by William Boyd
Pfitz had Lydecker transferred from aircraft crew to catapult maintenance, one of the worst details on the ship. It meant hours on the exposed bow of the carrier as it steamed full speed into the wind for a mission launch. Lydecker’s new job was to shackle the planes onto the towing block that protruded from the indented track of the catapult. He wore a huge goggled helmet with bulging ear protectors that made him look like some insectheaded alien or demented astronaut. It was a cheerless companionless job. The rush of wind made his bright nylon overalls crack like a pennant in a hurricane and conversation of any kind was impossible due to the shattering roar of jet engines driven at full thrust. As the plane was moved into take-off position Lydecker would run forward with the cumbersome steel-cable towing strop. He would secure each end of the strop to pinions in the undercarriage bay or just below the leading edge of the wings and slip the middle over the angled blade of the towing block. He then darted out from beneath the plane giving a thumbs-up to the catapult officer. If everything was in order the officer held five fingers up to the pilot of the plane who saluted his acknowledgement. Then like some ardent coach cheering on his team the catapult officer dropped to one knee, swept his arm forward and a seaman on a catwalk across the deck pressed the launch button. The catapult would be released hurling the plane, on full afterburn, along the narrow expanse of deck and into the air. The cable too would be flung out ahead of the carrier, dropping away from the climbing plane to splash forlornly into the sea in a tiny flurry of spray. The next plane was then towed into the take-off position, ghostly wreaths of steam hissing from the length of the catapult track.
Some strange impulse made Lydecker keep the beer can Pfitz had thrown at him. It stood on a small shelf above his bunk beside his electric razor and a creased Polaroid snapshot of the cinema usherette. For a week after the incident he had worn sticking plaster on his forehead, then the scab had sloughed off leaving a paler stripe on his already pale skin. Lydecker found that he unconsciously kept touching the thin scar, repeatedly running his forefinger gently over it, as if he had to keep reminding himself of its presence, like a teenager with his first moustache.
Denied the satisfaction of working on a plane Lydecker’s life became one of routine mindless boredom. There were long periods of inactivity or futile chores. There was the deadening monotony of the catapult maintenance crew; the endless scurrying beneath screaming jets with the heavy cable, the grease thick on his gloves as he fought with recalcitrant pinions. Sometimes the frequent malfunctioning of the Chester B.’s old steam catapult brought tedious afternoons of stripping the mechanism down, searching for faults and elusive defects. The pressure that was required to fling tons of lethal weaponry into the air caused valves to blow back, bearings to jam and gauges to crack and leak. There were many accidents. Planes given insufficient lift from the catapult belly-landing in the sea; a tardily raised blast deflector had caused a parked helicopter to be flipped overboard; combatdazed pilots had misjudged their landings and ploughed off the end of the carrier. Once a deck-tractor had momentarily stuck in reverse and backed a Skyhawk into the ocean – just like kicking a pebble off the quayside.
Throughout this time Lydecker appeased his tired and numb body by hating Pfitz. The man came to obsess him. His throat would be thick with emotion and fury as he forced the launching cable onto the Crusader’s grips. Sometimes he would wander over to the plane when the crew were working on it, but he was invariably met with insults and told to stay away. Slowly he came to feel that Pfitz had deliberately set out to deprive his life of the little meaning and satisfaction it had, and for some reason the only solace he found, the only way he knew of combating this emptiness was to replace it with his hatred. The emotion gave his life a structure of sorts, it became something he could rely on, constant and unwavering, like a picture he had once seen of St Paul’s Cathedral in the London blitz. Lydecker’s hatred was a familiar comfort; it had done able service from his earliest days. It had sustained him as he had lain in bed and listened to his father batter his frail mother in a frenzy of crapulous rage. It had provided support when Werbel took him off cars and put him on the pumps and had then restricted him to cleaning the lavatories and sweeping the concrete forecourt. As he had freed plugged drains or picked sodden cigar butts from chill pools of lubricant, listening to the laughter and banter of the mechanics in the warm garage, all that had kept his mind from tilting over into twitching insanity was his passionate hatred. It was this and the knowledge that no matter what Werbel made him do, no matter how he was debased by him, the hate lived on – secretly firing and fuelling his spirit. He was grateful to the Navy for allowing the hate to subside for a while. He still had no friends, was still one of the few despised and ignored that figure in any large company, but his ability with machinery was recognized and his self-esteem inched up from ground zero. He found his reward in the perfect roar of an engine, the smooth retraction of an undercarriage, or the clean function of an aileron. Never having asked for much, he needed nothing more, and his life reached a plateau of tolerance which was as close as he’d come to happiness. Until Pfitz had lost his Phantom.
