Who Shot the Water Buffalo?

by Ken Babbs

  “I just need to know someone is …”

  Willie comes in the door, carrying an extension cord. “They said there’s a plug-in on the wall, under the window.”

  He scurries around, sets the radio on the table next to the bed. “You want to try it out?”

  Ben-San looks at his hands in their bandaged mitts. “Not now, thanks.”

  “What’ve you guys been talking about?” Willie asks.

  “Nothing,” I say. “We were just yakking about how long it will be before Ben-San gets out of here.”

  “They’re saying it will be a few days,” Ben-San says. “As soon as the fever stabilizes, then it’s back to the States.”

  “It’s great seeing you,” Willie says. He looks at his watch. “The guys will be glad to hear you’re doing so well. We better hit it, Huck, long flight home.”

  “Yeah. Shake it easy, Ben-San, I’ll be in touch.”

  “Thanks for what you and Cochran and Soonto did, Tomas. And don’t forget what I said, you hear?”

  “Roger that.”

  On the flight back, my mind’s churning. Sure, Ben-San wants to marry her, now anyhow, but what about when he’s back in the States, and what about Yoshika? Is she going to want to hook up with him after he kissed her off? And what’s it going to be like when she sees him, all burned up? Estoy rechenado mis dientes, gnash my teeth, I’m at a loss here, and no one else in the squadron is going to deal with this shit.

  21. Spirit of Reconciliation

  Where’s the protection, Doc? … rounds are zinging in nastier than hornets … they promised us more armor plating for the cockpit … what you talking about, cockpit, Cochran says … what you need is an armor-plated jockstrap, protect your most vitals … is that protection from infection? … in 469 BC Hippocrates discovered one of the oldest infections known to man, but his mistake was thinking it was an involuntary flow of semen … somewhat on the order of a wet dream … the name he gave the disease stuck … gonorrhea … the flow of seed … I don’t know who discovered the rubber, Doc, but I’ll always remember what Cochran said … just roll it on until you either run out of rubber or you run out of pecker … what we really need is a reinforced rubber … yeah, a rubber mallet on your head, I tell him … any violence, it’ll be on your head not mine, he says … inch-pay, e-may if you’ve heard this one, Doc … there’s no excuse for violence except when making love … at least according to that old razorback, Pappy Lurnt …

  “Son,” Pappy Lurnt says, puffing on his cigar, “don’t you be taking this any further. By the time Lieutenant Benson is back in the States the memory of that Jo-san will be shaved so thin it could sit on a dollar and give you fifty cents change.”

  Pappy taps the ash from his corncob pipe into a dried wild boar snout sitting on his desk.

  “Remember this, young Lieutenant, you don’t take a hog to market in a Cadillac. The only thing that’s going to make your friend feel better is a drink of virgin’s piss and you’ll never find any of that out here. Now vamoose and deep six any notion of bothering the skipper with this marriage blather.”

  I shuffle back to the room, any chance of helping Ben-San squelched. I’m out of my element here, totally at a loss, and I put the whole thing aside, hoping some brainstorm will come up later. Our room is spanking clean, all of Rob Jacobs and Ben-San’s gear gone, their beds made up, and we’re awaiting the arrival of two new replacement pilots. On the other side of the room Cochran is covering the wall with pictures and clippings, part of his disinformation ploy to confuse the enemy. He’s suspicious of the maids. How many of them are passing on info to the Cong? … One American, he slouch like ape and his underwear, whooeee, bad enough he didn’t change more than once a month, now he not change at all, wears skivvie briefs till they shred to pieces then puts on another pair over the top—four, six, eleven elastic waist bands all piled on each other, filthy dirty.

  He cuts pictures out of magazines, pasting together a collage. Screaming, gesturing Bertrand Russell, glorying in a peace fit, is glued atop austere, skeletal Isak Dinesen, Bertrand shouting, “DON’T LET THE BASTARDS PUT YOU DOWN,” Miss Dinesen quietly retorting, “Don’t Break The Cool,” and now Cochran’s new addition to the collage is a newspaper clipping that claims the Buddhists, who are in conflict with the Vietnamese Government, believe the Americans have sent a spy, “to look us over.” When asked to describe him, the Buddhists tell the reporter, “Well, he was tall and had a very long beard and his hair was very long in back and curly. He said he was a poet and a little crazy and he liked Buddhists. We didn’t know what else he was so we decided he was a spy.” The clipping went on to say that the newsman burst out laughing. ‘That’s Allen Ginsberg, the Beatnik poet.’”

