Machine Gun Jelly (Big Bamboo Book 1)

by Shane Norwood

  Baby Joe stepped out through the broken door. He stood for a second, looking down at the pavement, trying to interpret what he was feeling. A connection? Responsibility? Fuck, yes. How could you deny that? Indirectly, he was only standing here because of that old man inside. It was a coincidence so inconceivable as to defy credence, yet it was real. He looked up. The cabbie was still sitting on the hood of her cab, smoking a cigarette. She indicated the house with a nod of her head.

  “What’s the story there?” she said.

  “Fucked if I know. Listen, did you get paid?”

  “No.”

  Baby Joe looked at the meter through the window, took some money out of his pocket, and handed it to Maggie.

  “What are you doing?” she asked.

  “Fucked if I know,” he replied, turning around and walking back towards the house.

  What the fuck am I doing? he asked himself as he stood in the doorway, looking at the old man. Bjørn Eggen was bent over the photographs with his face in his hands, crying softly.

  “Er, Bjørn Eggen, listen, er…perhaps you would be more comfortable staying with me, since your grandson is not here, and you don’t know anybody.”

  The old man dried his eyes with the back of his veined hand and looked up at Baby Joe, studying his eyes. Something in the Baby Joe’s demeanor told him he could trust him.

  “Vell, I don’t really like to stay in the hotels, ja. Okay, I make a deal vith you. If ve can stop for a beer on the vay home, I come vith you.”

  “Bjørn Eggen, you’re a man after my own heart.”

  “Vat the hell is that?” Bjørn Eggen said, when they were sitting in a corner at the Whale and Baby Joe had sat down with a pint of lager and a Guinness.

  “This is Guinness. Finest substance known to mankind.”

  “Looks like my vife’s arse used to look like,” said Bjørn Eggen, lifting his beer and causing Baby Joe to almost choke on his.

  They talked about Phil Parker, and Monsoon, and Bjørn Eggen’s life, and his dogs, and they talked about war, and Vietnam, and Phil Parker’s Congressional Medal of Honor, and how the dice roll impartially for the wicked and the meritorious, and how Philip Parker had had his life taken from him in defense of his country. And, as they talked, Baby Joe came to the realization that the old man did not know the true circumstances of his son’s death. He also came to the decision that Bjørn Eggen would not discover it from his own lips—for how would it benefit the old man, or serve his memories, to know that his son had died for nothing, in a place where he should never have been, in a war that was already over? Or to know of Baby Joe’s part in it, even though it had not really been his fault.

  While Philip Parker and Baby Joe were drinking in the Bay, the Cambodians seized the SS Mayaguez, which was on its way to Thailand. They took the crew to Koh Tang Island. Ford told Kissinger to ask the Chinese to tell the Cambodians to let the crew go. Kissinger told Bush Senior, who at that time was the US Liaison Officer in Beijing, to pass the word. The Chinese told George Senior to fuck off. Ford sent in the Marines. He sent the 1st Batallion 4th Marines, who were stationed in Subic Bay. Phil Parker and Baby Joe were Airborne, and so were the guys they were drinking with. For them, the shit was over. But when the Marines’ transport pulled out, they were on it. It had seemed like a good idea at the time.

  The Americans didn’t know two things when they hit Koh Tang. They didn’t know that the Cambodians had already released the crew of the Mayaguez, and they didn’t know that the island was heavily defended—ironically, against the Vietnamese. When the shit stopped flying, eighteen Americans were dead. Phil Parker was one of them. Three guys got left behind. Their names are the last three names on the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. Phil Parker was killed by one of the very last shots fired in anger.

  But that wasn’t all. At the end of the fight, there were only two choppers left evacuating the Americans. The second to last to leave was an HH-53. Phil Parker was on it. He was home free. They were hovering four feet over the surf ready to pull out when this Airborne kid came running through the smoke out of the tree line. The call went out to wait. The kid got to within ten feet of the chopper when a B40 grenade came in. It knocked him ass-over-tit into the surf. Without giving it a second thought Philip Parker jumped down, grabbed the kid, and heaved him into the door of the chopper. The chopper was heavy, and there was incoming, so Phil Parker waved them away. He ran back for cover and waited until the last chopper came in. They gave him the Congressional Medal of Honor for it. But he never got to use his free air travel, or get invited to a Presidential inaugural ball. Turns out the Airborne kid was cut to shit, and winded, but otherwise he was okay. The kid’s name was Baby Joe Young.

