When grass shucks bent from the wind, they didn’t close back when the breeze died. Suddenly, a soldier was holding a pistol with a string between it and his belt. He wore a dirty khaki shirt, stiff from having been sweat through and dried by the heat. His eyes were soft and brown and she smiled when she saw herself twinned in them.
Huong only sees the sky. She never follows birds.
She wanted to touch the soldier’s eyes, reach over and put her finger upon their wet, then touch her own. They’d be nice to see cats with. If she found some, maybe curled under the bridge in the shadow cool, she’d use the wet from his eyes to keep her from blinking. She could stare at the cats until the sampans sailed off the river and the boatmen’s dogs stopped barking at the moon.
The soldier raised a pistol. He shot her toothless uncle in the nose, and he fell into his shadow made jagged by the grass roots. The soldier’s eyes shook when the earless uncle stabbed him in the neck. He slid off the uncle’s chest before he fell into his shadow.
She squatted and smiled and put out her finger to touch his eye. She may find cats when she didn’t have to play Huong. She thought cats lived under the bridge and each had a rice basket with a white sheet. Her father might let her look if the boat didn’t come. Then she saw the uncle pointing at the bent grass. He was laughing. He wanted to know if her father brought his rope when he ran away. He slapped the knife blade against his thigh.
She was still Huong and her father was looking for the cats so he’d know where to take her later. He might tell her that gray cats were kicked out of the sky because they fell asleep. She wouldn’t ask him why. She already knew that gray cats were lazy and didn’t do their job of licking the darkness from the clouds. That’s why it rained all the time in Hue.
* * *
Annie did in-calls for the agency on Friday afternoons. Nick got a room downtown and sent the dates over. They were nervous guys dressed in business casual, khakis and a printed golf shirt. None wore their watches. She laughed when they patted their pockets, their chubby faces panicked, thinking they lost their wallets. You left it at the office with your watch, she’d tell them. She watched them get naked because a cop wouldn’t undress, then took the envelope with the money, the six hundred dollars an hour she split with the agency. You go to the bathroom and count it, Nick said. That’s the first thing you do.
But that was done for the day.
She sat on the hotel bed, thighs crossed, and waited for the driver. He would call her when he was crossing Michigan Avenue in this rain. She held her cell phone and waited for the fast ring, the blue flash in her hand, hoping Sageer was driving her home. He smelled like Brut soap on a rope and gave her lone roses from 7-Eleven that she carried to her stoop and dropped in the leaves the wind drifted against the porch. But he kept quiet when Bobby never shut up. He drove a blue Grand Cherokee and pointed out the features. The seat memory is here, Bobby told her. There’s the gauge for miles per gallon. He’d get out and help her from the car and then touch the small of her back, eyeing her over his glasses. He led her to her door, then brushed his gray hair over a bald spot. The wind always undid it, and the rain made the thin hairs go flat on his scalp.
Her last date of the afternoon had been a talker. She first saw him through the door chain, his thick eyes in the links.
“You’re beautiful,” he’d said.
Yes, she knew. A twirler.
She closed the room door, undid the chain, then opened it. He was a Gap ad for bloated guys and wore a blue starched oxford. After he gave her the envelope, he didn’t know what to do with his hands, so he pocketed them. The six hundred dollars was in twenties and tens, like he’d been saving for a few months. She pictured his wife putting Starbucks on Visa, paying eighteen percent for mocha lattes and wild berry scones. He went once, a lone cup of coffee in the business, and then lay there touching her, just staring and touching.
“This is worth it,” he’d said. “I do it every quarter. And, so you know, we don’t pay for sex, we pay for your silence.”
She watched the clock on the nightstand, a minute before three. He was nodding to himself, a smile like a slot machine winner, when the hour was up. She stood and his hand hit air trying to touch her.
Right now, the driver was late. Bobby, she thought. He was dumb enough to take Lake Shore Drive off Belmont in the late afternoon. She stared hard at the paintings framed above the headboards. Sailboats were big. The Days Inn Lincoln Park had them tendered in a harbor, the masts bare. The Best Western River North had the boats at sea with sails full of wind. But here, the Motel 6 on Ontario, she couldn’t remember the painting when she looked away.
