The moment Brogan stopped talking Angelica jumped in, hoping to head Bubba-Bob off before he said something stupid. “That’s still about the saddest story I ever heard. How about a drink on the house for your brother?”
“Sad!” Bubba-Bob bawled. “You call that shit sad. MK was a goddamn assassin. Whatever he’s got coming he’s got coming.”
“It all happened a million years ago,” Brogan continued, oblivious to the conversation around him. “Now MK’s down in Central America with all the rats running around without heads.”
“MK’s one of the rats!” Bubba-Bob shouted at Brogan, trying to break through. “MK’s been running without a head since Nam.”
“I think it was that perfect girl MK found in Bangkok while on R and R the first time, she changed him.”
“Oh, her again.” Angelica had overheard Brogan telling St. Cloud about a perfect girl in Bangkok. Months would go by while Brogan slipped around in drunken vexation over MK, fragments of information about the perfect girl would appear solid as iceberg tips in his scattered conversations, then melt in the random flow of disconnected thoughts. Angelica knew Brogan received detailed letters from his brother which arrived infrequently, bound by thick twine over brown wrappers with Central American postmarks. Angelica had never read these letters kept locked in a metal chest at the foot of Brogan’s bed. Brogan opened the chest frequently to withdraw substantial rocks of cocaine, exposing the stacked letters, hundreds of well-worn pages which seemed to add up to a book. Angelica thought Brogan trusted her because she never asked about the letters. Sometimes she had the strange idea Brogan wrote the letters and mailed them to himself, for Brogan in other matters was open with her about where he had been and what he was. Brogan had been all over Central and South America, what he was was a little bit of everything. From what Angelica knew Brogan was mostly a gung-ho spun-out Spook who wearied of working for bullets and beans and finally dumped the racket. What Angelica responded to was Brogan’s vision of the world as a sublime heaven or horrific hell. Angelica loved men who interpreted life in black and white. Brogan always seemed visibly agitated by the two choices, on the verge of choosing one, afraid if he didn’t the other would disappear. Brogan told her MK taught him a genius has no moral or monetary debts. Brogan said he had debts because he liked gold, hard currency was his mistress. Cocaine was powder disappearing up the nose of time, paper money could blow away in any political storm, but hard treasure sunk to sea bottom rewarded the man with stamina to find it. Brogan told her he had seen the hurricane of the future in Latin America, it was blowing across the Caribbean to the United States, touching Key West, soon to reach the mainland. Cocaine was the future’s first cloud portending cataclysmic change. Brogan had read the barometer of change, considered himself a dedicated cynic on an island of disbelievers. He had paid his dues in his own share of assassination plots in Marijuana Republics and Cocaine Dictatorships, offered his all-American assets to countries at war with themselves, raising a crop of misery where terror reigned supreme, it turned a hard man harder. Brogan’s history was not a political parable, only a shortcut to discovery that a smart man bypasses the business of making paper money for the business of finding hard currency other men have lost. This knowledge had its own cost, its consequence placed Brogan in debt, unlike his brother MK, who was a genius.
“Maybe MK went to Bangkok that first time to reproduce himself.” Brogan seemed to be finding answers to his own questions. “Maybe MK sought to regenerate his spirit, he was still young then, but growing ancient by the hour. He had been in the jungle only nine months before he emerged into a delirium of opium and flesh along the back canals of Bangkok. MK desired to penetrate the distant part of himself he held back from death, if he could reach this essence there still might be hope to escape the jungle. MK was taken by cab across many canals floating with flowers and garbage to a special house where women were not for sale by the hour or day, but their very lives were for sale, they were surplus daughters and sisters, sold off in an ancient tradition, justifiable only to seller and buyer. MK had heard rumors of such a house while in the jungle. He saved his money to search it out on his first R and R. If he survived the jungle he was going to find the perfect girl and buy her, the two of them would disappear from all the tears and trials of this earth.” Brogan stopped, momentarily losing his way on such a meandering trail. His eyes focused through the smoky window behind the bar, where a nearly naked woman in wavering heat put the tip of her cigarette to a flaming match offered by a young man astride a motorcycle. Brogan seemed reminded of something, a hidden sign. “When MK bribed his way into the special house he saw thirty, fifty girls. The old man running the place stroked his whiskers between nicotine-stained fingers before unveiling a young girl, spinning her out from silken bondage, revealing an object of perfection, a melding of grace and desire to bend the beholder’s eye with covetous shame. MK did not avert his gaze. Hello I love you won’t you tell me your name? This vision could be his salvation. MK tenderly wound the long swaths of silk about the girl’s exposed body, preventing other eyes from feasting upon flesh so pure. He ordered a great banquet, and in this country, where women squatted outside the door as man the master ate in privacy and solace, MK fed the girl from his fingertips. In a room alone, with servants forbidden, small plates of delicacies surrounded the two of them as the girl sucked from MK’s fingers and lips tiny sweet fish from rivers, dark succulents from the sea, raisined meats and coconut milk. Stretching her full across cushions aglow in candlelight MK oiled and kneaded the length of her supple body. Before dawn he was going to free her forever, from whatever rough hands would defile and demean her. MK had come to save himself and her, a final escape, exit from the jungle. Now that they had each other he slipped the white phosphorus grenade from its hiding place in his knapsack, balancing the familiar weight in his palm. The perfect girl eyed the rough metal egg with curiosity, she was a poor country girl who had never seen deathly weapons. Her fingers reached to the egg, fondling its harshness, tracing the tip of the pin. Before dawn broke MK was going to leave the jungle forever with the girl he could never have in the far flat fields of Minnesota. Hello I love you won’t you tell me your name. MK was going to blow the house of slavery holding his perfect girl captive to kingdom come. Nothing would be left except a bright flash of orange flame, then a towering funnel of white clouds bearing him and the object of his perfection straight to the mother’s milk of stars stretched across the heavens above.”
