R&R

by Mark Dapin

  The hut was empty.

  Shorty kicked a hole through the wall.

  Eagle pointed to a panic of disturbed dust by the fireplace. Shorty bent to touch it, felt a hatch door, and opened a tunnel. He dropped one foot inside and kicked the tunnel wall. Other units were supposed to wait for engineers to clear tunnels for booby traps, but the passageways under the huts in Long Tâm Thu didn’t lead to any sprawling underground guerrilla HQ; they were more like back doors onto a yard. They ran the length of a truck then resurfaced behind a rock or a bush.

  Shorty lowered himself into the opening. Outside, he heard a shot, and knew Simpson had spotted a runner. There was no return of fire, so Shorty assumed they had taken him down, sorted him out, brassed him up. There would be a man on the ground with a hole in his body, and through that gap would stream his life.

  Shorty scrambled through the tunnel on his elbows and knees, long, white and thin like a pipe-cleaner man, and crawled out on the other side. He saw a woman’s body, her hands clasped behind her head. She was bleeding from the mouth where she had dived into the dirt, and sobbing because she’d wet her pants.

  He reached to touch her. ‘Quyn . . .’ he said.

  ‘Fuck you fucking bastardstinkingstickcockcunts!’ she cried.

  Simpson covered Shorty with his Armalite as the interpreter bullied Quyn from yards away.

  ‘You smash my sister’s home, you fucking thindickboyballscherry­queer motherfuckers!’ screamed Quyn. She began to stand.

  ‘Stay down!’ shouted Simpson.

  ‘Tear off your fucking head,’ said Quyn to Simpson, ‘and suck your own cock.’

  Shorty grabbed her. ‘Are you okay?’ he asked her.

  ‘Drown in cherry sperm,’ said Quyn.

  Eagle jogged up to them, thrusting out his rifle, almost prodding Quyn on the breast with the barrel. Shorty pushed the gun away.

  ‘Forget it,’ said Shorty. ‘She’s just a girl from Le Boudin. She’s not VC. Her friend wanted to scare her. We’re a fucking prank.’

  An old woman lit a fire to boil water for tea. The headman shouted and waved his arms, demanding compensation for the damage to his village. The MPs relaxed into relief, their hearts slowing to a sentry’s pace. Eagle and Simpson smoked cigarettes. A small boy begged for candy. Eagle tossed a handful of jelly beans into the air. They scattered in the sand like gems torn from a necklace.

  ‘This fucking country . . .’ said Eagle.

  A cloud crossed the sun.

  ‘So this was all just a round in a fight between whores?’ Simpson asked Shorty. ‘Over what? You? Jesus Christ.’

  Quyn was sobbing, and a small stream of friends flowed towards her. She was the aunty to their babies. She loved to have children in her home. They passed close by the interpreter, almost rubbing against him, and the interpreter heard a whisper from a woman who was not like the others. He didn’t acknowledge the sound, but he came to Shorty and spoke softly, describing, without pointing, a hut on the perimeter of the hamlet, near the mouth of the tunnel.

  ‘That is the right place,’ he said.

  Shorty believed nothing the Vietnamese told him. ‘Who lives there?’ he asked the interpreter. ‘A man you owe money? You want us to kill him?’

  ‘VC,’ said the interpreter.

  ‘Oh yeah,’ said Shorty, ‘there’s VC everywhere.’

  ‘They tell me he was there,’ said the interpreter.

  ‘Do you want to take his wife?’ asked Shorty. ‘Is that it?’

  The interpreter carried on smiling and Shorty wanted to smash in his teeth with the butt of his Armalite, to knock them down like a door.

  ‘This is a war,’ said Shorty. ‘Do you people understand that?’

  The interpreter grinned.

  ‘You should get on the radio,’ said Eagle to Shorty. ‘Send the zipperheads to pick up the whore who sent us here.’

  Shorty shook his head. ‘You know what they’ll do,’ he said.

  ‘They’ll question her,’ said Eagle. ‘The hard way.’

  Shorty would not let that happen. ‘She’ll be gone when they get there,’ he said.

  Eagle spat. ‘How do they always know when someone’s coming for them?’ he asked.

  ‘Because they don’t know diddly fucking else,’ said Simpson. ‘The place they live is their whole fucking world. They don’t even know to shit in the bathroom.’