5
In the locker room, Murphy poured water on the sauna rocks while Goetzler felt his Tribune pages wilt. They watched the steam rise, but Goetzler a little harder than Murphy, almost like he was aiming a .45. He’d phoned for Annie that afternoon, but Nick told him she was booked through the week, and he’d call if that changed. Goetzler kept his cell phone in the sauna when he knew nobody canceled with her.
Chuck Murphy stayed lean from his constant running on the health club’s indoor track. Goetzler just sat in the sauna. Murphy was a boss public defender for Cook County and worked class-three narcotics cases to pay for his daughter’s M.Ed., while Goetzler was a divorced corporate man without children or alimony.
Murphy would tell Goetzler he was worried about the mortgage on his cabin in Lake Tomahawk, Wisconsin, and how he was afraid the priests at DePaul University might get everything.
Goetzler only nodded and sweat.
Before law school, Murphy had roomed with Oliver North during USMC Officer Basic School before they’d each led a platoon of marine infantry in Quang Tri, the year after the 1968 Tet Offensive. Murphy thought North was a dedicated man, but it was good the Marine Corps had forced North into retirement. Even during Iran Contra, he never told Goetzler anything more.
Goetzler had known Murphy since he resigned his military police commission in 1975, himself still a captain, but then with Army Criminal Investigative Division in Bamberg, West Germany, where his glasses never fogged. Goetzler had gotten a general’s son relieved when he discovered a heroin ring in the boy’s mechanized infantry company, led by two draftee Gangster Disciples from the West Side of Chicago, and the general had Goetzler passed over for major the third time. But Goetzler only talked to Murphy in the sauna and knew of his life and family from the stories he told. Goetzler did like him, and thought Chuck Murphy a patriot even though he joined Vietnam Veterans Against the War upon returning from Quang Tri Province in 1970, and believed he saw atrocities when, as Goetzler told him, he was only fighting guerrillas and they required such methods.
The third time they’d ever pitched water on the sauna rocks, Murphy looked at Goetzler, whose detective-captain-uncle, Kerm Goetzler, had just made him a Chicago cop, a job he’d hold for two years. Army majors live in duplexes, Uncle Kerm had told Goetzler, looking at his nephew’s silver Rolex, police sergeants have a bungalow and two three-flats.
Murphy shook his head like a trial lawyer. Goetzler had been talking about how America quit in Vietnam and the United States Government had sold every veteran down the river. Our legacy, he told Murphy, remains a sad joke because we didn’t guard it like the World War II veterans did.
“I wasn’t going to ask a man to be the last person to die for a lie in Vietnam,” Murphy borrowed. “That’s not the legacy I wanted.”
Goetzler tried his best Robert Mitchum from behind his steamed glasses, still believing Chuck Murphy was dumb enough to believe his cop routine.
“I was a professional soldier, Chuck,” he said. “You were a reserve officer. I believe I could serve in any army. It wouldn’t matter.”
Murphy laughed at him with a closed mouth.
“You’re a cop, now,” he said. “You were a cop then. And I’ve cross-examined enough cops to know they are too smart to be soldiers.”
“Why is that?”
“Beca
use soldiers are too dumb to be cops. That’s how you MPs get so lucky. What match is a drunk grunt when you’re shaking down a whorehouse?”
Today, Goetzler had Murphy because he couldn’t get Annie. He was glad he could always find him, but as they grew older, Murphy reminded Goetzler of losing because so often he sat in this sauna by default. You can’t work your bullshit on me, Murphy would tell him. I’ve seen you naked more times than I have my Mary Therese.
Murphy pitched the last cup of water on the rocks, then took the steam with his face. Goetzler laughed at him for believing that every afternoon he could sweat the bad things out. Murphy was always kayaking in Lake Superior and Lake Michigan, or running the Lakeview streets, smiling like he could wash most of life away. He’d just put his Lincoln Park town house on the market and was retiring from the public defender’s office. He wanted to pay off the cabin and the priests inside twenty-four hours, then grow old paddling in Wisconsin until he had a heart attack and drowned. Goetzler knew he’d be in Chicago only another two months.
