some unknowingly.

  There would always be coins, and paper money, and fruit, and sweets. But there would be other things as well. Condoms, combs, mirrors, false teeth, lipsticks, cameras, wallets, handbags, tampons, purses, pens, chewing gum, pairs of knickers, lighters, keys, address books, personal organizers, CDs and cassettes, guns, photographs, one time even a frozen chicken, and once a small dog. The wallets and purses Wally always scrupulously returned, usually receiving a reward from the owner, but the rest of the artifacts he could not return because he had no way of knowing to whom they had formerly belonged, and so he considered them legitimate business revenue. He had a small stall on a street corner, attended day and night by one of his “Billy lids,” where he sold the fruits of Rodney’s gathering, sometimes even back to the original owner.

  Wal’s Outback was quite successful. The locals liked it, and Wally’s kids hung around the hotels and the train station handing out flyers, and so they got a lot of tourists. Back in Australia he still had a half share in the hotel, and he knew that if he ever felt like going back, it would be there.

  And so, in the sunset of his life, Wally was a happy man. His life was full and interesting. He loved his women and his kids, and his boat, and Rodney. He was still in vigorous health, with all his faculties. He had memories in abundance, enough to sustain him until it was time for the long dream, and he had enough money, and plenty of beer, and if he wanted to jump on a different Sheila every now and then, nobody minded. Life was still good.

  Wally stood, scratched his balls, broke wind, shoved his empty bottle back into the crate, patted a passing kid on its head, said “Good on yer, son,” waved to his Sheilas who all looked up from their tasks and gave him big smiles, trotted down the swaying gangplank, and headed down the crowded, dusty lane towards Wal’s Outback.

  Monsoon Parker’s first evening back in the land of his birth had not been especially edifying. In fact, he had done nothing more than sit in his hotel room, smoking endless cigarettes and watching a cartoon on TV about some monkey with supernatural powers that kept switching between kung-fuing the shit out of bad guys, and turning itself into a handsome prince and trying to pork-sword the princess.

  The reason that Monsoon was spending his first evening back in the land of his birth watching TV in his hotel room was that Frankie Merang, after giving him a gratuitous slap in the teeth, had handcuffed him to the bed while he and Belly Joe had gone out to pork-sword some princesses of their own. So Monsoon was laid there, under a creaking paraplegic ceiling fan that was having about as much effect on the climatic conditions as a fart in a hurricane, slowly dissolving into the pool of sweat that was rising around him, and fervently hoping that some new form of particularly virulent and incurable swamp clap was currently circulating among Ho Chi Minh City’s ladies of the night.

  The priapic monkey-prince was distracting Monsoon from keeping his mind on figuring out his next move, because Frankie had thoughtfully turned the TV up to full volume and placed the remote in the bathroom before moving the telephone out of reach, just in case Monsoon felt inclined to alert anyone to his distressing situation.

  Monsoon had realized that it was going to be difficult to put the moves on Frankie and Belly and to give them the slip, but he had not anticipated just how difficult. They were keeping him tighter than a nun’s snatch, and until tonight one of them had always been right next to him since they stepped off the plane. He had not been allowed to speak to anyone, learning this the hard way when he had attempted to speak in Vietnamese to the cab driver and Belly Joe had slugged him in the nuts. The only thing he could figure that was to his advantage, so far, was that they wouldn’t be carrying any artillery. At least, not yet.

  So, all he had to do was pick up a trail that had been going cold for forty years, find something that may or may not exist, con the Don into sending over a shit-load of money to pay for it, slip these cuffs, overpower two stone-cold killers who were both three times his size, steal the dough, and split. Piece of cake. One thing, though, was that they were going to have to cut him some slack with the Vietnamese lingo, or else how was he going to be able to even try to track down the hypothetically extant merchandise? That maybe could give him the opportunity to recruit some muscle of his own, and things might change. He had to figure Frankie for having thought of that, but what he couldn’t see was how Frankie planned to prevent it.

  He was just wrestling with this problem, and keeping one eye on the monkey-princess, who he had to admit had a pretty fair pair for a cartoon, when he heard a noise like a Kodiak bear’s hoedown on the wooden stairs outside, and Frankie and Belly blundered into the room. Belly immediately came over and shoved his fingers under Monsoon’s nose. They smelled like he had just wiped his ass with a dead mackerel.

  “Ged a load of your sister’s quim, zipperhead,” he said, pleasantly.

  Belly Joe went over to the wheezing fridge in the corner, took out a beer, and sat on the edge of the bed, guzzling it and smiling at Monsoon, while Frankie busied himself unwrapping a cloth-wrapped package that he had carried in with him.

  Belly Joe was not named Belly Joe for his grace and agility on the parallel bars. Belly Joe was not even called Belly Joe because he was a fat, greasy, sweaty, malodorous bastard who had not been able to see his dick without standing on a mirror for twenty years. Belly Joe was known as Belly Joe because he claimed to have once dispatched a fellow inmate at Joliet by suffocating him in the showers beneath the prodigious folds of his stomach—a deed which, while greeted with considerable skepticism by the prison community, was considered sufficient in the telling to earn him the sobriquet. Belly Joe was indeed no slouch, though, when it came to shoveling away his grub, and it is reasonable to assume that, if Belly Joe had been present at the Sea of Galilee, then five fishes and a couple of loaves just wouldn’t have cut it, and that unless Jesus had had a few Big Macs lying about that nobody knew about, a few ragheads would have gone hungry that day.

