by David Rabe
Rasputin grins. His chuckle is a deep, happy, whining sound going off in his throat. “The kid gone?”
“Yeah.”
“Them kids gotta scramble, man.”
A candle moves across a window behind Rasputin’s head and Whitaker strains to glimpse the hand that holds it. Tossing aside his cigarette, he lights the one Rasputin offers, for the air is sweet already with the smoke of Rasputin’s exhalations. The cigarette, thin and wrinkled, more flat than round, is a Kent that has been emptied and repacked. “Now we gonna go get some sweet ass that’s young,” Whitaker says, hoping he sounds and looks experienced. He takes his first drag deep, a warm wind to blow through his mind, down and around with his blood. He pants for some additional air to help draw the thick smoke in; it is slightly acrid in his nostrils; he feels needles in his lungs, as he watches the joint go back and forth. It’s dark, he sees. Night. He and Rasputin are walking, and then in a different place, having strayed a ways among the shanties with Rasputin telling stories to which Whitaker scarcely listened. In the strangeness of his mind, wavy and slow, he is graceful and cool. He reaches way back, and punches Rasputin hard in the back of the head and watches him fall; he yells, “You’re it, Rasputin,” and goes running off to skid in mud and hide among chickens, his back to the wall of a house, his arms embracing the large urn behind which he has crouched for concealment. Chickens squawk crazily and rock on their stubby legs. He sees the bumps like blisters all over their ugly legs and feet. Their knees are bending wrongways. All exploding feathers, one bounces slowly in the air. Where’s Rasputin? Does Whitaker know? Yes, he thinks, remembering the long, slow flight of his fist through the air. Did he do that graceful blow for a reason? The stench of the chickens is strong: their old droppings and stale water mix with the decay of half-rotted grain. Grime is embedded in their bodies, he believes, in the filthy fibers of their feathers. He wonders a moment about Rasputin. Yes. His mind seeks to find Rasputin in the complex village taking shape in his imagination, all byways, alleys, lightless shanties. East? North? He tries nooks and crannies, but comes, he thinks, upon Xom, lost and lonely. But when he looks he’s all by himself, kneeling somewhere strange with no one near but chickens. He blinks, weary of the game. He glances right, preparing to stand—he will rise to return to the compound to play some poker—and then he is staring into the face of an old man, wrinkled and tawny, tufts of a white, wispy goatee. Not two feet away from Whitaker, the man’s eyes sparkle crazily behind a window of wire mesh, and Whitaker is terrified, while the old man covers his mouth and giggles with great pleasure at the fulfillment of a little joke.
Whitaker leaves hurriedly, hoping to tell Rasputin about this ambush. But he has no idea where Rasputin is. The alleyways wind and twist. He fears he’s wandering deeper into the maze of wherever he’s walking. The high-pitched chatter inside the little houses is coming less often, growing fainter. Is everybody lying down to go to sleep? The whole of the night becomes quieter and quieter, deeper and darker, until the loud slap of feet brings breathless American voices toward him. They come from out of nowhere, two kids in jungle fatigues, the first one flying by without a word, but the second, bigger, thicker, tells him, “Run, run.” Whitaker freezes, wheels, then chases after them. He gets within a yard of the last kid, who’s huffing and puffing, “Shit, shit, shit.”
Afraid to shout, Whitaker whispers, “What is it? What is it?”
“What?”
“Is it VC?”
“No, man, it’s the fucking MPs!”
Relieved, Whitaker is instantly and differently scared. They veer around a corner. The alley zigzags, then straightens out. He passes a lane that runs to the left and sees white-helmeted MPs, at least three or four of them, flash by on a parallel walkway that intersects with the one he’s looking down. It’s a sweep of the off-limits village. They’re hunting down soldiers who’ve gone AWOL and are hiding out, or anybody they find, because nobody should be there. The two kids in jungle fatigues are climbing a gray corrugated tin fence directly ahead and maybe eight feet high. The one has grasped the top edge and is straining to throw his right leg up and over. The second is jumping for a handhold. The fence shakes and wobbles. As Whitaker runs up, the metal groans under the stress of their attack. With a sudden shrill squeal it collapses. They tumble toward him, and he jumps back to get out of their way. But the fence isn’t a fence. It’s the wall of somebody’s house that they’ve pulled down. A whole family is sitting there uncovered. Kids, three or four, a woman, the man rising to his feet. There’s a steaming black cookstove. It looks like they were having dinner. They’re all shouting and screeching, the baby’s crying. They’re all angry and scolding. Dogs are barking in three or four different directions.
