Blood Tide

by Robert F. Jones

  Some things don’t change.

  Drunken white hats and dogfaces staggered blindly, warily past one another, expecting a sneak attack at any minute. The Glade was gone, where all the faggots used to hang out, poor cocksuckers, but Wo Fat’s was still in business, the oldest restaurant in the islands, 106 years old, the sign said, twice as old as Culdee (a dismaying thought). If he’d had any money, he would’ve ducked in for a bowl of ja jeung mein—old sailors swore that noodles and hoisin sauce limbered the joints for love. But he had harsher business pending.

  He went into the first bar he came to. Hilo Fattie’s, the sign said. Rock pulsed from the juke, colored lights through the smoke. B-girls sinuated through the crowd like destroyers through a wolf pack. He found a spot at the end of the bar and bellied up. A girl eyed him, but he shrugged her off.

  “What’ll it be, Pops?” The bartender, a plump young hapa-haole with a scraggly Yasir Arafat beard and a ring in one ear, smiled at him with the easy contempt of the young for anyone over forty. Culdee pretended to study the bottles ranked behind the bar, then stepped back frowning and hitched mock-painfully at his groin, as if he had the clap and wasn’t allowed to drink.

  “Better make it da kine ice-water,” he said, slipping automatically into Hawaiian pidgin. “Gotta take it easy awhile yet. Otherwise it’s auwe when I go to take a leak.”

  The bartender laughed. “Then, what’d you come here for, Pops? The ambience?” No pidgin for him, he was too hip for that crap. But he brought Culdee a glass.

  Culdee studied the faces along the bar, then the hands. Over near the door sat a guy about forty, crew cut, eyes flat as razor blades, half-loaded already, it looked. He was wearing a flowery Harry Truman aloha shirt, and his bare forearms were braced across the bar, a glass of what looked like straight rum cupped in his hands. He had a globe and anchor tattooed on one forearm. Sure enough a jarhead. Culdee drank down his ice water and eased over.

  “The Crotch sucks,” he whispered.

  “Wha’?” Razor Eyes focused on him. “Aw, fuck off, Gramps.”

  “Whatsa matta, brah?” Culdee leaned over even closer, eyeball to eyeball. “You get stink ear? Not hear so good no more? I said the Marine Corps sucks.”

  “And I said ‘Fuck off, Gramps.’ So fuck off.”

  “Come outside and say that, you jarhead mahu.” Mahu means “faggot” in pidgin. That did it.

  In the rain-swept alley beside the bar, Culdee faked a right, slipped the marine’s counterpunch, left-hooked the man to the belly, and followed across as he folded with a sharp left elbow to the marine’s jaw. When your hands are busted, you use the next best weapon. The marine fell and got right up again, blinking his eyes against the rain. He waded back in, head low, all shoulders and thumping fists.

  Culdee bounced against the brick wall and slid left, but the marine caught him with a wide flailing right that stung. Culdee tasted blood. He tied the marine up and tried to knee him in the nuts, but he swung a hip around to block it. He pounded Culdee over the heart. Culdee swung around and bounced the marine’s head against the wall, making a hollow, thumping sound, like kicking a pumpkin. The marine’s eyes went blurry. They were both breathing rough. It was raining hard now, a deluge. The pavement underfoot was slippery, glinting cold; hard lights glared from the passing cars. Culdee thought Shore Patrol. This was taking too long. He measured the marine up against the wall and hit him with a solid right that, despite tape and bandage, sent fire racing to his shoulder.

  The marine went down along the wall. Culdee kicked him in the jaw. Then he took the wallet from the man’s hip pocket. It was fat with twenty-dollar bills. Enough maybe to buy a plane ride back to the mainland? Culdee riffled the bills with his thumb. His right hand was already puffing up, and his knees were shaking with adrenaline. All around and through him he could feel the singing: rain on cobbles, tires on asphalt, pulsing jukes and the song of strong drink in young blood, the silky hiss of women moving in the warm, wicked dark. Back on the mainland there was nothing but booze and bad dreams. West and south, though, far over the ocean, the song of this moment grew stronger. He took a bill from the wallet and pocketed it. Then he placed the wallet under the marine’s head, like a leather pillow. He left by the back end of the alley.

