by Don McQuinn
He tried to speak and the words jammed in his throat. He tried again, managing a guttural whisper.
“God, Ly, we’ve got to get out of here! Now!”
“No. We are alone in the house.” The small voice against his chest was a carnival of vibrations. “You wait. I will call you.” Lithely, she was out of his grasp and gone up the stairs.
After a few seconds of agitated pacing, he threw himself on the sofa and drew out a cigarette. On his first attempt to light it, the match flew from his fingers and he leaped to stamp on it, cursing and laughing. The second attempt was successful, except for regenerated amusement at the sight of his trembling hands. There was time for a few jerky drags before she called.
“Charles?”
He ground out the cigarette and paced himself to walk the stairs. At the top, her voice came down the hall.
“The second door, on the right.”
His only impression of the room was inchoate colors and smells. The single thing that registered clearly in his vision was her face, framed by her fanned black hair on the pillow. She had the sheet pulled to her chin, breasts thrust against the white cloth, the nipples crowning them with smaller peaks. The material clung to the contours of her slightly spread legs.
He sat on the edge of the bed and stripped his clothes off, flipped the sheet away, and rolled to take her in his arms. There was no time for preliminaries in his desire, nor did she require any, reaching to embrace him, gasping once, clawing her nails at his back, and then they were both writhing.
Afterwards, lying in overwhelming lassitude, he held up his free hand and turned it to and fro. A wry smile played across his features as he noted the lack of tremor and he laughed softly.
Ly stirred at the sound, rolling a sleepy leg across his own, her thigh smooth and caressing. She pulled her head back from where it had rested on his shoulder.
“You spoke?”
“I laughed.” He bent his arm to stroke her hair and she snuggled back onto his shoulder, rolling the thigh suggestively.
“You have a strange sense of humor.”
“Do you think I should be sad?”
She pinched him. “Animal! You know what I am saying! There is a difference between happy-satisfied and happy-ha-ha. You cannot lie in my bed and laugh at your own secrets!” She pinched him again and he squirmed.
“Stop it, goddamit! I wasn’t laughing at any secrets! I was only thinking how good I feel now and how bad I felt earlier and it made me happy and I laughed. Big deal!”
She moved against him. “Good. I don’t want you to have too many secrets. I want you to be mine.” She raised up to look into his face, her long black hair draping in protective folds, shielding their meeting eyes. “Did your people ever tell you that here in the south it is traditional for the women to dominate the men? In the north it is the men who are boss, but in the south, the woman is the strong one in the house.”
“I’ve heard it. I don’t know if I believe it, and if it’s true, I don’t care. I’m not Vietnamese and I’m from a helluva lot further north than any Vietnamese, so you can imagine how dominating I can be, if that’s the game you want to play.”
Her laughter cascaded across his chest before she dropped back beside him. “See, you twist our customs to suit yourself. What pleases you, you adopt, and what does not please you, you ignore. You are the worst of the colonialists.”
He stroked her hair again. “You may be right.”
She tensed and her voice came to him muffled, distant. “Now you want to speak of serious things. You are relaxed and pleased and you will say foolish things about you and me. Please, Charles, do not. Right now we are children stealing fruit the farmer will not miss. It is exciting and it is harmless. That is all it is. Like children, we must someday become adults and live in a world where stealing—even fruit—is a crime.” She stretched to kiss the hollow at the base of his throat. “I do not want to grow up again, Charles. When you leave, I will become an old woman. You must promise you will never talk of things that can never be for us.”
A coldness swept through him, a sense of waking to find himself naked before a killing wind.
“I’ll promise not to speak now. We’ve no right to build a wall around each other or around ourselves together. We’ll wait and see what time does for us.”
Once again she rose on her elbow. “You haggle like a fish peddler.” She twisted her face in mock ferocity.
He pulled her down and kissed her. Her thigh slid upward between his legs like warm oiled silk. When they broke the kiss, she smiled mischievously.
“What a warrior we have here! So soon after one battle and seeking another!”
He grinned back at her. “You know how it is. Winning isn’t everything, it’s how you play the game.”
