He knows going into the boat is a mistake. There is a reason the army has guards posted along the roads to Cholon. On the bridges over the klongs, too. Navy swift boats patrol the waterways. Cholon is teaming with people, rats, vice, crime—off limits to GIs. But he knows. He has heard. This is how they go. His brothers … with their women. By boat, in the dark, up the Ben Nghe Channel to another world, away from the killing, the savagery, the generals. To Chinatown. To drown in the wet, golden loins of Asia for a while.
She stretches out her arm, beckons him to the boat. He sees every inch of her body calling to him from beneath that red dress. It is nothing more than the thinnest veil. A film, really.
“This is bad,” he says. “Are you sure …”
“Quiet,” she says.
The boatman is nervous. He says the army shoots the ferrymen sometimes.
His eyes dart around, expecting to see the flash of a gun any second, the ambush beginning.
“Come.” She extends her hand to him again.
In the distance he hears a harmonica whining, Bob Dylan singing “Like a Rolling Stone.” The music seems to be rising from the river. Coming closer. Suddenly a swift boat growls out of the gathering mist and darkness from downstream, its search light flicking along the river banks.
She pulls him into the boat, onto its damp floor, her body molding to his. The .45 is in his right hand when the search light flashes overhead, then is gone with the last strains of Dylan.
“Fucking hell,” says a faint voice on the swift boat. Who knows why.
The ferryman dips his paddle, backs his boat out from the landing. The current catches the craft and rushes it downstream. Coppery lights of charcoal cooking fires glow like fallen flares up and down the shore, wisps of smoke vanish into the violet sky of the coming night.
“Do you love me?” she asks. She says a name. It sounds like his father’s. And his own.
The noise and energy of Cholon at night are tremendous. Even behind the concrete walls of this one-room apartment, he can picture everything: Throngs crowding in and out of the glow of kerosene lamps hanging over the tables of the night market vendors, the clucking shouts of auctioneers, the tables displaying sunglasses, counterfeit watches, tubs of steaming shrimp, live fish swimming in pickle jars. Beneath the shrill whistling of caged birds, music like the howling of cats echoes from tin ny speakers. An ancient man with a long, stingy beard is on his knees in the street, dissecting a six-foot-long monitor lizard for a crowd shouting at him prices they will pay for the liver, the gall, the heart, the testes. The scents of charcoal braziers, curry, ginger, peppers, roasting peanuts, and frying fish filter through the wooden slats of the window shutters. The world is panting, sweating, selling its soul beyond these walls. Yet knows nothing of him in here.
“Everything be okay. Rest now.” She lights a candle and a joss stick with a match. The room begins to glow. “You lie down.” She nods to the large hammock hanging across the corner of the room from eyebolts sunk into the dirty green walls. She changes into a red satin robe.
The hammock is almost the only thing in the room except for a clothesline, a pole fan, a dresser with a carving of a Buddha with big breasts, a songbird in a wooden cage, and a console TV/stereo. In the center of the room is a Formica table with folding chairs. A dha with a dark jade handle lies on a counter by the small kitchen sink. On the walls are the faces of children. Scores of them—Vietnamese children, white children, black children … beautiful children with huge, bright eyes. They are photos clipped from magazines, some snapshots too, taped to the plaster. He keeps thinking that this must all be a figment of his imagination. He is passed-out drunk. Dreaming. And maybe he is going to die here.
She puts her hands softly on his chest, slides his unbuttoned khaki shirt off his shoulders, presses him down into the hammock until he is sitting back, reclining. Half in, half out. Her legs straddle his knees.
He is burying his face in the black silk of her long hair when a back door to the room bursts open.
In an instant he has his .45 drawn, pointing.
She is off him like an explosion. “No shoot!”
Standing in the shadows is a child. Two or maybe a little older. A nest of black curls frames its beaming face. She scoops it into her arms, but its eyes never leave him.
He pops the clip out of his weapon. Then, for some reason he cannot understand, he rolls both pieces into his stinking khaki shirt and hugs the bundle to his chest.
“This is Dung,” she says. “Dung, say hello to Michael.”
Snap out of it, he thinks. Wake up, brother!
FIFTY-FIVE
“I’m not proud of it. She was just a kid. So was I. It was a different time. The world felt like it was spinning out of control. We thought any day we would be sitting in a bar or walking down the street and a car bomb or a sniper would take us out. It happened to people all the time. We wanted to live a little before we died. Can you understand that?”
Michael pictures again the coppery lights of charcoal cooking fires, fallen flares up and down the dark shore of the Mekong. “Were you in love?”
His father leans back, rubs the back of his neck with the fingers from both his hands.