  By midnight Culdee was back aboard, sitting in the stern sheets in a pool of lantern light. The rain had stopped. A bottle of Philippine Tanduay rum stood on the chart table. He was listening to the boom of the surf and soaking his right hand in a bucket of seawater. He heard Miranda’s oars creaking in the dark, the bump as the dinghy came alongside. Someone in the dinghy started handing up bags of groceries and cardboard boxes of hardware, then slung a heavy seabag after them. A man climbed up behind Miranda—a dark, wiry, frizzy-haired Filipino with a foxy face and a wry, slightly mad grin. He was wearing a cheap aloha shirt with the price tag still dangling from it and a pair of ragged bell-bottoms.

  Miranda’s face jumped from Culdee to the rum bottle, then back to Culdee.

  “Did a little shopping of your own?” Then she looked at the rum bottle again and saw it wasn’t opened. Her face relaxed.

  “I had to see if I could do it,” Culdee said. “I could.” He pulled his hand from the bucket and showed it to her, puffed and purple.

  The Filipino in the aloha shirt was Effredio, Miranda’s old pal from the PI. He’d wangled a deadhead flight to Honolulu to meet them, knowing Miranda would be shorthanded. A good shipmate, Culdee thought. And another watch stander, thank God.

  “All right,” Miranda said, “let’s get this stuff stowed. I want to sail at dawn.”

  Culdee slung the bottle over the side and turned to. He was on for the passage.

  Part Three

  LÁZARO

  TWELVE

  The straight-line distance across the South China Sea from My Tho in the mouth of the Mekong River to Balabac Strait in the Philippines is a little more than six hundred miles. A well-found ship encountering no hazards and averaging a speed of six knots should make the passage in just over four days. It took the Vietnamese junk Happy Life nearly six weeks, and then her troubles had barely begun. But trouble was nothing new to this voyage.

  Since slipping out of the Mekong Delta on a squally moonless night in early May, the fifty-foot trading vessel had encountered one disaster after another. Her rotting cotton mainsail blew out the very first night, its battens cracked by sudden gusts that howled like sea devils from every quarter. Near Con Son Island, as the ship staggered around at the wind’s whim, crying babies and squealing pigs nearly betrayed her to a government patrol boat. Only another squall’s blinding descent saved the ship that time. But the squall exacted tribute for its mercy: three women were swept overboard with infants at their breasts, and the foremast was carried away, sail and rigging with it.

  Off Investigator Shoal a month later, the junk’s worm-riddled hull touched coral. Holed in three places, she settled rapidly, increasing her draft enough to hit another coral head, which snapped the prop from her ancient French engine. Not that there was much fuel left. Half a dozen drums of diesel, bought at peril on the black market in Ho Chi Minh City, proved mostly water (salt at that) topped with a deceptive two-inch skim of oil.

  But the hull had been patched, the bilges bailed—with buckets, cook pots, rice bowls, even tea cups—and the voyage continued. There were still fifty-seven persons aboard, mainly women and children and a scattering of older men—former officers and noncoms of the defeated Army of the Republic of Vietnam, a few prematurely retired businessmen from Saigon and Vung Tau, and the elderly sailor Tho Van Huong, who owned the Happy Life and served as her captain.

  Most of the pigs and chickens that began the voyage had already been eaten or lost overboard in one storm or another, along with two of the three monkeys smuggled aboard as pets. The surviving monkey, a fierce, pregnant female, took refuge atop the mizzenmast, where her long, quick teeth fended off all attempts to recapture her. At night, especially in bad weather, she descen
ded the rigging to steal food and water from the most unlikely and carefully protected places. Early one morning, before first light, Captain Tho had seen her loot a bag of sticky rice and a full gourd of nuoc mam from between the legs of the fat one-time banker, Nguyen Tran Le, then urinate on his pillow before scampering back aloft. Captain Tho had the only weapon aboard the junk, a rust-pitted American M2 carbine dating back to the days of the French, and could have shot the monkey from the rigging anytime he chose. But he admired her courage and contempt. Besides, he told himself, if I shot her as she huddled on the mizzenmast, she might fall overboard, and we wouldn’t be able to eat her. I would only have wasted a bullet—I have just twenty rounds for the carbine, and those I must save in case of pirates.

