Smoky Joe's Cafe

by Bryce Courtenay

  Contents

  About the Author

  Dedication

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgements

  Glossary

  Also by Bryce Courtenay

  About the Author

  Bryce Courtenay is the bestselling author of The Power of One, Tandia, April Fool’s Day, The Potato Factory, Tommo & Hawk, Solomon’s Song, Jessica, A Recipe for Dreaming, The Family Frying Pan, The Night Country, Smoky Joe’s Cafe, Four Fires, Matthew Flinders’ Cat, Brother Fish, Whitethorn, Sylvia, The Persimmon Tree, Fishing for Stars, The Story of Danny Dunn, Fortune Cookie and Jack of Diamonds.

  The Power of One is also available in an edition for younger readers, and Jessica has been made into an award-winning television miniseries.

  facebook.com/BryceCourtenay

  brycecourtenay.com

  To the men of 11 Platoon, D Company, 6 RAR, those who are alive and those who gave their lives at the Battle of Long Tan.

  Also, to the combined Australian Forces who served in Vietnam.

  CHAPTER ONE

  Nightmares, don’t tell me about them. Every night as it begins to grow dark I open a bottle of Scotch. I tell myself, if I can get pissed enough they won’t come. I’ll be so motherless, so brain dead by the time I crawl into the misery of sleep that my subconscious will leave me alone, let me get through the night without the terror.

  It works sometimes, but not often enough. It’s the night noises; I wake to a noise, any noise, and the anxiety builds. Before I know it, I’m up with the knife and on patrol around our living quarters upstairs, then downstairs to the cafe, then into the backyard and the storage shed, I even check the pavement outside Smoky Joe’s before I come back to bed and lie awake shaking like a sheila. I sleep with a Confederate Bowie, a real bastard of a knife, a copy of the standard army issue used by the Confederate troops in the American Civil War.

  I took it off a Yank Marine at Vung Tau. He was so pissed he could hardly stand up and he reckoned he’d been dudded by a bar girl and it looked like he was about to use it on her. I grabbed his arm and took the knife just as the provosts, the military police, arrived. They took him away and I still had the knife. I reckoned I’d earned it anyway. The little whore lost no time demonstrating how grateful she was to me neither.

  The Confederate has an eleven-inch blade forged from Damascus steel, it lies safe under my pillow where I can get to it fast. If the bastards come for me I’m ready. Wendy has begged me to throw it away. She’s terrified I’ll wake up screaming, like I’ve done a hundred times already, and use it before I’m truly awake. On her, me, the kid.

  More than once I’ve wrecked the joint before I’ve woke up properly. Or I’ve grabbed her and covered her with my body screaming, ‘Hold on, Mo, the dustoff’s coming, you’re gunna be okay! Hold on, please, Mo, I love you, mate! Don’t fucking die on me, you bastard!’ Looking down at Wendy, Nog AK47s going off, crackle-pop-crackle-pop-pop-pop, our machine gun, brrrrrrrr-bam-bam-bam, the noise all about me, grunts shouting, firing every which way, the noise of the dustoff blades putta-putta-putta-putta as the helicopter comes in to pick up the wounded, her head is missing, blood everywhere. Wendy’s head is Mo’s head and then it switches around again. But in the nightmare I tell myself, ‘How can me mate live with no head?’

  So here I am, a screwed-up Vietnam veteran. No better or worse than my mates and not quite knowing what’s gone wrong. Flashbacks, nightmares, rage, dizzy spells, anxiety, paranoia, insomnia, depression, sometimes long periods of impotence, and a whole heap more, that’s me. Bloody pathetic, isn’t it?

  The quacks at Repat shake their heads, say they’ve done all the tests and nothing shows up. Veterans Affairs, taking directions from Canberra, who, taking their brief straight from the Pentagon, simply repeat the official line. One bloke who interviews me has this half smile on his face, ‘Mr Thompson, as far as the department is concerned your psychological problems are not caused by your war experience. You have been diagnosed with a personality disorder. Maybe it was something that happened in your childhood, something your mother or father did to you. And as far as Agent Orange is concerned it’s about as harmless to humans as baby powder.’

