Monkey on a Chain

by Harlen Campbell

  I gave her a low whistle and she grinned happily at me.

  She marched up to the bar and ordered a beer in a loud voice. The bartender asked what she wanted, and she looked at me. “Bring her a Bohemia,” I told him.

  “What’s Bohemia?” she asked me.

  “Mexican beer.”

  He brought over a bottle, a frosted mug, and half a lime and set them in front of her. She didn’t reach for them, but just stared at him. “Well?” she demanded.

  He looked confused. “Well, what?”

  “Aren’t you going to check my ID?”

  I laughed.

  He sighed. “Okay. May I see your ID, miss?”

  She dug the driver’s license and passport out of her purse and handed them over. He looked at them carefully, checked the pictures against her face, and handed them back. “Thanks,” he said, and walked away shaking his head.

  April leaned over to me. “They must serve just anyone in here,” she said. She wanted me to share her outrage. “The first time I’ve ever been legal, and he didn’t ask for my ID!”

  I watched in the mirror as she sampled her beer. Her first sip was hesitant; her second was enthusiastic. Looking at her, I was tempted to play her game. I had lived with her for four days, talked to her, even slept with her if you count sleeping. She had brought some heavy questions to my door. Who killed Toker? Who set the second explosive device in Toker’s house, and why? Who was rooting around in Johnny Walker’s business in Phoenix? What did Toker mean when he said that Squall Line was broken? Who had been waiting in our motel room that last night in Phoenix? And on, and on.

  But the question that interested me the most, the one question I had no handle on at all, was why Toker brought April home from Hong Kong. He had despised the Vietnamese. As far as I knew, he had known Miss Phoung only peripherally. And yet her daughter had grown up in his house. He had been as good a father as he could to her, apparently. Why? There are always reasons for killing people. The reasons for caring for them could be more elusive.

  April had finished half of her beer. I reached over, took the lime, squeezed it over her mug, dropped the rind in the beer. She looked dubious, but tried it and smacked her lips.

  I grinned at her. “Let’s go eat.”

  We carried our drinks into the restaurant and ordered the surf and turf special. It wasn’t bad. After we’d eaten, I asked April when she was born. “November 25, 1969,” she recited.

  “No, I mean your real birth date,” I said.

  She looked at me suspiciously. “Why do you want to know?”

  “Just tell me, damn it!”

  But she saw an advantage and decided to take it. She looked at me impassively. “Truth or Consequences.”

  I sighed and said, “Let’s go then.” I was going to have to play, eventually, and might as well get it over with. April looked triumphant. I wondered what she had planned for me.

  I ordered a snifter of Martell’s and another Bohemia for April and paid the bill. We carried the drinks back to the room and sat on the balcony overlooking the city.

  It was early evening, pleasantly cool after the day’s heat. The city lights fell away from our location on the side of the mountain, down toward the black strip that marked the Rio Grande. On the other side, the lights were few and farther between. Juarez. It would be easy to get lost there.

  The balcony was as wide as the room, but only about five feet deep. April leaned back in her chair and propped her feet on the wrought iron rafting that fenced us away from a three-story drop to the parking lot. Her dress slid up to mid-thigh. There was no moon, but there was enough light from the room behind us to see her face. She looked excited.

  “Me first,” she said.

  “I’ve already started,” I told her, “but I think you better tell me the rules.”

  “Simple. We take turns asking questions. We can answer or not, but if we answer we have to tell the truth. If we don’t answer, we have to take the consequences.”

  “Isn’t this a little silly?”

  She laughed. “Your first question. No, it’s not silly. You swear to either tell the truth or take the consequences. So there’s no reason to lie. And if you take the consequences, that tells me something too. My question.” She looked at me. “What is Squall Line?”

  “That’s outside the game. I told you I’d tell you about it if the time came that I had to. Not otherwise.”

  “Then I’ll rephrase it. Why does Squall Line have to be outside the game?”

