Chapter 5
EL PASO
From lift-off to touchdown El Paso is just over forty minutes from Albuquerque. Less than an hour to cover two hundred and fifty miles of desert so forbidding that the Spaniards called parts of it the Jornada del Muerte, the Journey of Death. We landed early in the afternoon. It was not as hot as it had been in Phoenix, but the sun had a sting it lacked there.
We needed a base of operations. I settled on the Executive Suites on the west side of town, about half a mile north of the freeway, and registered us as Benjamin and Trudy Stepford. April didn’t look like a Trudy, but I was running short of imagination.
It was still early in the afternoon. I left April at the hotel, over her strong objections, and found a pay phone. I only had one link to Roy, the same number I’d written on the hotel stationery in Los Angeles before I entered Toker’s house three days ago. It was a very old number. I had no confidence in it, but it was all I had.
A woman answered the phone in Spanish. I fumbled my way through a conversation that led nowhere. She’d had the number for six years and she’d never heard of Señor Rodgers. It was about what I’d expected. I returned to the hotel.
April wasn’t in the room. There was no note. I wandered around until I found her by the pool. She was wearing a black and orange bikini. More like a string bikini. Two teenage boys were performing on the diving board for her benefit. I bought a club soda and carried the glass over to her. The boys glared at me. “Nice threads, miss,” I said. “Mind if I join you?”
Still sulking over being left behind, she just shrugged. I sat and nursed my drink, watching the boys with friendly interest. They had been drinking and did their damnedest to splash me. I smiled at them. “Friends of yours?” I asked.
“They’re okay,” she said.
They must have been listening. The larger one took encouragement and walked over, followed by his buddy. “Hey, is this guy bothering you?” he asked. “Because if he is, we’ll be happy to take care of him for you.” He gave me a challenging look. “Real happy,” he said.
I ignored him. “Your move, Trudy,” I told her.
She smiled at the boy. “It’s okay,” she said. “He’s my father.”
“Oh.” He looked abashed. “Sorry, sir,” he told me. “We was just looking out for her.”
“I could see that. Go play.”
He glared again, but turned and left. His buddy tagged along behind, whispering to him. They swaggered around a bit to show what they thought of me, then picked up their towels, tossed their beer cans in the pool, and left. I fished out the cans and dropped them in the trash.
April had closed her eyes and turned her face to the sun. I sat on the chaise by her feet and watched her. The bikini left nothing to my imagination. The top covered her breasts like two candy wrappers. She let her legs relax and they fell slightly apart. The orange triangle stretched over her mound from just above the hairline to a strip between her legs before it began to widen again over her cheeks and disappeared under her. A few stray tufts of hair peeked out the sides like shy children hiding behind a playground slide. Her legs flowed toward me. She had done her toenails bright red, or maybe it was a more delicate shade of pink strengthened by the sun.
She breathed deeply, as though she were asleep. She wasn’t asleep, though. She was totally aware of me. She didn’t want me to know it, but I did. The cloth over her nipples slid from side to side as she breathed. I didn’t blame the boys for trying to chase me off. They must have felt some kind of awe when she walked out to the pool. It was their tough luck that I was too old to be chased away by the kind of silliness they had to offer.
I reached out and tugged on her big toe. She didn’t pull it away from me. “Nice suit,” I said. “Better than the one I got you in Phoenix.”
“Are you enjoying the view?” she asked.
“The perspective is nice. Hillary must have felt like this the first time he saw Mount Everest. Or Cardeñas, the morning he discovered the Grand Canyon.”
“You’re obscene.” She moved her legs together.
“Nuts. I’m in the presence of great beauty. There are no words to describe the view. It’s a work of art. I’m speechless.”
“You’re full of shit.” But her legs relaxed again. “You aren’t looking at anything you haven’t seen before.”
“Some things, you see one and you’ve seen them all. Other things you can look at forever.”
“So I’m a thing now, am I?”