  Baby powder? Now that’s real funny, but the bastard doesn’t know it.

  Once, we’d been out in the jungle for three weeks and we know exactly where we are, we’ve just used a smoke grenade and a passing chopper has radioed in to give us an accurate location. So we know from looking at the map that there’s a lot more deep j ahead, at least four days of scrub bashing before the operation is over.

  Then suddenly a couple of hours further into the boonies and it’s not there, the jungle’s missing, a miracle. Instead of visibility of maybe six yards we can see ahead of us for five hundred yards. Everything in front of us is dead and we’re kicking up this fine white powder. Touch a dead tree and the dust comes down to cover your greens, smells weird too. (Unbeknownst to our intelligence, the Yanks had defoliated the area two weeks previously.) What was supposed to be in the middle of primary rainforest is like a dead world.

  This was the first time I’d seen what Agent Orange could do, though, of course, I had no idea at the time what it was, or how the dense jungle came to be defoliated. Let me tell you, there was nothing left alive. We saw dead bats, birds, spiders, every kind of insect you could imagine and not a green leaf on anything, everything silent, all of it covered with this fine white powder that looked just like baby powder.

  I’d have liked to have told the arsehole in Vets Affairs that story but he wouldn’t have listened anyway, they’re experts at nodding your life into non-existence.

  In Vietnam we fought with the Yanks, though not alongside them. A lot of them were half stoned most of the time, which we soon learned wasn’t an addiction but a bloody necessity. At their Blackhorse Base in Long Khanh province, the US Army divided their platoons into potheads and non-potheads. The potheads did the day work and the non-potheads the night work. Though not the Marines, Airborne and Special Forces, the professional soldiers, they stayed clean and as warriors they don’t come a lot better.

  If the Yank conscripts had stayed off Mary Jane, their name for dope, I reckon there’d be a lot less names carved on that granite wall they’ve got in Washington.

  We used grog not dope for the same purpose. Frankly, you needed something just to get the jungle and the fear out of your head for a while. You couldn’t go into the jungle half stoned, gung-ho, thinking you were John Wayne, and hope to stay alive. No way, grog or dope was always for afterwards.

  There’s another point I should make here in case you think I’m knocking the Yanks. The kids they sent to Vietnam were like eighteen years old, just out of high school, they were still boys. The youngest of our Australian conscripts were closer to twenty-one. Those three or four years make a bloody big difference in a bloke’s life. Then there’s the training. Compared with us, your average Yank recruit hadn’t even received the basic instruction for survival in jungle warfare.

  The Noggies or Nogs, they were the two names we used mostly for the Viet Cong, other names were Charlie, Cong, VC and NVA, they used weed too. But, like the Australians, not when they were fighting. Without the help of one substance or another, I count grog as one of them, the warriors on both sides would have laid down their AK47s, SLRs, M16s or Owen guns and gone home to their wives or girlfriends.

  That was the whole point of Vietnam, us and the Nogs were shitting ourselves every time we went into the jungle. I once heard a black American sergeant explain what it was like in Vi
etnam, ‘Your asshole’s turned inside out like permanent, man!’

  The bloody jungle was the enemy as much as the Viet Cong. Sometimes it was dense with a tall canopy of big trees, like the rainforest in New Guinea, or up North, which wasn’t hard to work. But in areas where it had been bombed it became secondary growth with lots of bamboo everywhere, all of it tangled and dense and bloody hard to see into or move through. Or when you fought around the river, the mangrove forests were like a jungle. That is, before the Yanks come up with their big idea.

  There wasn’t only Agent Orange, but Agent Blue, Green, Purple, White, you name it, they had a colour for everything and every colour killed something. They sprayed this shit over the jungle like the monsoon rains had come early. Only this time the clouds were coming from the helicopters and the C123s fitted with spraying arms that swarmed over the jungle like huge insects pissing down on the trees.

  At the time nobody really asked if it was dangerous, we all reckoned if they were spraying this stuff where we were fighting and even living it couldn’t be harmful to us. Nobody in their right mind would put their own troops in danger, would they?

