R&R

by Mark Dapin

  ‘Hellogoodmorning. You veryhandsomeman,’ she said, although she could speak English like an attorney. ‘You too tall for American.’

  ‘Me Australian,’ said Shorty, like Tarzan.

  ‘No!’ screeched Quyn, although, of course, she knew. ‘Uc da loi number one!’ She giggled and covered her mouth.

  Shorty tried to ease her off his knee. Over her shoulder, he saw Baby Marie with the hibiscus-flower lips.

  Quyn grabbed his face and pulled his eyes back to her.

  Baby Marie called Tâm to come out of the kitchen where she was learning to be a chef, chopping onions and filleting fish for the mute who cooked. Tâm stood taller than the other girls, and regarded Nashville as if he were a stranger.

  ‘Meet my friend,’ said Nashville to Shorty, ‘the lovely Natalie Susan Mitchell.’

  Nashville leaned across and squeezed Tâm’s ass, then felt a terrible tenderness, which made him drop his hand. ‘This is my new buddy,’ said Nashville to Tâm. ‘He’s from Austria. Like Hitler. But more uptight.’

  Behind the bar, a head emerged from a hatch as Moreau in his Foreign Legionnaire’s cap climbed up the ladder from the cellar and gazed, disappointed, at the first customers of the day.

  Quyn slipped off Shorty’s lap to give her boss full view of this new client.

  ‘Bonjour,’ said Nashville to Moreau.

  It was the first time since high school that Shorty had heard anyone speak French.

  Moreau snorted. He had a sharp, drawn face, long eyes and an almost hidden mouth, like a thwarted vulture, beaten to the roadkill.

  ‘Monsieur Moreau, this is Shorty,’ said Nashville. ‘He’s Austrian.’

  ‘Guten morgen,’ said Moreau.

  Moreau passed each of them a cold can of American beer. Shorty secretly spilled his Budweiser into a spitoon while the other men talked, as it was against regulations to drink on the job.

  Whoever Moreau once had been, he had ceased to be when he came to Vung Tau. It was thought he’d served in another army before he’d joined the legion. He had been Polish, it was said, then French, but now he called himself Vietnamese. He’d stayed in town when les colons had pulled out, and said he would still be there when the Americans were gone. He carried a swastika tattooed on his wrist – a Buddhist symbol, he said, a homage to a local wife. Shorty noticed he was missing a finger. It looked as though it had been severed at the first knuckle.

  ‘You want bisque?’ Moreau asked Nashville. ‘I have fresh shrimp.’

  ‘Two bowls,’ said Nashville.

  Moreau passed the order to Tâm.

  Nashville shook his empty can. ‘Time for another?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes,’ said Moreau. ‘Shall I give one to your friend the ostrich, to spill on his foot?’

  ‘He ain’t an ostrich,’ said Nashville, ‘he’s an Australian.’

  ‘C’est la même chose,’ said Moreau, ‘both keep their heads in the sand.’

  Nashville struck a match on Moreau’s bar. ‘You know, sir,’ he said, ‘it’s a misunderstanding that when an ostrich senses danger, he buries his strangely fucking Gallic-looking head in the sand. Au contraire, croque monsieur, he drops to the ground and flattens his head against the earth, and continues to keep watch on the enemy with the largest eyes of any land animal.’ Nashville lit a Marlboro.

  ‘You are a boring man,’ said Moreau.

  Nashville smiled. ‘Women love me,’ he said.

  Moreau bared his yellow teeth. ‘You pay me to fuck them,’ he said.

  Nashville grabbed Moreau around the back of the neck, and pulled him close, so their skulls met at the forehead. They rubbed heads and were content.

  Nashville and Shorty sipped their bisque which, to Shorty’s surprise, was a soup served in a cup. He had been expecting a biscuit on a plate. He dipped a piece of baguette into the saffron broth, which tasted like prawns that had been trawled from an ocean of cream. Shorty imagined waves of milk. He ate self-consciously, aware Quyn was watching him.

  ‘I hear there was a shooting,’ said Nashville to Moreau.

  Moreau sniffed. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Caution killed a zombie.’

  ‘Did you see it?’ asked Nashville.

  ‘Non,’ said Moreau, who preferred to lie in French.

  Soup dribbled down Shorty’s chin. Baby Marie came over with a white cloth and wiped it away. Her skin was the colour of the bisque, thought Shorty.

  ‘What do the zipperheads say?’ Nashville asked Moreau.

