Who Shot the Water Buffalo?

by Ken Babbs

  She droops languid eyes.

  Cochran prods me from behind. “Can the gab. Let’s make it.” Spare Tire lurches to his feet. “Hey! Where you think you’re going?”

  “No time to talk, Pop.”

  We head for the door. Scar Arm barrels across the room to cut us off and we arrive at the door in a dead heat. Scar Arm grabs Heroko-Betty by the wrist and it turns into a tug of war, me pulling from one side, Scar Arm from the other. Cochran and Yaeko-Sue throw their weight into the fray and we pull Scar Arm out on the sidewalk. He holds on grimly.

  “I put plenty money in this club,” he shouts at Heroko-Betty. “You work for T. Harry and me. You owe us many years yet.”

  Cochran flags down a taxi.

  “If you not come back, you through. Dogs will lick your bones in gutter.”

  The door booms open and Doc Hollenden flies out. He bangs into Scar Arm and knocks him into the gutter. Heroko-Betty’s sleeve goes with him. She screams and lunges for it but I pull her back.

  T. Harry stands at the open door, his great bulk silhouetted in the light.

  “You western barbarians act like street creeps, you can join your street creep friends. Hey, where you girls think you’re going?”

  The taxi sprays a sheet of water across the front of T. Harry’s seven hundred dollar suit. Cochran opens the door and we pile in with the girls.

  “Sayonara the fuck out of here,” Cochran yells at the driver.

  Spare Tire staggers out the door. “Hey! Wait for me.” He lurches and falls into T. Harry’s back.

  “Aw, shorry ‘bout that,” Spare Tire mutters, shuffling around him.

  T. Harry and Scar Arm go after Spare Tire who backpedals frantically, a losing effort because he’s too snockered to stay on the sidewalk. He veers into the street.

  “Turn around. Muy pronto,” I yell at the taxi driver.

  The taxi does a one-eighty. T. Harry and Scar Arm catch up with Spare Tire, drag him up against the side of a building and start pounding him. Cochran jumps out of the taxi and slams the gangsters’ heads into the building. Spare Tire covers his eyes.

  “I’ll pay for the drinks, honest.”

  Cochran drags him to the taxi and pushes him in. He lands in the girls’ laps.

  “Oh God. I’ve died and woke up in heaven.”

  Cochran jumps in the front seat next to me and the taxi spins away.

  “Escaped by the four skins of our teeth that time,” Cochran says. “You cop a bottle, Yaeko-Sue?”

  She pulls a fifth from beneath her skirt. Cochran gulps down a slug and passes the bottle around. Spare Tire can’t believe his luck. First he thought Cochran and I made a fool out of him with the mental detector, then he got fleeced out of his Ko girl, and after that got beat up by the two gangsters, but now, in a miraculous turnaround, he’s lying in the laps of two lovely Ko girls, and drinking Old Overholt whiskey straight from the bottle. Sitting next to them, Doc Hollenden nods to the music blaring over the taxi radio and, up front, Cochran and I stare through the windshield at the brightly lit streeets that turn into dark shadows as we zoom out of town.

  Cochran looks like a demented madman with his flaming red face and hair charred from his temple to the top of his head. In the back seat Heroko-Betty laments the loss of her leather sleeve, and her job at the 500 Club.

  “Don’t you fret about that,” Spare Tire tells her. “I’ll get you the material you need to fix your jacket. You say you sewed that outfit yourself?”

  She brightens. “Oh yes. Some day Heroko-Betty buy a dress shop and sell clothes she makes.” Her face falls. “Soon as she save enough money.” Tears spring to her eyes at the thought of her hopeless dream.

  “Those crooks won’t ever let you leave, honey. They tie you up like a sharecropper. You’ll never make enough to get out of debt to the company store. But don’t worry about that now. You got me on the case and I’ll—”

  The taxi lurches to a stop, dumping Spare Tire and the girls and the Doc onto the floor. The driver turns with a happy smile.

  “Beach right here.”

  A family is camped on the sand. Tents made of blankets hang on ropes, and the kids are asleep inside. The old folks sitting outside at a low table are playing what looks like a combination of mah-jongg, dominoes, monopoly, chinese checkers and go.