“If Mona Lisa is a thing. If Venus de Milo is a thing. If the—”
“You’re full of it,” she broke in. “Do you suppose I could have my toe back?”
I released it and lightly tickled the arch of her foot. She sat up and faced me intently, one leg on either side of the chaise, her hands on her knees. Her eyes were dark under her black bangs, her cheeks slightly flushed.
“Why did you leave me here?” she asked. “Last night you promised I could help you.”
“I promised I’d tell you about Squall Line if I had to. I said nothing about finding Roy.”
“You have to. He’s my father.”
“Maybe.” I meant maybe he was her father, but she took it the other way.
“If you don’t let me help, I’ll find him on my own,” she said seriously.
“How?”
“Any way I can. I’ll put an ad in the paper.”
“Right. That’s how ducks find hunters. They land on a pond and watch for muzzle flashes.”
“Then let me help you. I have to find him. I have to know if…if he’s involved.”
“We both have to know that,” I told her quietly.
“So let me help.” She wouldn’t give it up.
“All right, you can help,” I agreed, “but you have to do it my way. You’re too young. You don’t know how to protect yourself. You could get hurt. You have to let me protect you.”
She put her right hand on my left shoulder and looked squarely into my eyes. “As long as you’re just protecting me from the killer,” she said. “Don’t ever protect me from the truth. I need to know it, all of it. You can see that, can’t you?”
I could see it. I grimaced and said, “I hope it frees you.”
“If it doesn’t, nothing will.”
I took her hand from my shoulder and set it back on her knee. “We’ll get started in the morning.”
“Why not now?”
“It’s almost five. The places we need to go will be closing in a few minutes.”
“Where do we need to go?”
I told her about the dead end at the phone number. “We’re going to have to start in the past,” I said, “and work our way forward.”
“What about tonight? We can’t just sit here.”
“There is nothing to be done now. Tonight, we wait.”
“I’ll go crazy.”
“No, you won’t.”
“Then you have to do something for me. Entertain me.”
“How?”
She’d already figured that out. “We’ll play a game. Truth or Consequences.”
I knew of the game. I never played it, on principle. The consequences were always something I didn’t want to do, and the truth was always something I didn’t want to tell. “Grow up,” I said.
“I am grown up. I’m twenty.”
“You’re twenty-one. Didn’t you look at your driver’s license?”
“I am? Twenty-one?” She sounded delighted.
“Go see,” I told her. “And get dressed while you’re up there. I’ll meet you in the bar.”
She stood and walked quickly toward the elevators. I watched her go, smiling. She was excited. If she’d been a couple of years younger, she would have run. I should have made her thirty-one. See how she liked that.
I ordered another glass of soda in the bar and passed some time looking at myself in the mirror, thinking about the day I turned twenty-one, the day before my flight out of Tan Son Nhut airport in Saigon. Only Toker and I had b
een left in-country. He was going to help me celebrate leaving. I hadn’t told him it was my birthday.
We met at the Joy Blossom downtown. We did some business with the man who ran the place, a short thin man in his early fifties. Everyone called him Bob. He was an ex-captain in the ARVN, the Army of the Republic of Vietnam. He had a broad face, deeply lined, with high cheekbones, black eyes, thick black hair that he combed straight back, and one leg. He always smiled when he saw me and set a beer on the bar before I asked, and he always offered me my pick of the girls. I wasn’t sure that he wasn’t VC. Really, I hadn’t given a damn. I respected him a bit, liked him a bit, and did a bit of business with him. On the other hand, I despised him, hated him, and did a bit of business with him. That was life in the Republic.
I’d been in the Blossom all afternoon, listening to a Stones tape on the Japanese stereo behind the bar and putting down some beer. My jeep was out front with one of the street kids watching it. There was a little trick: You take a grenade, wrap a rubber band tightly around the release lever, pull the pin, and drop it in one of the gas cans strapped to the back of a jeep. After a while, the gas destroys the rubber hand and the grenade and gasoline do what God intended them to do. That’s why I always hired a kid to watch the vehicle when I parked it downtown. That and the fact that the kids needed work.