  ‘They want to know what happened to the old man’s ears,’ said Moreau. ‘They’re disturbed by the thought that they may be sitting with their ancestors and yet a foul-mouthed and murderous American drunk might still dig them out of the ground, cut off their ears, take them to a bar and shoot them.’

  Nashville nodded.

  ‘What does the Mamasan think?’ he asked.

  ‘The Mamasan does not concern herself with this,’ said Moreau, ‘but she feels dead bodies do not belong in bars.’

  A rifle section of axe-faced Australians wove cautiously through the bistro, and harboured at a cluster of corner tables from which they could see everything that came in or out. Baby Marie brought them cold beers on a tray and each man tried to touch her as she served him.

  ‘Who’s the Mamasan?’ Shorty asked Nashville.

  Moreau turned his back to fetch two more beers. Nashville grinned and slapped Shorty on the back.

  They both think I’m an idiot, thought Shorty.

  ‘What do you know about the dead guy?’ Nashville asked Moreau.

  ‘He was nobody,’ said Moreau, ‘a madman who lived on the hill.’

  ‘So how did he get to the bar?’ asked Nashville. ‘Being as he was dead.’

  ‘He’d cleared part of the hillside,’ said Moreau, ‘so he could camp by the family tomb. When he died, the Annamites took away his tent, and the coffin maker buried him beside his ancestors. But, with the bivouac gone, the stormwater flowed into the clearing and flooded his grave.’

  Once again, Nashville congratulated himself on choosing Moreau as his one and only informer.

  Moreau said he believed the GIs who carried the corpse into the bar had nothing to do with Caution. He didn’t know why Caution had shot the body, or who had cut off its ears, but he’d already had press-agency reporters in the bar, who acted disappointed when they didn’t see dead men without ears in Le Boudin every night. They bought themselves drinks but didn’t tip the girls, and asked questions when they could be fucking.

  ‘Do you know where Caution went?’ asked Nashville.

  ‘Non,’ said Moreau, ‘but mes amis tell me he is dead.’

  ‘When did that happen?’ asked Nashville.

  ‘Soon,’ said Moreau.

  When Baby Marie saw Shorty, she noticed his nose first, like a trunk flanked by elephantine ears. In the time before the French, people would pay rice to look upon a Tonkinese his size, who’d trek from village to village and pluck coconuts from the trees. They danced for him and drank, because they knew he would die young. Tâm understood that Nashville’s new friend was a fool, born in the same dark cave as the other blind men from Australia. Quyn found something else in the boy, because she looked for other things.

  Shorty appreciated all the girls and their different kinds of beauty. But he realised Moreau was a pirate, and wondered why Nashville seemed to like him.

  Nashville dipped towards Moreau. ‘The Captain thinks the Mama­san’s got Caution,’ he said.

  Moreau shrugged.

  ‘What is a Mamasan?’ asked Shorty.

  ‘Him,’ said Nashville, pointing to Moreau.

  Shorty would ask the same question until he had an answer. People mistook his persistence for foolishness, as if a more intelligent person would surrender rather than face the humiliation of appearing unimaginative through repetition, but Shorty generally found out what he wanted to know.

  ‘I don’t recall seeing TJ here too often,’ said Nashville to Moreau. ‘Did he have a gi
rl?’

  For an instant, Nashville imagined Moreau’s eyes pointed towards Tâm.

  ‘Not here,’ said Moreau. ‘He came sometimes, but only to make trouble.’

  Nashville pressed the side of his jaw with his thumb.

  ‘So what brought him here that night?’ asked Nashville. ‘Were you cooking grits and cornbread?’

  Moreau frowned.

  ‘I meant that metaphorically,’ said Nashville, looking at Tâm.

  Shorty pushed into the conversation. ‘This Mamasan, who is she?’ he asked.

  Moreau shook his head, as if such matters were not to be discussed with Australians. Nashville put an arm around Shorty and guided him to a table. He leaned back in a shot-up chair and hooked his hands behind his head, the storyteller about to share his truth.

  ‘A mama-san is a brothel keeper,’ said Nashville. ‘They’re as common as crabs in this town. The Mamasan, on the other hand, is unique. The question of her identity troubles every law-enforcement officer when he first arrives in Vung Tau. But, like a girl in a blowjob bar, no one’s quite sure who she is, or how she got to be under the table. I call my girls – every one of them – Natalie Susan Mitchell, after the cheerleader who refused to let me rest my hands on her rack after the Troy, Tennessee, Minor League Super Bowl. And the Mamasan guards her identity like Natalie Susan Mitchell protected her chastity. But while Natalie Susan Mitchell now works as a pump attendant in Blytheville, Tennessee, the Mamasan runs every racket in Vung Tau.’