The two GIs scramble past him, saying, “Xin loi, Xin loi.”
“Sorry,” the big one yells.
Whitaker turns to run after them.
17
Way far away and hard to believe at first, traces of car horns and variously pitched engines call to him with hints of which way to go. The whine of Lambrettas, Hondas, and mechanized cyclos; the grumble of jeeps, taxis, trucks, along with the music piped into the night from bars, guide him through the confusion of all those hovels and out into the bright bustle of downtown Bien Hoa. When he steps from the backstreets into the open air, he is sweaty and gasping and insanely thirsty. He bends, his hands on his knees. He wants a cigarette, but has lost his pack. He gratefully locates the nub of grass still in his pocket and salvages one last toke huddled near a wall. When he straightens, it’s weird how the first thing he expects to see is Xom and Rasputin. But all he sees is everybody else. He buys a pack of Camels and climbs into the cab of a Lambretta to cruise down the streets of shops and many bars, inside one of which he will find Xom and Rasputin, he is sure. But suddenly, it is sometime later and he is lolling alone in his Lambretta, smoking a cigarette, while fields drift past beyond the trees alongside the road. The moon is yellow. He has a slight headache and is very very thirsty. Maybe too thirsty to live. It scares him to have drunk so much and smoked on top of it. The fear spins a little, floats in his head, falls to his stomach. He’ll get killed one of these days, dead in a ditch, a corpse, beautiful no more, shit. Glancing at his watch—9:05—he pats his pocket to feel the comfort of the knife he carries folded there. He slips it out, keeping it hidden after levering the tip open against his thigh. He looks at the driver’s silhouette and thinks of the road and the wheels turning under them. Then he hears a surprising sound. It’s a chorus of girls’ voices, somewhere ahead in the dark. He leans out the slatted side of the cab. Before him on the right-hand edge of the road, figures dart through the frame of light cast from the windows of a shanty. Another light appears, narrow, quivering, the wan projection of what he thinks is a Lambretta parked on the shoulder, the engine sputtering to life. Then the poor beam of Whitaker’s vehicle touches the scene, revealing three girls bidding farewell to a GI who is climbing onto the back of a motor scooter. They seem to have come from a building that sits in a clearing just off the road. He thinks he remembers passing it in daylight, and what he remembers is blue stone situated in white gravel. On impulse, grinning Whitaker says, “Stop. Dung Lye,” to his driver as the girls yelp and hop about the scooter beginning to move. Whitaker has a peculiar feeling. Without plan or map to chart the night, he may have had a stroke of luck. Will he find a little cutie china doll? Blasted on beer and pot, wayward amid all those back alleys, he is here. The lingering beer and grass have soaked his blood in self-infatuation. He feels, with reasonless excitement, at the center of a big accomplishment.
When the scooter has buzzed away fifty feet or so, the taller two girls move side by side toward the house, while the third, the smallest, dances after the departing scooter, and then jumps up and down until nothing is any longer visible down the road.
Whitaker wonders briefly about the late hour—dare he risk taking the time to get laid now? And then he worries that these girls aren’t whores, but
just girls. But wouldn’t whores be the only ones saying good-bye to a GI in the dark at this hour? He has paid the Lambretta driver. The engine throttles up behind him. “Hello,” he says to the remaining girl. She turns. “Chao co,” he says. “Hello.”
Though skinny and slouching, a little boyish in her build, she seems an amazingly beautiful whore dressed in blue slacks and a pale blue shirt that hangs loose about her hips. His earlier excitement calls to him with its claim that it looks like his hope for good luck is coming true. Or will she tell him to go on and just dee-dee on down the road, no more ass tonight. “You got a beer?” he says.
“For sure,” she says. “C’mon.”
“Coke, too.”
