R&R

by Mark Dapin

  Nashville scrutinised the bold, even handwriting on his envelope, as if there were several people who might contact him from Stillwater, Oklahoma, and he needed only to ascertain who had written that day, three weeks ago, when the letter had been mailed from the post office next to the liquor store, three blocks east of his father’s house, where sprinklers made rainfall rise from the ground.

  The letter was addressed to the PMO’s office in Vung Tau. Nashville read the postmark and examined the stamps: ‘We Appreciate Our Servicemen’, with the Statue of Liberty and the Stars and Stripes. They came from a sheet, he decided, that his father kept in the drawer of his bureau, where he worked by his window and watched birds take seed from a feeder, as if the swallows and martins were his responsibility, his children.

  Nashville was afraid of nothing but memories. He sat in the Conex with the letter, and listened to the footsteps in his mind as his recollections padded closer. At first, they seemed harmless, even wholesome. He remembered how his father, Robert Lee Grant, had taught him to swim in the Obion River, on fishing trips at weekends. Nashville used to pitch his tent on high ground above a creek. His dad would sleep in the truck, with the radio on.

  That was enough. Nashville didn’t need any more, but he’d opened the door to the way things used to be, and now all the other memories would pile in and jump on him and beat him down.

  When Nashville was ten years old, one Friday evening after dinner, Robert Lee drove to the garage to buy a pack of Kents. Nashville waited on the porch for him to return. For a month, he slept on the stoop in his blanket, curled up around his BB gun, to provide covering fire for his father when he escaped his kidnappers and came dashing back home.

  Nashville didn’t believe Robert Lee had gone, because parents didn’t run away. His mother showed him a typed letter from an attorney, promising money. Nashville imagined the kidnappers had forced his dad to sign.

  Robert Lee used to teach school. His subject was English and he coached the wrestling team. He left Nashville Hemingway and Whitman and a great and terrible strength.

  His mom told Nashville that Robert Lee had taken another job, in Stillwater, Oklahoma. Nashville found the town on a map, but could not imagine his father there, in his sports jacket and smiling brogues. He missed most of all the smell of his father’s pipe tobacco, and the power of his arms under his white cotton shirt.

  After he had been six months in Stillwater, Robert Lee began to write, by hand. His letters arrived in pairs – one for Nashville, and one for his older brother, Rick. His dad told him about his new car – which was a Dodge – and the sunshine in Stillwater, then he had to go because there was somebody at the door, or he needed to finish marking papers, or he was up late and it was time to go to bed.

  He said he was sorry for what had happened – as if it were an event, rather than a decision – but when Nashville was older he would understand.

  But Nashville understood already why Robert Lee had gone to Stillwater, Oklahoma and left his family in Troy, Tennessee. It was because he thought he could get away with it.

  Without his dad, Nashville felt his bedroom window was open and anything could crawl inside. At school, all the kids knew the wrestling coach had vanished, the English teacher had gone, and the town discovered it had always held suspicions about Robert Lee. He’d been a popular teacher but he had a distant look, like he wasn’t really listening. They used to think he had brought it back from the war, when he had been a captain in the Marine Corps. But now they noticed it in his boys. The Grants were born with it. It was as though they felt they were too good for the town, and if they didn’t like something everyone else had to put up with they could just jump in a car and leave for Oklahoma.

  Nashville played out in the street past nightfall in the spring. He was in his own front yard when an older boy knocked out his teeth, to snuff out his spark.

  His father wrote to Nashville, Whatever happens, you will always be my son. But Nashville was not the son of the wrestling coach any more, because the son of the wrestling coach would never have had his teeth punched out in his own front yard. That could only happen to the son of nobody.

  Nashville took to boxing. He had his father’s balance and his own bottomless hurt. It helped him to punch a bag, or a mitt, or another boy. Nashville’s trainer, Harry Bragg, was a ruined fighter who found delight in the unsullied athleticism of hairless boys. Bragg knew how to give and take a punch, and felt that to be the only pious transaction in an impure world. There were few boys of Nashville’s weight boxing out of Troy, Tennessee, so Bragg would enter him in amateur competitions all around Obion County, for sparring practice. Nashville fought in Woodland Mills and Hornbeak, Samberg and Reeves, then the Golden Gloves in Memphis, Tennessee.