“So you live your whole life to go die by a Wisconsin lake,” Goetzler said.
Murphy sat smiling in a towel.
“You are a decorated marine and successful civil servant and you want to check out beside a north wood pond. A lifetime of bad-mouthing your country should come to more than that.”
“No,” he said. “When I start feeling chest pains over eighty, I’m taking a birch kayak into Lake Superior. It beats dying in hot paddy mud or the hot sand.”
“At least the men in the mud and the sand go fighting. They will never know the feeling of being defined by men who were not there.”
“I know you don’t think that way,” he said.
“They died believing an idea of themselves. That’s the best way to go.”
“There’s a cabin for sale right next to mine,” Murphy said. “We could sit in my sauna and forget we’re not the Greatest Generation. We’ll have a time, Donny. We’ll let everything fall away.”
“Nothing falls away.”
“You’ve watched too many movies.”
“You galloped at too many windmills,” Goetzler said.
He wanted to tell his friend how he censored himself these years to keep him from seeing inside, but Murphy would just laugh, and say, you cops always try getting something on the world by pretending to kill your hearts. Instead, Goetzler sat quietly and watched Murphy squeeze sweat from his bicep pores, knowing there were two more months until Murphy vanished like a dead Indian, or an Irishman gone to America. After he moved north, there’d be a lot of silence, and Goetzler tried not thinking about it.
* * *
After Vietnam, Goetzler busted a general’s son in Bamberg, West Germany, Captain Douglas Rogers Junior, a sweaty-lipped company commander in Second Armored, West Point 1969. Surveillance found the captain had two black NCOs in his company with Vietnam tours dealing heroin they got from Barcelona by way of Tunis. They supplied Second Armored with smack and drove new Mercedes-Benzes. Then, black soldiers with Asia time started disappearing, six AWOLS in two weeks, and Goetzler saw a stateside gang connection: Chicago Vice Lords and Gangster Disciples were coming to Germany instead of Southeast Asia in 1974 and had freedom to operate. The AWOL soldiers all came from Inglewood, Sixty-third and Cottage Grove where the night hung dark between broken streetlights. The six were Vice Lords, loud kids from the South Side beaches. They were killed over business, shot and dumped in the muddy Rhine with cinder blocks chained to their ankles, but the last two were just dropped in the brown water, and the West German police found them washed up against a bridge pier west of Düsseldorf.
Goetzler wore a dark suit now, a Strafford from London, the uniform of Army Criminal Investigations. He saluted no one. He walked into the offices of captains and lieutenant colonels all over Second Armored, hung his wet trench coat over chair backs, and asked them what they planned to do about the drug problems in their units. The officers always sweated, thin beads between the nose and the upper lip. They pulled at West Point rings and looked at pictures of their wives upon the metal desks, small, mean women, former beauty queens from South Carolina teaching colleges. In the beginning, Goetzler never minded how the officers clubs paused when he walked inside. Men turned their backs and resumed their conversations in low tones. One time, an old transportation colonel asked him how he expected to plot a career when his job was to make people look bad. I have my orders, Goetzler said.
But already the stories about Goetzler’s wife preceded him like a bad smell. The MPs found her kissing Sergeant Nick Camarda’s hairy stomach in Goetzler’s own BMW one night along the back fence of the supply depot in West Berlin. He was a skinny guy with hair on his knuckles who tore the filters off Kools before he smoked them. Officers loved to laugh at bad ones like this. I know this CID guy, a captain with ten years, they’d say. They caught his wife with a wop supply sergeant from II Corps. The golf ball through the garden hose joke circulated all over II Corps, and now the officers smiled at him when he walked into the club for dinner. Goetzler wished he could laugh with them, grin ear to ear like he’d been short-sheeted in the barracks.
His wife had been a teller at LaSalle Bank in Chicago before the wedding. He only married her so the army wouldn’t think he was gay. She was part man and she used her body like a tough cop might, bullying with a thin waist and fleshy hips, even believing her shoulders square and thick. She imagined them cruising Europe in sleek rental cars, convertibles, like Dustin Hoffman had in The Graduate. The sun had to be a certain way in the mirror, low to the ground, and the sky pink and blue and white where the white sunlight hazed along the horizon. She made him pay for not making that happen. I have my needs, she said.
