by Sarah Bird
Vaughn taps the photo, calling my attention to a row of fifty-five-gallon drums baking in the sun at the edge of the runway. Bands of different colors encircle each drum. “See those? Those are what killed Gene. What are killing me.”
I glance up. Listen to the ragged wheeze of his breath.
“Called ’em the rainbow herbicides. Agents Purple, Pink, and Orange. According to the Pentagon, none of them was ever on Okinawa. But there they are. Only time and place military had ’em all together like that. Either testing for Vietnam or dumping the dented drums straight into the Pacific Ocean. I researched this shit. You better believe I did. It’s all on the Internet now. Just look it up, you’ll see.
“Back then, though? They told us that shit was safe as water, and we were so ignorant we believed ’em. No gloves, no hazmat suit. We humped those damn drums using our bare hands like the idiot kids we were.”
Vaughn shakes his head, mutters to himself, “Young, dumb, and full of cum. Excuse me. Don’t report me to your mother. Lucky for me, I was the biggest goldbrick you ever saw. Laid back much as I could. Gene, though, Gene liked running a front-end loader, liked watching those barrels with the colored stripes on them bumping down a long hill and splashing into the ocean. He was there every day handling that shit, breathing it.”
I recall Gene, old before his time, rooted to his recliner, oxygen tube running into his nose, the end table next to him covered with pill bottles, always more of a glowering presence than a person. Vaughn glances at the security monitor. Two of the screens now show the marines in separate rooms, naked, sitting on the divided stools, being washed by their chosen woman. The women slosh soapy water across the men with as little emotion as workers at a carwash sudsing up a big SUV. When one of the men is thoroughly soaped up, his attendant positions herself behind him. I look away, thoroughly creeped out. But the image of the girl using both hands to reach under him and rhythmically wash his genital area with long swipes from his ass to his erect dick is already burned into my brain. Only my intense desire to hear my grandmother’s story overcomes my nearly equally intense desire to leave.
Vaughn doesn’t seem to notice the screen or my embarrassed reaction as he mutters, “Thank God, I had the Bush.”
I wince.
“Naw, naw, not like that. The Bush is what we, me and the other brothers, called the five, six blocks of Koza that we owned. Owned …” He goes off into a reverie. When he speaks again, it’s more for himself than me. “I’m telling you, this should be in the history books. The Bush was my kingdom. My domain. Me and the Soul Tronics. We were like the house band for the whole scene back then. It was ours, we owned it. Me and every other brother on the Rock. The Man did not dare set foot into the Bush. We set up the official Far East branch of the Black Panthers. Only we were more radical and better armed. You think getting pulled out the projects, then sent to Vietnam to get your ass shot up for some bullshit cracker war ain’t gonna radicalize a brother?”
There it is, the anger always ready to flare, exactly like my mom’s. With her gentle mother and silent father, I always wondered where it came from. Vaughn relaxes. When he speaks, he’s once again one of the brothers who owned the Bush.
“Brothers going to or just coming out of ’Nam on R and R with their KA-BARS, their sidearms. Lot of green beanies too. Them Green Beret sonsabitches could kill a man with a ballpoint pen. Yeah, we had some desperate motherfuckers holed up in there. You hear lot of talk about, ‘I was the only white dude ever go into the Bush.’ Bullshit! MPs wouldn’t go up in there. White man’s military mighta ruled our lives on base, but not in the Bush. That was ours. And the Okis backed us up. Least the ones with any balls did. You want tough? Those were the motherfuckers invented karate. Japs took away their weapons, they turned their hands into weapons. Never needed a gun, a knife. They want you dead, didn’t need no ballpoint pen, kill you with their bare hands. You think I didn’t see them do it? Hell I didn’t!”
Vaughn looks off, nodding to himself as if he’d just gotten the last word in. Then he remembers that I’m there and says, “Your grandmother, fine woman. Just wanted what she couldn’t have.”
“What was that?”
“Delmar Roquel Vaughn. You really want to hear all this old-timey shit?” he asks, now that he has my attention riveted.
Codie could nail down attention the same way. When she was around, you couldn’t put your eyes anywhere but on her. Charisma. It astonishes me to witness its source. I nod.