  “Squall Line was the code name of a government operation. A top secret operation. Knowing about it could get you in trouble. I wish I didn’t know about it. My question. When and where were you born? I want the exact date and place.”

  “I don’t know the place. A house outside Ho Chi Min City, I think. It was on April third, 1971. Why?”

  “That’s your question. Because it means you were conceived in early July of ’seventy. I wanted to know when so I would know who was in-country.”

  Her eyes widened. “Who was?”

  I shook my head. “That’s your next question. How did Toker find you?”

  “I don’t know. We were living in a kind of shed in the camp in Hong Kong. One evening a policeman and an immigration officer came. It was about dark, and we were eating. We had rice, I remember, and a little bit of fish, and I didn’t get any of the fish because I was not part of the family, and also maybe because I was only a girl.

  “When they came in, I was scared, and I went to the place where we slept and tried to hide. They talked to Mr. Nguyen for a little while and then he yelled for me. He looked very angry. I didn’t come right away because I was afraid, but the other kids pushed me out so that he wouldn’t be mad at them. And also because they didn’t like me because I wasn’t a real Vietnamese and I was a burden on their family. Then Mr. Nguyen grabbed my arm and handed it to the policeman. He looked like he hated me.

  “But the policeman didn’t look mad at me, so I stopped crying after we left. They took me to an office. It was the first time I’d been inside the camp offices. A man came in, an American with a funny beard, and asked me some questions, and then they took me to a nice place. They gave me food. Fish and a sweet bun. I stayed with the American for a day, and I was in a different part of the camp for almost a week. Then Mr. Bow came and told me he was going to adopt me and take me to America where I could be an American too. I asked if he was a cowboy, and he looked surprised, but he said that he wasn’t.”

  She took a deep breath. “Now, who was there when I was conceived?” Answering my question had been hard for her. I tried to put my hand on her shoulder, just to touch her, but she shrugged me away. She didn’t want sympathy. She wanted an answer. “Who?” she demanded.

  “As best I can remember, we all were,” I said. “Roy. He was a captain by then. Captain William Rodgers. He was getting short. And there was Sissy. Master Sergeant Juan Cisneros. He was the first man Roy took into our operation. He’d been in Manila and just rotated back in-country. He was killed later. Johnny Walker was Staff Sergeant John Coleman. He was about to ship out. He had just recruited Toker to take his place, to wind down the operation and close the books. Toker you know about.”

  “And you.” She looked at me accusingly.

  “Yes. And me.”

  “So any one of you could be my father?”

  “I don’t think so. I couldn’t, for sure. I never made love with…with your mother. It couldn’t have been Walker. You aren’t dark enough. That leaves Roy, Sissy, and Toker. But Toker had only been around for a couple of weeks. He didn’t know Miss Phoung very well. He didn’t know any of us very well yet, for that matter. I mean, as men. Of course, we were all in it together.”

  “In the operation?”

  “That, too. I meant in the war.”

  “And this Sissy man?”

  “That was Juan Cisneros. We called him Sissy. He was the first man Roy brought in. He was also the one who met your mother and introduced her
to Roy. He was killed in ’seventy.”

  “Killed how?”

  “In Squall Line.” I cleared my throat. “It’s my turn. How did Toker treat you?”

  “He was good to me.”

  “I mean, did he treat you like a daughter? Or like a woman?”

  She stared at me. I was a little embarrassed and didn’t meet her eyes. “You want to know about sex? Did he ever try to have sex with me?”

  “It’s just that I don’t understand his motives.” I felt awkward talking about it and cleared my throat. “I told you that he didn’t like the Vietnamese much when we were over there. So I guess my question is, what was his motive? Sex? Did he act like he felt guilty about the war? Was he using you to make up for something? Or did he treat you like you were really his daughter?”