Goetzler got back-channel word from Third Army in Frankfurt to solve the heroin problem. But Second Armored, “hell on wheels through the hedgerows,” never admitted it went crazy with dope after 1970. Men were stoned at rifle ranges and shot out the target stakes, laughing with open mouths. They mainlined heroin before inspections and stared at the officers with wide, happy eyes. The soldiers dropped blotter acid sent from the states in paperback novels and listened to Pink Floyd on reel to reel tape decks in dark barracks’ rooms lit by black lights and lava lamps. Their walls were covered with velveteen artwork: Hendrix with the white Stratocaster, the cover of Led Zeppelin I, toothy tigers jumping from jungles. Goetzler made the case by searching Staff Sergeants Tyrone Wills’s and Anthony Green’s red Mercedes-Benzes. The heroin was in their trunks like an extra tire jack, and Goetzler sent them to Leavenworth for life. The general’s son was relieved of command and sent stateside to be a range officer at Fort Benning’s Infantry School.
The captain’s father was Major General Douglas Rogers Senior, West Point 1942, now G3-Operations at Third Army, a gaunt man with prizefighter’s eyes who won the Distinguished Service Cross at Monte Casino, and married a woman he first glanced in a Tuscan hill town while retreating from the Germans in late 1943. He came back after the war and found her in a ruined café, pouring an old man espresso and kicking stray dogs away from the table with dirty bare feet. She claimed she remembered Rogers, his glance through the sideways rain while German artillery hit the river, and married him the day the paperwork cleared headquarters. The army press repeated the story in post newspapers whenever the old man got a new assignment. There were before and after pictures. She had wide hips, dark eyes, a perfect 36C, and looked at him the way a hungry person does a waiter.
Rogers sat in officers clubs with the few classmates that hadn’t retired, thin men who’d went gray on their thirty-fifth birthdays. He wasn’t going to let some draftee frag his son. He got him a job on Creighton Abram’s Saigon staff in late 1972. He lived near the embassy, along Tu Ten Street. Goetzler figured the captain had a snapshot of him and his father having dinner on the rooftop of the Rex Hotel. There were no women in ao dai, poised like cats on the officers’ laps. The men ate steak and looked at their watches.
The general had an
infantry division there late in the war and claimed he led junkies, pimps, and thieves into Cambodia. I have to be honest, he said. I was scared of the enlisted. The rumor went that Doug Rogers told a reporter that under the condition of anonymity. Goetzler knew three officers were killed by fragging in his division, hit during firefights with hand grenades at very close range, and two had died in Cambodia.
He summoned Goetzler to Third Army headquarters. He sent a courier down to Bamberg, some starched PFC in a Department of Defense Ford. The orders were specific. Report in uniform, 1300 hours.
The general’s face was lean, his cheekbones definite. He sat behind his desk with his hands behind his head, his legs crossed at the knee. He looked at Goetzler as if watching TV from a couch. The red flag with his two white stars hung from a wooden pole in the corner. The office was nice, an executive’s desk, a padded leather swivel chair, but the window looked upon the headquarters’ parking lot and the general’s own reserved space. Goetzler had expected something different, maybe a few more potted plants, a wet bar stocked with package store bourbon, but it was a room in a big building, like one square in an ice cube tray.
Rogers kept Goetzler at attention, locked up in his green uniform. The sweat ran down his back. His shaving cuts burned.
“My boy is taking an assignment in the South Carolina National Guard,” the general said. “He got a job in a bank, Goetzler. Charleston First National. He’ll sign off on car loans to start.”
The general’s eyes were smug but terrified. His two stars hadn’t helped his son. The army today was like the HMS Bounty after the crew sent Bly off in the rowboat. Goetzler could see the general never imagined Vietnam would cause all of this.
“Can you understand the humiliation?” he said.
The general waved Goetzler quiet before he spoke.
“He went to West Point, Captain Goetzler. Twenty-first in his class. You think he fooled with dope.”
Because the Rain Page 4
