Profane Men

by Rex Miller

  The first time had been what men sometimes call a mercy fuck, happening less out of need than simply because both of them thought the other expected and wanted it. The physical part had been almost embarrassingly perfunctory and clinical. But as they became friends, each of them viewed the incident as nothing more than what it was — an inconsequential, irrelevant act.

  The second time had been a sloppy, rather tough bout taking place in the middle of the night, a third stranger in on the joke. All of them drunk on too much wine, a clumsy tag-team match in two out of three falls. A silly mess that ended up in a tight riot of dueling vibrators and giggles.

  The third time had been a slow, loving seduction. Beginning early in the evening with Princess on her sofa wearing a short, diaphanous silk nightgown in the humid closeness. Her friend looking at the hard nipples poking at the silk, the little shorty top hung by spaghetti straps from Princess’s shoulders, her friend’s hands moving across those shoulders and easing the straps down as they talked softly. Both of them knowing it was going to happen again and looking forward to it in anticipation.

  Her friend had done such an amazing thing, kissed her once, very chastely on the lower lip, and proceeded to lick every inch of Princess’s face; a slow, deliberate, hot, wet licking that covered everything from her hairline down. Long, slow strokes that were, because Princess thought in Chinese, far more symbolic than lustful. The amazing part was that Princess was touched by it. Normally fastidious, she would have been disgusted by it any other time, performed by anyone else, but she thought it so irrationally sweet that it brought tears to her eyes suddenly, and then her friend licked the salty tears away.

  And it didn’t stop, the licking on Princess’s face like it was some wonderful ice cream delight, licking her cheeks and ears and throat with the slow strokes of a long, pointed tongue. And soon Princess became aroused, against all odds. When her friend cupped Princess’s breasts and touched her hard, swollen nipples, Princess felt herself wet, flowing, almost to the point of climax. And her friend eased her back down on the cushions and gently drew her legs apart.

  It had been so perfect that it was like they had made an unspoken agreement never to repeat the incident, and the third time had been the last, the only time really, a marvelous, freaky expression of mutual admiration and trust. And the strong bond of friendship between the two badly scarred young women continued to grow. The princess and the pauper.

  If Dali, back in his melting-timepiece period, could have portrayed the two women in one of his surreal works, he might have painted them together against a background of dripping clocks and parallel lines; the lines appearing from the foreground perspective. Parallel lines that run toward the horizon, coming together in the shape of a pointed spike.

  Princess was a professional worrier and a user. There would be a time when she would use this new relationship. Down the line a ways, closer to the horizon as the pathways appeared to intersect. And this new friend who was in love with someone else would be pleased that she could be used, and she would give her gift not at all reluctantly.

  Princess the worrier was a survivor. And something was very, very wrong about this whole mess she’d stepped into. Her mood was becoming one of quiet desperation. She wanted out. This scarred, severely pockmarked young woman with the fabulously sexy voice. The voice of the outlaw.

  Chapter 11

  “Charlie! Charrrrrr-leeeee!”

  — television spot for a woman’s fragrance

  Walking toward smoke was invariably a spooky thing in that ghost-story land, but then, what wasn’t? If you were smart you didn’t rule anything out just because it was strange. This was a country where civilians liked to play pretend spook, where there was even a plane we called Spooky. And the spooks were everywhere. In fact, there was only one kind of dude who didn’t want you calling him a spook — a spook.

  You never knew when you were about to walk into the next kick-ass ambush, and contact would suddenly engulf you just when you were dead tired, really dragging, and it would be right there putting rounds all around you, overrunning your emotional perimeters, zapping your defense systems. When you were at your lowest psychological ebb, when you were at the bottom of your physical reserves and running on empty, contact would come — on Charlie’s terms.

  That’s what we were all about. Making like Charles. Charlie was a guerrilla: bad, mobile, unbelievably dedicated. Anything he gave up in the daytime he’d likely come back for that night. So whenever possible we fought our own brand of counter-guerrilla warfare, back before it was moved into the high-tech mode of search-and-destroy war. In the kind of bullshit war of attrition the U.S. military machine was being forced to wage, the spike team was a uniquely cost-effective weapons system.

  Operation Toledo Blade. We are moving between the tree line and the edge of a large field of rice paddies bisected by a series of muddy dikes. The impoverished dogpatch of a village has a name on the El Tee’s map that sounds preposterously close to (so of course becomes) Fuck You Two. Fuck You Two appears deserted. Smoke curls from the ashes of a presumably empty hootch. The smell is fast becoming a physical presence that we are having to deal with. Stinkyville we should have named it. Good old Fuck You Two — Kilroy was here. Vas you dere, Charlie?