  She thought about it. “I always felt he treated me like a daughter,” she said slowly. “He wasn’t a very warm, touching kind of man. I thought about it sometimes when I was alone, after I got older, and I decided that if he had a real daughter, he wouldn’t have treated her any differently. But of course he cut me out of his will. He wouldn’t have done that to a real daughter. And then I found out that he had never really adopted me. I guess I can’t answer your question. I don’t know what his motive was.”

  We sat in silence, thinking about Toker. Then April shook herself. “My turn,” she said. “What was my mother like?”

  That was hard to answer. Painful. I knew I wasn’t going to like this game. “She was a pretty woman,” I said. “She was about your age at that time. Shorter, though. Maybe five foot three. Slim. Long black hair, like yours. Her eyes were darker, and her cheekbones were very high. She had more slant to her eyes. Her hands and feet were long and narrow. She liked to wear Ao Dai’s.”

  “I don’t mean that. Was she a prostitute?”

  That came out of left field, but I could see where she might have gotten the idea. “No, she was a woman who made the best of a difficult situation. Her father was some kind of government official, but he died. Her mother died shortly before Sissy met her. I never knew she had a sister. They must have been pretty poor. Then Sissy fell in love with her. I guess it was love. Anyway, he set her up in the house off Tu Do Street. That was back in ’sixty-eight, I think. Over a year before I met her. Roy was doing a tour in the Southern Command, Panama, at the time. Sissy and Walker were running the operation by themselves. All that happened before I came on the scene, so I can’t tell you exactly how it was, but she wasn’t a prostitute. She just had some hard decisions to make, and she made the best ones she could.”

  “How did she wind up with Roy?”

  “Sissy finished a tour in March of ’sixty-nine and arranged a short tour in the Philippines. We had business there. After he left, Miss Phoung stayed on. It was her house. At least I think Sissy put it in her name before he left. The rest of the group, Roy and Walker at that time, kept meeting there. It had become a sort of headquarters. I don’t know exactly how it happened, but Roy was living there with her when I was brought in. That was in May. And now it’s my turn. Tell me about life with your aunt.”

  She was slow to answer, and she spoke dreamily. “We had a room—near the fish market, I think. I remember how bad it smelled. I grew up there, in a little room on the third floor. We were together all the time. No one would play with me because I was half American. When I was old enough, I helped her. She had a shop, a little booth, really, on the street. She used to sell things. Cigarettes, batteries, newspapers, things like that. She taught me. I didn’t go to school much because of the things the teachers said about me. But I learned to read and write and use the abacus. I could make change very well, and I was proud that she let me do it. I loved her a lot. It was very hard to leave her, to get on the boat. I cried for days.”

  “Did she have money?” I asked.

  “Yes. I never thought about where it came from, but I can see now that there was more than she got from her shop.”

  “Did she ever get letters from America?”

  “You crazy? She might have been killed. People disappeared all the time.”

  April turned to me and wiped her eyes. “My turn. Tell me about the first and last times you saw my mother.”

  I stared into the night, toward the darkness that was Juarez. “The first time was in June of ’sixty-nine. I’d just been transferred to the MPs. Roy took me to the house. I knew that I was going to have to start paying for the transfer, and I was nervous and excited. Roy introduced me to your mother, but I didn’t pay much attention to her at the time. She left us alone, and he told me about the operation, about what I would do if I came in with him, about the others and where they were. Anyway, I just remember that Miss Phoung was wearing an Ao Dai and that she was pretty.

  “The last time was in January of ’seventy-one. Roy had resigned his commission and taken a job in-country, with Air America, he said. He was being very mysterious. I rarely saw him. Toker and I were running the operation by ourselves, winding it down while the people we dealt with slowly finished their tours and rotated stateside. One day I went by the house and Miss Phoung was there with Max and some workers. The place was almost empty. She had a few boxes left that they were loading on a truck. She wouldn’t say where she was going. She just said goodbye and left. She was wearing an Ao Dai that time too, a white one.”

  “White is a special color in Vietnam,” April said quietly. “Did you know that?”