“This is bullshit!” Bubba-Bob roared into Brogan’s face. “MK never blew his fucking self up!”
“When dawn came”—Brogan didn’t miss a beat—“MK awoke. The perfect girl was gone, but the grenade was still in his hand, she had left that, not knowing what it was, not understanding its explosive value. His wallet was gone, his knapsack was gone. MK thought of popping the pin, bomb Hanoi, bomb Saigon, bomb Bangkok, bomb America, bomb yourself. But he didn’t. MK laughed, the first time he laughed in nine months. MK laughed alone in the alone room. MK never laughed again, until years later, watching the fall of Saigon on television in a bar in Belize. MK laughed, he knew he was better off to take his chances in the jungle.”
“Too bad the bitch didn’t have the sense to pull the pin on the bastard.” Bubba-Bob gave Angelica his rascal wink. “Would have saved guys in twelve countries from trying to do it since.” Bubba-Bob was in the mood for rock hard fun or a rock hard fight, not parables.
“MK says after his failed encounter with perfection he only sought imperfect girls, very imperfect.”
“I say bees balls, bubba! Bees balls to your brother and his turd world exploits!” Bubba-Bob had had enough. He considered himself a patient man, a fishing man, a man who waited for others to run out of luck. Bubba-Bob didn’t consider himself a typical Charter Boat captain, because too many guys nowadays had backed into the business sniffing the ass-end of a freshwater salmon, considered themselves sportsmen who gamed for fish, rather than fishermen who fished for meat
. Bubba-Bob considered himself a saltwater professional, it made him sick to set tarpon free after they had put up a good fight. Such was the world Bubba-Bob now had to put up with, letting tarpon free and asking coke whores how long it took them to come. It had become a guppy-eat-guppy world, and it stuck a jewfish bone in the throat of a shark-killing saltwater professional just to think about it. “MK’s just another Vet who got lucky, was in the right place at the right time and made himself a killing. None of that impresses me. Sure as hell doesn’t stand the hair up at the bottom of my dick. I’ll tell you what I really think of MK.” Bubba-Bob swigged another glass of rum, which Angelica had quickly poured, thinking it might fire him off in a direction of less lethal consequence. “The bottom line is not the dollar, but our Government. We’ve got a free country that makes room for us to smuggle and deal, legitimizes our petty ripoffs by making them illegal, which makes them profitable. MK’s screwing all that up. MK hasn’t sold out down there in Latin America just for a buck, but for the sake of selling out to find out what’s on the other side of that. MK deals in guns, drugs, high-tech stuff, sells to any side. It’d be one thing if MK was even a Commie, but MK doesn’t even have that excuse, he’s not even a fucking liberal. MK’s sold out his country and he knows it. So I say bees balls, bubba, bees balls to your brother. He ain’t no fishin man, that’s for sure. MK’s going to get unlucky, very unlucky, and when he does he’s going to find himself at the wrong end of the food chain.”
Bubba-Bob’s words hissed in Brogan’s face, they were a clear sign for Angelica to beat an acceptable retreat. It was too late to put Bubba-Bob back in his cage, even if five lion tamers were standing by to do the job. Angelica filled glasses and rang the cash register, keeping her eyes on Brogan and Bubba-Bob at the far end of the bar where a silence had descended, dividing the two like an invisible blade. Maybe Bubba-Bob was getting ready to break every bone in Brogan’s body, maybe he felt he already had. Maybe Brogan was too drunkenly self-absorbed to have heard a word Bubba-Bob uttered. Whatever it was, it was too good a show for Angelica to pass on, so she slid back down to the deathly quiet end of the bar with a perky smile pressed on her lips, arriving in time to hear Brogan’s words, groggy but deliberate, brushing aside the silence.
“MK started tying up his imperfect girls, he became a tie-up guy. He tied imperfect girls up for more than one reason, but the real reason he found by accident after Bangkok. He had this girlfriend in Saigon, Joy-Joy, a Vietnamese Catholic, not a hooker, but not a saint either. Joy-Joy had parents to feed, couple of younger brothers, she was a great cook and younger than MK. MK set Joy-Joy up in a little apartment, when he came out of the jungle he wanted her there. At first MK tied Joy-Joy up just to look at her, tied her to the bed. Later, he tied her to the doorknob of the only door in the one-room apartment. He tied her carefully, with soft but secure rope. Sometimes Joy-Joy wore nothing, just a gold chain with a crucifix hanging from her neck. Sometimes what Joy-Joy did wear MK took off so he could watch the changes of color on her flesh as hot light streamed through the dusty window. MK just sat there, watching her, listening to all the sounds coming up from the street, hissing motorbikes, shouting foreign voices, he smelled the stink of fish oil from foods frying in other apartments. One day, about a month after Tet, MK had come back from up around Hue, he knelt Joy-Joy down with her bare knees scraping the floor, tied her hands to the doorknob, bound her feet. He took off his pants and came at her from behind. Joy-Joy did not move, not a muscle flinched. MK felt the skin of her buttocks cold as slick steel pressed against his upper thighs. He moved inside her, but nothing happened for him. All MK heard was his own hard breathing. It was as if Joy-Joy wasn’t there. An hour, maybe two, he was caught to her like that, nothing coming from him but an aching hardness refusing to go away. Then Joy-Joy slowly arched her back, a great cat preening with determination, her head turned back toward him. MK reached to kiss her lips, aching in the very center of his being. His face came close to Joy-Joy’s and she spat. A white projectile of spit exploded in MK’s face, he shuddered, falling away from her, his ache gone.”
Mile Zero Page 21