  The door to the room opens and a cavernous face peers in. He introduces himself. “Lieutenant Jonathon Merkle, from Paducah, Tennesee. Blessed are the pacemakers,” he says, “for they shall keep the beat.”

  He’s a Bible thumper, he’s proud to admit, for he comes from a staunch Baptist family that believes full immersion is necessary, talking in tongues is okay, snake charming is entirely possible and hot coal walking totally acceptable. Bible quotes are a requisite, no matter how badly mangled, and heavenly ascension is a perquisite for those who talk the talk.

  I glance at Cochran. Madre mío, what hath God brought? Cochran waggles his eyebrows. More grist for the mill.

  “You want to go over to the O club and hoist a few?” Cochran asks the newcomer.

  “No, thankee, I’m going to stow my gear and hit the sack, and, God willing, get some sleep. I’ve been traveling for days.”

  “Old Baptist John there, he’s stuck on that train,” I say, after Cochran changes into regular duds and we head out for the club.

  “Bound for glory,” Cochran says. “Faith is the conductor, belief is the engineer, it’s rapture on the rails. Forget going to the O club. I yearn for greater delights. Let’s swing in here.”

  He knocks on the Rajah’s door and peeks in. Captain Beamus looks up from some papers. The look on his face goes from quizzical to a grimace.

  “Hey Captain,” Cochran says, “Why don’t you get your glad rags on and let off some steam with us in town?”

  Captain Beamus shakes his head, “No, I’ve got work to do. You go on without me.”

  “Okay, but you’ll be missing out.” Cochran hesitates at the door. “Say, since you won’t be using it, mind if we borrow your jeep?”

  The Rajah looks at us over for a moment, then says, “Go ahead,” and tosses us the keys.

  Cochran pulls the door shut. We hesitate, waiting for a crash, an ashtray, say, against the door. All quiet.

  “You know,” I say, “in the spirit of reconciliation maybe we ought to cut the fucker some slack, da chance al cabrón, as they say down on the border.”

  “Yeah but the border we’re working on is the DMZ.”

  We’re in our civvies, not all that different from our Marine khakis—chinos, short-sleeve shirts, penny loafers, white socks—two Yanks on the town, usually with guns and bullets strapped around our waists, but not tonight, not while we’re walking in the spirit of reconciliation.

  “So, maybe we ought to ease off fucking with the Rajah’s flight gear,” I tell Cochran.

  “Yeah, cutting off the pants legs on his flight suit might have been topping it a bit. After all, he did make the call that spared us a night on the mountain, which probably saved Ben-San’s life.”

  We drink to that, and decide to forego our previously churlish behavior, not in keeping with our status as officers and gentlemen. We’re splurging, eating lobster, drinking white wine and nibbling Camembert cheese at a pretentious French restaurant where it’s business as usual, despite the war. As oddball luck would have it, Emmett and Too Tall Tolliver are also eating in the restaurant and they clomp down at our table for after- dinner drinks.

  What’s with this new friendly Emmett? He has adopted a proprietary air, probably because he rescued us from that mountain
side hellhole. Since Cochran and I are mellowed out in the the spirit of reconciliation, we abide his drunken gusto and Germanic bluster. Emmett is in rare form, yakking exuberantly, bumping his gums in glee over the blissful rapture of the well-known hummer.

  “It’s a honk house pleasure, and you ought to get to know it. Sweet Lips is famous for giving the best hummer in the Far East. The Army boys taught her to hum ‘When The Caissons Go Rolling Along,’ which is worth its weight, but nothing compared to the treasure, er, I mean the pleasure you get from ‘The Marine Corps Hymn.’ You’ll be seeing stars, Fourth of July fireworks, the old red white and blue cascading in streamers across a rainbow colored sky.”

  Cochran and I raise our eyebrows. Pretty flamboyant prose from old Emmett.

  “Yep,” he says, “far as I know there’s only two authentic Vietnamese contributions to international folk art. Betel nut and the hummer.”

  Cochran gives me the eye and we edge out of our chairs.