She giggled as he rolled her over and there was no more laughter for a while.
Later, she insisted that he dress first and wait for her to join him in the living room. Once on the sofa, he sprawled and hoped no one would come home soon so he would have to try to act alert.
When she entered the room, immaculate in her ao dai again, a faint tinge in her cheeks was the only thing to betray her. She kissed him lightly, then sat on the opposite end of the sofa. When she addressed him, it was with her prim teacher’s voice.
“It would be a mistake for you to call me Ba any longer, I think. You would forget and your embarrassment would be too clear. I cannot call you Major any more, either. My parents and that sly Hong will suspect, but they will not know. Sooner or later they will learn the truth. By then they will have suspected for so long the knowledge will be a relief to their curiosity instead of a shock to their feelings. We must be very discreet.”
“You said yourself you’re no child, Ly. Maybe it won’t shake them up as much as you think.”
She looked at him pityingly and he felt like a small boy who’s blurted a dirty word in front of company.
“I have made myself your woman. There has been no talk of marriage or love. Even if there had been, my parents are not the sort of Vietnamese who would welcome a white son-in-law. They have known too many lies from white men, they have known colonialism, they have known what it is to be barely tolerated tenants in the land of their ancestors. When they learn I have made love to you, they will accept it calmly only because they won’t know what else to do. Then, in time, they will find a reason for me to live somewhere else. When more time has passed, they will find it inconvenient to visit me or ask me to visit them. One day they will simply forget I was ever here. It will be very civilized.”
Looking at her, he wanted to shout at the controlled serenity, storm at the carefully modulated voice. In his need, his mind sought reference points, and he was thinking of a jade princess in a museum, beautiful, precious, and eternally resigned. He went to her and took her shoulders in his hands, his eyes straining to see through hers.
“You should have told me! You expect me to live with something like that? You know you’re destroying your life and you make me a party to it? I won’t, Ly! I can’t do that!”
“You must,” she said, still calm. “It is what you want and it is my life and it is what I want. I am the one who will pay, and it is worth it to me. My life with my husband was short. It was good. He made me learn what a woman can be. Since he died, I have lived with memories. Now there is you. When you are gone, I will have that memory. When I let myself want to make love with you, it was weakness. Now that I have done it, I feel strength, more than I ever knew I had. I hope you will come back to me, Charles. It is shameless to say so, I know. But I want you. And if you do not—” She paused, then, “It is not written anywhere that life is always what one wants.”
“I’ll be back.” He looked away, exasperated. “I’ve never understood any woman, but you’re impossible. You only give. There’s no taking. And you give too much, risk too much. You are a strange woman.” He took her hand in his.
She laughed at him, untroubled. “There is no give or take, Charles
. It is all fate. Anyhow, you are the strange one.”
“Me? I’m the one who benefits. I’d really be strange—hell, I’d be crazy—if I didn’t make the most of the situation.”
She drew her brows together. “That’s not what I mean. You are strange because you think you can lie to me.”
“I haven’t lied!”
“Of course you have.” The teacher’s voice was back. “You, the students before you, and especially the clever Colonel Loc and Colonel Winter. Do you think I am a fool, that I cannot see the type of men who come here for lessons? Grim, hard-mouthed men, full of determination. These are men who scribble on paper, who draw charts? I have looked at soldiers all my life.”
“You are mistaken. We are soldiers, true, but our work’s exactly what you’ve been told. It’s dull, but it needs to be done, so we do it.”
She moved to place the palms of her hands on his cheeks and rubbed her fingers across his ears, studying them tactilely. “Poor darling. You are such a loyal liar. And it was you who convinced me.”
“There’s nothing to convince you of. You’re imagining things. You watch too much television.” A tickling sensation told him a glaze of sweat was forming on his upper lip. He clenched a fist to avoid reaching to wipe at it.
“Of course I watch television. I watch people, too.” Her fingers curved from his ears and the index finger of each hand drifted back and forth along the bone ridges under his eyes. “I told you you have cruel eyes. Tonight, when you arrived you laughed and talked and there was something there that would not go away. Only when we were in my bed did they change, and now they are the same as they were when you came here. Death swims in your eyes like a soul in the yellow springs.”
