by David Rabe
“Ohhhhh,” he says, and shakes his head. This is not what he wants. “Must go compound.”
“Buy me one orange.”
It’s late; he’s tired. “Must go compound,” he tells her.
“Tee-tee. We go my house. I do prick you.”
The complete absence in him of any interest in getting laid is so amazing, momentarily, that it makes him stare and think. She pouts. And then it seems that going to the compound is a kind of spell, too, only weaker than the one cast by her nearness, no more than a vague urge that is evaporating and leaving him there. He’ll do a good deed, she feels so bad. “Okay,” he says. “One orange.” She springs to her feet and comes out the door.
The stall toward which she guides him is in front of a shanty with a ragged canopy shading three closely arranged tables and chairs. It’s located near the road but below a shoulder so steep it has the appearance of a ditch. Lan keeps looking at him with an unnervingly happy expression and Whitaker, walking, has the sensation that by letting her hold his hand this way he’s being hauled into a realm outside the rule most GIs adhere to, which is that you give nothing but your hard-on and your money to these whores. It’s not a distinction that he likes or wants. Anxiety stirs as they enter under the shadowy roof, and he wonders at her power to pull him here. With grand gestures and eyes full of pride, she orders a Coke for him, an orange for herself, and then snuggles onto his lap for all the world of rumbling trucks, jeeps, and buzzing scooters to gawk at. In his gut there rolls a wave of resentment, and he wishes the dark would hurry up.
Plunging within inches of the edge of the steep shoulder, a jeep clanks to a halt, sending up dust and pebbles. The brawny lieutenant who springs from behind the wheel wears the lightning-bolt patch of the 25th Infantry Division. In clipped, hard tones he speaks to Lan of someone, a girl, Whitaker guesses, a name that sounds like Cam the way he says it. Lan explains that Cam has gone away. Lan doesn’t know where, but, “Cam say to say him her love. Cam boucoup love him.” The lieutenant says he’ll come back tomorrow. “For sure,” says Lan. When the man’s eyes pass over Whitaker plopped there with his whore on his lap, they have a fierce and cool hate.
She is playing with his ear. Her pressing body increases the already stifling heat, making his sweat pour. A kind of fear, nameless and taunting, is loose in him. When a chugging Lambretta goes by with a couple of GIs aboard, he thinks they smirk at him, and then the proprietor of the stall lowers the canopy and chatters at Lan, who makes it clear they should move inside. Hardly have the drinks arrived when Whitaker has to rise and go pee. He staggers out the back considering clandestine flight. But thoughts of her sad face, his power to change it just by saying he would buy her an orange drink hold him. His nagging inability to forget how he did nothing while standing by and watching a man beat her pulls at him to go back. His guilt is a hole through which she can reach him at any time, and she doesn’t even know it’s there. It’s laughable. And now two drunken Vietnamese soldiers stand on either side of her as he returns. Coming around the corner, he stops. She sits at one of the little tables shifted inside. The edge of the wall against which his hand is pressed has a weatherworn, splintering surface. His immediate confusion brings on tension that flows into his fingers and turns them rigid. With care, he starts across the space of ground between himself and them, thinking he will check and double-check the situation. They are after this girl he wants to be rid of. So what is this slow, steady grind of anger that has begun to claim him? Another American soldier is there. In the gray air, a freckle-faced kid lounges on his side on a bench, his fingers tapping the top of his beer. Whitaker can’t recall seeing him before, and he notices, also, the strangeness of how there has been no response yet to his arrival. The owner lights an oil lamp, and the flickering reveals the tiger-striped ARVNs as the pair who jeered at him earlier. Lan’s brief happiness is gone. She looks downcast and sullen, her gaze on the floor. The men, in their camouflage fatigues splotched with variations of green and black, have jungle hats hanging on their backs from strings around their throats; they babble and poke at her. He tries to see if they have weapons and wonders whether the lumps in their baggy trousers are grenades, but there’s no way to tell.
Near enough now to perceive in the dimness the other American’s gaze, he frowns at what he thinks is sneering amusement, and halts, suddenly reluctant to go any closer. Faltering here, he is spotted by one of the ARVNs; the tawny face grins, like a light going on. The man yelps to his friend and points at Whitaker.