“Not like with your mother … no. She was poor and homeless when she got to Saigon. Not there a week before the pimps were on her like flies, had her trussed up in a bra and G-string, hustling tricks for rent and food money in a bar called Wild Bill’s. She had a kid, a toddler by another GI. So it was complicated. But I didn’t care. He was long gone. And I missed your mother so much. I felt so bad about leaving her with you in her belly. I just wanted a woman to make me feel like everything was going to be alright again. And I wanted to take her off the street. She deserved better. That picture of the girl dancing on the bar. I took it the day I met her. So there. Now you know.”
The air smells of charcoal, roasting peanuts, pepper.
“You lived together?”
“Just a few months. She had this one-room flat in Cholon. The army didn’t feature that sort of thing. But they knew what was happening. There were a lot of couples like us in Chinatown. It had been going on for so long when I got there, you could see many Amerasian kids in the streets. They spoke English.”
“What happened?”
“I got new orders. To the Philippines.”
Cage birds are whistling, shrill, staccato notes.
“The war was going badly. There was all hell to stop it back home. Someone up top decided our fraternizing with the locals was out of control. The press had started to write about it (the hooch girls), and the army didn’t like the heat. They decided to pull the plug on all the love nests. Coming off duty one night, a sergeant major grabbed a bunch of us MPs who were shacking up. He said, ‘You got orders. Go to the barracks, pack up your gear, and get on the bus to the airport.’ Just like that, we were history. No chance to say goodbye.”
The old man on his knees in the street is dissecting a monitor lizard, pulling out the liver, the heart, the testes with his fingers. Offering them up in his bloody hands.
“You ever see her again?”
The fisherman gets a wet look in his eyes. “We always told each other live for today. We knew it wouldn’t last forever. I sent her my checks for a few months. She never wrote. But I didn’t expect her to. Writing English was hard for her. I felt the loss, unbelievable saudade. But I hoped she had found someone new. Someone from her own country who could cherish her forever, take care of her and the child. But really, who would have her with that half-American kid? Even in Cholon. I worried about her a lot. Then I heard from your mom that you were born. My only child, my son. I felt like I had been given a new life. A chance to start over. We named you after my father. And I never looked back.”
“But sometimes you remember?” Shadows of figures are crowding in and out of the lamp light in the night market. The hot, fetid smell of the river seeping through the streets, the open windows.
“Yeah, kid. Sometimes it ge
ts to me, if you want to know the truth. I’m not proud of myself for what happened with Meng. I should have been loyal to your mother. And honest with Meng. She never knew about your mom. But it’s over. That was a long time ago. In another country. Nothing I can do about it. So I tell my half-cocked lies about adventure in the mysterious Orient…. And I try to let it all go. I suggest you let it go, too. Just quit this case, will ya? Give it up before it tears you to pieces.”
“I can’t.” His words echo in the steel wheelhouse. They sound to him like bawling cats. He closes his eyes and sees a Vietnamese woman waving, beckoning from a small boat. And Tuki in a pink terrycloth robe. She sits on the ledge of a window, a chain-link screen across the opening. Her knees are pulled up under her chin, her dark hair falls in a ringlets over her shoulders and arms. For a while no one speaks.
“Jesus. You know what?” Michael’s eyes open, suddenly big as plums. He does not know where these words are coming from. “I was thinking that this trouble I’m having is all about Vietnam. But I’m not so sure anymore.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah. This is about a bunch of stuff.”
The boatman sits in black pajamas, a paddle across his lap, staring at him.
“Like what?”
“I don’t know. Honesty maybe. Helping people who need you. Loyalty. And guilt. A boatload of guilt.”
The fisherman throws his arms up in the air. “Oh sure, that explains everything, buddy boy. Listen to yourself. You’re talking nonsense. Guilt about what? When Nixon was carpet bombing the Viet Cong, you were just a baby.”
He drops off his chair. Squints at his father. “Maybe that’s the point. I’m not a baby anymore. I’m the son of a badass, a war vet, a fisherman, and a dreamer. So I’ve got some baggage. Maybe a lot more than I used to think.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“I won’t just abandon her.”
“What aren’t you telling me, pal?”
Something sharp and cold seems to pierce his chest. He sees her again. She is not a woman like the others in Bridgewater or even Provincetown. Backlit in silhouette by the blazing sun outside, she could be a child. In Saigon. In Cholon.
“Why not? Come on, Mo, talk to me!”
“Because … because she could have been my …” His mind considers her gender, gropes for words of relationship. He hears her voice: Dung? Dung is my long lost brother. “Blood,” he says finally. A holy child. A love child. “Like … all of those forgotten children over there. You know what I mean?”
His father sits frozen in his seat, staring at his hands folded in his lap. “Yeah, son,” he says softly. “But what are you going to do about Filipa?”
FIFTY-SIX
“I think we found them, Rambo.” The voice on the other end of the phone is Votolatto’s.
