His left arm was still tied off, violet stain at the crook of his elbow, needle on the floor beside his hand.
Perelli knelt to find a pulse. After a moment he looked up at me. “Nada,” he said.
We stood together in the doorway. “Shit,” Perelli said, whispering, “where is anybody?”
“Let’s get him out of here.”
“Christ,” Perelli mumbled, “what is this, a fucking murder? I mean, where’s the guy that called?”
“Probably eating dinner. Let’s just get this guy over to the hospital, Perelli.”
“Yeah, off-load him over there, forget this ever happened.” Perelli pulled the body out of the broom closet feet first. The skull thumped against the floor.
“Now he’s got a broken head too,” I said.
“Shut the fuck up, will ya?” Perelli looked down at the corpse, and said, “Think we’ll be in trouble for this? Shit, dead junkie, it’s gotta be on our watch. Who is this asshole fucking up my dinner anyway?”
I looked at Perelli, my hands under the body’s shoulders, and said, “He’s my cousin from Milwaukee and you better give me a little help here.”
Perelli grabbed the ankles. “You’re a genuine smartass, you know that?”
We wrestled the weight onto the stretcher, belted the body down. In the corridor we could still hear the low murmur of the radio, the only sound beyond our labored breathing. The corpse’s right arm kept falling as we wheeled toward the door. Finally we let it drag, down the steps, into the back of the jeep.
We delivered the body to the hospital emergency room loading dock. Two medics in white suits transferred the corpse from our stretcher to theirs, banged through swinging doors, and were gone. Perelli watched the doors, saying, “They’ll probably try to blow him back up in there. Shit for brains in this man’s army.”
Back at our watch post Perelli slumped into a chair. “Jesus,” he said. “Everybody dies here. Ain’t one fuckin’ thing, it’s another. Everybody buyin’ the farm. You notice that?”
I glanced at him, then away. “I noticed that,” I said.
In his office Master Sergeant Weldon was reading the Playboy. “File a report,” he said flatly from behind the centerfold.
Perelli got up and went into Weldon’s office, sat down in front of the sergeant’s desk, talking to the cover of the magazine. “You hear the latest, Sarge? Dead junkies in broom closets. No shit.”
The cover of Playboy featured a blonde in front of a paper moon with her back to the camera, nude except for glistening black shoes, one spike-heeled foot hiked up to rest on the moon’s bottom curve. She looked back over her shoulder, smiling at Perelli.
“I can’t even eat my goddam dinner,” Perelli said.
Weldon heaved the magazine onto his desk top, sighing. “Perelli,” he said, “your fun has only just begun.”
3
The river in Saigon was a drift of fruit peel and vegetable waste floating to the sea, children laughing and splashing in the shallows. The vendors began to line the banks at sunrise, cooking in the pink mornings until the smell of burning dung and camp smoke laced the scents of fish and water rat and distant ocean. A grandmother in a black ao dai set her stand up a few yards to the south of where I sat, spreading a ground cloth for the woven conical sun hats she sold. They were the hats worn by farmers everywhere in Asia, and she wore one herself. Her face was seamed, tired and beautiful. The Coca-Cola peddler squeezed his bell as he clanked his cart behind me, bottles ringing. I listened to the vendors’ shouts grow into the day and watched the water move. A quartet of fighter jets blew over in formation, folding one by one toward the northwest. A Marine Corps helicopter labored past, rotors patting the air as the pilot braked for landing, and I could clearly see the streaked and expressionless faces of two soldiers crouching in the doorway of the aircraft, looking off toward open sky. The helicopter crossed and faded and under it, on the far shore, a group of schoolgirls rode bicycles, filmy white dresses adrift behind them like wings in the river wind and black waterfall hair swaying across their narrow backs, the high music of their voices traveling the haze and oily water as they rode, passing on south like a flock of mythical creatures in the fresh light.