Toker slid onto the stool next to me. “You drunk?” he asked.
“Better. I’m short.”
He smiled. “How short are you?”
“I’m so short I could walk under a snake with my hat on.” It was the thing to say when you were really short. It wasn’t funny. It wasn’t funny because the first time you heard it, you weren’t short. The land of the round-eyes was three hundred and sixty-five days and a zillion miles away. And later, when you finally became a short-timer, you’d heard it so often that it wasn’t a joke, more like a prayer. Give me one more day. One more day and I’m free. Sometimes the prayer worked and sometimes it didn’t.
“You been here a long time,” Toker said.
“Two and a half years.”
He whistled.
We sat there, thinking about two and a half years. The walls were unpainted concrete, the bar was plywood, the windows were small and covered with chicken wire netting, and the lights were dim. A new girl was dancing naked on the bar, looking bored, staring out over our heads. She looked like a village girl, stocky, with broad feet, strong hands, chipped nail polish. Probably came to Saigon to escape the war. Maybe lost some family to us or them. Wanting a job and a little peace. Winnie was the name she used. I hadn’t bothered to ask her story. I’d asked a lot of her sisters, in the past, and their stories didn’t change much.
She saw me watching her and danced over in front of me. She put a foot on either side of my beer and did a deep knee bend. I grabbed the beer just in time.
She showed me some teeth. “You want go back room, GI? Fuckee-suckee?”
I pushed a bill at her. “You too much woman for me,” I told her. “You go dance.”
She wiggled her twat in my face for a minute, trying to change my mind, then made the money disappear and danced her way back down the bar. When she was out of reach, she told me, “You fucking queer, joe. You number ten.”
I laughed at her. “Come back here,” I told her. I waved another dollar. The good kind. Green. “Tell me you love me.”
She walked back and stared down at me. “You number one GI, joe. I love you too much.” She snatched the paper and pranced away, giggling. “You number ten queer, joe!” she yelled.
Toker was shaking his head. “Fucking slopes. I don’t know how you stood it. I’m out of here the first chance I get.”
“You got what, another year?”
“Less. Nine months. Then I take off my little silver bar and say fuck you to the Army, the Republic, anybody I want.” He sucked on his bottle. “Start spending some of that sweet Green Roy’s baby-sitting for me. Buy myself a piece of round-eyed tail. I don’t care if she’s black or white, long as her pussy’s on straight.”
I looked at him. “They’re all on the same way,” I told him. “Take a look.” I gestured toward the girl on the bar.
“You know what I mean,” he said. “American pussy. Nothing could be finer.”
I shrugged.
“What are you going to do, first thing?” he asked. “You ride the Freedom Bird tomorrow.”
“Take a break. Hook up with Roy.”
He nodded. “Take good care of him. I don’t want to have to come looking.”
“You won’t.”
“I know it. If I was worried, you wouldn’t be here.”
I laughed at him. He was dreaming and we both knew it. “Just do your end,” I told him. “Payday will come.”
“Right on. I’ve got nine months to go. Just enough time to put baby to bed.” He bought two more beers. “Here’s to the Real World,” he said.
“The Real World.” I drank with him, but I couldn’t imagine anything more real than the Republic.
Toker left me in the Joy Blossom just before curfew. He took the keys to the jeep when I told him I was going to stick around, and promised to get it back to the motor pool. I thought about finding another bar, but I didn’t have the spirit to move. My duffel bag was packed and waiting, back inside the green line, and I had already walked my papers through admin. All that was left was to show up at Tan Son Nhut before the plane left. And then see how the Real World had changed while I was gone.
Bob wandered over and leaned on the bar opposite me. “You not going back to base?” he asked.
“I’ll stay here,” I told him. “I’m celebrating tonight.”
He nodded. “You leave tomorrow, go stateside?”