Working away from Pfitz’s immediate sphere of influence Lydecker became more aware of the man’s other obsession. Pfitz’s fascination with napalm was the subject of bemused reflection among the members of the catapult maintenance crew. ‘Hell, there goes Fireball Pfitz,’ one of them would remark, and there would ensue some discussion about the ‘poor fuckin gooks’. Lydecker didn’t pay much attention at first. He had never been to Vietnam, even though he’d been on the Yankee station for four months. The fleet made an endless patrol, usually just over the horizon from the coast, rarely steaming into sight unless cruisers or destroyers were called to bring their large guns into play. But gradually Lydecker came to see that Pfitz hated Vietnam as much as he loathed Lydecker himself; and he felt an involuntary sympathy start up in his body as Pfitz lovingly recounted the devastation eight canisters of napalm had wrought in a straw village to the wide-mouthed audience of his ground crew. ‘The Rose Train’ climbed the gradients into the sky weighted with seething latent fire like some modern archangelic predator. Lydecker would watch it go, his head a confused muddle of thoughts and sensations.
And each night, exhausted, he would gaze at the slightly buckled beer-can as if it were some ikon or idol of his hate. In the distorted planes of its surface he seemed to see a vague metallic template of Pfitz’s bullish features. He would stroke the scar on his forehead and think about Pfitz and the men he had known like him – his father and Werbel – and the intensity of his hatred brought his flesh up in goose-pimples. He would clutch the sides of his bunk and screw his eyes tight shut as if in the grip of an acute migraine attack. Men like that shouldn’t be allowed to go about unhindered, he would think distractedly, something should be done to them.
Then one day Pfitz had an engine cut-out as Lydecker was shackling the expendable wire bridle to the nose wheel of the Crusader. The air vibrated with the idling jets of planes waiting in line and the hot gases of the exhausts made the crowded deck of the carrier shimmer and dance in the haze. Pfitz had to be towed off line and there was some delay as Lydecker fought to free the cable from the stiff nose-wheel clamps. Pfitz had raised his cockpit canopy and as Lydecker stood up, the cable finally released, he saw Pfitz’s purple enraged face screaming inaudible obscenities at him through arcs of spittle. It was as if Lydecker had been responsible for the cut-out, as if his particular touch on the nose wheel had mysteriously spooked the functioning of the jet. And in the waves of Pfitz’s anger Lydecker was disturbed by the sudden realization that Pfitz was a hater too, that, like him, he needed his hate, needed his malice to beat the world.
That evening Lydecker applied for a long overdue spell of shore leave. The bizarre feeling of kinship had unsettled him. It appeared that Pfitz’s plane would be out of action for a week, and now – more than ever – Lydecker didn’t want to be around.
Lydecker was granted five
days and opted for Saigon. He passed nearly all of his time in a Tu-Do bar brothel methodically working his way through the nine girls who serviced the clients. Out at the back of the bar there were three lean-to cabins with rickety iron beds. Lydecker spent the day drinking beer and every now and then would stagger up to one of the girls – comic-book whores with thickly mascaraed eyes, mini skirts and padded bras – and lurch outside to a cabin.