4
I met Lwan where she worked, where I was alone drinking Asahi and vacantly watching the street when she sat down and said You’re lonely. I was wary and said that I was not and when she invited me to her apartment I was hesitant. She courted my hesitancy elegantly, taking me up the fire escape past her cat into the one large room with the moon lying down on the ceiling, and we drank and talked, beginning to fall into the whole heat of taxi horns and bicycle bells and beggar chants ascending to a complete body, a musical politics invisible from a third-story window with the night engines of our arms and legs and the occasional helicopter grinding past at roof level so we waited until it passed to speak, beginning to fall into the space we made love in, falling and unwinding through to where I came back to her when I could and came back again and came back and always came back.
5
Dear Mary,
The ringing in my ears has finally stopped and it didn’t end as I had hoped, a sudden freedom, but slowly, so I couldn’t really know if it would ever leave me alone. Or it never ended and is ringing now as I write these words and will always be with me but I will simply be unable to hear it, my brain no longer able to recognize what it carries and cannot purge, the way one survives but is never again truly free. I remember talking to you about Jews who survived the camps and their madness and suicide and I can tell you it happens fast, it’s not a dream and history never died. Time will pass and I will be standing on a street corner or standing in line somewhere, looking for all the world like anybody at all, another human being amidst the hundreds, one among the thousands, out on his daily rounds, living his life on any given day. Something will have happened in my life that festered, scarred, finally just sits, a photograph on the spine.
I remember the first time you cried with me, and the first time I saw you naked. And every time after the first times. Such memories are owned by the air. That’s real safekeeping.
All my love.
6
“Where’d you do your time?” The supply sergeant was playing solitaire, snapping the cards into place without interest.
I paused in front of my new locker, dress shirt on my palm folded down to an eight-inch square. “Central Highlands,” I told him. “Iron Triangle. Binh Duong Province. Around there. I’m on open travel orders.”
The sergeant looked up from his game for a moment, then back to his cards. “You don’t really seem like the Special Ops type,” he said.
I jammed the shirt into a hole between socks and boots and sat down on my footlocker. “So who really is?” I asked.
The sergeant looked up. “Some,” he said. “Some. You can be sure of that.”
The sergeant was using the standard squad bay recreational table for his solitaire. I felt him look at me, at my back, and I turned around to see him softly pushing the cards into confusion. He stood and stretched, and lay down on the table face up, legs hanging off at the end. He got a cigarette lit and left it in his mouth, talking up through the smoke. “Livin’ in the boonies with the dinks. Shit. I’d be fuckin’ freaked out, too.”
The sergeant was silent after that, exhaling like a beached whale. I sat on my footlocker, staring at the space of gray concrete between my bare feet.
7
Hawley yelling at me in the Blue Star Bar, “I owe you one, you son of a bitch! Let me buy!” Then, to the man holding him by the arm, “Fucker saved my life. No shit, man. I gotta buy him a drink.”
He stumbled forward, collapsing over the stool beside me, elbows on the bar holding him up.
“Hey,” I said. “Little wasted?”
“Wasted, hell. Just getting started.”
“So what brings you to Saigon?”
“R and R, man, what you think?”
“R and R and you come to Saig
on?”
He tried to wink but could not. “One of these goddam holes over here is just like all the rest. Know what I mean?”
I took a drink of beer.
“Hey, you son of a bitch,” Hawley said, the words slurred, “I buy the next round. Bartender! Hey!” He looked at me, head wobbling. “Where the fuck’s the bartender in this establishment?”
“She’s coming.”
A pretty Vietnamese girl in a black bikini stopped in front of us. She looked bored, and when Hawley grabbed at her breasts she pulled back, frowning; he began to giggle, laid his head on the bar, face down.
He giggled and said, “I love it.”
I shook my head at the bar girl, and she moved away.
Hawley turned his head to one side so he could look at me. “Hey, man. No shit. You saved my ass. And I never gave you a proper thanks.”
“Just the circumstances,” I said. “Anyone would have done the same.”