“Hello,” says the one who spotted him. “GI, hey, you see. I talk you numba fuckin’ ten girl.” He points at Lan. “Okay, numba fuckin’ ten thou, you see?”
“What’s goin’ on?” says Whitaker.
“Here’s the deal,” drawls the other GI. “They feel like she oughtta go back of the shed with ’em. You know. Suck ’em off; give ’em blow jobs, screw ’em, whatever, and she’s bein’ coy, like she don’t know what they’re sayin’.”
Halfway through this languid explanation, Whitaker has become aware of the intense focus of Lan’s eyes upon him. “You understand gook talk?” he says to the GI.
“Hey, Whitaker,” she says.
“I got me an ear for languages, shit.”
At the call of Whitaker’s name, the farthest Vietnamese bends close to her, his voice humming. Now she shudders and starts to rise, her venomous, pained words striking out at the man, who puts his hand in her face and shoves her down.
“She don’t have to go with ’em, does she?” says Whitaker.
“Let ’em be, man.”
“If she don’t wanna go with ’em why does she have to?”
“They’re the closest thing we got to TV, man. I’m watchin’. Dig it.”
The three Vietnamese have turned from one another to study this exchange; they seem to know it deals with them.
“You gonna get that poor girl cut anyway, man, you get in their way,” says the languid GI. “I’m tellin’ you.”
“What?”
“It’s a family matter.”
“Hey, Whitaker,” says Lan.
“You really think they’d cut her? I mean, you sayin’ they’d really do that? Cut her throat?”
“Why not?”
“Hey,” says Lan again, “Whitaker.” And in her tone of desperate supplication, Whitaker hears something clear and true. She prefers him to these other men—she prefers him and wants him to do something. He looks at her and her eyes tell him to duck the lie taking hold of him, the ploy that he’s heard before and will hear again, the standard bullshit SOP that says that if he fails to stand up for her, it is for her benefit that he fails. He’s saving her life by letting these little fuckers mess with her. Bullshit, he thinks. Bullshit. Who would know better than she would if there was any danger of them coming in the night to hurt her? And if she knew such a danger was real, would she ask him to intercede? And was she asking? The obvious answer shows the trick for what it is. The lie is so glaring it makes him ashamed to have nearly bought it. Ever since he let that fucking jerkoff mess with her, he has felt like half a man. He sees through the fading bullshit to the one simple thing he can give this girl. He will not let himself off the hook the way he already did once today. He will ask Lan what she wants. He will not impose himself on her, but these others won’t either. If she wants to go with them, she can, though he knows she doesn’t, for they are barely scratches in his awareness, thin presences, reedlike wrists and legs, and they are petty and cruel. The louder of the two has his fingers twisted in Lan’s hair. She is squealing at him. Standing there, Whitaker gets a sudden whiff of pleasure and a touch of pity when he thinks of the anger and self-loathing these scrawny men must feel at the sight of a person of Whitaker’s size. Their woman prefers the stranger. He understands; they must yearn to be tall and burly. “Hey,” he says, stepping forward, and all three turn with questioning eyes.
“Lan,” he says. “What you want?”
“Eeaaaaaaa?” she says.
“Don’t worry, buddy boy,” says Whitaker. “I’m on my own.”
“Indeed.”
Lan is standing, insolent and daring; she stomps her foot and says, “Shit.”
Whitaker’s move has put uncertainty into the situation. The Vietnamese men are tense beneath a guise of jovial ease. But neither Whitaker nor the two of them can any longer be certain of the condition in which they will leave this moment. The effect of his arrival has strengthened Lan while weakening the others. The man who clutched her wrist is hesitant about grabbing her again.
“What you want?” he says again.
She does not respond for a moment as she and the men are illuminated with a flash of headlights, while a truck and trailer-load of bombs en route to the air base roars past. The beams shred on the walls, their faces, and the earth quakes a little.
“Lan,” says Whitaker.