  Nashville’s mom had brown hair and wore fawn shoes. Her eyes were chocolate, her freckles caramel and her legs tanned golden in the Tennessee sun. She wore short, pale blue dresses, like a blonde. She knew why Nashville’s dad had left her. She wouldn’t do the things he asked.

  So his mother looked for men who’d come to her – a mechanic, a postman, a cop, a teacher at the school; but married, all of them – and she would do with them all the things she had not done to keep her husband, and when she was done they would walk away.

  Nashville watched the men come and go as he shadow-boxed in the yard. He hung a bag of rags from the clothesline – printed with the insignia of the US Marine Corps, who never ran away, except from their families – and bothered and bashed it while he waited for Bragg to get back from his hardware store and open up the gym. When the men left behind clothes – an undershirt, or a pair of socks – he stuffed them into the bag.

  His mom was careless of herself, but she guarded her children. If ever a man moved to hurt them – and some of these shameless, faithless husbands felt everything was theirs – she would withdraw. If he spoke badly of her boys, she would send him home unempty, and scared of what she might tell.

  Nashville loved her, really loved her, but he wished he could be enough for her, like the war widows’ children who filled all the space in their mothers’ lives, with their faces that reminded of their fathers; Nashville thought that might be the problem, that she brought home other men’s faces so she wouldn’t only see his.

  One day his mom had a screaming fight with Rick about the men. Rick, who had never loved her quite as fiercely as Nashville, yelled that he was going out, and he never came back. Nashville understood why Rick had done that, too. Because if Rick did it to their mom, it meant their dad had done it to their mom, and not to Rick. And it meant his dad had been right to do it, too. After all, everyone left their mom. She drove men away.

  The next week, Nashville was fighting an Italian boy named Pierini for the West Tennessee bantamweight junior title. Nashville knocked him on his back twice in the first round. Bragg saw the change in him, that every punch was now a small murder. A bantamweight shouldn’t be able to hit so hard. Only black boys boxed that way in West Tennessee.

  Pierini lay in the regional hospital, fed through tubes. His uncles said they would bury Nashville alive, so his mom sent him to live with his dad. His month in Stillwater, Oklahoma was a crater in Nashville’s memory and a scar across his heart. He’d thought maybe he could mend things but he broke them even worse. In Stillwater, Oklahoma, he earned the name Nashville, because he’d come from a town only one hundred and sixty miles away from that city, which made it the exact same place to the people of Stillwater.

  When the Italian boy recovered, Nashville came home. He gave up fighting, played football and studied nothing, worked in a saloon as a bartender and bouncer – underage and oversized, the local boy who’d stopped Pierini – then enlisted in the army. He knew he’d get drafted, and he would be able to choose his own posting if he volunteered. He would’ve liked to be an engineer but he didn’t have the schooling, so he signed up for the MP so he would not have to kill anybody.

  Nashville had been happy in the army. Since they’d taken h
im to Long Binh, he felt like he was drowning. But he could remember his father’s hands on the plane of his belly and the flat of his chest, under the water in the Obion River, steadying and supporting him, as if they’d never let him fall.

  Nashville took off his shirt and laid it on the floor of the Conex. He didn’t open the envelope, but he tore the letter in half. He ripped each part in two, and halved it again. He shredded the paper and arranged it in a small mound over his shirt. Then he pulled out the matches he kept halfway up his ass, and struck the whole bundle against the side of the shipping container. They flared into a torch, and Nashville held the flame to the paper, and watched the smoke rise from his fire and find the spaces between the bars on his cell door.

  That’ll bring them running.

  The end was already written. All Nashville could do was choose the time. But when they burst in decked out like Casper the Unfriendly fucking Ghost, and tried to make Nashville kneel for the noose, he’d show those rednecks who was going to bow. He’d punch their heads through their fucking hoods just like the time he’d smacked the fight out of that greaseball and seen his wop eyes roll up in his dago head, and watched his empty body flop to the canvas like a limp slice of stale tomato.