  The Hygiene Unit at Nui Dat sprayed insecticides like DDT, Malathion and Dieldrin round the camp on anything that moved. They sprayed it in our tents, in our weapon pits, in our kitchens and mess halls and in our latrines. It would be on the plates we ate off and the cups we drank from. It’s so toxic, Dieldrin is now banned in every country in the world because it’s a carcinogenic and deadly to humans.

  That’s just one of dozens of chemicals used. Of course, we were told the stuff they sprayed everywhere was deadly to insects, leaves, rice paddies, rivers, mozzies, spiders, in fact to everything that grew or breathed except humans.

  I guess when you’re twenty-one years old you’ll believe just about anything the army tells you. And, if it isn’t quite the whole truth, well, what the hell, they just kept denying everything. She’ll be right, no worries, trust me, son.

  ‘Mr Thompson,’ the quack from Veterans Affairs said, ‘it’s probably a slight blood disorder, perfectly natural in some people, the severe acne, it will clear up in time, I should think.’

  I remember how he examined the lesions on my cheeks, behind the ears, under the armpits and into my groin, deep cysts and acne, blackheads the size of your pinkie nail. ‘Hmm, interesting,’ is all he said. I showed him how my palms were sweating all the time and took off my shoes and showed him my sweating feet and the peculiar smell that came from them. I pointed to the sores and blisters on the back of my hands.

  He looks at my hands, he’s wearing these thin plastic gloves so he don’t have to touch me. ‘It says here you’re a mechanic by trade, Mr Thompson.’ He looks up from the form in front of him, ‘It just could be something you’ve picked up in the mechanic’s workshop, probably battery acid.’

  Battery acid! Doesn’t he know I’d know if I’d spilt battery acid over the back of me hands?

  ‘I’ll take the precaution and give you a note to the Shire Health Inspector,’ he says and starts to write as he continues talking. ‘As for your insomnia and anxiety, it’s perfectly natural, an adjustment to civilian life. I’ll give you a prescription.’ What the bastard was really saying was, ‘You Vietnam vets oughta pull yerself together.’ That’s my interpretation, that he thinks we’re a bunch of wimps and to go home and get on with our lives with the help of a cocktail made up of Moggies, Valium and Scotch.

  But I digress. I am aware that Vietnam is forgotten history, a sort of national disgrace we’ve swept under the political-conscience carpet. It was a war where Bob Menzies, who was Prime Minister of Australia at the time and therefore father of the nation, reckoned a bit of a stoush would do our lads the world of good, make real men out of us. Well, if those weren’t exactly his words, it’s the same difference. He thought it would be good for Australia, good for the national character, or a similar piece of total and utter bullshit.

  So, for the moment, if you’ll forgive the impertinence to Menzies and Holt, who followed him, let me talk about those who were regular army and those, like me, whose names got pulled out of the barrel to go to Vietnam on behalf of the national character and our undying friendship with the U.S. of A.

  We were the blokes who returned from Vietnam to find that the national character now required that we be treated like a bunch of mercenaries guilty of war crimes. It seems the real heroes were the nice little boys and girls who marched in the Anti-Vietnam rallies chanting slogans, waving the Viet Cong flag and passing a joint around while the cops looked on. We came back to an Australia where smoking dope was fashionable among the young trendies, who thought of themselves as weekend hippies and after-hours flower children.

  The church, as usual, switched sides, with the Vietnam moratoriums specked with back-to-front collars. Then, of course, there were the trade unions, urged on by the Labor left, who had their digit finger severely up their bums trying to make a stink in Canberra.

  Well, back home again I soon enough find out that I can’t work for any bastard, not even as a builder’s labourer. I’m a qualified, three-certificate mechanic by trade, GM, Ford and Datsun, passed all the courses as well as topped my tech course. I’m aware I’m no Einstein, but I’m not exactly a bird brain neither. But I can’t get under a car without going into a blind panic. I try to keep my nose clean as a labourer, but soon enough the building foreman looks at me the wrong way, or in my fevered brain I think he does, and next thing I’ve got a fistful of his overalls and his gumboots are a foot off the ground. Being a real big bloke with the post-Vietnam blues is not a likeable combination and I’m beginning to hate myself more even than I hate the civilian world I’ve come back into.