  I wander to the water’s edge and swish my feet in the ocean. Tiny creatures glow and flicker in the phosphoresent wake. Heroko-Betty grabs me from behind and hugs me tight. Not so hard, baby, I no feel so good. She lets go and claps her hands. What now?

  Oh, good, just what we need. Cochran has bought a case of Asahi beer from the mah jong family. He plops the case on the sand and passes out bottles.

  “They were willing to part with the beer for windfall profits. Now who do you suppose got the windfall, them or us?”

  Doc Hollenden gulps happily. I fall on my back. Heroko-Betty pours beer on my face and licks it off with a slick puppy tongue. She fumbles at my clothes. I kick and splash. She wraps her spidery arms around me. The ocean roars. Salty tears flood my eyes. Heroko-Betty arches her back and squeezes me from root to tip, drawing a long tight knot out of my chest down through my gut and out my dick like a double ought wad from a ten-guage water-buffalo gun blowing sparklets into the black Japanese sky, goodbye you, nos vemos más tarde. I fall into a peaceful sleep. Two seals bark and laugh and roll in the surf. Chinese checkers race across the sky. Dominoes clack clack like wooden shoes walking on the top of my head. Water swirls around my legs.

  I groan and try to sit up, but a heavy weight holds me down. Heroko-Betty is passed out on my chest. The seals are Yaeko-Sue and Cochran wrapped tightly together. Doc Hollenden sleeps with his head across their legs. Spare Tire slouches over the case of beer. Empty bottles clank in the surf. The taxi honks. The supply plane to Soc Trang is waiting. I crawl out from under Heroko-Betty and poke the seals.

  “Let’s go.”

  We stagger to the taxi. There’s enough beer left to drown the barking dog that bit so bad the night before and it looks like we’ll survive the ride. Suddenly the taxi skids sideways across the road. A big Mercedes sits crossways, blocking our way. The band members from the 500 Club form a line in front of the car. T. Harry and Scar Arm stand at the ends of the row, hulking punctuation marks in their ruined business suits.

  “Uh, oh,” Cochran says. “This is going to call for some creative Zen thinking. Anyone got any ideas?”

  “Retreat,” Doc Hollenden says. “The quality of a constructive withdrawal is not strained.”

  “Retreat, hell,” I say. “Facing the Hammer’s wrath if we don’t make it back to the base on time will be worse than anything these creeps can dish out. Crash on through.”

  The driver’s eyes widen.

  “Oh no. Taxi not mine. Have to pay if it wrecked.”

  Spare Tire waves his wallet. “Buy them off.”

  Cochran rubs his head. Flakes of burned hair come off in his hand.

  “Not a bad idea,” he says.

  Cochran takes out his pocket knife and starts cutting up the taxi driver’s phone book. The girls keen like mourning widows, in this case their own funeral. Ours too, probably. Forget that.

  Cochran steps out of the taxi.

  “Okay, okay, you win,” he yells. “Take all our money.” He holds up a big handful of cut up phone book pages with real money on top. “We’ll just skeedaddle on out of here.”

  He hops in the taxi. The driver turns the car around and burns out, back toward the beach. Cochran holds the money out the window and lets the bills peel off into the wind.

  “Get them,” T. Harry yells.

  The band members race forward, stomp on the bogus money, grab the ones fluttering in the wind, so intent on getting them they don’t notice the Doc and me hiding in the bushes. The Doc is shaking like a dog shitting peach pits. T. Harry and Scar Arm scuttle past, exhorting the band members. “After them! We’ll get their money and them, too. They owe us.”

 
I lead the Doc along the bank of a ditch that parallels the road.

  “Quit your moaning and start paying attention,” I tell him. “This is your Vietnam snooping and pooping training.”

  “Pooping is right.” Turds and garbage float on top of the water. The Doc shudders. “To think of it. Dying before I even get to that god-forsaken country. What an ignoble end. And me a professional man.”

  “Hush, we’re there.”

  I peek over the edge of the ditch. The car is pointed toward the water. The Doc and I crawl up to the car and, just as we hoped, they didn’t bother to lock up. I open the driver’s door and slip the gear shift into neutral and release the hand brake. The last thing I do before we give the car a shove is tighten the Doc’s necktie around the horn button so that as the car begins its descent down the incline, the horn is blaring.