  When Pierini had gone down – the stinking spaghetti wop with black olive eyes and parmesan breath; Nashville had turned his face into a pizza – it was like Nashville’s soul had left his body. It soared above him and looked down on all the world, sated and elated. When the referee started his count, there was a big part of Nashville that was hoping the boy would never get up.

  Nobody else knew, but he hadn’t been able to hide it from Caution.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  Weldmesh over the windows protected the army bus from a grenade attack on the highway to Saigon, and helped concentrate Shorty’s mind on the case.

  He made a register of suspects in the death of Sergeant Caution, but there were no individuals, only groups: the nogs, the VC, the villagers, the National Committee for the Defence of the Dead – whoever they were. He gave another page of his notebook to people he thought might be the Mamasan. The list read: Moreau, Mr Anh, Sam Singh, Ginger Meggs, Caution, Nashville.

  There was a chance, Shorty realised, that Caution had been killed by somebody Shorty had never met, or even heard of – the family or friends of Nguyễn Van Tran, for instance, or perhaps a personal enemy in the US Army.

  Shorty read through his notebook as if it were a mystery written by somebody else. There were no women on the list.

  Fermez la porte, he thought, although he meant Cherchez la femme.

  It was early evening when Shorty arrived in Saigon, with a leave pass in his pocket and a packet of condoms the sergeant had insisted he carry, as he didn’t realise Shorty had both a girlfriend and a fiancée in South Vietnam.

  The air in the city centre tasted of gasoline. There were more real cars on the roads, big black beasts like the Captain’s Cadillac, and every driver sounded his horn, drowning the birdsong at dusk. Buildings rose taller than the trees, and none higher than Shorty’s hotel. He had been supposed to bed down at a cheap pub in Cholon, but had instead booked himself into the Caravelle, where reporters and diplomats met to exchange lies. It cost Shorty his savings, but he’d been told the rooftop bar would be the place to find the man who might help Nashville.

  Shorty stood with a beer in his hand and looked down from the tenth floor at the Opera House, the Hôtel de Ville and the spires of Notre Dame Cathedral, fractured pieces of gothic France. Among the crowd of lizards, soldiers, spies and whores in the bar, Shorty noticed a familiar face under a memorable yellow hat. He wound his way cautiously to a table at the balcony, where a small man with a big cigar tapped his spats to the music in his mind.

  ‘Izzy?’ asked Shorty.

  ‘E is,’ said Berger, and smiled. In his youth, Berger had spent a season as a stand-up comedian in the bars of Kings Cross, and this had been his catchphrase, although it had never actually caught on.

  The two men shook hands, and Berger motioned for Shorty to sit.

  ‘I thought you’d gone back to Sydney,’ said Shorty.

  Berger scratched his chin, as if he’d thought the same thing and was surprised to find himself at the Caravelle. ‘Saigon is a city of opportunity, Shorty,’ he said, ‘and the Deal figured he should play the cards he’d been dealt. Which turned out, incidentally, to be a pair of aces and three kings.’

  Berger called for a waitress and whispered in her ear. She giggled, and returned with a bottle of vintage burgundy wine and three glasses. Diane Arouse came out of the bathroom to join them. She was wearing an ao dai, with her hair up in a beehive, like a local bar girl.

  ‘Hi, cutie,’ said Diane Arouse, and kissed Shorty on the cheek.

  Shorty did not have a chance to ask what Berger was doing; Berger immediately began to tell him.

  ‘They say variety is the spice of life,’ said Berger, ‘and, as a former variety performer myself, I am forced to agree. However, irony is the relish on the side. And so it is, ironically, that I find myself in the capital of the free nation of South Vietnam, managing the very same business with which the late Sergeant Caution so recently attempted to rob me of my livelihood and, indeed, my twelve hundred dollars.’

  The waitress poured a glass of wine for Shorty, then held it to his lips so he could drink.

  ‘Isaac and I are supplying escorts for Allied officers,’ said Diane Arouse.

  ‘And we are making – if I may say so – a fucking fortune,’ said Berger. ‘For everyone.’

