Girl by the Road at Night

by David Rabe

  The driver calls over his shoulder, and Lan responds cheerfully, leaning close to the back of his head. The high beams of a truck are visible for a long time, approaching from the opposite direction, and then the deuce and a half whooshes past. Whitaker turns around to watch it shudder off the road, where the silhouettes of multiple tents are momentarily ghostly in the headlights.

  The Lambretta slows and takes a right onto the dirt of a narrow pathway. They bounce and veer, and just beyond the wreckage of an ancient automobile, something foreign and from the thirties, Whitaker thinks, they come into An Duc To. They halt, and people of all ages watch them disembark. An old man on a stool holds an infant. A young girl eats from a bowl of bone white rice beside two young men in shorts who stare, their brown shoulders shimmering. Whitaker hears the grumble of a gasoline-powered generator.

  Do they like him, or hate him, these people? he wonders. Or don’t they give a shit one way or the other that he is prowling on the hand of a whore between shacks and debris down the beaten trail of what is probably their little main street? The first row of homes gives way to a clearing where a blacksmith’s shop pulses with showering sparks. At the next cluster of huts, one of which is Lan’s, she uses her key to let them in. He stands a moment in the partial dark before sitting down on the edge of a wooden bed. Lan moves a burning lantern in a slow circle to show the dirt floor, the tin of the walls, a shabby chair and chest. “House me numba ten,” she says.

  “No.”

  “No sweat.” She joins him on the bed, unzipping his fly and lifting his prick to the air, where under her influence, it stirs. His brain, he realizes as if rising from a dream, aches at the center with a blunt, punishing throb. When he reaches to lift her skirt, she stops his fingers and confronts his questioning look with her own guilty gaze, her dismayed apology. “Pussy me sick, Whitaker,” she says.

  In the occurring silence, he squints, and she moves backward until her shoulder presses against the wall. “Got sick pussy, Whitaker,” she says and this time her meaning—she is on her period—finds its way into his brain. He thinks of entering into blood. He thinks of entering into Vietnamese blood. Anticipation finds an unexpected warmth, and anyway, he has a rubber this time.

  “No sweat,” he says, reaching to pet the taut softness of her thighs.

  “Numba ten,” she cries, “numba ten.” She scurries sideways to a position beyond his reach. He is crawling toward her over the little bed. “Black-man,” she says. “Numba ten. Talk me do him fuck-fuck. ‘No,’ me talk. ‘Sick pussy.’ Him screaming. Hit me. ‘Pussy me sick, black-man.’ Numba ten. You know. Pussy sick. Him dinky dow. Him screaming.” Now she ducks and moves until his prick is nestled in her hands once more. He takes her head and puts her mouth down near the tip, but after a time during which she has only crouched there, dumbly pressing her lips in what seems to him bewilderment, he lets her use her fingers. In a moment arousal speeds up, and then it’s racing, and he rolls sideways to get between her legs. Disappointment changes her eyes and she peers up at him in fear, but it is only the position he wants and when she understands, she smiles. Her fingers happily tap and press to coax the nerves into constriction. Okay, he thinks. He wraps his arms around her. Okay. But he wants to prolong it. He wants to prolong how it feels. He wants it to go on and on. Why can’t he prolong what he’s feeling? He strains above her, pumping, coming, blinking. Just this once.

  A little later, wide awake and lying on his side, he stares at a filigree of spider webbing. He’s stupefied with exhaustion, but nothing else seems of interest. Just the glitter of those threads. Cramped in his skull is the pain of his long day without sleep. A gecko comes from out of nowhere, chirping and scampering across the ceiling. Another hangs suspended. Dissatisfaction scrapes and squeezes him, a vice grip on his skull. His restlessness is a raw abrasion. It surprises him to find her watching him. He asks for aspirin; he taps his head, makes a suffering face; he groans, “Numba ten. Head me. Numba ten.” She goes to the metal chest against the wall, but it’s not aspirin that she brings back. Instead she is unscrewing the lid on a tiny jar. She takes a sniff, and gives him the chance to do the same. “Okay?” she says.

  The ointment has a greenish, lardy look and a foul odor, but he doesn’t know what else to do, so he says, “Okay.”