  When I first came back I tried running a service station, took over the BP franchise in the small town where I was born in the Riverina. My folk have been here for four generations, long before the irrigation canal. My great-grandfather and his brother Jim came up overland by wagon from Sydney and they started up a blacksmith shop. Jim, it seemed, was a bit fond of the bottle and took up with an Aboriginal gin and went walkabout. Anyway he disappeared from the Thompson family history never to be heard of again. My great-grandfather died working at the anvil and my grandfather took over from him and did the selfsame, died with the blast furnace at his back and a hammer in his hand. If they went to hell the devil would’ve handed them a hammer each and they’d have carried on like nothing had happened. Then my old man turned the smithy into Thompson’s Garage, the first petrol pump in town. There have been Thompsons in Currawong Creek since before they dug the first dunny.

  Well, eventually the old man, carrying on the family tradition, dropped dead while pumping petrol. This was while I was away in Vietnam. BP took over the site and developed it into a state-of-the-art service station just about the time I got back.

  I come back a bit of a war hero, well in Currawong Creek anyway, where there didn’t seem to be any anti-Vietnam backlash, which says something for the town at least. The Bank of New South Wales give me a loan. ‘Always been a Thompson running things mechanical in this town,’ the manager says, dead chuffed with himself as I sign my flamin’ life away as the local BP franchisee.

  Green and yellow are the BP corporate colours, the colour of the jungle and my own cowardice. Not a very promising start in the service station business with me shitting myself every time I crawl under a ute. Being a BP dealer doesn’t last long. Any skills I may have previously possessed in public relations I shat into my greens fighting the Noggies in a rubber plantation at Long Tan. Sure enough, one day I end up chasing a local shire councillor down the street, brandishing a monkey wrench, determined to brain the fat, pompous bastard.

  My fault, of course, something he said that wasn’t meant to sound the way it did. Anyway the shit hit the fan. What with me not willing to back down and several of the other big hats in the shire copping a fair share of Thommo’s aggro. Suddenly the whole town’s driving to Fisher’s Bend twenty clicks up the ro
ad to fill up with petrol. BP gimme the bum’s rush and a Thompson ain’t running things mechanical no more in Currawong Creek.

  So, being the brain-damaged fool I am, the next thing I try on is marriage. I’m lucky enough to still have my childhood sweetheart, Wendy McDonald, stick with me through all the flak. Her folk own Smoky Joe’s Cafe, and, while I should have known better and she should have run a mile, we eventually get hitched.

  I’m the luckiest bloke in the world but, of course, it doesn’t take long for me to abuse the privilege. I come home pissed more often than not. I’m behind six months in the payments to the bank and they foreclose on me.

  I’m now feeling ratshit all the time and getting these bad headaches which make me lose me temper soon as look at anyone. The rash, sweats and acne is getting worse, with no explanations for the reason. The chemist can’t do nothing and the local quack shakes his head. I’m a flamin’ mystery to the medical professional and if I wasn’t such a big mean bastard, the quack at Veterans Affairs would probably accuse me of malingering so as to cop a disability pension.

  Wendy and me are fighting. It’s not only grog’s the reason, I’m now into dope as well in an attempt to stay sane, or at least calm. Mixed with grog and pills it’s not exactly acting like a health cure.

  Then Wendy’s old man drops dead in the middle of making a mixed grill for a tourist. Poor old bugger. Like me old man, he died on the job. But I’ve got to say this for him, in this one-horse town he played the music he wanted and he died to the strains of The Drifters. Wendy says he called the grease trap he’s run since the fifties Smoky Joe’s, because he never got over the songs of two Yanks, Leiber and Stoller, two Jewish blokes, Yanks, who, it seemed, loved Rock’n’Roll, Rhythm and Blues, and Jazz.

  ‘Them two wrote songs that make people want to get up and dance. Not like the bloody rubbish you hear these days,’ he’d snort to anyone he thought didn’t dig the music that went all day and half the night in the cafe. He’d point to the jukebox which only had his records in it, he’d filled the coin slot with a drop of lead and fixed it so it played continuously without anyone tampering with it. If you didn’t like the music at Smoky Joe’s, tough titty, it was the only cafe in town. The Chink’s was the only other place you could go to eat.