  It was more than that, though. Twenty rounds would not go far against the pirates on the South China Sea—Vietnamese, Cambodge, Thai, and the even crueler Filipino mundo they were bound to encounter as they neared their destination—all armed with automatic weapons and even (he’d been warned) rapid-fire cannon. Twenty rounds would barely suffice for the suicides he planned to recommend to the men and old women in his charge in the event they were taken. Horrible as survival might be for them, with its promise of rape and slavery, the young women and children had a chance, but the old, the ugly, the male—they would surely be slaughtered. No, twenty rounds was nothing. In the end, he would not shoot the monkey simply because he had seen too much death already.

  His mother, father, brothers, and most of his sisters had died at the hands of the Japanese during the Pacific war, or under the martial ministrations of French and Viet Minh soldiery in the decade before Dien Bien Phu. His own wife and two sons—mercifully, he had had no daughters—were killed later by forces as random as a napalm cannister, a Viet Cong bicycle bomb, and a U.S. Marine Corps hand grenade.

  The grenade had taken his wife—and two young water buffalo grazing nearby—as she planted rice shoots one foggy morning in a paddy near Phu Loc, up the coast from Da Nang. At Captain Tho’s urging she’d gone north to the supposed safety of Da Nang, where her sister lived. Too many VC in the delta, he told her. Go north. The marines will protect you. They are the best of the My—the best of the Americans. Then one morning a truckload of drunken long-noses, red-faced and roaring with laughter, had driven past the paddy, heading up to the fighting around Hue in that bloody Tet of 1968, and one of them had thrown the grenade. The marine’s friends congratulated him on his accuracy, Captain Tho’s sister-in-law said later. She had witnessed the murder from the far side of the buffalo, which absorbed most of the fragments from the blast. Captain Tho’s wife lay dead, a bundle of black and red rags sinking into the mud—just another wasted slope, as the My would say.

  Another wasted slope. Not many years ago the phrase would have enraged him, or at least brought a bitter twist to his smile, but now he knew the words applied to him as finally as they did to his dead wife, and to all the dead of his lifetime. His passengers, at least, had hope. Most of them had relatives already in the United States—the World, as the My called it, the Land of the Big PX—and those who did not at least had friends in America who would swear to blood ties. The former ARVN officers would be welcomed, out of My guilt if nothing else; the businessmen, for their money, of course. Captain Tho had no one to vouch for him; he had only the worthless Vietnamese piasters his passengers paid him in advance, some of which he had converted to a few ounces of gold—but not enough to bribe even the lowliest of those Filipino officials whose appetite for palm oil was legendary, even so far afield as Taipei and Singapore, themselves mythic capitals of corruption. Captain Tho knew his best chance lay in delivering his human cargo as secretly as he had loaded it, under cover of darkness on some lonely beach, then disappearing into the maze of islands—more than seven thousand of them, and few with any governmental presence at all—that constituted the Philippine archipelago. His gold and the pesos he might realize from selling the Happy Life could be enough to last him the few short years that remained to him. If not, there was always the carbine—or his knife, a razor, a short length of rope . . .

  But now, as Captain Tho stood at the tiller, his legs braced against the first swells of the Sulu Sea, even those prospects seemed unlikely. Last night, with the southwest monsoon filling his one remaining sail, he had slipped the trawler between the Philippine islands of Palawan and Balabac, through the narrow Balabac Strait into the Sulu Sea. Other delta fishermen who had made this passage warned him that the southern coast of Palawan was infested with mundo. He must pass it with the utmost stealth, then turn northeast with the monsoon winds at his back and run as fast as he could for Puerto Princesa, far up the inside coast of Palawan. There was a Philippine naval station there, where his passengers could turn themselves in for temporary internment at a refugee camp until further passage to Manila and the United States could be arranged.