  “Numba one.” She turns him onto his belly, and climbing astride his back, she applies cool, greasy gobs to his temples, then his neck and shoulders and along his spine. The smell coils into his nostrils where it pokes and picks at him. He wants aspirin. Thoughts of aspirin, images of bottles, mounds of white tablets, insanely euphoric slogans taunt him with a sense of deprivation. The floor beneath the bed is dirt. His head rests partially off the bed, so he stares at the dirt. He doesn’t like himself. He wishes he was someone else. He has no idea who. Who? he asks, but he’s already admitted that he doesn’t know; he has no idea. Anybody. Any-fucking-body. He sees his watch on his dangling wrist. It’s twenty minutes to curfew, and once curfew comes and goes he will be AWOL. Lan shifts on his back. She’s skinny and small, but her fingers are uncannily strong and she’s digging into him, finding something, squeezing it until it retreats from her intensity, trying to find a way out of him so it can get away from her. He knows he can stay the night with little risk of getting caught. Only an attack, or a practice alert at the compound, would bring his absence to light. He doesn’t want to leave. He wants to stay and be somebody else. He could become him here. Some unknown somebody else. Anybody. Any-fucking-body. “Christ, I’m going,” he says. “I have to go.”

  As he turns to lift her off, a soft hurt of disappointment suffuses her face and gives the sound she makes a downward arc. “Eaaaaaaaaa?”

  “Must go compound.”

  “Sau.”

  “No. Must dee-dee.”

  “Numba ten.”

  “Me no go compound, me numba ten,” he says.

  “You go Bien Hoa. Do bar girl. Fuck-fuck.”

  “No,” he says. “You dinky dow.”

  “For sure, I know.”

  “Never happen.” He points at his wristwatch. “No go Bien Hoa. Too late. Must go Long Binh.” He taps the glass face with the speedily moving second hand beneath it. “Must go compound. You ’stand? Dee-dee mau. Dee-dee mau.”

  “I go,” she says.

  “What?”

  “Ban di dau do? You go where?”

  “Compound.” He points, not even certain of the correct direction. Just pointing at the wall.

  “No.”

  “Yes.”

  “Okay. I go. I go. Lambretta me,” she squeals. “Lambretta Lan.” And a wild, mischievous glee has lighted her eyes. “For sure,”

  she yells. “Okay. Numba one. Numba one Lambretta me!”

  She’s a complete fucking mystery, like the weather in some far-off part of the world changing the weather where he is. Like the planets and their shifting in a horoscope, and you read it in the newspaper and say, “What the fuck?” Her wish to accompany him is bewildering.

  They’re dressing together. She’s hurriedly changing into white cotton pajamas, while he pulls up his underwear, his pants. He slips into his T-shirt, and then the short-sleeved button-down shirt he’s been wearing. His socks are still on his feet. He’s too tired to resist her. She can travel along if she wants, and he’ll get rid of her at the gate. Anyway, he’s not going to make it without her help.

  Yammering something at him, she slips into her sandals and hurries out the door. And when he looks around and sees that he’s alone, something comes over him; it’s eerie and cold. He becomes angry and spiteful, like an abandoned, vengeful ghost, looking down at her purse and the little blue compact inside. He takes it, slides it into his pocket.

  Lan is knocking at the door of a neighboring hut with a Lambretta parked along the side wall, when he comes out. A man answers, and she talks excitedly, pointing at Whitaker and then off into the darkness. The man goes inside and returns in a rush to start up his machine.

 
; They rattle along the dirt trail and then bounce onto the concrete of the highway. Whitaker looks backward, down the dark to the strange glow, solitary and fading behind them, that is An Duc To. The ride doesn’t smooth out the way it should now that they’re on the pavement. As they pick up a little speed the shaking actually worsens, and he figures the wheels are out of alignment or an axle is bent. They sway and shudder like a small boat on rough water. The engine has an outboard motor sound. “Hope we’re not too far from shore,” he says to Lan. “Can you swim?” She blinks and widens her eyes, looking puzzled. “If we run out of gas,” he tells her, “we’ll have to row.” He doesn’t feel like talking pidgin English anymore. She reaches to pat his shoulder. She says something to the driver, who turns up the throttle. They jump a few yards and then hang on to a better speed. She grins and nods reassuringly. “Okay. Numba one.”