  “Yes. It’s the color of mourning.”

  “Do you know who she was mourning?”

  “No. She wore white almost all the time toward the end. Sissy was dead. Roy was gone. She was pregnant. Maybe she was mourning herself.”

  “You said this Max Corvin was with her. Did she like him? Could he be my father?”

  “Absolutely not! She hated him. He was…well, she blamed him for Sissy’s death, I think. I don’t know why he was there.”

  “But it was his men who were loading her things on the truck?”

  “Yes.” I didn’t want to think about that.

  “So she could have gone off with him?”

  “I can’t believe that.”

  “But she could have? Was she afraid? Did she act like he was forcing her to do something? To go with him?”

  “It was more the other way around. He acted like he didn’t want to be there.”

  “Did you talk to him?”

  “I didn’t say a word, April. I had nothing to say to the man. He used to be dangerous to us, but we’d pulled his teeth.” I rubbed my face. It was getting late. “Last question,” I said. “Just before Toker was killed, you wrote in your diary that you wanted to find your real father. Did you ever try?”

  “No. I didn’t know how. And Dad had told me not to. I had to respect his wishes.”

  “Did his attitude toward you change?”

  “He seemed a little worried about something. I didn’t think it was me, though.”

  I stood and stretched. “That’s it,” I said. “Bedtime.”

  “Not yet.” She faced me. “I get my last question. When you said goodbye to my mother, did you kiss her?”

  I blushed. Fortunately, it was too dark on the balcony for her to see. “No answer,” I said. “The game is over.”

  “Not yet. Answer me or take the consequences.”

  There must have been some power in the game, because I was reluctant to lie to her. “The consequences, then.”

  She walked over and stood in front of me, staring up into my eyes. “Kiss me.”

  I tried for her cheek, but she wasn’t having any of that. She turned her head and met my lips fully. She put her arms around me and pulled me tightly to her. Her breasts were soft against me, her mouth opened, and I folded my arms around her. Her back and her buttocks were soft under the thin dress. We stood like that for a long time, and I felt myself stiffening against her. I pulled away.

  “The consequence was a kiss,” I said. “A kiss is all you get. And stay in your own bed tonight.”r />
  “Sure,” she said.

  She was lying, of course. I stripped down to my shorts and crawled into bed. She headed for the bathroom. When she slipped in beside me, she was naked again. The lights were off. My back was to her. She propped herself up on her elbow and leaned over my ear. I felt her nipple rubbing against my shoulder blade. “One last time,” she whispered. “Truth or Consequences.”

  “No.”

  She slipped her arm around me, put her hand on my chest, and then ran it down my belly. She wrapped it around my testicles and squeezed. “Yes,” she said. “Truth or Consequences. One last time.”

  She had me. “What’s the question?”

  “My mother. You loved her, didn’t you?”

  I didn’t answer, and she squeezed me again. “Yes,” I said tightly. “I loved her. In a way.”

  “But you aren’t my father?”

  “No.”

  “You never had sex with her?”

  “No.”

  “But you wanted to?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did she know you loved her?”

  “Maybe. I didn’t tell her, but she might have known.”

  “Why didn’t you tell her?”

  “I couldn’t. I never had a chance with her and I knew it.”

  April squeezed her hand again, but it was gentler, more of a caress. “That’s why you don’t touch me. Because you loved my mother.”

  “I touch you,” I told her. “Just this afternoon, I grabbed your toe.”

  “That’s no big thing.”

  “Maybe not to you. It’s a good toe.”

  “Then it’s because of me. You like Oriental girls, and I’m half American.”

  I rolled over onto her. She spread her legs to accommodate me and hooked her heels behind my knees. My secret was pressing into her belly.

  “Does it feel like I don’t like you?” I asked.

  “No,” she said softly, and kissed me.

  I returned the kiss with a passion I could barely control. “Then stop being silly,” I whispered. I rolled back off her and said, “Now go to sleep.”