  As dawn broke, with a high green island called San Lázaro dead abeam to the west, Captain Tho saw what he had dreaded throughout the voyage. Three small, speedy boats appeared through the break in the island’s fringing reef and raced toward the Happy Life, their engines throwing rooster tails high in the red dawn light. Captain Tho checked to see that the carbine was loaded, with a round in the chamber. Then he hid it again beneath the straw mat beside the wheel. These would be the mundo.

  Yet as the boats raced nearer, he felt a flicker of hope. The mundo, he’d been told, used what the Filipinos called pump boats, knife-hulled outriggers powered by big Japanese outboard engines. These boats looked more like military vessels. Their flat, wide hulls, on which he could see machine guns mounted forward of the gleaming glass windshields, were painted a dull dark green, the color of mangrove swamps, and all of them had long, whippy radio antennae. Perhaps this was a Philippine Navy patrol. Perhaps he wouldn’t need the carbine.

  As the sound of the boats reached the Happy Life, women and children awoke and scrambled on deck, lining the rail and chattering in high, tense voices. The men took their time appearing, trying to look brave and unconcerned, but Captain Tho could feel their fear as clearly as one feels heat from a bomb crater. They all kept glancing at him, there at the helm, and he tried to smile back reassuringly. The pregnant monkey at the masthead was screaming furiously.

  Then the boats were alongside, idling down to take station astern and on either beam of the Happy Life. Some of the crewmen were dressed in navy-style fatigue uniforms, baseball caps, light blue shirts, dark blue dungarees. Others, though, had their heads wrapped in bandannas and were bare-chested or wearing dirty T-shirts with slogans written on them in My, the language of the long-noses. These men preferred greasy tan shorts or sarongs. All of them, regardless of dress, were heavily armed.

  “Where are you bound?” A man on the boat to Captain Tho’s right was speaking on a loud-hailer in Vietnamese.

  “Puerto Princesa,” he yelled back.

  “What cargo?”

  “Nothing. Just passengers and their personal effects.”

  “Heave to and stand by to be boarded. We must search your vessel.”

  Well, it was to be expected. Captain Tho put the helm over and luffed up into the wind. The Happy Life slowed and stopped. The boarding party scrambled over the rail. The man who had spoken on the loud-hailer came aboard and stood beside Captain Tho. He was a wide, thick, dark man with a face like a scarred slab of mahogany. A heavy pistol was holstered on his hip, but he bore no insignia on his fatigues. His eyes were an odd, flat green color, like that of the boats.

  “Are you of the navy?” Captain Tho asked.

  “You need not worry,” the man said. He smiled with his mouth but not with his eyes. “A routine search, nothing more.”

  But it was a strange routine.

  Down on the deck one of the searchers grabbed a chicken and yanked its head off. Then he threw the flapping body into the cockpit of the boat alongside, yelling something to those in the boat that made them laugh uproariously. One of them picked up the bird and pretended to copu
late with it. They laughed even louder.

  Another caught a pig after a brief chase and cut its throat with his bolo knife. The blood sprayed out over the women and children nearby, and they started to scream. The man raised his bolo, and they quieted. The pig lay bleeding into a bundle of clothes.

  Other men were looting the passengers with easy efficiency, taking transistor radios, cook pots, items of clothing, wallets—whatever of value they could find. Trinh Van Suu, a trim, straight-backed old man who had been an ARVN colonel, stepped forward and remonstrated with one of the looters. His eyes flashed, as did the gold in his mouth. The looter drew a pistol and shot Colonel Trinh through the chest. Then he hammered the gold teeth from his mouth and pocketed them.

  Looters were raping young women right there on deck. Children looked on, fascinated.

  “You are not of the navy,” Captain Tho said.

  The wide man laughed.

  Nguyen Tran Le, the banker from Cho Lon, waddled aft to the wheel, furious. He stopped just below Captain Tho.

  “Traitor! Pirate! You betrayed us, you led us to these devil-bandits, you’re in league with them! Deny it if you can!”

  The monkey was screaming on the masthead.

  “I deny it,” Captain Tho said. The wide man laughed again.