  We are aware of Charlie’s proximity again. Our point gun, White, signals to D’Allesandro, who is humping his ammo, and we stop in a semi-ragged column. His vigil as point is a reflexive thing, and he has learned somehow to trust his animal instincts. White is one of those you’d never fuck with in a million years. A stone death freak. White is not his name, by the way. He has earned the name White. He always walks point, just as Harold Grein walks drag. White is standing motionlessly.

  He is sensing, smelling Cong. He says he can smell VC and we believe him. Not just the nuoc mam smell or the rotten fish odors or anything like that. It is the sharp presence of Victor Charlie, something beyond explanation. Akin to the old scouts who rode point for the cavalry because they were reputed to be able to “smell injun.” White is taking it all in, totally in harmony with his surroundings.

  He has given himself over to instinct, experience, the atavism that is down there somewhere hiding next to the vestigial tail. White walks with his brain on automatic pilot, moving slowly, loose, absorbing, tasting, flashing on shadow images and hunches and vibes. White is heavily into speed and downers — speed and downers, sports fans — and he can slither down some badass road with those incredible sensors of his scanning for the evil vibrations.

  The pocket of smell is unbearable now. Motionless, we become conscious of its overpowering assault on the senses. Nam’s stink is always there, but this is its pure, undiluted essence. It strikes at the nostrils, smashing against the mucous membranes with a peculiar blend of rotting fish, shit, camphor smoke, and germ-infested livestock smell that grabs your mind and wrenches it away from reality and sticks its dirty finger up your nostrils.

  “Here! Smell this shit, motherfucker.”

  The powerful stench of death is everywhere. Thick, acrid smoke curls from the largest of the village’s hootches like a dirty, ashen shroud. It reaches my nose with stinging effluvia of napalm, fermented fish sauce, mo-gas, body bags, cock rot, fright, immersion foot, burning feces, and shallow graves.

  “Whoa! Goddamn!” somebody behind me whispers.

  “Up-tight!” Somebody else stags, whispers back, fucking flakes. White is moving again but very carefully. We are doubly cautious, easing down through the area like porcupines fucking. The heat is shimmering visibly, an oppressive and obnoxious villain that is definitely going to drain canteens, threaten, suffocate, befuddle, exhaust, become a palpable essence, and just generally fuck us over good before this bitch is finished. Operation Toledo Blade slinks through the stinking, fucked-over dogpatch Fuck You Two all hairy and scary, groggy and grungy, and ready to get down and seriously take some names. Gook is everywhere and nowhere. Dusty’s PRC
monster, king shit of all radios, is sending out a code message as I walk more or less in cadence with the coolly sexy, professional radio tones of the female voice a few meters behind me.

  “Hellbore, Ajax, Quicksilver, Zulu. Popcorn, King, Raven . . .” The distant voice is metallic, tinny, chilly. It shimmers like a mirage. It drips in the heat: a flat, remote, electronic, faintly sensuous yet abrasive, weird crackle that gets swallowed up by the atmosphere and evaporates under the hot sun as it leaves the PRC. Well-modulated and nondescript as a West Coast anchor lady asshole, the voice has been strained through a synthesizer, filtered and flattened, bled into balanced parametric E.Q.s.

  “Whiskey, Zulu, Lima . . .” The woman’s voice reverberates through a chamber of space expanders, layered onto stacked tracks so sophisticated not even the music industry has heard of them. The voice comes out of KILL Outlaw Radio camouflaged by a zillion iron filings spread like so much electro-peanut butter across Ampex heads: recorded, rewound, remixed, reunited. Disembodied and dehumanized, unrecognizable and unspectrographic, neither woman nor machine, she vanishes in the air, the cold neoglot filtering out of Dusty’s radio in an icy, hypnotic gloss:

  “Borneo, Foxfire, Caveat, Icarus . . .”

  “P-U! Who shit?”

  “Yore mammy,” I hear Shooter Price say as we clear the hootches. I hate this part of my movie. A hard-core Viet Cong rooster crows again, scaring the living shit out of me. I am operating at maximum paranoia. Not your plain, ordinary lock-the-door-fer-chrissakes-and-if-it’s-for-me-I’m-not-here paranoia. I’m talking speed freak, dope dealer, get-out-of-town-and-no-I’m-sorry-we-didn’t-bring-any-luggage paranoia. I want out.