  Knowing his friend’s predilection for having his belly filled was probably part of the reason that, as Belly Joe turned to grin at him after a rafter-shaking fart, Frankie filled his belly with seven slugs from a Browning 9mm. Monsoon, manacled and helpless, looked on in horror as Belly Joe dropped like a poleaxed moose. Frankie stepped up and emptied the remainder of the clip into Belly Joe’s forehead before whirling the automatic on his finger, Destry-style, and blowing the nonexistent smoke from the end of the silencer.

  “This town
wasn’t big enough for the both of us,” he said, grinning at Monsoon, who looked on with an expression that was a cocktail of equal parts terror and incomprehension, with a dash of curiosity, poured over the ice that filled his veins, severely shaken, not stirred.

  “I’ve always wanted to say that,” said Frankie, with a broad grin, flopping down on the bed next to Monsoon.

  “Now, my little rinky-dink friend,” he said, “let’s you and I have a little discussion, shall we?”

  Needless to say, Bjørn Eggen’s first reaction when they stepped from the customs hall into the breathtaking heat and humidity was to look for the nearest cold beer.

  “Before ve do anything, ve haf to…”

  “I know,” Baby Joe interrupted. “Find a beer.”

  “Ja, exactly.”

  Amid the cacophony of noise and the whirling kaleidoscope of color that assailed them, as they stood in the sunlit street and were immediately surrounded by a hundred importuning voices and hands, Baby Joe heard a different, familiar accent. He looked down to see a skinny, dark-skinned kid who appeared to have a scouring pad attached to the top of his head.

  “Hey, mate. You want beer? Bloody cold, fair dinkum.”

  Bjørn Eggen heard only the word “beer,” but immediately the kid had his undivided attention. “From vhere do we find the beer?”

  The kid handed him a card. It read, Wal’s Outback. Karaoke Lounge and Bar. ‘Tucker from down under.’

  Underneath was an address and a phone number.

  “Where is this place, kid?” Baby Joe asked.

  “Just around the corner, mate. Two minutes. It’s me dad’s place.”

  “Then lead on, young man, lead on,” Baby Joe said, winking at Bjørn Eggen and setting off after the kid who was already skipping down the street.

  They followed the boy through a sinuous maze of torturous streets, streets that looked like they had been designed by a snake on acid. Bjørn Eggen was fascinated, and watched the unfolding vista with great interest and a bemused smile on his face at finding himself on the exact opposite polarity of everything that was familiar to him: color instead of white, heat for cold, noise and clamor for serenity.

  Baby Joe was feeling decidedly weird, as if he were following in the phosphorus trail of his own footsteps—when a young man with whom he shared a common name and destiny, a young man sanguine and unburdened, had stalked these same streets, or streets very much like them, a half a lifetime ago. The ghosts had gathered around him and were speaking to him a lot sooner than he had anticipated, as if they had been waiting for him for all these years.

  Fifty yards in front of them, the kid stopped in front of some bamboo tables and chairs set out on the sidewalk, and into the actual road so that the traffic was obliged to navigate around them. He began to wave and skip up and down.

  “Here, mate, in here,” he yelled.

  They passed under a painted sign upon which koalas and kangaroos were primitively rendered in garish colors, and the words “Wal’s Outback” were spelled out in stick-like depictions of aboriginals striking elaborate poses, and entered the cool, dim bar.

  A pretty girl in a red silk dress, with the same dark skin and wooly hair as the boy, smiled at them as they came in. “G’day, mates, howareya?” she said, extending a long elegant arm in welcome.

  “Vat haf she said?” demanded Bjørn Eggen.

  “She said hello.”

  “Vich language is this?”

  “Australian.”

  “I haf think they are speaking English in Australia.”

  “They think so too,” said Baby Joe, stepping up to the bar.

  Like the furniture, the bar was constructed from bamboo and raffia, and behind it stood one of the ubiquitous, dark-skinned young people, this one a boy with his fuzzy curls stuffed into the confines of a felt hat with corks suspended from the brim on pieces of string.

  “Nice hat, kid,” said Baby Joe.

  “No, it’s not, it’s bladdy stupid. Me dad makes me wear it.”

  “Is the girl at the door your sister?”

  “Yeah.”

  “And the boy that brought us here is your brother, right?”

  “Yeah, me kid brother.”

  “Are there any more?”

  “Ah, yeah. Heaps.”

  “Your dad must be a busy man.”

  The youth grinned. “Too bladdy right, mate. What can I git ya?”

  “Beers. Big and cold.”

  “No worries.”