“Woo-wooo,” Hawley crooned with his left cheek flush to the bar. “Modesty becomes you.” He started to giggle again. I looked straight ahead into the mirror on the other side of the bar. The bar girl stood a few feet away, rearranging the top half of her bikini.
“You know something, man?” Hawley said.
“What’s that?”
“I gotta take a piss.” He raised his head slowly, looking around wide-eyed, a child waking in a strange place. “Gotta take a piss,” he said, standing, one hand on the bar for support. He made his way to the table he’d left, falling into it, bottles and glasses spilling, rolling, shattering. Soldiers laughed and Hawley climbed onto the table, got to his knees, pointed at me. “Hey!” he shouted. “That man saved my life in the heat of combat!”
Hawley wobbled into a crouch and stood as if he were on a high wire, soldiers shouting him on, clapping, chanting as he pulled his zipper down, bellowing, “Here’s a little tribute to the man that saved my worthless ass!” The bar manager was out from a back room, yelling in Vietnamese, pushing through the crowd.
Hawley had his penis in hand and let go, pissing a soft sparkle arc. The crowd made a space for the stream, laughing and applauding. The manager pushed in close enough to shove at Hawley’s left leg; Hawley went down on his knees, pissing over his trousers, table rocking over on two legs with his weight, swayed midair and Hawley sprawled on the floor, on his back, laughter surrounding him and his prick hanging in the zipper’s teeth.
The cocktail table banged over beside Hawley, rolled into a chair. I finished my beer, and waved to the bar girl to bring me another.
8
I picked up the taxi at the head of Tu Do Street, slipped in the backseat and gave my destination, and the driver moved off. Saigon at night: impassable sidewalks, mopeds squirting around and through traffic. Begging children ran to the taxi windows, pounding, yelling in, pushing scabby noses against the glass.
“Someday I blow this pop stand,” the driver said suddenly. He turned to flash a grin, proud of his English.
I nodded. “May be a good idea,” I said.
The car stopped in traffic and the driver looked at me in the rearview. “Really,” he said. “I go to America. Get the hell out.”
I did not say anything.
The driver held his right hand in the air, rubbing first finger and thumb together. “Money,” he said. “Still drive cab, but live lot better. Maybe buy cab.”
“Maybe,” I said, watching the streets.
A horn behind us. The driver crept the car forward about twenty feet and turned back to look at me. “Got a brother Washington, D.C. You hear of D.C.?”
“I’ve heard of it,” I told him.
“Got a brother there. He got a restaurant. Gonna work there.”
“Good,” I said. “Best of luck.”
The driver’s expression went suddenly grim. “That’s what my brother write to me,” he said. “Best of luck, he tell me.”
I nodded at the windshield to let him know the traffic was moving. He nudged ahead, pushing against massed pedestrians, shouting out the window, turning across oncoming traffic into an alley. We moved into the dark slit. Naked and half-naked families crouched against the walls. A woman covered with open sores sat next to a trash can, staring straight ahead. She appeared to be dead.
“I get you fine girl,” the driver told me.
“No, thanks. Got one already.”
“Yeah?” He looked at me in the mirror. “Vietnamese?”
“Look out for the kids,” I said.
He honked viciously at two children playing in a puddle in the middle of the alley. They ran to the wall and he looked into his mirror again. “Gotta do Vietnamese girl,” he said. “Best pussy in-a world.”
I repeated my destination. He took on his grim expression again.
We left the alley and turned right onto a broader boulevard, traveling briskly in lighter traffic. I rolled the window down, and the air that came into the cab was filled with the smells of fish and salt water and diesel fumes. The flag over the American embassy rippled on an easy breeze, lit dramatically from below by a spotlight hidden in the garden’s foliage. Light gushed from a point in the ferns, humidity steaming over the garden, insects clouding into the beam. The driver slowed; at the next intersection the street was congested by a marketplace throng. I told him to stop. “I take you on, man,” he said.
I told him again to stop.
“You gonna walk?”