“Okay. For sure.”
As they enter the little house, Whitaker pauses in the doorway to glance down the darkened road. He feels a little regret and wonders if his watch is right. Curfew is ten o’clock. Out beyond that time will mean he must stay out all night or risk being reported for returning late. And what if the VC find him naked and humping? Well, they’d shoot his ass? He should go back. Or what if MPs haul his naked ass off to the clink, the motherfucking clink?
The girl is grinning at him from across the room, having gone away and come back with Bommniba Beer 33 in a bottle and Coke in a can. Her buoyancy puzzles him, as does her beauty, and he begins to believe it’s all a mistake. He starts to doubt his good luck, the odds shifting toward his earlier worry that she is no whore. She has opened both the bottle and can for him, and the ice in which they were kept has left them cold, wet, and flecked with sawdust. Taking them from her hands, he decides she’s just too happy go lucky; her eagerness and enthusiasm can’t belong to somebody who’s been screwing all day. Now he searches for the other girls, the replacements, expecting them to enter, old and ugly, the ones he’ll get to fuck after being aroused by this pretty one.
“Okay,” she says, “c’mon,” pointing to a bench along the wall. He obeys and sits and she departs. A moment later, he glimpses her through an open window between the rooms. He guzzles the Coke, takes a long drink of beer, and glowers at the floor. He cannot believe money will be enough to buy him the loveliness of this girl. She will vanish like Sharon; he could not have Sharon. He does not get loveliness. The others will appear. That was the routine in all the bars: young girls lured and aroused you, their ripe, sweet softness the dream that got you going. Then you were ready, swollen and eager, and the young girl was gone—slipped away like air. The back-alley room where you went was full of old women, ugly girls. In them you rubbed yourself into release, ignoring their bitterness and boredom.
Mired in these thoughts, their dismal claim on his future, he is surprised when the girl returns to sit upon his lap. Then her hand fits into his crotch; the fingers seek to cradle, then pet, his balls. She whispers, Troi oi. And he says nothing, looking at the wall of cracked stone beside the makeshift window through which he can see the neighboring house where maybe the Mamasan lives. The tingling in his crotch is sweet; still he does not believe. He thinks to put his hand to her tit and finds a handful of largely padded bra.
“Yeah, yeah.” She smiles. “You like me do prick you. Maybe long-time. All right. Do fuck-fuck all night.”
“You,” he says again, pointing at her.
“Lan,” she says. “For sure. No sweat.”
“Lan.”
“Can do fuck-fuck me. Lan.”
What is it that forbids him to believe he will have her? He will spend money anytime for the body of a woman. To spend money for the body of a woman seems to him a theft in which he is clever and devious and enviably bold. He believes that he knows that when they bargain for dollars, they don’t know what they’re doing; they are settling for less than what they secretly know they secretly want, though what that is, exactly, he doesn’t know and doesn’t have to know. He feels it and believes what he feels, just as he believes in theft and unanswered questions, and paying as little attention as possible to his own thinking.
Now the two other girls shuffle through the room and he examines them with curiosity, aware for the first time of something strange in their coloration, an oddity in their features. “No Vietnam,” he says and they giggle under his scrutiny.
“Indian,” says his girl. “Sisters. Same-same.”
“Indians?”
“For sure.”
They are big breasted as Americans, their hair lacquered stiff with PX hair spray. Indians from India. The mystery of their presence here makes him feel that the world is huge and as full of surprises as a crackerjacks box. It makes him want to give an Indian war whoop, while in the corner the two girls appear to be preparing for departure; their purpose in the room is to transfer small articles from a shelf to a suitcase.
Lan has his hard prick lying up against his belly where she is petting it with her thumb, her body shielding the activity from the others’ view. That she is so thoughtful, so private, pleases him, though his bulging trousers could hardly be a cause for embarrassment here, even if seen. Still, he’s glad. “Can do short-time now, okay?”
“No, no,” she says.
He feels doomed the instant he hears her denial and the urge to throw her across the room twitches in his hands.
“Long-time,” she says. “Do you long-time. All night, okay? Sleep me.” And to convince him she gives the tip of his prick an affectionate little twist that makes him swallow hard and blink.