  The boy set two tall beers on the counter, so cold that that ice adhered to the outsides of the bottles. After three each the old man asked for the restroom, and was directed through a door and out into the bright sunshine behind the bar. Stepping into the relative gloom of the bamboo-roofed outhouse, he latched the door behind him and, kicking the commode, peered into it, making sure there were no inhabitants that might give him an unpleasant surprise, before dropping his shorts and sitting down. It was cool and peaceful in there, with the light falling in lines across his knees from the latticed door and the gentle buzzing of insects and the soporific effect of the cold beers.

  Bjørn Eggen had already decided that he liked Vietnam and was enjoying himself immensely. He really liked Baby Joe, whom he thought he was a very good man, and he had enjoyed the flight over, having had a few drinks and talking with Mrs. Mary Rose Muffin. She was a very nice lady and had told him where she was staying, and he hoped he would get the opportunity to see her again once he had found his reprobate grandson.

  Bjørn Eggen satisfactorily completed his enterprise and as he bent over to retrieve his shorts he became aware of a strange sound, like a leaking pipe or someone blowing their nose. He paused to listen, but the sound stopped. He was bending over again and had both hands on the waistband of his shorts when something warm and wet attached itself to his anus with a gentle sucking action. With a scream, and a dexterity that belied his years, Bjørn Eggen propelled himself bodily through the outhouse door, ripping it from its hinges and detaching whatever-it-was from his anus with an audible pop.

  Baby Joe was already heading for the back door before Bjørn Eggen’s yell had entirely cleared his larynx. He burst into the hot yard and saw the old man on his knees, covered in dust and straw, desperately trying to pull his shorts up over his wizened ass cheeks. He sprinted to Bjørn Eggen, helped him to his feet, and assisted him with his tangled leather braces. The old man was shaken and pale, but looked more angry than frightened.

  “What happened, Bjørn Eggen?”

  The old man pointed accusingly at the outhouse. “Focken arse bandit try to stab me arse in der.”

  The two of them peered into the outhouse, with its wrecked door, and saw nothing but the pale glow of the white commode in the shadows.

  “How many beers have you had? There’s nothing in there.”

  “Someone grab me arse in der for sure.”

  By now the courtyard was filling up with dark-skinned, wooly-haired kids of varying sizes and genders, and the eldest, the bartender, stepped forward.

  “What’s up, mate?” he said, looking concerned.

  “My friend was assaulted while he was in the shithouse.”

  Laughter erupted among the kids.

  “Vat so focken fonny?” said Bjørn Eggen, glowering at the children.

  “Ah, no worries, mate. It’s just Rodney,” said the eldest, smiling.

  “Who the fock is Rodney? Maybe I gif him the big punch in the nose, ja?”

  “It’s a big bladdy nose, mate,” said the bartender. “Look.”

  He went to a gate in a fence immediately behind the outhouse, opened it, and whistled. Rodney came swaying into the yard, chewing a length of bamboo shoot and looking very pleased with herself. Bjørn Eggen looked appalled.

  “Fock me. Focken elephant try to fock me in the arse with the focken nose, ja.”

  “If you’d have gotten that up your ass, you’d have known about it,” Baby Joe said.

  “Ja, for sure. Shame ve don’
t haf Crispin here, ja?”

  The next beers were on the house, but Bjørn Eggen and Baby Joe could hardly drink them for laughing.

  Monsoon was rubbing his wrists, staring at the destroyed features of what had, until recently, been Belly Joe. He had watched Frankie change the clip and shove the piece into the waistband of his pants, and then pour them both a shot of something that was supposed to be brandy, before un-cuffing him. Monsoon calculated his chances of taking Frankie as slightly less than the chances of the Clippers winning the championship any time before the sun expanded and burnt the earth to a cinder, and he was fairly certain that Frankie Merang had come to the same conclusion. This was all becoming very confusing, and while he was all in favor of Belly Joe catching a hot lead tattoo he knew it could very easily be his turn next. He decided to give Frankie his undivided attention.

  “You probly curious to know why I dropped fat boy?”

  Monsoon nodded.

  “An’ you probly curious to know why you still breathin’?”

  Monsoon nodded again, a little more enthusiastically.

  “Well. It’s like this, see. I need ya. An’ you need me. You gotta know that the Don was gonna have me bump ya, once you found the connection, or even if ya didn’t. I know ya smart enough to have that figured, an’ I know ya bin’ busy tryin’ ta figure how you was gonna give us the slip. Meantime, I bin doin’ some figurin’ of my own, an’ it come out like this: Suppose we fix it so the Don thinks we made the deal. Now, he ain’t gonna trust a putz like me with any kinda serious moolah. He’s gonna send a coupla financial people, you know, bean counters. Supposin’ I tell the Don I found a guy has the entire supply of the stuff that there is, and that he wants ten mill for it. Strictly cash. Ten mill is gonna sound like we cut a good deal, make the Don more likely to take the bait, and it’s a nice handy number to split two ways. We get somma your slope pals on the team, and we set it up like they are the sellers. I got some samples from the Don, which we use to convince the pencil pushers that the deal is legit. Plus, and this is the kicker, I figure we need a coupla clowns to dress up like they’s army personnel, an’ we go through a little routine so’s the money boys buy the scam. Then, when they produce the green, I waste ‘em and we split the dough. You followin’ me so far?”