Her fearful expression transforms to disgust and then joy as she faces him. Her grin delights him. “Numba ten,” she says. “They numba fuckin’ ten.”
“For sure,” he says.
“Di di mau.”
“Di di mau,” says Whitaker. “Get outta here,” and like ghosts they go, retreating from his voice as if his voice controls them. They vanish among the shanties with a swiftness Whitaker did not anticipate, leaving the other GI chuckling in an eerily amused and lazy voice as he rises to begin his own departure.
“Chao co,” he says to Lan, and then he gives Whitaker a look and says, “Chao ong.” He’s called Whitaker “Mister” in Vietnamese, delivering a half-assed dig because Whitaker has behaved decently toward a slope whore. The kid’s small-minded ignorance amuses Whitaker. He will refuse the insult. He will refuse everything about it. Whitaker will drink a slow beer before traveling leisurely back to the compound in a glow of self-respect for having acted as he believes he should.
Now the dark thickens into night and the lure of Lan’s body grows with the passing time. Seated on his lap, she tells him about the Vietnamese soldiers, while a stranger with a case of trinkets and a gleefully demented grin arrives from the road. “Talk me do him no money,” she says. “Numba fuckin’ ten do him no money. Okay. For sure. I talk him, ‘No sweat, gimme tee-tee money.’ ‘No money,’ him say. ‘Shit,’ I say. ‘No money, bulls’it.’ You know, bulls’it.” The peddler sets his case open on the tabletop close by, and at the sight of his display Lan thrills and squirms, even as she is unable to quit her explanation without making sure the injustice of what happened is fully clear. “Him no can be nice. Boucoup Cheap Charlies,” she says. “Sau, sau, sau. Must have money. No money, numba fuckin’ ten. Crazy,” she says. She pats her head where the one pulled her hair. “Hurt Lan.” Waving her fingers over the colorful tray of cosmetics and jewelry, she peeks up at him, “You buy, okay? Okay, Whitaker?”
With the same old pouting look operating on him again, as if he’s nobody, as if he just walked in, he begins to wonder just how stupid she thinks he is. As she stands and leans over the peddler, resentment heats up in him at what seems her increasingly presumptuous demands. She examines the beads, the rings and bracelets. She giggles and speaks excitedly, patting the old man’s hand, and a thought comes to Whitaker as if from the back of her thin neck, the slant of her shoulders bowed over the booty she loves: she is working him like a hustler. He’s a patsy for a fucking whore. In bright-eyed delight, she presents to him a blue plastic compact containing a fluffy powder puff, a silver mirror, and pink powder. “You buy me, Whitaker? Give him money.”
Deciding that with this request she is sabotaging the terms between them, which began with his desire to help her, he agrees, happy to regress, if that’s what she wants, happy with the amount of arousal his prick feels, looking at the darkened indentations of her dress at her crotch. He’ll get a short-time. She spins in glee while the peddler happily counts Whitaker’s money and Whitaker experiences a sense of diminishment. He had wanted a kind of simple decency between them and now it is gone. As Lan clicks shut the tacky little trinket, she locks the possibility away. “Shit,” he says, recalling Sharon’s marriage to money. “Do short-time.” He brings her face around, wanting to get things moving. The startled confusion he finds is not what he expected. Whatever strange little fire is behind her eyes makes him hesitant. “Do short-time. Now,” he says.
“No.”
“Yes.”
“No.”
“I say yes.”
“No. Go my home. House me long-time.”
“Your house?” he says.
“For sure. An Duc To. House me.”
“Short-time,” he says. “I want short-time. No can do all night.” He has no overnight pass and An Duc To, a village a few miles past the Long Binh compound on the highway toward Saigon, is off-limits. It’s been off-limits since day one, and though he doesn’t know the reason, he feels the fear of those dark miles of road where no light shines and the turnoff to the village itself is a narrow trail into a deeper darkness.
“C’mon,” she says. “We go.” She closes her fingers on his wrist and pulls to get him started.
He jerks away; he glares at her, annoyed that she thought she could just grab him like that. “Fuck it,” he says.
“Sure. No sweat.”