  He turned on the interpreter. ‘Look at you,’ he said, ‘you dime-show fucking Chinaman. I’m from Illinois. Do you even know where that is?’

  ‘South of Wisconsin,’ said the interpreter, ‘north of Louisiana.’

  Simpson shook his Armalite.

  The interpreter turned away from the MPs and headed towards the hut he had indicated. Shorty sighed and followed him. Eagle flanked Shorty as they approached.

  Everyone in the village was watching them, silently.

  Shorty stood at the wall, listening. ‘There’s someone inside,’ he said.

  ‘That’s because it’s someone’s fucking house,’ said Eagle.

  ‘Come out!’ shouted Shorty.

  The interpreter called the command in Vietnamese.

  ‘Fuck it,’ said Shorty, and kicked down the door.

  Inside the hut, a rope hung over a spent fire. Shorty was in a smokehouse, for curing pork. A hatch opened in the floor and the onyx-eyed boy Hai sprang out like Elmer Fudd on his short, fat legs. He’d jumped down the tunnel from its exit in the bush, and scrambled twenty-five yards through a darkness of spiders to get to the hut before Shorty.

  Hai stared at Shorty, terrified, but darted towards the line. Shorty trained his gun on Hai’s head, which was almost as big as his body.

  I didn’t come here to kill children, he thought.

  The boy grabbed meat from the rope and disappeared into the hole.

  When Eagle followed Shorty inside, he didn’t know Hai had ever been there. He saw the open lid of the tunnel, but his eyes fixed on the last item on the line. Fastened to the rope, above the embers, among ham hocks and loins, was the head of a man, mouth open, eyes wide, as if it were looking for its body.

  ‘I know him,’ said Shorty.

  The head had belonged to Mickey, the Vietnamese MP whose body had been discarded outside Le Boudin. It had been smoked, to preserve it.

  The boy had run off with the other two human parts on the cord. Pegged next to the head had been a pair of ears.

  The troops built a compound from fence posts and wire, rounded up the villagers and herded them inside, sullen cattle with flies resting in the corners of their eyes. The interpreter took out suspects one at a time – the women bovine, the men bucking – and threatened them with white mice, the ARVN and US bombs.

  Shorty took Quyn to the headman’s empty hut. He gave her tea and cigarettes, and watched and loved her while she sat and hated him. He asked her few questions, but she spoke readily, with the detached, ethereal voice of a spirit that has already joined the ancestors.

  ‘I was with Caution the night he killed Nguyễn Van Tran,’ she said. ‘He was drunk, driving his jeep too fast in the dark, and he hit the uncle by accident. Caution stopped and I thought he would try to save him, but he cradled the uncle like a baby and felt him die.

  ‘I looked in Caution’s eyes and he was happy, because he had finally taken a man’s life. I hated him, Shorty, but I had to be his woman. I only went with him because he could get what Moreau needed.’

  Shorty wanted to reach out and hold her.

  ‘He liked to tell me about the body,’ said Quyn, ‘and how the old man had changed as his spirit slipped out. He talked about it when we were fucking. He kept his hands around my throat.’

  She touched her own neck, which Shorty had kissed a dozen times.

  ‘When he was excited,’ she said, ‘he squeezed.’

  Shorty found he wanted to kill a man who was already dead.

  ‘When the corpse was with the coffin maker,’ said Quyn, ‘Caution got drunk. He drove me to the works
hop in the night. I thought he wanted to look at the body one more time before the burial. But when he took the lid off the box, he gave me a knife and told me to cut off the ears. He couldn’t do it himself because his fingers shook, because there was only beer and whiskey in his blood and in his brain. He knew the old man was my uncle, but he wanted the ears to take home to America. He’d heard the stories the GIs tell to frighten the whores, of men who wear necklaces of ears, who hang them outside their tents, who collect them for their officers to show how many little Vietnamese they have killed. This was the kind of man Caution wanted to be, not just a fucking cop. He needed evidence that he too had taken a life. I worked for a butcher, Shorty. I knew how to cut clean.

  ‘Afterwards, he fucked me on the lid of the casket.’

  Shorty tilted back his head to hold the tears in his eyes.