  The far-off cone of light above the gate becomes visible, and then gradually distinct and brighter. Lan scoots from her side of the Lambretta to his. “You go sleep. You go sleep,” she says.

  “For sure,” says Whitaker.

  She bobs her head knowingly. She giggles and pats his hand.

  “Dung lye, dung lye,” he says to the driver. He can see helmeted heads moving about. He’s wary of getting shot by a bored or worried guard and wants to stop with room to spare. “Dung lye.” They slow and then sit idling at the far edge of the wide entranceway under the bright circle of the floodlights.

  One of the guards is striding out from inside the bunker. “What’s goin’ on?” he yells. He stops behind a waist-high barricade, a sort of foxhole constructed of piled-up sandbags, where another guard joins him. A third guard watches through a firing slot, his rifle aimed casually in Whitaker’s direction.

  Whitaker climbs out quickly and waves. “Be there in a minute,” he yells, busy giving money to the driver.

  “Just get your butt in here, okay?” says the guard. “Snap to it.” He’s coming a few yards down the sloping dirt, his weapon at port arms.

  “Go sleep,” Lan says. Her grin is huge and real with some welling of bewildering joy Whitaker does not feel.

  “Okay,” he says and starts away. The Lambretta gives a high-pitched whine and then, with a grinding, suffering sound, it trundles in a circle, the jolly driver smiling and Lan nodding and waving through the slats. The broad-faced guard and his buddy are both eyeing Whitaker with a lot of interest, and so Whitaker isn’t watching as Lan, gesturing toward him, disappears. He stops and looks down the highway. He can hear the struggling motor, but the Lambretta is mere white streaks becoming no more than an impression of streaks and then nothing. He thinks her slight body bounced back and forth, her arm uplifted. Is there any doubt that she rode to the gate to make sure he wasn’t going to any other girl? He feels like the brunt of a joke. Hands on hips, he looks at his scuffed shoes in the gravel. The guards are counting down the seconds of the last minute before he’s late, and they’re at nineteen. She drew him to her house when she was on her period. He found her sitting in clean, pretty clothing, careful makeup and perfume, when she had been wearing slacks and a shirt at the time that soldier beat her. She dressed up and then sat around like she was expecting somebody. Maybe she was and they didn’t show up. He springs forward the last few yards and slides sideways, his feet throwing up dust, like a baseball player coming into a base standing up. He scoots his hands outward in an umpire’s signal and says, “Safe!”

  The third guard has come to the door of the bunker. “You must be somethin’, buddy boy,” he says. He’s stocky, close to the ground, almost square. “Really, really something. You got ’em followin’ you home.”

  “I hold my breath,” Whitaker says.

  “You what?”

  “It’s the balloon principle, man. Deep breaths. All in. Not out. Never out. All that air in and in my prick so it’s gettin’ bigger, like a balloon. Never out. Remember the principle. Drives ’em wild.”

  He walks on, slowing down, like he doesn’t know exactly where he is, but he’s glad to be there. The rooftops of the Quonset huts are little more than glinting edges against the deep sky. The evac hospital has lots of lights on. He fingers the compact in his pocket. He should have given it back to her before she drove off. What got into him? A jeep passes, and he follows it to the motor pool. He stands looking in at the increasing number of vehicles: ambulances, jeeps, the ever-present deuce and a half, but lots of those little cargo trucks, too, some dump trucks. There are trailers and different kinds of construction equipment, a bulldozer, some backhoes. He sees a cement mixer, forklifts, a road grader. The machines stand silent and shadowy, looking almost lonely, and then the figure of a man, a sentry, strolls from behind the bulky shape of an ambulance, and here and there a hood or a fender reflects a dusty sparkle under the clouded sky, the faint starlight. They’ll need him to work there soon. They have to. At least that guy walking over there has something worthwhile to guard. It won’t be long. As he turns to go, he hears chords of music, a big orchestra. He looks about. What could it be? Beyond some tents he spies a bell of light. Oh, a movie’s on. He glances at his watch. He’ll go down. As he gets nearer, edging around some tents, he sees the film is in color. He stops for a beer in the EM club. He buys some peanuts. He plays some pinball.