“You go home. You go An Duc To. I drink beer,” he says. “Beer,” he calls to the owner.
“You no want all night?”
He says, “Fuck it.”
“Okay, okay. Fuck it. Fuck it.” Haughtiness takes her over. “Fuck it,” she says, and with flourishing indignation, she picks up her purse and compact. She makes a show of slipping the compact into the purse, all the while sneaking sly looks at him. He takes a big drink of beer. She’s comical, her petulance so crazily overdone, and his anger could evaporate, but her brusque, arrogant march out the door leaves him sitting there. She stomps along the bottom of the steep shoulder and then up to the road. In seconds she disappears. The darkness is a wall of overwhelming black, behind which she regards her life mournfully, he knows, and hopes for him to come to her. He sits sweating, his body sluggish under the weight of a gloom he detests. Let her wounded fucking pride go to shit, he thinks and rises to glower out the window. The slanted tin rooftops hang in a row like the teeth of a saw. Suddenly visible in the distance, a fragmentary patch of water appears and disappears. At the start of the jungle, weeds stand in outline, reminding him once more of saw blades, underbrush mixing with shadows below trees and the buried moon. He can think of nothing but the trickery of women. Did he really want some genuine feeling between himself and this girl? Or was it just pity? That’d be his bet. Pity. And it’s a waste on somebody like her. Maybe he could do something else decent—help out some kids, help them go to school. The rest is so shitty and complicated and messed up. When she sits down beside him, his thoughts don’t stop their spinning instantly. He’s no longer by the window but back at the table, and he looks up to hear her whispering softly, apology in her voice, petition in her breath on his ear and throat. “Go my house, me, Whitaker. No go short-time. Go short-time must go Madame Lieu. Go her house short-time must pay money Madame Lieu. Go house me, no money. Numba one, no money.”
“Oh,” he says.
“Okay?”
“Okay.”
By the time they reach the road, he’s not so sure. Haunted by a vague premonition of error, he watches her hail a Lambretta. Together they climb into the back and sit on opposite sides. The headlight flares; the sputtering engine jerks them into motion. While Lan chats with the driver, Whitaker stares glumly at the rattling floor. Then, touched by a fluttering he knows to be her fingers, he looks into her shadowy face. A fleeting roadside glimmer lets him see joyful eyes. There’s happiness here that he doesn’t understand but wants to share. What’s troubling him is the fact that it’s only a few hours since he vowed to be more responsible, and not only when he got back stateside, but here, too, and already he is heading to an of
f-limits village when he should be getting back to the compound. But what he’s doing is what he wants. Deep down he knows it. Deep down his urge is to break loose the instant he feels hemmed in, knocking aside every rule, even his own. How will he ever amount to anything?
Only the sickly yellow throw of the Lambretta’s headlight lessens the inky road carrying them along between stretches of jungle, fields, a few scattered houses. With the village of Tam Hiep behind them, they pause at an intersection under four streetlights. To continue straight would carry them toward Vung Tau. They turn right, as they should, and Whitaker is reminded of the recent calamity of four air force NCOs who decided one drunken night to drive to Vung Tau for an ocean swim. The husk of their scorched, overturned jeep was found at the edge of the jungle where it had been hurled by the exploding rocket. One man lay crushed beneath it. Two others were in pieces. The fourth had scrambled into the ditch where the bullets caught and dropped him.
Out of the slatted side of the humming Lambretta, Lan waves her skinny fingers toward the Long Binh compound, coming up on their left. It’s all concertina wire, bunkers, and ditches, with the long shell of the evac hospital lit up in the flats and glowing tents and Quonset huts in the distance. “You work?” she asks him.
He nods. As they near the main gate with its floodlights shining down on the closed barrier in front of sandbag barricades, the bunker, and lounging guards, he knows he should tell the driver to pull over and let him out. But he just sits there, saying nothing. He doesn’t want to stop as it all floats by, and soon the wider unlit highway to Saigon down which they skitter infects him with a loneliness that moves him to close his fingers around Lan’s small wrist, whether for company or because he wants her near and available for his knife should there be trouble, he doesn’t know. They seem almost the same thing.