  Just as the 500 Club gang realizes what’s happening and stops chasing the phony-baloney money to come rescue the car, the taxi roars over the hill. Cochran leans out the window.

  “Chopper pilots, not B-29 pilots, NYYYAAAAHHHH.”

  Doc Hollenden and I jump in the taxi and we skid around the rear of the Mercedes ahead of the gang band members rushing up to stop it from going in the ditch. T. Harry and Scar Arm arrive in time to see the car settle in a welter of bubbles.

  “Guess if I hadn’t left the door open it might have floated.”

  Cochran slaps me on the back. “Congratulations, my boy. Another fine example of your dry Texas wit.”

  “Never mind that. We got enough money left to pay the taxi?”

  Spare Tire holds up a wad of bills and cackles delightedly. His eyes are black and his nose broken, his lips caked with blood.

  “Man, this beats anything I ever saw in Korea. Even Mama Toko’s. I got to hand it to you Gyrenes. You know how to have fun. Say, ladies, what are you crying about? It’s all over.”

  “Maybe for you, but not us,” Yaeko-Sue sobs. “You will go away but we have to stay. They will beat us and make us work on Four Corners with street creeps. Now we will never get enough money to get free.”

  “Hey, didn’t I say I’d take care of you? You’ll be making more dough than you’d ever get slaving for those bastards. I’m taking you gals to Kyoto and setting you up in that dress shop. Heroko-Betty, you can design and sew. Yaeko-Sue, you can be the sales lady. What do you say to that?”

  “What about my little boy?” Heroko-Betty asks. “Can he live there, too?”

  “Sure as you’re sitting on your sugar daddy’s lap. I know just the place. Got an apartment upstairs and another in back. It’ll work out just fine.”

  The girls bounce up and down on Spare Tire, hugging and kissing him, kicking Doc Hollenden in their glee.

  “Hey, the glasses. Watch out for the glasses.”

  Cochran gives me a thumbs up.

  “Start your engines,” he growls. “This launch is a go.”

  We leave Spare Tire and the girls waving goodbye from the taxi, and carry Doc aboard the plane. The rear door whooshes closed, the engines roar and a sickening tug presses us into the thin canvas seats. We break out on top and level off, props throbbing in a broken beat until the pilot finds the right synch and the throb settles to a lulling hum.

  Cochran’s asleep at last, chin bouncing on his chest. Doc Hollenden jerks like a puppy dreaming about squirrels. Too bad he left his gear behind. Bueno, no importa. They can ship it to him later. Nothing to do now but sleep it off. Those gangsters were real bastards. Forget them. The memories break into fragments. Little droplets joining with the great big sea.

  8. Loss of Concern

  It’s not just my shoulder, Doc … my head hurts like hell … worse than any hangover … Daddy said there’s no hangover like a hangover from drinking jungle juice … they made their own in New Guinea … distilled whatever fruit they could find and then soaked more fruit in the juice and then drank the mess … no habanero hot sauce like at home but that jungle juice did the trick … turned everything all cattywampus … sent funny signals to my brain … write with your tongue … read with your ears … listen with your eyes … please your toes … and it made the little kids sorting through the trash and singing “Pistol Packing Mama” sound like the heavenly choir … but you don’t want to hear that noise the next morning … not when it’s ringing like church bells in your head … I know it’s all in my head, Doc … same thing your predecessor told me when I described the curly edges I saw on the building roofs after he gave me an opium pill … that was Doctor Eversham … you never met the man … they sent him home after discovering a discrepancy in the dispensary … too many opium pills were unaccounted for … I don’t mean to be talking out of school here, Doc … forget the pills … I need a shot and not any jungle juice nor that Tennessee Jack Daniels, neither … hit me with the real thing … put me under, Doc …

  Leaving Doc Hollenden asleep in the supply plane, Cochran and I go to our tent and change into flight gear. We’re expecting an angry welcome when we walk into the ready room but the poker fiasco is buried in the turmoil caused by the rifle shot we heard in the enlisted men’s area the night we flew to Japan. Corporal Randolph, one of the mechs, killed himself, and all the talk’s on Randolph, why’d he do it, was it an accident, or was he under some kind of mental strain no one knew about?