It was only on the third day that he noticed the young thinshouldered girl who wiped and cleared the tables and periodically swept out the cabins. She was quiet and withdrawn and had slightly buck teeth. Unlike the others she wore an ao-dai and a thigh-length chemise. Her status in the bar was indeterminate. He never saw her with GIs and she never used the cabins. Sometimes she would go out to the back or into the toilets, but only with civilians or the occasional Vietnamese soldier, only spending the briefest time – about two minutes – away from her chores. She did not pout, flirt or posture like the other girls and never wore their cheap western clothes. Yet for all her quiet dignity and restraint she was the lowest creature in the bar. A quick-time girl – lower than the pimps and shoe-shine boys, lower even than the many cats and stray dogs that nosed around and were temporarily adopted and spoilt by the American servicemen. Why is she doing this? Lydecker found himself asking. What was it about her that kept her in this whores’ city so calmly accepting the shitty jobs and compliantly carrying out the spurious sex-acts demanded of her? The paradox enraged and excited him and the girl gradually took a hold on his mind. Not having noticed her at first, he now seemed to see her everywhere. She hovered round the perimeter of his vision: taking the empty bottles from his table, slipping from a cabin as he entered, mopping up pools of vomit in the men’s room. He discovered a disproportional irritation in this, and despite himself swore and shouted at her if she approached. Strengthened by his uniform in this city of obsequious servants, he befriended other servicemen who used the bar and in his noontide drunkenness wove obscene stories round the thin girl, flashing his eyes in her direction as he joined in the raucous guffaws.
She paid no attention to him, her frail body moving amongst the tables, her straight shiny hair framing her face.
At night Lydecker tossed in his bed and found his thoughts turning again and again to the thin girl. He stayed away from the bar a whole day before crashing in late at night in a beerhaze to seek her out. He found her in the corridor that led out to the cabins at the back, her arms full of dirty sheets. Lydecker bore down on her, maddened by her inscrutability and at the same time potently aroused. He wrenched the sheets from her hands and forced her against the wall drunkenly nuzzling her neck.
She made no move to resist him. He gazed into her eyes.
‘Whassa fuckin matter with you? Damn you,’ he implored slurringly, ‘whyncha like the others? No good chicken-shit . . .’ His voice tailed off into a wet whispering pant. He looked at her and saw why she wasn’t like the others. Beneath the stretched oblique lids her brown eyes stared out defiantly in candid unalloyed hate.
Lydecker stepped back, suddenly dismayed and shocked. ‘Ach, no good fuckin . . .’ he grunted to himself and staggered off down the passage. The girl stood there, a grubby snowdrift of soiled sheets around her ankles, and watched him go.
During his last day of leave Lydecker took three cheery whores to bed. They giggled when he stared into their eyes.
‘You like GI?’ he would ask uncertainly.
‘Sure, you number one,’ they would smile. ‘US number one.’
So no hooker fell in love with her John, Lydecker reasoned, but where did that little bit of skinny ass get the right to condemn him like that, to look at him in that way? It troubled and nagged at him, her contempt. It marred his swaggering progress through downtown Saigon; it sapped his confidence and aloof reserve as he pushed his way through the pimps and beggars; it made his hurried sex with the other prostitutes more grimy and unsatisfactory. Nobody, he declared, knew more about hate than him; surely no one had hated so intensely; but this chick . . . He was prepared, even willing to accept the scorn and despite of the peasant for the armed invader, but the look in that girl’s eyes had seemed to mark him out personally for her wrath.
So on the last afternoon of his last day Lydecker sat in the bar and studied her, his mind a jostling crowd of vague tensions, obscure guilts and unresolved lusts. He was due to pick up a helicopter in a few hours that would ferry him back to the fleet on the Yankee station. He felt disturbed, hungover, sullen. Saigon had proved no release, no real solace. He felt immensely fatigued at the thought of returning to the catapult maintenance crew.
The bar was quiet in the afternoon’s torpor. The whores lounged in groups around the wall, some ARVN soldiers played cards in a corner. Lydecker stared at the girl as she swept the floor. Her hair was tied up with a scrap of pink ribbon, her chemise shone crisply white. Once her gaze passed over him as he sat there but there was no flicker of recognition, no revulsion or even acknowledgement in her motionless face.
As the time drew nearer for his departure Lydecker was seized with a restless panic at the thought of leaving with so much uncertain and unfinished. He felt the sweat pool against his body and his uniform chafe. He drank beer after beer in an attempt to keep cool.