“Okay, here’s how it was back in the day. The girls who worked the Bush were there because they liked a brother, you know what I’m sayin’? I was fronting the hot band in the Bush. I could have had any female I wanted. Never a question of me paying. Hell, girls bought me presents. Beautiful Akai reel-to-reel, Seiko watch, Pentax camera, Denon hi-fi. Made me loans they never expected to see come back. Oriental women know how to treat a man. At least, they did back then. Not like the trash you got now.” He waves vaguely toward the security monitor. “Damn Flips and Bucketheads. Sukie, though, Setsuko, now, she was a whole ’nother level. She was obsessed. I mean cuckoo stalker insane for me.”
I almost stop him. Almost say, “That’s my grandmother you’re talking about,” but I have made a decision: It’s not. He’s just telling me an old-time story from his life, and it can’t touch or change who my grandmother was to me. I won’t let it. I knew who she really was. I’m only listening to the story for the information I have to get.
“That’s not just me talkin’,” he continues. “Anybody’d tell you the same. End of a show, she was always right there with a nice, cool, moist towel outta the fridge, bowl of sōki soba with all that good pork in it, bottle of cold Orion.” He grunts at the memory. “Even though she knew I was with a different lady every night, she’d lose control, try to scratch the new one’s eyes out. Got to where I knew I had to cut her loose. I couldn’t have that kind of discourse going on.”
I like it that he uses the wrong word for “discord.” Listening to him brag about what a stud he was makes me even more certain that he is my mother’s father. I feel it in my blood, the cheater and the cheated. The left and the always leaving. The one who thinks connection equals entanglement. Whose idea of free is alone.
“I was just about ready to tell her not to come ’round no more when I got my orders. For ’Nam. All of us bloods making the scene down the Bush, we all got them the same day. Military knew the Bush was more powerful than they were, so they ganged up, air force, army, marines, navy. If you were black and not eatin’ a yard of the Man’s shit, you got orders that day. And there weren’t any assignments sortin’ mail at Hickam either. Naw, it was all front line. You got papers that day, you were gonna end up in the Central Highlands or the Mekong Delta. And you were gonna end up dead. Those orders were death sentences.”
Vaughn looks out the window. The sun has come out and slants a harsh stripe of light across his face. His eyes glitter the way old people’s do. He sounds even older when he says, “I wasn’t gonna let the air force kill me. Took me a while to figure out they already had.”
THIRTY-SEVEN
Vaughn stares out the window. It’s a long time before he finally picks up his story again. “The Bush was wild that night. Never been wilder. Girls were crying, making a fuss. Brothers all frontin’ about how they ain’t goin’. No way. No how. Then guess what happens?”
I shake my head, intent on what he is saying; I know the story is coming to the part where my existence begins.
“Typhoon! You believe that shit? Elsie, Typhoon Elsie, supposed to hit Guam; it veers off, heads right for the Rock. It was an official TC-1 alert. Base closed up, locked down. No one even supposed to be outside the fence. But after we got orders? We figured, shee-it, what they gonna do to us? Send us to Vee Et Nam? So we take it to the street. Ready to riot. Hoping they’d send some MPs after us, because we didn’t care anymore. Whatever stockade they threw us in be better than dying in the Central Highlands next to some Montagnard fighting
for a country he actually gave a shit about.
“So it’s straight-up chaos in Koza, know what I’m sayin’? It’s pouring rain, the wind is howlin’ like standing in the prop wash of a B-52. All the club owners are freaking out, boarding up windows, pulling down the metal shutters, shoving sandbags under the doors. The mama-sans are filling up bathtubs, buckets, douche bags, anything they got for drinking water. Coupla shops still open are packed with people buying batteries, cans of Spam, jugs of water.
“What a trip. Our girls crying, hanging on to us. Wind whipping that rain sideways straight into our faces. Like a movie. And all us young, good-looking, renegade bloods were the stars. And our courage and pride and righteousness were going to beat back the damn United States air force, army, navy, and marines. Then someone with a radio starts yelling about how Elsie been declared a supertyphoon. Winds predicted to hit a hundred and seventy-five miles an hour. That is some serious shit. Blow a fuckin’ anchor down the street’s what I’m talkin’ about.”