  The Australian soldiers called out for more beer.

  ‘Have we ever tried to arrest her?’ asked Shorty.

  ‘Rein it in, Junior G-Man,’ said Nashville. ‘The Mamasan’s got the only effective police force in town. She keeps the cowboys in line. Without her, there’d be gang war, the US Army’d be just one of the gangs, and the Aussies would be – I don’t know – completely fucking irrelevant. In absolute contrast, I might add, to their situation today.’

  Shorty smiled, to make Nashville think his disdain went unnoticed.

  Baby Marie attended to the Australians. To Shorty, she looked so small and fragile. The Australian soldiers joked around with her, asking if she had a boyfriend while they felt her hips and thighs. She told them she did and he was from Tasmania. They asked to see her map of Tassie and tried to lift her dress. She said her boyfriend’s name was Tommy, and she pronounced it ‘to me’, as in ‘come back to me’.

  Tommy Callaghan had been working as a shipping clerk in Launceston, Tasmania, in an office that smelled of polished teak and pipe tobacco, when he was called up for national service in 1966. He was small and light, and could pull himself up a rope like a spider scrambling on silk, so the other men in his platoon called him Monkey. This made Tommy Callaghan proud, because nobody had ever thought to give him a nickname before. Now he was Monkey, with Polly and Biggsy and Bilko and Reffo and Tony the Wog, and he was happy that he belonged.

  After six months in the bush in Phuoc Tuy province, Callaghan was given three days’ rest and convalescent leave in Vung Tau. At Le Boudin, he met Baby Marie. One night in the bar, he sat beside Nashville, who was eating steak frites and drinking a carafe of red wine. Nashville spoke first, because he was the most drunk. He asked Callaghan if there was a particular breed of dog he admired. Callaghan had grown up with a border collie, and told Nashville unremarkable stories about an energetic animal that had herded cattle before it retired to a life in town. Nashville asked for details, such as the colour of its eyes and the size of its ears.

  Nashville had called for another wine glass. Callaghan had never drunk red wine before. It tasted of cinnamon and vinegar, of castles and kings. Callaghan had grown up in the country, and confided in strangers easily. ‘It’s funny,’ he said, ‘that you can find love in war.’

  Nashville misunderstood him. ‘Yeah,’ he said, ‘I love this war.’

  Callaghan told him about Baby Marie, whom Nashville had fucked acrobatically for two weeks in July, and who had left him with gonorrhoea. Nashville listened, enchanted. He asked for details, such as the colour of her eyes and the size of her ears.

  Callaghan said Baby Marie was unlike him in every way, and yet he felt he knew her. He could see her sadness, and feel it as if it were his own.

  ‘What’s she sad about?’ asked Nashville, wondering if it was gonorrhoea.

  ‘Her whole life,’ said Callaghan, ‘and the war.’

  Baby Marie came in from the kitchen, carrying a plate of fish. She kissed Callaghan on the forehead, and asked him his friend’s name.

  Nashville introduced himself and called her ‘ma’am’, and thought of her on the bed in the back room, with her ass in the air.

  Nashville left them to find Natalie Susan Mitchell who, that night, was a noisy, friendly village girl with strong legs and thick, black hair. Nashville found it hard to keep an image of a border collie out of his mind.

  Callaghan planned to take Baby Marie home when his tour of Vietnam was over. They would open a shop in Launceston like the Chinese stores in Vung Tau, and he would record in his account book the sales of watches, scents and eight-track tapes shipped from Hong Kong. He would tell his father she had been an air hostess, and they had met on a plane. Ted Callaghan would believe him, he thought, because Baby Marie was beautiful, and Ted had never seen an air hostess. Baby Marie would cook duck on the barbecue in summer, and serve Ted Callaghan red wine.

  Tâm, who read fortunes, told Baby Marie she would be buried in a land of dancing kangaroos. Baby Marie asked who would lie in the grave beside her. Tâm said she saw Tommy, and a tomb swept at Tet by light-skinned sons with grey-green eyes. She did not tell Baby Marie about the demons hiding behind her headstone, feasting on a human heart.