With an hour to go he beckoned one of the whores over. She had become something of a favourite with him and she now slid easily onto his knee. Her smile was wide and at once she started to whisper endearments and run her sharp fingers through his hair. Lydecker shrugged her hands away, for some reason the artifice and dishonesty repulsed him. He pointed to the thin girl.
‘What about her?’ he demanded hoarsely. ‘How much?’
The whore looked archly offended, hurt. ‘She no good. Not for GI. She number ten, Johnny, she quick-time girl. No fickyfick.’ She made a contemptuous jerking with her hand.
With a sudden movement Lydecker brutally tipped her from his lap and strode across the room towards the girl. He dropped a handful of notes on the bar in front of the startled patron and seizing the girl’s hand dragged her out to the cabins at the back.
He pushed her into the first room. Solid slabs of sunlight beaming through the shutters sectioned the floor and the grubby coverlet on the bed. It was stiflingly hot. With a finger Lydecker sluiced perspiration from his forehead and upper lip. He stuffed the rest of his notes into the girl’s unresponsive hand.
‘Okay,’ he croaked. ‘Christ damn you. Let’s really give you something to get riled over. Take ‘em off.’ He pulled off his own clothes in a hasty flurry of movement, leaving only his shorts. The rough concrete of the floor cooled the soles of his feet. Sweat dampened the sparse black hairs on his pale chest. There was the distant sound of a Honda revving.
Very slowly the girl pocketed the money and tugged her hair free from the ribbon. She slipped the sandals from her feet and gently unwound the cloth from around her waist. The swish of material sent dust-motes spiralling among the sun-bars.
Without removing her chemise she went and lay on the bed. Lydecker stood, his chest heaving, his erection straining against his cotton undershorts.
‘I said take it all off.’ He spoke quietly, a tremble in his voice.
The girl did nothing, her hands clenched by her slim brown thighs.
‘All of it, baby. That means the fuckin shirt.’ Lydecker awkwardly slipped down his shorts and moved over to stand by the bed. The girl didn’t look at him.
‘I’m waiting,’ Lydecker said harshly.
In response the girl raised the hem of her chemise to her waist and spread her legs. Lydecker gulped, a blob of sweat fell from the tip of his nose.
Suddenly he grabbed the girl’s hand and jerked her roughly to her feet.
‘Take it off!’ he shouted. ‘I fuckin paid you.’
‘No,’ the girl said evenly. ‘No good.’
Lydecker seized her and crushed his mouth on hers, clashing their teeth together. Then Lydecker drew back. He had seen her eyes. On fire wit
h disgust. Ashamed and angry, he wrenched at the chemise. It tore slightly at the shoulder. At the sound of the ripping cotton the girl’s eyes registered alarm.
‘No, Johnny,’ she said as though only half remembering the unfamiliar whore’s argot. ‘No good.’ She made vague passing movements with her hands in front of her face and soft explosion noises in the back of her throat. ‘Number ten. No lie, GI. Not good for you, Johnny.’
What the fuck was she talking about? Lydecker wondered in desperation, her thin hands still swooping to and fro.
‘Strip, damn you. Off. All of it,’ he gasped.
She saw she could do nothing more. His purple swollen sex stood out from his belly like a clenched fist salute, an absurd symbol of his domination. Crossing her arms in front of her she swiftly pulled off the chemise.
Lydecker looked at the firm pubescent girl’s body. ‘That’s more like it, baby,’ he said, trying to sound kind. ‘I ain’t gonna hurt you.’ His gaze cautiously returned once again to her eyes, hoping to find some more amicable response. ‘What’s all the trouble been about eh? C’mon, honey.’ But then he was perturbed to see a look of almost contemptuous triumph cross her face. She turned abruptly to reveal her back. And as she turned Lydecker’s beer-numbed mind grasped feebly at the reasons for her evasiveness. ‘It’s all right baby,’ he said reflexively, but it was too late by then.
When he saw her back Lydecker’s brain screamed in silent horror. His hands rose involuntarily to his mouth. The girl looked at him over her shoulder.
‘Nay-pom,’ she said quietly in explanation. ‘Nay-pom, GI.’