I feel it, the winds howling through me, the winds that have always howled through me. Finally, I know where they come from.
“About then, lights flicker off. Shops close. Streets get dark and empty. We’re standing in the middle a fuckin’ ghost town. Then that siren goes off. You ever hear an Okinawan typhoon siren?”
I can barely force a word out, and whisper, “No.”
“Make the hair on a dead man’s neck stand up. Scary movie shit. Like they opened up the graveyards and ten thousand ghosts come pouring out, all wailing and flying through the streets. Man, eyes popped open when those sirens went off. No one be talkin’ about blockading the streets, garroting the MPs one by one when they come for us. Everyone looking around for some shelter and all we see is doors closed, locked, and sandbagged. Brothers be thinkin’ about those nice safe reinforced concrete barracks back on base. Next time that siren goes off, they gone. All the girls gone. Poof. Vanished. All except one.”
“My grandmother.” My anmā. I can see my grandmother so vividly, the way she always was. Always moving ahead, pushing forward no matter what, even if she was walking into a gale.
“Yeah, little Sukie. Not a dog out there loyal as that one. The wind about strong enough to blow her to China, and she just stand there, put her hand in mine, and led me away. Had a nice little studio. Had her a hot plate, four-blade ceiling fan, cassette player, nice double bed. Actual mattress on a frame. And the building was sound. Lot of buildings, shit whole department stores!, blew away when Elsie hit. Eight people killed. But we rode it out, me and Sukie, drinking awamori, smoking those funky Violet cigarettes, laughing. Made me happy to make someone as happy as she was just from being with me. I was like Elvis, Jesus, and Smokey all rolled into one for Sukie.”
She pined for you for the rest of her life. I wonder whether I should hate him for breaking my anmā’s heart or if it really was better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all. I wonder whether I’m like my grandmother or my mother.
“Even after Elsie moved on, Sukie stayed home from her bar hostess job. Bought me whatever I wanted. Beer, cigarettes, sōki soba. What can I say? Woman flat-out worshiped my ass. Loved to just pat me like I was some big, giant Christmas doll. My eyes, though. Man, she’d stare into them and whisper in her crazy Oki language. Not Japanese. Whole other language. And my hair? She’d bend over and kiss it like every curl was a baby that needed her to coo over it.”
I think of her, transported, as she kissed my curls, Codie’s. Of the adoration that oozed from her.
“At first, being a deserter was like staying home sick from school. I stopped shaving, grew me a fine Eldridge Cleaver, Soul on Ice, Black Power beard. But it wasn’t the same. The Bush never recovered from Elsie. Typhoon blew the heart out the place. None of the cats who made the scene so cool ever came back after that night. Every last one of them was shipped out on the first plane that took off after Elsie passed. No more brothers strutting around in leather jackets, black berets, and purple granny glasses giving the Black Power salute.
“I got jumpy. Was sure they were coming after me. That they’d find me holed up in Suki’s little apartment. Every time someone knock on the door, I’d slip out the window, hide in the alley until they left. But the MPs never came. No one came. Local police didn’t even care. Once I realized no one was coming, I started wandering around outside. Sukie’d freak every time I opened the door. But I had to get out. I’d go up and down Gate Street. B.C. Street. If Sukie’d made enough the night before, I’d get me a hot dog, a few beers. Those five or six blocks were my prison yard. Went on like that for months.
“Eventually, I started going all the way up Gate Street, right to the edge of the base. Circled around all the way to the runway where Gene was unloading them rainbow barrels. Thought I was a ghost when he first saw me, then he had to know all about how I beat the air force almighty. Played it off for him. Acted like I was livin’ the life, boy. Gene.” He shakes his head at the memory. “Eugene Overholt.”
“I was so lonely, I gave that hillbilly peckerwood my address and he started coming around. Got to be the highlight of my week when Gene’d show up with a loaf of Wonder Bread and a jar of Skippy peanut butter from the commissary. By then, he had this crusty rash all over his hands, arms. Told him it was from those damn drums. He just said, ‘Not possible. PACAF has certified that it’s safe.’ Fool.