  Captain Rajah Beamus, the ops officer, begins the meeting before the Hammer arrives. “This is for the benefit of you gentlemen who have never been overseas before. You’re going to see things and do things that would never occur back in the States. The important thing to remember is that what a man does here is his own business and is not to be discussed with others, and that includes what you say in letters to your wives.”

  “Uh-oh,” Cochran says out of the corner of his mouth, “sounds like the old lecture on the loss of concern for the hallowedness and sanctity of marriage.”

  “We know now that Corporal Randolph killed himself after getting a Dear John letter from his wife. It didn’t help that he was a moody man, given to brooding.”

  “As opposed to breeding,” Cochran says, sotto voce. Not sotto enough.

  “That’s enough, Lieutenant. The last time I was overseas there was a married officer in the squadron who ranched in town with a local woman. One of the other officers wrote a letter to his wife telling her about the affair. The word was passed among the wives, and the rancher’s wife, in on the gossip train, found out what was going on. She in turn wrote a very nasty letter to her husband and at the end of the tour the officer was faced with the prospect of a divorce.”

  “What are we supposed to do?” Cochran interrupts. “These abominable conditions are ripe for sexual explosions. There’s no relief nowhere. I woke up this morning with a horrendous hard-on, one of those jack lever things. Push it down and it raises you off your feet. I knew if I so much as touched it, it would go off.”

  He hesitates a beat.

  “So I touched it.”

  The pilots hoot and slap their legs.

  Rajah Beamus glares. “Knock it off. This is serious. One more word out of you, Cochran, and you’ll pull duty officer for a week. Now hear this. The officer who got the letter from his wife saying she knew about his overseas affair, that officer went to his Commanding Offcer and complained about the harm the original letter-writer was doing. The C.O. called in the Puritan letter-writer and gave him the ass chewing of his life, warned him never to mention another squadron officer in any more letters home. Any questions?”

  Ben-San, forever the class clown, makes a phoney yawn. Mouth gaping wide, he releases a long drawn-out moan, taken up quickly by the other pilots.

  “I’ve got a question,” I yell through the moaning. “What happened to that man? That dastardly letter-writer? Did his wife divorce him, too?”

  “I have no idea, Lieutenant. I don’t pry into other people’s lives.”

  “Does this mean a man can’t trust his wife to keep the things he tells her to herself?” Rob Jacobs asks.

 
“My advice is to not to tell wives anything about other men’s affairs.”

  “Then do you recommend setting up a snake ranch and not saying anything about it?”

  “I’m implying nothing of the sort, Lieutenant.”

  “A stiff dick has no conscience,” Ben-San yells.

  “Any port in a storm,” Cochran bellows, setting the pilots off.

  “Porthole.” Followed by a fake laugh, snorfglffff, gitchhhh, belly itches.

  “As you were, gentlemen!”

  Too late. The dam is breached. What’s he expect, lecturing us like we’re college fraternity numbnuts?

  “If one of us should happen to write the kind of letter you mentioned, about one of the married men …” Cochran says, “… then the nasty letter that comes back, the impending divorce. Are we to, ah, assume that the officer concerned …” black eyebrows rise up and down … “the one who caused the mess. Would he be given the same treatment by our Commanding Officer, the treatment you mentioned, the royal ass chewing?”

  “That’s up to the C.O.”

  Before another fake laugh can erupt, Emmett stands up.

  “Knock off the shit. It’s okay to do your banging. Hell, everyone knows a man will have his nooky, but do it away from the squadron, for Christ’s sakes. You can’t trust anybody. It might be your bunkmate finking on you.”

  “Stick by your man,” Ben-San sings.

  “Don’t pull that shit on me,” Rob Jacobs calls.

  “Kiss me on the way out,” yells another pilot.

  Fake laughs and joke sneezes go off simultaneously. Har har no time off. Kachooie hog grease. When they die down, Ben-San says, “Hey, if you’re horny as a goat then go ahead and bang your brains out. Then admit it. Who cares if someone finks.”

  “You’re forgetting the code,” Cochran says. “You either got to be sneaky or you got to be pure. There’s no common ground of good sense anywhere between. When have you ever heard a man admit he’s a lecher, boozer, gambler and mean-tailed bastard? Especially to the woman he’s tied on to for life.”