  “Hey, where you going? Don’t you want her address?”

  “Some other time, maybe.”

  “No, no. You’ve got to give it a try.” He writes the directions on a napkin. “It’s out on the fringes, in the dark side of town, very private.”

  A knowing wink from Emmett. Or was it a lewd leer? The light isn’t very good in this room. When we get to the jeep, Cochran pauses and looks at me. Like it or not the bastard has put a bee in our bonnet.

  “What do you say?” Cochran asks. “Want to check it out?”

  I’m dubious, mighty dubious. But temptation is twanging. I shrug.

  “Still early, what’s to lose?”

  We drive through the center of town, Cochran at the wheel. I’ve got the napkin opened on my lap. Brightly lit streets and gaudy store-fronts give way to potted dirt roads, stalls with charcoal fires and kids playing on dirt roads in front of tin-siding shacks open to the street. I’m trying to read street signs and find the right house numbers.

  “There. That looks like the place.”

  We park down the street and walk back to an open- fronted shop. An alley runs alongside. We go down the alley and knock on a door. An older woman, wearing black silk pants and a long white shirt, opens the door. She looks up and down the alley and motions us in. Holds out her hand. We know the drill. Two hundred and fifty piasters each. The money disappears under her shirt. She leads us down a hallway and motions us inside an austere room.

  A woman rises from the bed. Sweet Lips. She is young and clear skinned with hooded eyes. Barefooted and wearing a short smock, she is all business. She nods to Cochran, indicates for him to lower his pants. Diablos y qué? Am I supposed to stand here and watch? I turn away. She gasps. Must be those shredded layers of filthy BVD waistbands.

  A banging and shouting and scuffling in the hall interrupts the proceedings. That doesn’t sound like an impatient customer to me. Sweet Lips puts her finger to her lips, glides across the room, pulls back a curtain and opens a window. Come on, she motions. Cochran, limp as a wet noodle, pulls up his pants and hobbles to the window. I go out first and he follows after. We tumble to the ground, get off me you fucking gorilla.

  We struggle to our feet, Cochran buttons up and we look around. This isn’t good. We’re in a small yard, enclosed on three sides by a high wall and behind us by the house. The voices in the bedroom rise in angry shouts, then are followed by a crash. Flashlight beams pierce the dark yard. If they catch us out here we’re fried. We hunker down next to the house. Harsh demanding masculine voices cry out questions. Questions wanting answers, and wanting them right now. Shrill feminine voices shriek in response.

  “It’s a raid,” Cochran whispers.

  “No shit, Dick Tracy.”

  That’s sure as hell not the Shore Patrol. Probably a Vietnamese vice squad, hopefully not the Can Lao secret police. Any way you look at it we’re in deep shit. If we get hauled in they’ll fry our asses all the way from Beamus to the Exec right up to the Hammer, maybe even the base C.O. While I’m fretting, Cochran crosses the yard and checks out the walls. Eight feet high with broken glass glinting on top. He takes off his shirt and throws it up on the wall.

  “Give me a leg up,” he whispers.

  What now? Out of the frying pan?

  “Come on,” he says. “They’ll be looking out that open window next.”

  Okay. I boost him onto the wall.

  “Oooch, owww.” He’s getting acquainted with the broken glass. He leans down with a hand. In for a peso. I grab his hand and he hauls me up, introducinges me to a skin- shredding welcome.

  “Yow, that rankles.”

  We slide off the wall and land in soft dirt on the other side. Yank out our hankies and daub at the bloody spots on our hands and bodies. We’re standing in the flower garden of someone’s home. The rooms in the house are lit up and people are moving around inside.

  “Here, rub this all over you,” Cochran says. He holds out a blob of evil looking muck.

  “What the hell is that?”

  “Just dirt and stuff from off the ground. It will hide your smell.”

  “My smell? Who gives a rat’s ass about my smell?”

  “We stink like skunks to the Vietnamese. Anyone comes outside they’ll smell us right away.”

  Cochran rubs the muck all over his chest. Gives me the look. I take a glob from him. He’s right about one thing. It doesn’t smell American to me. Filth, dirt, rotten vegetation guck, honey bucket glop, putrid rotting stuff. I close my eyes and rub it on my stomach and chest and arms. The door opens and a kids steps outside and looks around. I stop rubbing and hold perfectly still. This is it. Showdown time. Something rubbing against my leg starts a shiver that runs up my spine and explodes in my head. What catastrophe now?