  ‘When the body first came into the bar, I sent the note,’ said Quyn. ‘I didn’t know Caution would shoot him. I hoped it would drive him mad. Later, when he was drunk and looking for a fight, I sent the note to Nashville. Yes, I hoped Nashville would kill him, but I know he did not.’

  ‘How do you know?’ asked Shorty.

  ‘I sent the note before the fight,’ said Quyn. ‘I didn’t know he was already in the bars. He went home after Caution had beaten him, and found it on his pillow.’

  ‘Quyn . . .’ said Shorty, stretching out his hand.

  ‘Fuck you, cherry boy,’ she spat. ‘I hope you die in this war.’

  She turned her back until he had left the hut.

  The smokehouse belonged to nobody, the headman assured the interpreter. The terrorists must have used the tunnel to get in.

  Was the beheaded soldier killed in Long Tâm Thu?

  Nothing had been killed in Long Tâm Thu but chickens.

  Did the headman realise what would happen to his village?

  Yes, but what could he do? He hoped his people could be moved together and would be allowed back to tend the graves.

  And what of your future, the headman asked the interpreter.

  TWENTY-NINE

  The snakeman had walked the streets of Vung Tau before the French built their mansions in the hills, before the church spires stretched higher than pagodas, and before the bars grew out of the sand. But even the father of all the fishermen, with his silver earrings and pillbox eyes, could not recall the snakeman as a boy.

  The snakeman tended no graves, and burned no incense for ancestors. The market women believed he was born of snake, and told ribald stories about the size of his father. The fishermen said he shed his skin in a single piece, and hid from the sun while fresh flesh grew.

  The snakeman spoke with a hissing lisp, which was only heard when he bought his lychees or bricks of tobacco. His eyes seemed hooded, as he kept them half-closed. His leaf hat shaded the top half of his face.

  Although everyone in Vung Tau knew the snakeman, none could describe his features. When they looked at him, they saw only the snake. The python was like his second head, with a slothful, malevolent stare, and the fangs of Mara the demon. When the snakeman took the python from his shoulders, he disappeared.

  Nobody saw the snakeman, but the snakeman saw everything. He had seen the French march in and march out, and the first GIs storm the beach, charging in full kit, as if they expected to come under fire from the pimps and whores. He had observed the arrival of the Australians and wondered where their country might be, and why these men would come from so far away to hunt Vietnamese.

  He had stood in the shadows by the side of the road when Caution in the jeep had run over Nguyễn Van Tran. He had been camped on the hill the evening the casket of Nguyễn Van Tran had carried him away from his ancestors, and the night Nashville had chased Caution to his death. He had watched the VC unload the headless body of the man the Americans called Mickey on the doorstep of Le Boudin. For the snakeman there was no horror in death. It was simply another event to be witnessed and remembered. He had seen armies rise from the sea and watched them sink back into the ocean.

  The snakeman lived curled in a rope in the tunnel where the boys had tried to pull Shorty the night he met Ginger Meggs. Quyn stepped out of a Lambretta and walked off the highway to the place where the brazier had burned. She tapped her foot on a patch of unmarked ground and the snakeman opened his entrance and carried her inside. He guided her on her knees through his lair, past broken birds’ nests and the skeletons of mice. His catacombs smelled of dried droppings in wet earth, of the life of an animal that no longer walked the world. He whistled through his tongue as he led Quyn to her chamber. She could hide here until the monsoon was over, and the dry season brought new detachments of Americans and Australians, who had never heard of TJ Caution, Nguyễn Van Tran or Baby Marie.

  She paid for her sanctuary with a kiss.

  Through country deserted by birds, the remaining two sections of Ten Platoon moved in the long grass with exaggerated mime-artists’ steps. The diggers were almost silent, barely breathing. Their new forward scout was Titch, who had replaced Reffo at the head of the patrol. He was a big man with a light step, already popular in his section, even though Reffo was missed.

  They had been in the bush for two days when they harboured for the night and set up an ambush by the side of a trail they thought the VC used to move between Long Tâm Thu and their base in the hills. It was nine p.m. when Tony the Wog, now made up to a corporal, heard the laughter of men on the track.