  22

  Lan helps her neighbor, Huynh, secure his Lambretta. She thanks him and he shrugs and smiles, then goes inside. The pang that stops her short of her door is the realization that she forgot the photograph, that she left it lying in its envelope on the table with her book in Madame Lieu’s sister’s house. Her uncle Khiem hadn’t come as he had promised and then she saw Whitaker. Well, tomorrow, she thinks, hoping the photo will be safe. They come out of the shadows as she enters, thrusting a rag in her mouth and a sack over her head when the door has been opened and closed, and she is being dragged to the ground and the bed where each takes a turn binding her arms while the other thrusts himself between her legs, stripped of her slacks and the pink cloth of her underwear, before the knife is put behind her ear and pushed so the skin opens like a seam and her gargling cry begins and ends in surprise, far off behind rags and cloth and hands. What had her? Something had her. There is pain and struggling thoughts trying to catch up, trying to answer, running wildly toward what’s happening to her, but they cannot get there. The pain hammers and shatters the thoughts and they give up. What had her? Was it the wind? Did the wind have her? Did her father see her? Where would she be without the dusty world?

  23

  Children are scampering around on hills of glittering garbage. Varied colors flash in the daylight, bits and pieces, irregular shapes. It’s a teetering bluff of junk spread over twenty or thirty square yards and there are two peaks, one a bit lower than the other. A boy in blue shorts is tossing objects down to a pair of small girls in ragged slacks and shirts. They wait on the level ground, looking up. He throws a box, and several tin cans follow. They land heavily, the way they would if full. A five-gallon gas can gets flung, then a bicycle wheel, spinning toward the girls who scamper out of the way. On the shorter of the two heaps, where the rubble is mostly green, two bodies struggle over some item that Whitaker, riding shotgun on a run to the dump, cannot identify. He and Doland, the driver, are bouncing along toward the low-flung haze up ahead. It’s a ditch full of burning debris tended by a dozen mamasans in black pajamas and conical hats. The mamasans work along the length of the ditch with rakes and shovels. When Doland finds an open slot and prepares to back in, Whitaker jumps out. He guides Doland with hand signals and then yells for him to halt as the rear starts to overhang the drop-off. The heat comes at him like a boiling wind. He lowers the gate and swings aboard. Doland joins him, and they start dragging the first of their trash barrels to the end of the truck. They lift and empty it, and then go after the others. The fumes sting Whitaker’s eyes and the exertion gets him panting. Each biting breath comes more and more rapidly into his throat. If they go slower they’ll breathe easier, but be there long
er. Several tires have caught fire; they send up sooty corkscrews of stink into the bright, breezeless glare.

  “You know what I need?” says Doland. “A smoke.”

  “Fucking A,” says Whitaker. “Why not?” They light up. They are part of a line of about ten trucks from various units all emptying barrels of rubbish. The deuce and a half next to them guns its engine and goes. Several others are bouncing toward them over the dry, flat terrain. A couple of mamasans scurry up. They use their rakes and shovels to push into the trench whatever rubble spilled or was dumped sloppily. Whitaker flicks his finger and sends the cigarette butt high; he loses it in the glare, then locates it, tumbling into the mess.

  Later, it looks like there are even more kids working the piles of trash. Whitaker, swaying with each jolt the truck undergoes, holds his rifle with the butt balanced on the seat between his legs, the barrel out the window into the open air. He catches the stench of rot; maybe they’re passing closer on their way out for some reason. One of the kids is tumbling down the steep rubble, toward the little plateau between the two piles. Whitaker, following the kid’s fall, glimpses a shanty on the other side of the gap, the roof supporting a blue sign with red-painted letters spelling out something in Vietnamese. “You think that says ‘garbage’ in Vietnamese, Doland?”

  “What?”

  “That sign.”

  “What sign?”

  “It was back there. It’s gone now.”

  “I got to get this sucker washed before I turn it in,” says Doland. “Sergeant Emlin’s orders.”

  “Hey,” says Whitaker. “Lemme tell you where.”

  “I know where.”

  “No, no. I know a really good place.”

  “I’m talkin’ about a good enough place. I got a good place.”

  “You gotta listen to me, Doland.”

  “Why?”

  “I’m tellin’ you, Doland. C’mon.”