“Yellow springs? What kind of poetry is that?”
“It is poetry. An old expression for the land of death. I saw that when you first came and it made my heart weak. I fought with you because I knew you needed me as terribly as I needed you.”
He stepped back. “I did need you. I will again. But you’re wrong about me and wrong about the Unit. I’m glad you were, because I wanted you—want you—more than I can tell you, but your reasons were wrong.”
She nodded slowly. “Then it will not trouble you if I tell you I’ll pray for your safety.”
“Everyone should have someone praying for him, if he has to fight Saigon traffic.” The dull humor clacked in his ears. Still, she responded in kind.
“Men who tease need prayers to protect them from knives in their sleep, too.”
The tension in the room ebbed, an emotional tide retreating with unpleasant driftage. They both heard the heavy door of the fence thud home outside and he brushed her lips in a final kiss.
Her father was just reaching for the front door with his key when Taylor pulled it open. The small Vietnamese looked up and started at the appearance of the Marine in his doorway. When he steadied, he stammered a question.
“Y-you are l-late tonight, Major. You had trouble with the lesson?” He glanced at his watch. “It is almost nine-thirty.” A veneer of anger and suspicion colored his belated awareness of the hour.
“We practiced conversation instead of grammar,” Taylor explained. “Like so many conversations, this one lasted much longer than we realized.”
The parents entered and the father turned to pointedly stare Taylor on his way. “I understand, Major, although I am sure you understand you must be careful in the future. There are people who live for gossip.”
“I apologize, sir. I would not want to be responsible for idle gossip. I will be very careful.”
Ly waved goodbye hurriedly, turning away. Her mother watched her, then looked at Taylor’s retreating back. Her left eyelid made tics as though a particularly hardshelled insect had intruded there.
Book Two
Chapter 17
“Gentlemen! A toast!”
Winter raised his glass and his companions at the long table quieted and waited. He began with grave pomposity.
“You’re all probably wondering why I’ve called you together here.” He openly reveled in the laughter and applause from the assembled men of the Unit.
“We’ve kept the good tidings from you all day, and we scheduled this last-minute dinner to celebrate. Colonel Loc and I received a report at 1000 this morning concerning a disaster that has befallen our enemies.” He raised his glass a notch higher and placed his other hand on Loc’s shoulder, who flinched minutely, although the tiny smile remained fixed to his lips.
“From 1000, and as of 1600, our foe has seen eight of his clandestine ordnance storage areas disappear in smoke and flame.”
Duc turned a baffled frown on Taylor. “I do not understand,” he whispered.
Winter noticed his confusion, as well as the blank stares from some of the other Vietnamese at the gathering. He leaned forward.
“What I’m telling you, Major Duc, is that eight of the ammo dumps we booby trapped have blown to shit. OK?”
Duc leaped to his feet, waving his arms dangerously. “Khong biet, OK for sure!” he shouted. “Number-fucking-one, you bet!” He weaved and the whiskey-ruddied features wobbled as he structured his next phrase. A quick glance at Colonel Loc, however, and he flowed back into his chair, despite the latter’s obvious amusement.
The laughter quieted and Winter proposed his toast. “To continued success! To the destruction of Nguyen Binh and his entire organization!” A bilingual murmur of assent rolled, each man agreeing in his own manner. Glasses thumped around the table. During the self-congratulatory babble, Taylor inventoried the spartan banquet room of BOQ One and its twelve occupants. They sat in cafe chairs at a long table that jiggled on uneven legs. It sat at the mathematical center of a room painted a bright yellow as false as a pimp’s smile. An occasional glad shout from the swimmers in the pool wavered through the night and washed across the more subdued laughter of the party.
Taylor had been detailed to make the arrangements for the dinner. He’d asked Winter why he was so insistent on the austere room instead of one of the fine restaurants in the city and been told, “Because it’s one place I can be reasonably sure isn’t bugged and I want everyone free to talk. What’s the sense of a party if everyone has to sit around and count every goddam word he says?”