  And right now the kid was feeling confused, disoriented, and fucked-up in the head, just like all those years ago on the chopper. He was looking for the son of the man who had saved his ass, and gotten himself killed doing it, and drinking with his father. How did that work? What celestial haunting mechanism was clanking its chains here? Is there some karmic requirement that the present must be forfeit to the past? That debts from the past must be redeemed in the future? And if so, by what means or in what currency must the debt be paid? He was also feeling guilty as hell. Guilty about keeping the truth from the old man, and knowing he had no right to do so, even if it was the right thing to do. Or was he just telling himself that? How would the old man feel about sharing a drink with the man who had caused his son to sacrifice himself? And he felt guilty about his motive for asking him to stay, which in truth he was not entirely sure of himself. It was part sympathy, part instinct, part curiosity, and partly some uncanny and disturbing sense of the past reaching out to let him know that he could not escape it.

  But it was also cynical pragmatism. He thought it might help him discover what the fuck was going on, and what Monsoon had that was so interesting to the Don. Asia and Crispin had obviously just stumbled into something…something big enough that the Don thought it necessary to get them out of the way. And what was the deal with the old man? He was obviously not aware that the clipping was a fake. Why had Monsoon gotten him involved? Why had the poor old bastard been dragged halfway around the world just so that life could give him another kick in the balls?

  He knew that he should just walk. Every instinct and tenet of common sense told him so. He should just put the girl on a bus back to Baton Rouge, put the fudge packer on a plane to wherever, drop the old man at the Mirage, and walk away. Three people were dead already—one of them killed by him—and he knew it was only just beginning. He didn’t give a rat’s ass about that evil creep Maxie. That little shitbird had deserved it, and he had been doing the world a favor. But he knew how these things worked. One thing led to another and before you knew it, your ass was against the wall, and you had to either fight until it was over, or cut and run. He was going up against some bad boys, here. The worst. His boat was waiting for him at the edge of his dreams. And he was close…almost close enough to call it quits right now. Maybe now was the time. Do something smart for a change. What the fuck was he doing? For people he didn’t even know. Sure, one of them he really liked, and she made him feel like he hadn’t felt for twenty years. But she was a whore, a three-hundred-dollar-a-night trick twenty years his junior. You didn’t need to be Stephen fucking Hawking to figure out how much time that one had left on the clock.

  Baby Joe went to the bar for a last round. He looked back at the old man, sitting there in his leather shorts, with the sun from the high window lighting his hair Rembrandt-style. He was five thousand miles from home, worrying and hoping, with a picture of his dead son and a lie in his pocket. He thought about Crispin. Two hundred and fifty pounds of quivering jelly, almost as helpless as when he came screaming into the world covered in blood and shit. He thought about Asia. The taste of her breath, the smell of her hair, the weight of her breasts. That look in those exquisite tawny eyes. He thought about his promise to her.

  And he knew he wasn’t going anywhere un
til this thing was over. He was going to fight, because that was all there was to do. Because deep down in the dark recesses of his soul, where the dragon lived, he wanted to. Fuck the Don!

  “Mr. Young, you are one stupid motherfucker,” he sighed aloud as the drinks arrived.

  “Excuse me?” said the barman.

  Baby Joe shook his head. He went back to the table, set the drinks down, reached into his pocket, and sat.

  “Bjørn Eggen. You should have these. I found them in the house, so they must have belonged to Phil.” He placed the medals on the scarred and scratched wood, and they lay glinting silver and bronze in a beam of pale light.

  The old man reached out slowly and took them up, and held them in his horny, wrinkled hand. His eyes misted over again as he looked up into Baby Joe’s face. “Ja,” he said, very softly, “thank you. Thank you, my friend.”

  They finished their beer in silence, and as they drove down the freeway, back to Baby Joe’s townhouse, Bjørn Eggen stared in silence out of the window. He saw the lights and the billboards, and the garish colors, and bizarre shapes of the hotels, and the monotonous, dun-colored desert, and the hazy, gray hills beyond. Then he saw the insides of his eyelids, and was asleep.