“Wasn’t like I wasn’t an even bigger fool, though. Bit by bit, it come to me why the air force wasn’t coming after me: They already had me locked up. I was in a sixty-mile-long, three-mile-wide prison. I mean, where the fuck I gonna go? All they got to do is wait until I go stir-crazy like every other grunt ever gone AWOL on this Alcatraz of an island and they knew I’d turn myself in. Or they could just pick me up if I try to leave. Instant I flash my passport at the airport, I be in handcuffs and on my way to Leavenworth. And not just for desertion either. Hell, no. Okis had started protesting by then about all the rapes, murders, robberies committed by GIs and how U.S. military courts never done jack shit to a one of them. How Tokyo never stood up for them either, just hung ’em out to dry as usual. So military was looking for a scapegoat. They ever got me, they wouldn’t just ship me out to ’Nam; they’d pin every murder, every rape, every cab fare ever got walked, and every pack of gum ever got stole on me and I’d be doin’ some hard, hard time.
“Minute I realize I was never getting out, that’s when I started losing it. The walls closed in on me. Koza, I had to get out of that shithole. I figure if I was going to be serving a life sentence on the Rock, at least I could do it in a decent city like Naha, where there’s something beside strip clubs, tattoo parlors, and T-shirt shops.
“I didn’t say nothing. Sukie, though, she was about half psychic, always getting messages from her ancestors. She knew we were played out. That I was leaving and wouldn’t be taking her with me. She went crazy in her own quiet, moody way. Is it possible to rape a man? I woulda said no until then. That woman would not leave me alone. She was always pawin’ at me, grabbing at my dick.”
I stand. “Yeah, okay, that’s enough. My grandmother was the best grown-up I ever knew and you were lucky that she gave you the time of day.” As I start to leave, he stops me.”
“I’m sorry. I haven’t been around decent people in forty years. I can’t even talk right anymore. You’re right; I didn’t deserve your grandmother. Stay.”
I keep walking to the door.
“Hey!”
I stop.
“I’m not gonna be around a whole lot longer, and I need someone to know this story before I’m gone.”
I don’t move.
“I won’t talk smack about your grandma anymore, but I am gonna tell the story true. You want that, don’t you?”
I nod, sit back down.
“No surprise she turned up pregnant. I ask her what she want me to do about it. Sukie’s a professional. She knew how to get it taken care of. I’m not saying that’s the way I shoulda been, just
that that’s the way I was. But from then on, she was the one wouldn’t let me anywhere near her. Sulled up like a possum. Prayed and lit incense. Only time she smiled was when Gene came by. She found some funky ointment for his rash. Rubbed it on him with her pretty little hands. Asked in this whispery baby voice if that made him feel better. Gene’d just nod his head like he was hypnotized. Being pregnant changed Sukie. What she wanted didn’t matter anymore to her. Only my baby mattered. She needed someone to protect her, protect the baby, and I guess Gene seemed like the answer to all those prayers she was saying and all that incense she was burning.
“Pretty soon, Gene stopped even pretending he was coming to see me. Then he stopped coming to the apartment at all. Sukie’d leave, go meet him somewhere, come back smelling like that funky Jade East shit he wore. Few times I did see him, Gene looked at me like a dog got caught eating the Thanksgiving turkey. All ashamed, feeling bad for cheating with my woman. Only thing I felt was relieved. Didn’t even tell her good-bye when I left. I’m sorry I did your grandma that way after she saved me, but once I had me a job lined up in Naha, place to stay, I was gone. Solid gone.”
I guess a billion dominoes have to fall in exactly the right order for any one person to appear on earth, but the epic randomness of my being here because a typhoon veered off course and gave an Okinawan bar girl the opening to make her move on a guy she was crushed out on momentarily overwhelms me.
Vaughn’s gaze flickers over to the monitor. What he sees there causes him to sit up straight, bristling with attention. The girl he’s watching slithers over her customer like an eel with good rhythm, twining and rubbing until the marine arches his back, his glistening chest rising off the air mattress. He reaches out for the girl on top of him, and Vaughn zooms in. He watches with a steely gaze as the soldier grasps the girl’s hips, tries to force her onto himself. Vaughn is on the verge of jumping up when the girl shakes off the marine’s grasp and wriggles about on his crotch until the soldier shudders, his eyes fluttering and mouth gaping open as he sinks back down.