  He clinked glasses with Diane Arouse, then invited Shorty to join the toast.

  ‘We never went back to the Cross,’ said Berger. ‘We brought the Cross to Saigon.’

  Shorty told Berger about Nashville’s arrest, and the case and the clues, including the massacre of chickens in the village.

  ‘Ah,’ said Berger, ‘I might be able to help you there.’

  Berger turned to Diane Arouse. ‘I’d appreciate it if you could leave Shorty and I alone for a while,’ he said, ‘and perhaps turn a trick with the mug in the dark suit at the bar who is, if I’m not mistaken, the first secretary at the Australian embassy.’

  A thin man with brown hair stared silently into his whiskey sour.

  ‘It’d be good for business if you could get to know him and blow him,’ said Berger to Diane Arouse. ‘Doesn’t matter in which order.’

  Diane Arouse walked over to the first secretary and asked if she’d seen him before. She had moved in diplomatic circles in Sydney, and thought she might recognise him from a party. Did he perhaps own a leather mask?

  The first secretary looked shocked. Diane Arouse assured him she was kidding.

  Shorty held his wineglass to the light, as he had seen other men do – although he didn’t know why.

  ‘You might remember, Shorty,’ said Berger, ‘my difficulty at the Grand Hotel where, in my first night in Vung Tau, I was cunningly tricked into fucking a man in the ass. Although I was philosophical about this by the time you’d been clubbed and robbed by a cartoon character, I’d felt less lyrical after the ass-fucking in question. Hong had made a meal of the Deal, just like Caution had taken me for a fall guy, so I decided to kill him.’

  ‘You decided to kill Sergeant Caution?’ asked Shorty.

  ‘No,’ said Berger. ‘I decided to kill Hong.’

  The waitress filled Shorty’s glass.

  ‘I went back to my room and put on some clothes,’ said Berger. ‘I took the piece from my American friend and stuck it down the back of my pants. The girls at the bar told me Hong would have gone home to his village, so I jumped on a Lambretta and had the driver drop me by the rice fields. I prowled into Long Tâm Thu like a commando, Shorty. Not like an impresario. I was a wild animal. I would’ve hated to bump into me and try to make me fuck me in the ass at that moment. Of course, it was pitch dark in the village, because the Vietnamese have never invented electric light to make sure men can’t distinguish between
pussy and ass. But I knew which hut belonged to Hong because the Lambretta boy pointed it out to me, so I crawled and crept and I got past the chickens and the dogs and I sneaked right into his shack, which was as empty as a mug’s wallet. So I sat there with my pistol trained on the door, waiting for him to come home. But I fell asleep.’

  Suddenly, Shorty understood. ‘When did you shoot the chickens?’ he asked.

  ‘That morning,’ said Berger. ‘They were squawking. They gave away my position. But that was the end of it. I used up all my ammo on the chicken and the village boys heard me and they chased me off with sticks.’

  ‘So you didn’t kill Caution?’ asked Shorty.

  ‘I didn’t kill Caution and I didn’t kill Hong,’ said Berger. ‘All I killed were some chickens.’

  Shorty nodded.

  ‘The chickens,’ declared Berger, ‘were red herrings.’

  Shorty offered him a quarter-smile, just to show he’d got the joke. ‘But what I don’t understand,’ he said, ‘is why, when you went to bed with Hong, you didn’t pat the pussy first. I always pat the pussy first, even though it costs a dollar more.’

  Berger raised an eyebrow, gently rocking his yellow hat.

  ‘I think the key to the case is the Mamasan,’ said Shorty, although he had a feeling he might’ve said this before.

  ‘Fifteen minutes ago, you thought it was the chickens,’ said Berger.

  ‘Do you know who she is?’ asked Shorty.

  Berger shook his head. ‘I imagined a big fat sheila with enormous tits,’ he said.

  ‘Do you think she killed Caution?’ asked Shorty.

  ‘Smothered him, maybe,’ said Berger.

  Shorty frowned. ‘So who did kill him?’ he asked.

  Berger took a breath, to signal the start of a lecture.