“That’s a fact, jack.”
“You spend your last night here, with me?”
“You mind?”
“I’m honored.” He smiled at me. “You tell me something?” he asked. “Why you come here?”
“I was drafted,” I told him.
He shook his head. “No. I mean, why you come here? Last day, maybe you excited to go home. Why you come here?”
He was watching me carefully. I thought about it. “I like it here,” I said. “You have number one place. Number one beer. We do good business. I know you pretty good. You and me different,” I told him, “but I know you.”
“You long time Vietnam,” he said.
“Long time.”
“You like?”
I smiled at him. “Vietnam number one.”
He looked over my shoulder. “Your friend don’t like.”
“He wants to go home.”
“Maybe better he go.”
“He can’t.”
Bob nodded. “Too bad.”
“Yes. Too bad.”
He noticed my bottle was empty and picked it up. “This number ten shit,” he said. “You wait.”
He ducked behind the bar and came up with a bottle of cognac, Martell’s. “This number one shit,” he said. “You drink, on Bob.”
“We drink together, Bob,” I said. I poured him one and we touched glasses.
“You tell me something,” he said. “You army, right? You ever kill people?”
I nodded.
“Vietnamese people?”
I looked him in the face and nodded again, slowly. “You army too,” I said. “You kill people? Vietnamese people?”
He met my gaze levelly. “Kill all kind people. Even kill Chinese, one time. All kind people. No difference.” He took a sip of cognac. “Too bad,” he said.
I agreed. “Too bad. Vietnam number one. Too bad.”
We drank together. Later, he asked me, “You have girl, Rainbow? You have baby?”
I shook my head. No girl, no baby.
He shook his head. “Too bad. Two babies for me,” he told me. “One boy, one girl. Boy go fight. Dead now. Girl okay though. She number one daughter. Take good care of me.”
“You don’t have wife?”
“One wife.
Bomb get her, then boy go fight.”
“American bomb?”
“Number ten bomb.”
I nodded. “Too bad. Maybe things get better.”
“Maybe.” He shook his head though. “I don’t think things get better for me. Maybe they get better for my baby.”
He looked around, noticing how late it was getting. “I go lock up now,” he said. “You drink. Miss Winnie take good care of you, bring you more bottle.” He paused, then offered his hand. “Good luck, you.”
I shook with him. “Good luck, Bob. You take care of your baby.”
“I try,” he told me. “Always I try.”
Winnie had pulled on some kind of shift. She came and sat beside me. I offered her some of the cognac, but she shook her head. “No drink,” she said firmly. “Bad shit. You go sleep now?”
I nodded and picked up the bottle. She led me down a hallway behind the bar to a small, windowless room with a cot, a table, and a wall full of pictures cut from American and French movie magazines.
“This my room,” she told me. “Number one. No take GIs here. You sleep here?”
I smiled at her and set the bottle on her table.
“My father say you okay GI,” she said. “You want me?”
“Yes.”
She nodded matter-of-factly. “Good. Tonight we fuckee-suckee. Tomorrow you give me present. Maybe I don’t call you no fucking queer.”
She stepped out of her dress and started working on my pants. When she finished, we lay down and danced the old dance. She was strong. She held me tightly and ground her teeth at the end, and I was completely drained when we finished. She slept with her back to me on the narrow cot. The room was hot. No air moved, and we stuck together with our sweat. I didn’t sleep until late, very late, and I woke up early. She made us a breakfast of rice and an egg with a little hot sauce. I gave her all the piasters I had left and caught a cab back to my quarters.
Given the time and place, it hadn’t been such a bad twenty-first birthday. Remembering it had made me thirsty, though. I called the bartender over and asked if he stocked Martell’s. He did, and I bought a snifter, for whatever the memory was worth.
April showed up as I was finishing it. She had showered and put on a summer dress in some fabric that looked like silk. Pale yellow, with a pair of sandals that matched.
Monkey on a Chain Page 10