  “What on earth is a safe house, Mr. Young?”

  Crispin was tipsy, bordering on off-his-trolley. He had been drinking steadily since his arrival, hiding in the sweet, warm depths of a gin bottle, communing with the genie who lived there, the genie who could make everything all right, the genie who could make all the bad things go away. Poof! Like magic. He was using gin to suppress his pain and confusion and fear, and he had just about suppressed the fuck out of them by the time Baby Joe sat him and Asia down at the garden table to speak to them. Bjørn Eggen was lying in a deep, exhausted sleep in the spare room, dreaming of sunlit dogs running across the snow.

  Baby Joe smiled indulgently. He was beginning to like Crispin despite himself. In fact, he was beginning to like a lot of people recently: Crispin, the old man, Asia. Rather more than like, in her case. What the fuck was wrong with him? Maybe there was something going around.

  “A safe house is a place where you’ll be safe, because nobody knows where it is.”

  “What a splendid idea,” Crispin said, giggling, and taking another sip of gin. His fat face was florid, and his bouffant had collapsed down over his eyes, making him look like a jovial and overindulgent judge.

  “Baby Joe, do we have to?”

  “Some evil shit is going down, honey, and I don’t want you anywhere near. These are hard words, but somebody wanted you dead. They’ll keep trying until they succeed. You leave tonight. I’ll rent you a car at the airport. You drive to LA and fly from there. You’re sure there won’t be any problem with Crispin staying?”

  “It won’t be a problem for us, but it is going to be a huge culture shock for Crispin. It might be more humane just to let the Don put him out of his misery.”

  “There’s not much that can shock me, dearie, let me tell you,” said Crispin, who had almost nodded off.

  They both smiled.

  “We’d better get him kitted out with more appropriate duds for down there, or they’ll think Mardi Gras has started early,” Baby Joe said.

  Crispin fell asleep, slumped in his chair with his chins on his chest and his hair hanging down like a wilted sunflower. They were silent for a few minutes, knowing what had to be said, but neither one wanting to be the one to bring it up.

  Finally Asia spoke. “Baby Joe? How long do we have to stay?”

  Baby Joe took a deep breath. “Maybe you can never come back. I don’t know yet. I don’t understand what is going on, but it’s bad. It isn’t your fault, but you have walked into something, something to do with Bjørn Eggen’s grandson. People are dead, and more will die. I’m going to make sure that one of them isn’t you.”

  “But what are you going to do?”

  “I’m not sure. I’m just going to play it by ear. But I can’t do anything while I’m worrying about you.”

  “Are you worried about me?”

  “You know I am. This wasn’t part of the plan, and I didn’t expect it, but it’s happened now and I have to deal with it.”

  “What about us?”

  “Asia. This is not the time. Okay? Let’s just make sure there is a ‘you,’ and we can worry about ‘us’ later. I’m going to organize the wheels. You call the airline and sort out the tickets. I’ll be back in a couple of hours.”

  Baby Joe stood up to leave, and Asia ran to him and threw her arms around him. “I want there to be an us. I feel so safe with you. So secure.”

  Baby Joe kissed her, and gently pried her arms from around his neck. “There’s no such thing as security, baby,” he said softly. “It’s an illusion. This is a difficult situation. People get emotional under stress, and when they’re scared. You said it yourself, I’m old enough to be your father.”

  “But I…”

  Baby Joe put his finger to her lips. “Later,” he said. “Things will be clearer with some distance between us. Now you know the drill?”

  Asia pulled a face, and took a theatrical deep breath. “Don’t answer the door, don’t answer the phone, if anyone tries to break in, shoot them. Yeah, I know.”

  Baby Joe grinned, turned, and walked out of the door. Asia looked down at the slumped figure of Crispin, sighed, plunked herself down in her chair, and reached for the bottle.

  Baby Joe drove to New York-New York, parked his car, walked through the lobby to reception, and took a cab to the airport. He rented a small, unobtrusive Japanese hatchback, drove it to the Crown and Anchor, got a pint, and sat down to ring around his contacts, finding out as much as he could about Monsoon Parker without divulging anything.