I got out, walked around the cab to his window. He said the fare was twenty U.S. dollars. I gave him three. “Hey, man,” he said, “not enough.”
“Hey,” I said. “Plenty.”
He cursed me in Vietnamese.
9
Where I walked the streets were full, people and light and noise, shouting and garbled music and distant horns, cooking smells, the smell of urine, of cologned sweat. Hey Yankee, you buy a watch? and he was rolling a sleeve up to show the bright train of watches to his tattooed bicep. I shoved past into the fishmongers and noodle sellers and whores and boy soldiers, Chinese cowboys and begging children. A night like any other here, a dream disappearing in a sleeper’s mind downrange of the moon, sleepwalkers’ parade, a night drowning in its own breath. I looked up and saw a prostitute watching me from a balcony: we watched each other for a moment, then she smiled, waved. I waved and walked on, and at the Blue Star I turned into the tight room with too-loud American rock and roll, Jim Morrison singing “Light My Fire.” An Americanized whore wooed a black boy in some kind of foreign naval uniform, shifting her hard hips against his leg, leaning forward so her little breasts fell into view in her halter. The black boy didn’t know what to do.
I pushed past the crowd, through the back door, and up the stairway. Wicker stairs; bamboo lashed, lit by a single forty-watt bulb at the top. There was a boy sitting halfway up, eaten by shadow, maybe ten years old, and as I passed he said Hey GI, you wanna acidy? Co-keen?
I told him I didn’t and moved on, stairs wheezing softly and giving with my weight as I went. At the top I knocked on the single door and a voice said, in English, to come in.
She sat alone at the small table with a dim lamp, dealing herself cards from a tarot deck. There was a black-lacquer bowl of rice and water chestnuts to one side, chopsticks laid neatly across the bowl. Every time I came it was the same: the small and dignified Vietnamese grandmother dealing fortunes, hundreds of different fortunes, amusing herself, passing the time.
She smiled at me. “Good see you, son,” she said.
I put my right index finger on the queen of clubs. “Good fortune?” I asked.
She shrugged. “Good picture,” she said.
I placed my order, took the moist fold of bills from my sock, and counted out on the table in front of her, over the cards. She bent to a cardboard box beside her chair and brought up the neatly packaged half pound of marijuana. Cambodian, she said in Vietnamese. Then, in English, she said, “Very fine now,” and grinned. After a moment of grinning at me she gathered the money, counted it
, slid it out of sight somewhere in her clothing.
“You good boy,” she said. “Good Yankee.”
“There is no such thing, Grandmother,” I said, pushing the plastic bag into the lining of my jacket. She nodded, and her smile dimmed only slightly.
10
He was standing in the short hallway outside her door, face shining wet in the bulb’s weak glow. Hey, GI. A silvery whisper. You wanna work for Madame Lin? Make-a deliver?
It was as if the boy sitting on the stair as I came up had grown to manhood and was still working the same side of the street. This older counterpart had a bright nylon shirt opened down his slick chest, wearing five or six silver chains around his neck. I looked down; his hands were empty.
“Madame Lin?” I shrugged, lifted my eyebrows, held up open palms, a picture of innocence.
He pushed his head toward the old woman’s door; “Make-a deliver,” he said again. “To American base. Business agent for Madame.”
I dropped my hands, sighing, shaking my head. “You and Madame Lin stay away from the base,” I told him. “They’ll shoot you. Without a second thought.”
He studied me.
“Really,” I said.
He grinned abruptly: his teeth were filed, filling his smile like a yawning shark. I moved past him, hoping he was content to leave me alone. At the base of the stairwell a prostitute languished, bittersweet, smoking a cigarette. The smoke slid in front of her face. “Hey, GI,” she said softly. “Take me home. I fuck you forever.”
11
Perelli came into the squad bay and said a couple guys wanted to see me downstairs.
“A couple guys?”
“Yeah.” Perelli shrugged. “Asked for you. Want to talk to you.”
Fatal Light Page 7