“Beg your pardon?” It is nine thirty Tuesday morning. Michael is still sleeping when the phone rings. Since he got back from Nu Bej on Sunday, he has been surfing the web almost full-time, checking out the drag bars in and around San Francisco for any sign of Nikki and Duke. But nothing is turning up except a whole lot of spam from porn sights. The buggers must get his address when he logs into the drag clubs. Filipa’s going to love seeing this stuff.
“The infamous Nikki and her bum buddy. I think we know where they are, and it ain’t San Francisco.”
“Where?”
“The Vineyard.”
“No shit.”
“Yeah. No shit, counselor. Your client’s tape checked out A-okay after we got it translated. So then we found your pal Kittikatchorn. What a mess, he was jonesin’ bad as I’ve ever seen. But he talked.”
“Really?”
“Confirmed what he said on tape to Tuki. Man, does he hate you, though. Anyway, we got some search warrants. Nothing comes up on the Russian queen. But we score on the boyfriend’s bank records, debit card. Seems like he’s been living the high life on the Vineyard, mostly Oak Bluffs, for the last ten days. Hotels, meals, freaking load of bar tabs, boat rides, clothes. Like the guy’s on his honeymoon.”
“Now what?”
“The captain thinks your client has a way with the gab. Thinks folks talk to her. Everything we got on this Nikki is circumstantial. Pretty solid stuff, but it doesn’t totally get your client off the hook.
You hear me? How do we know it’s not a conspiracy thing with your client and Nikki? We’re thinking we want to send Tuki to them on the Vineyard wearing a wire. See what gets said.”
Michael is not quite getting it. He can’t see how you just plop Tuki into Nikki’s secret love nest, uninvited, and expect anyone to say more than “Gee whiz, what the hell are you doing here?” But it sounds like the cops suddenly need Tuki. This is when the defense attorney says ‘I want a deal.’ He goes for the whole paella.
“She cooperates, we want all the charges dropped on Tuki.”
“Tough guy, huh?”
“Just doing my job.”
“Don’t fuck with me, Rambo!”
“Immigration charges, too.”
“You’re out of your mind. What about the security tape, man? It’s got her stealing the murder weapon.”
“It’s a fake. You’re looking at an imposter on the tape.”
“Says who?”
“Tuki. She says someone is wearing her drag. But they got the earrings wrong. They’re not her earrings.”
The dick is silent for several seconds. “I’m thinking, Rambo.”
“Think about this. Tuki plays her scene right for you, she makes you a hero. You get the bad guy.”
The detective exhales heavily into the phone. “I can’t do anything about the immigration stuff, that’s federal.”
“You know people.”
“I hope you are not asking me to tamper with a case, commit a federal crime?”
“She’s not technically an illegal. She’s the child of a U. S. citizen. Her old man was a Marine in ‘Nam. There are laws to protect people like her. We just need some time, six months, a year would be better, to get her documented. See?”
“You’re busting my balls.”
“No. I swear to god. We just need to get a copy of her birth certificate from Saigon.”
“You’ve already been working this out in you head, haven’t you?
The court’s not going to pay you for immigration work.” He shrugs. “I do what I can.”
“I gotta hand it to you, Rambo. Not many public defenders would hang tough with a case like this. They would just plead out the client and move on. What’s your story?”
“When I used to fish with my old man and my uncle for ground fish on Georges Bank, we would sometimes have three, four, five days of heavy wind and seas. Couldn’t fish. Could barely keep the boat afloat. Just jogging into it. One time I asked my father why we don’t just turn tail and run from the weather. ‘We came to catch fish,’ he said.”
Votolatto does not say anything. He is thinking about fishing. Thinking he should have known that the college boy came up in the fleet. Fucking tough Portagee. Bone for brains.
“Well, Vasco da Gama, are we going fishing on the Vineyard or not?”
“You going to drop the charges?”
“I have to speak to the D. A.”
“Come on, you know you already did. You wouldn’t have called me otherwise.”
“She delivers, she walks. Fair enough?”
“On the immigration stuff, too?”
“You know what, counselor? You’re a pisser.”
“That’s what my old man says. Help me out here. I need time to take care of the immigration paperwork.”
“Maybe there’s something I can do. But she’s got to give us a top-notch show. You think she can handle it?”
“You ever see her onstage?”
“Naw, I don’t go for drag.”
“She’s a movie star.”
“So it’s a go?”
“I’ll tell her your offer.”
“Don’t be jerking me around, Rambo.�
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“This isn’t my call. Tuki makes her own decisions. And one other condition.”
“What?”
“I get to come along to watch out for her best interests.” The detective growls. “Can I ask you something? Does she give you a hard-on?”
Provincetown Follies, Bangkok Blues Page 22