  What he discovered left him more puzzled than before. Parker was nothing. Just a small fly buzzing around in the shit at the bottom of the food chain. No different than a thousand other small-time hustlers, feeding off the crumbs and scraps from the king’s table. The kind of guy that people like the Don only noticed if they found them stuck to the bottom of their Italian loafers. This poor bastard must have done a state-of-the-art piece of fucking up to get himself in so deep with Don Ignacio Imbroglio. There was every chance that the reason he was not at home was because he was on a permanent vacation to Sleepville out in the sticks. The fucking River Styx. Which meant that, sooner or later, he was going to have to break it to the old man. His phone rang. It was Asia, with a corncob up her ass.

  “Crispin has gone back to his apartment!”

  “He what? The stupid bastard!”

  “He’s drunk. After you had gone, I laid down to relax and must have drifted off. When I woke up, he was gone. He left me a note saying that if he had to go and live in a swamp, he at least wanted to have some decent clothes. He said he would be back in an hour.”

  “Okay. I’ll see what I can do. Sit tight. Usual rules.” He hung up. That fat fucker! If Baby Joe had any sense, he would just leave him. But Crispin knows the plan. He might spill. Shit.

  Finishing his drink, he dropped a twenty on the table and walked out to the hired car.

  Thumper Thyroid knelt before the trussed-up and trembling Crispin Capricorn. Smiling, he held up a small black device with a bright red digital display that read 03:00. He waved it in front of Crispin’s wide eyes and set it on the floor in front of him. Standing, he stepped over the reeking thing that had been Nigel and into the kitchen, with Oberon skipping at his heels. Thumper turned on the gas in the oven, propped the door open with a knife, and turned all four gas rings to full. He walked back over to Crispin and knelt again. He looked into Crispin’s eyes, seeing the hugely dilated pupils, watching the sweat pouring down the pale, pudgy face. Oberon jumped up and licked Thumper’s face. Thumper petted him, still looking into Crispin’s eyes.

  “Good boy,” he said.

  Thumper reached down to the little device and pressed a small green button on top of it. The digital display flicked to 02:59, and then 02:5
8.

  Crispin screamed, “FOR CHRIST’S SAKE WHAT ARE YOU DOING? NO, NO, STOP IT, TURN IT OFF, TURN IT OFF!”

  02:46, 02:45…

  Thumper Thyroid smiled at Crispin and pinched him on the cheek. “Three minutes, fat boy,” he said. “Enjoy.”

  He stood, made a clicking noise with his tongue, and walked out of the door with Oberon scampering happily behind him.

  Crispin squealed. A high, thin, hysterical screech. “NO. WAIT. STOP. COME BACK. OBERON. OBERON, YOU TRAITOR. YOU JUDAS. YOU FUCKING FURRY LITTLE TURNCOAT. OBERON, COME BACK. NO. NO. PLEASE GOD NO. HELP. HEEEELP.”

  Thumper could hear the screaming as he trotted down the two flights of stairs and walked around the building to where the car was parked. As he climbed into the driver’s seat, Oberon hopped in through the open back window and sat on the back seat. Thumper started the engine, turned on the stereo, and twiddled the dial until he found an oldies station. He heard Bob Dylan singing “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door.” Smiling at the appropriateness of the song, he carefully fastened his seat belt, put the car into reverse, and looked behind to make sure the way was clear.

  He saw Oberon looking at him. Panting happily. Proudly displaying the small black device with the bright red numbers that he held between his teeth.

  00:02, 00:01

  Thumper Thyroid didn’t even have time to complete the phrase “Oh, Fuck,” before the exploding Semtex sent Oberon to that great big kennel in the sky, and Thyroid to wherever it is that inept boxers, murderers, and sometime-mob-enforcers go.

  Baby Joe dispensed with a precautionary parking of the car, and, satisfying himself with a quick scan of the front of the building, drove around the back and into the parking lot. He saw the red Mercedes, and he saw the figure behind the wheel turned away, looking at something in the back. Before he had the chance to decide what to do, the sun rose for the second time that day. An immense orange flower grew in front of him, and a sudden violent wind rocked the little car on its chassis. All sound ceased, and the air seemed to be sucked out from his lungs, and then came a deafening WHUMP, and the devil breathed fire and brimstone on him. Baby Joe rolled out of the door just before the windows came out of the little hatchback in a tinkling silver shower.