  I glance down and stare into the piercing green eyes of a cat. The kid calls, the cat slaps my leg with its tail and, meowing, runs to the kid. The kid picks him up and they go inside. My heart rate slows down to a few hundred beats above normal. After a while the lights go out in the house. After a longer while, after counting the stars peeking through wispy clouds, after absorbing the smell of smoke from a million charcoal fires, after our legs have gone numb, after the mosquitos have drained us dry, Cochran says, “They gotta be gone by now.”

  We shake some feeling back into our legs, then it’s up and over the wall, more bleeding, more hanky pats, then cross the yard to the window, locked, but Cochran has had it with all this hiding and he smashes the window and yanks it open.

  The bedroom is dark and empty. We slink down the hall to the room where we first came in. The older lady and an older man and Sweet Lips are sitting on a couch. We walk in. The trio cowers, terrified at the sight of two bloody monsters in shredded mud-caked clothes. But then, realizing it is only the barbaric Americans, their frightened looks change to disgust.

  As far as I’m concerned, it’s over, let’s amscray before something else happens, but no, Cochran rubs his finger and thumb together, the universal sign for moolah. He wants our money back. The old guy rushes up to Cochran, yakking a mile a minute, waves his arms and hands, makes emphatic no-no noises, points to the door, makes a sound like a siren, waves bye bye, makes the same finger thumb moolah motion, waves bye bye again. Okay we get the picture, they had to pay off the police, and now all he wants is us out of there, out of their lives. He shoos us out the door. We are reluctant but compliant, what are you gonna do? La realidad es una chinga, or as they say in a Texas whorehouse, reality is a bitch.

  Outside, Cochran considers his arms, the bleeding, his ruined shirt, his ripped and blood-stained pants, his face grimey with sweat and dirt. Shit-muck smell all over him. He looks at me.

  “Go get the jeep. You’re not as fucked-up looking as I am.”

  Is he serious? The way I feel, I’m a sawed-off replica of his garbage heap mess.

  When I pick him up he is laughing. “What’s so funny?” I snarl. “Losing the money, is that what’s funny? Or is it our arms like barb wire whipdown? Or maybe our c
lothes throwaway trashed. Or is it this smell making my throat gag?”

  “None of the above. I was just thinking about how it all went down.” Cochran’s face contorts into a piratical smile. “It’s like a Vietnamese TV cop series. Eliot Ness and the Unsuckables.” He chuckles grimly. “They had to have been tipped off, coming in right on our heels like that.”

  “What are you implying?”

  “They weren’t after Sweet Lips and her pals, or they would have hauled them in. Not mentioning any names but who else knew about that place?”

  I look over at Cochran. Is he implying what I think he’s implying? Memories can be simmering, payback a long time coming. Is Emmett holding a grudge? We don’t really know what’s going on behind that blunt Teutonic forehead. Anger, we’ve seen that. Antipathy toward the Red Horde, that’s a fact. Maybe what it’s really all about is those fucking communists are fucking atheists and Godlessness must not be allowed to spread. Well, that will never happen, not with us on the case, just look at Cochran and me, bleeding and beaten, clothes torn and covered with shit. How could anyone think these two miserable specimens could be anything but total winners in the fight against the world communist takeover?

  Cochran is ready to crash, slumped in his seat, brooding. He glances over, picks up on my quizzical stare, smiles, and his face comes alive. There’s the Cochran I know and love, although I’d never tell the bastard that.

  “Just shifting gears, Tomas, that’s all, just shifting gears.”

  Back at the Frog House, Emmett sticks his head out of his room. He must have been waiting up for us.

  “I see you made it home okay. How was it? Whoa, looks like you did some tussling.” He makes a face. “What’s that smell?”

  “How was what?” Cochran says, his voice flat.

  “You know, ‘From the halls of Montezuma to the shores of sweet lipsaree.’”

  “Don’t know what you’re talking about. Here, make sure these get to Captain Beamus.” Flips him the jeep keys.

  We continue down the hall to our room.

  “Emmett didn’t tip the cops off,” Cochran says. “That would be too devious for him. He’s a straight-ahead guy.”