  FOUR

  The streets of Vung Tau stretched lazily in the gluey afternoon heat. Nashville’s jeep was caught behind a cart porter pushing a mountain of slowly melting ice. Nashville brushed a fly from his eyes and drummed his fingers on the dashboard, trying to capture the beat of ‘Jimmy Mack’.

  ‘How does Moreau know what the Mamasan wants him to do?’ asked Shorty.

  Nashville scraped at the sunburned skin on the back of his neck.

  ‘When Moreau says, “The Mamasan says this” or “The Mamasan says that,” ’ said Nashville, ‘it could be he’s just telling me what he thinks, or how the zipperheads in general feel. He might be getting it from the chief of police, Ellsworth Bunker or Ho Chi Minh. At the end of the day, it don’t matter squat, because Moreau knows what’s going on.’

  Nashville stopped by the Grand Hotel to ask about the notepaper. The fat pimp concierge said there was a pad in every room. Any soldier or girl could have taken one. He complained that everything got stolen from his hotel, even the lampshades and toilet seats.

  ‘You’re a bigger crook than any man in town,’ said Nashville.

  On his way out, Nashville pocketed an ashtray.

  At the end of their shift, Nashville drove Shorty back to ALSG, the sandbagged shanty town of tin sheds and tents where the Australian MPs were based, alongside a field hospital and workshops, and a cactus garden of truck tyres. Shorty trod lightly on the duckboards that crossed the camp. He passed other men, mostly shirtless, always smoking, and every face a stranger’s. He shared his room with Jack Adams from a property near Toowoomba, Queensland. Adams was already in uniform, prepared to go out on the night-time bars patrol. The two men shook hands quickly, and Adams jogged to the perimeter, where Nashville waited on the other side of the wire to hand over the jeep.

  Adams kept a calendar pinned to the wall, a puzzle in the shape of a woman’s body trapped like a mermaid within a net of small squares. With every day that passed, Adams filled in another section of the grid, so the woman’s open mouth emerged first, then her exaggerated breasts. On day 365, the last of Adams’ tour, the prize was the space between her legs.

  Shorty looked at the dates, and realised it had been eighteen months since his father, Harry, had read out loud the letter fro
m the government, calling up Sean Long for national service. Harry, who’d also been known as Shorty in the last war, didn’t want Sean to leave the land, but there were Rules and you had to stick to them. Harry was group captain of the bush fire brigade, a responsible man who had sworn off the drink, and could be relied upon to stay calm as the dry grass burned and the animals fled. Sean had been given a send-off party by the footy club, which somehow ended up a sprawling, affectionate, teeth-shattering brawl, then went off to train with the other Victorian conscripts at Puckapunyal, in the hills. The base was only ninety minutes from Harry Long’s farm and, after the first few weeks, Sean was allowed to go home at weekends. Some national servicemen, desperate to see their girls, could make it in an hour, but Sean kept to the speed limits, since they were devised to save lives. He asked to join the infantry, like Harry in 1941, but because of his height, he was posted to the Provost Corps. After corps training in Sydney, Sean returned to Puckapunyal, fell out of a Land Rover and broke his leg. He was taken to the camp hospital, where he was tended by a nurse who was six foot tall with bobbed black hair and green eyes. She was the first woman to touch Sean, so he fell in love with her.

  For their first date, he had taken Betty fishing.

  ‘He fell for me hook, line and sinker,’ Betty had said.

  Betty’s parents had hoped she would marry young, because they feared her scant prettiness wouldn’t last into her twenties. Her features were large and she had hands like a man, but the nuns said she possessed a beautiful soul. When no man proposed, she became an army nurse, so as to use her life for a perfect good, healing the sick while defending her country.

  She was older than Sean and she loved him in an adult way. She cared for her gangly boy, and tried to bring him up. She found comfort in his strength and good temper, his confused contentment, his puzzled smile. She enjoyed looking at his face and laughing at his sincerity, and listening to him speak about fishing and dogs, the weather and the land.

  Sean no longer went home at weekends. Instead, he and Betty would enjoy a date at the cinema in Seymour, where they saw The Russians Are Coming, The Russians Are Coming with Alan Arkin, and Alfie with Michael Caine. Sean didn’t remember much about the movies, since Betty would always find him in the darkness and love him with her hand. For his part, Sean could touch Betty anywhere, but only on the outside of her clothes. It was an agreement they had reached wordlessly. They both wanted Betty to be pure on their wedding night.