  Ten Platoon remained still, their chests pressed tight against the ground, looking towards the trip wire, invisible in the night. Tony the Wog was determined to kill two nogs to make up for Tommy Callaghan and the Reffo. No, six nogs. No, ten. He wanted to knock every fucking one of them for what they had done to his mates. He wanted to blow their shitty fucking country to hell.

  The soldiers couldn’t see the laughing men, even when they were almost upon them. They wore black robes in the dark, as if a part of the night. But when a noggie ankle hit the wire and Claymores started jumping, Tony the Wog ordered his men to shoot everything Vietnamese, anything that was not a part of Ten Platoon.

  The gunner shredded the men with his M16. He turned the peasants into dog meat. The battle-intelligence guys searched the dead men’s bags, brushing aside shreds of skin and shards of bone, wiping their documents clean of blood. The guerrillas were carrying Mickey the MP’s ID papers, and Sergeant Caution’s wallet.

  When the news arrived at ALSG, Shorty was drinking alone in the provosts’ bar, where he’d last shared a beer with Jack Adams. The duty sergeant told him about the signal they’d received from Tony the Wog’s patrol, and Shorty was determined to get Nashville out of Long Binh that day. The transport sergeant had nothing going to the base, but he knew a bunch of Louisiana chopper pilots had heard Moreau was cooking lobster, and had flown in for lunch to crack claws at Le Boudin. Shorty might be able to hitch a lift with them, if he hurried.

  It was a fierce afternoon in Vung Tau, and Back Beach frothed with surf as the snakeman watched Shorty enter Le Boudin. The Louisiana chopper pilots were gone, but Nashville and Moreau were laughing lazily, sharing a bottle of burgundy wine.

  Shorty was astonished to find his partner in the bar. He wanted to run over and hug him, but he’d never hugged a man and wouldn’t have known where to put his hands.

  ‘Shorty!’ cried Nashville. ‘My hero!’

  Nashville had Tâm balanced on his knee, her blouse unbuttoned to the belly. While Nashville drank and fondled her, he also smoked a cigar. Each time he inhaled, Tâm plucked the Havana from between his lips and, when he was ready for another puff, she replaced it.

  There was a black space like an open gate in the space where his front teeth used to be. Nashville caught Shorty staring at his mouth.

  ‘Ah, don’t worry,’ he said. ‘They were dentures anyway.’

  There was a patch of hair shaved off the side of his head, where surgeons had laced up his skin like a football.

  Shorty allowed his eyes to run acr
oss Nashville’s face. Swellings bubbled beneath his cheeks and brow.

  ‘Hell, it looks like I dipped my head in honey and stuck it in a beehive, don’t it?’ asked Nashville.

  He looked at Tâm and squeezed her thigh. ‘Well, I guess that’s exactly what I did,’ he said.

  Nashville offered Tâm his defanged smile. ‘Honey,’ he said, and blew her a kiss.

  She giggled, pretending to be the girl Nashville knew she wasn’t, and whom she’d never impersonated until that day. Moreau, Tâm and Nashville were all grinning, but even Shorty could see Nashville was the only person who was happy.

  When Nashville prodded him, Moreau offered the cigar box to Shorty.

  ‘Cubain,’ he said. He poured Shorty a cup of wine.

  Nashville nudged aside Tâm, grabbed Shorty by the shoulders and pulled him to his chest. Shorty clasped his hands behind Nashville’s back.

  ‘But how did you get out of Long Binh?’ he asked.

  Nashville tapped Moreau on the kepi. ‘The legionnaire remem­bered,’ he said.

  Moreau smiled modestly. ‘I am an old man, Monsieur Short,’ he said, ‘and an opiomane. I live for my drug, and that is why I stay in Vung Tau. But sometimes, my days are like dreams.’ He shook his head slowly, a harmless old fool who despaired of himself.

  ‘And do you know what jogged his memory?’ asked Nashville. ‘At first, it was the news of your daring fucking raid on Long Tâm Thu. That was what shook the cobwebs. But as soon as Moreau heard – by what fucking means, I’ve got no idea – that the Aussies had greased the VC carrying Caution’s documents, the whole night came back to him, and he raced to Long Binh on Tâm’s clockwork fucking scooter to tell them he suddenly recalled how he actually had spoken to me after the fight and shown me to the back room. What a piece of luck!’