A jeep pulls onto the space of ground in front of the shanty, headlights winking out before the wheels cease. The two girls, giggling, dart out the door.
“Boucoup GI,” says Lan.
They enter, tough-looking, stocky young men, who nod to Whitaker with Lan sitting on his lap. He puts his arm across her thigh so his fingers dangle against her crotch.
She whispers, close to him: “Sleep all night, okay. Ti ti, they di di mau.”
The two girls, having gone for beer, return and settle into the arms of the new arrivals, while Whitaker, giving in to the residue of the pot and the gaseous lulling alcohol of his beer, begins to drift. Sitting with his prick pleasantly hard, the urge to ride is arousing but peaceful because satisfaction is certain. As he drifts, he dreams and circles around the question of staying through the night. Not only might he die by Vietcong, but should his absence from camp be discovered, he would be AWOL. He needs to go. Right now. It’s not too late. Even if he ends up with some kind of punishment for being out past curfew, he’d be better off than ending up dead. It’s good advice, and he knows it, but it seems intended for somebody else. He thinks of being AWOL, and likes the idea of the label beside his name, the sense it gives of who he is. Just then he starts, called by something he’s picked up on in the air without even knowing he was looking. It pulls him from his thoughts into the room, where he recognizes nervousness in the other two GIs. They laugh too loudly. Whitaker asks where they’re from, meaning the name of their military unit, and they tell him, “Louisiana.” They wear MACV patches. They smile and eye each other, but their girls do not like them. Whitaker can feel it somehow, like he’s reading everybody’s mind. Wonderfully confident now in the luxury of Lan having chosen him, he feels how much better he is than these strangers. One of the big Indian girls, shifting clumsily for comfort, slips and with a loud yell plops to the floor. Whitaker laughs heartily, and while she struggles up, babbling and embarrassedly scolding the GI who dropped her, everyone giggles and looks at one another as if to say how happy they all are to be there together.
Later Lan enters from the shadows of the back room into the flickering light of the front and Whitaker sees the pink of her panties bulging through the side of her slacks where the zipper isn’t holding. He will be there soon, he thinks. But then her hand leaps to cover the hole in her clothing, and shame flashes in her eyes. She tugs the shirttail down to cover the pinkness. Whitaker doesn’t understand and then he thinks he does. But it’s hard to believe that she’s embarrassed by the shabbiness of her clothes, that she went to the trouble of keeping
her long shirt untucked all evening to conceal a broken zipper. She is bent near him, whispering now that she is going away for a minute. Will he stay the night? One thousand five hundred Ps.
“Yes,” he says. “You.”
“No sweat. I go. Tee-tee, I come back.” Before departing she delivers a smiling statement to the Indian girls, who grin knowingly to each other and giggle and nod.
Whitaker, watching her shifting buttocks as she leaves, is drinking beer and thinking, I’ll fix her transmission. I’ll change her oil. I’ll look right down her carburetor’s throat and aim my flashlight and move the fuckin’ throttle linkage and watch the gas spray until the throat is wet. Whitaker sees Lan below him as a sleek, fierce auto; he squeezes a tit to change a gear. He jams his pedal to her floor and, fingers twisting in her hair, drives her down a sweating, squealing two lane.
“Hey,” says one of the Louisiana boys, “you come here a lot?”
“Yeah,” says Whitaker.
“She your girl?”
“Yeah.”
“She sure is a good one.”
At that instant, she passes across the open doorway between the rooms, a metal basin and towel balanced in her hands.
“She’s gonna take a bath,” says the shorter Louisiana boy incredulously.
“That’s right,” says Whitaker.
“Ain’t that somethin’,” he says. “Takes good care of herself for you. That’s good. Keeps herself clean.”
“You ain’t ever been here before, huh?” says Whitaker. “I thought maybe you were good friends with them two girls.”
“Oh, no,” says one.
The other is standing up, stretching. “Did she say somethin’ about you and long-time, if I heard right? Don’t you worry about gettin’ your throat cut sleepin’ out all night around here? I don’t think I could sleep so good just gooks around.”
“Yeah, and what about bed check in your unit?”