Looking around again, Taylor thought, give us each a tin cup and we could do a Jimmy Cagney prison messhall scene, except for the colored shirts. Still, the locale seemed to be having no ill effect on the others. Tomorrow was going to be Hangover City.
He amused himself watching the others, sparing little time for Winter, Loc, or Duc.
Kimble was interesting. He drank with everyone else, measure for measure, but managed to give the impression he was observing a ritual. There was no depth to the smile on his face, like oil on water. To his left, Lieutenant Colonel Tho was a complete contrast, keeping involved with several conversations at once. He was pleasantly serious with Denby, to his own left, and openly interested in any statement from Kimble. When either of those conversations lulled, he’d lean forward and direct a comment past Denby to either Loc or Winter. Taylor wondered idly if Tho used interrogation technique to keep discussion flowing.
On Taylor’s own left, Captain Allen nursed his martini, the only one at the table. Taylor caught Allen’s eye and grimaced at the funnel-shaped glass.“You just can’t let any of us forget you’re Ivy League, can you? Everyone else sits here banging back booze, but not you. Oh, no! You have to stoke up on before-dinner martinis. Where the hell d’you think you are? The Four Seasons?”
Allen was arch. “I certainly should be. My association with you plebeians is simply a burdensome exigency of war. I drink martinis while you swill,” he sipped to emphasize his point, “because it’s incumbent on me to uphold the mores of the better element. A form of noblesse oblige, if you will. You may wish to write down that phrase, although I can’t imagine you having need of it. It’s French, of course. Perhaps you noticed? French is the language of diplomacy, you know. You’ve heard
of both things, surely.”
Taylor laughed. “Du ma, Ivy League. There’s a phrase a lot handier around here than your fruity noblesse oblige.”
“It’s something I’ve heard.” Allen yawned his ennui. “I suppose I should ask what it means. Learning is never to be scorned, regardless of the source.”
“It means mother-fucker. Where’d you ever hear such talk?”
Allen choked on his drink and scrambled for his handkerchief. After a series of strangled barks, he dabbed tears from his eyes and blew his nose.
“That was a dirty trick,” he said, voice rough from coughing. “I just bought a brass tray from a guy down on Tu Do this afternoon. When he gave me my change he was smiling and the last thing he said was, ‘Thank you, Captain. Have good day, du ma.’ ” He mimed the peddler’s bobbing head and sing-song English, then laughed at himself. “Zapped again. I ought to go back tomorrow and pound the tray around his skull like a helmet.”
“Gracious goodness!” Taylor cupped his chin in a limp-wristed motion. “A violent emotional outburst? Whatever would your embassy chum-buddies say?”
“You’d be surprised. Some of those people may act like ultimately urbane citizens, but inside? Some of them were born with a bellyful of snakes. When they talk about soul food, they mean eating real souls.” He turned in his chair, warming to his subject. “Some of them are forever pumping to learn something, anything, about American intentions here. I was wondering what they’d look like if they could have seen me rearrange Trung’s face with the butt of that shotgun. They might not be so anxious to ask questions. It can get to be an awful drag, talking to people whose main interest in the war is how it’s going to affect investments or trade agreements. Or if Charlie may drop a rocket on the power plant and knock out the air-conditioner.”
Taylor nodded, aware no comment was wanted, knowing Allen was talking out half-understood personal problems.
“They’re not all like that,” he rushed on. “A lot of the women work in hospitals and orphanages and so on. Still, you begin to feel like a parasite, knowing guys like you and Harker and Duc are doing things, and I’m milling around sucking up cocktails, wondering which hors d’oeuvre is the one that’s going to have me racing for the crapper all the next day.” He paused to make a face. “Can you get a Purple Heart for diarrhea? I mean, is there a percentage figure, like, ‘Captain X, during his tour in Vietnam, did suffer explosions in his lower intestine approximately 87.3 percent of the time, causing him intense physical discomfort and psychological trauma as a result of breaking off an average of 12.7 conversations daily in order to sprint for the shitter, occasionally with an absolutely horrid lack of success?’ ”