  I want to be long gone, away from these dinks in their black pajamas and B.F. Goodrich sandals. I don’t want to see any more ghosts or spooks, brothers or sisters, Buddhists or ll-Bravos, Honda cowboys, or stoner hippies (“Got any extra change?”). I’ve seen enough green berets and red berets, white mice and black Muslims, M.P.s and NVA.

  I want to see easy riders, bells, clunky toes, fruit boots, unisex, Goodwill, fishnets, Fu Manchus, burns, Nehrus, Napoleons, Dr. Feelgoods, Wolf-man beards, wings, and minis! Most of all I want to see those miniskirts. I want to see those little mothers up to the ass. I want leg. Miles of beautiful, curved, suntanned, healthy, Californian, Texan, Mex-Tex, Michigan Avenue, Fall River leg. I want to see my last au dai, my last cyclo, my last Vietnamese street orphan, my last body bag. I want to be so short that I left yesterday and this is a recording.

  We have busted our asses all day long in this miserable green motherfucker for absolute zip. Now we are going to turn around and hump back toward the general direction of the el zee, back through the heat and the NVA, back through the antipersonnel mines and the VC snipers, back through the bad speed and the blow with Ajax, Borax, Ex-Lax, through the bouncing Betties and the sharpened bamboo with shit on it, through the sappers and the crappers, back through the maggots and the faggots and the fucking nitwit probe into The Badlands. All this because of a wild hair up the ranking poop chute of some looney-tunes lifer sitting in his black-market air-conditioning back in Danang or Nha Trang playing with his whang. Numbah fucking ten. Toledo Fucking Blade my fucking sore asshole.

  “Come see the show at China Lights and ask for Patty if you want a good time. Patty is ready for a party and quote if you are into me I’ll get into you. I love toys and having fun that only girls know about unquote. Be sure to look up Patty at China Lights. Listen up for another new phone number on the half hour, right here on KILL Radio!” KILL taunts us as we move back around the village.

  “Gentleman courier for hire. Thirteen years’ solid experience. Discreet, dignified, dependable. I am available to serve the needs of Euro-Asian businesspersons who demand the sine qua non in a trustworthy, covert courier. Professional rates. Will consider only quote nondestructive activities unquote. Write Blackwell Services, Box 100, 942 Cathcart West, Montreal, Quebec, Canada. You’re in tune with the unique services of KILL Outlaw Radio.

  “Tim. Personal message to Tim. Please let Jo Ella know if you are OK.”

  “Fucker’s OK, Jo Ella, no sweat.”

  “Yeah, Jody’s ass is OK, too, bitch.”

  “Um hum, Jody and Tim are fuckin’ each other, Jo Ella, is that OK?”

  Moving back through the rice paddies and the rain hits. A hard, butt-kicking sheet of violent, Asian-IndofuckingChinese rain that comes slamming down out of nowhere, pissing all over the river, turning everything gray and red and brown and muddy and treacherous.

  “Awwwwwww, fuck.”

  “Pissin’ fuckin’ rain.”

  “Ah cain’t see shit.”

  “Fuckin’ perfect,” I mutter.

  “How’s this shit for some palatable essence, motherfucker,” D’Allesandro says.

  “Palpable essence, you dumb honkie, chuck, whitebread skuzzbag dago greaseball of a shit-for-brains motherhumper guinea cunt,” I correct him gently.

  “That’s what I said, asshole, whyn’cha take your K-Bar and clean the wax out of your fuckin’ ears.”

  “Howja like me to take and clean the wax out of your fuckin’ ass, you spaghetti-suckin’ batsa fongool of a wop-ass eye-talian slime sack.”

  “Incoming!” somebody says, and we laugh as the rain really opens up with a vengeance, coming down hard out of the southwest or whatever fucking direction, out of a sky that is getting lighter instead of darker.

  The ceiling just descends and suddenly the icy bullets are thunking down out of the sky in brittle, horizontal sheets. When the fuck did you ever see rain like this back in the world? Fucking never happen. Only here in this godforsaken armpit of a country did the rain come out of nowhere to haul off and kick some serious ass.

  It comes exploding out of a gorgeous, hot, sunny sky: stinging, stabbing, sluicing down necks, smashing covers, collapsing poncho hootches, drenching windshields, drowning tanks, gathering in giant fucked-up puddles, enormous damn quagmires that could eat an APC, monstrous, equipment-devouring black holes that could turn a whole firebase into a dirty red loblolly of mud the consistency of concrete with a hard-on. Incoming.

  Max Frost and the Troopers are singing in the rain over Dusty’s PRC as it comes hammering our beat butts. He is trying to find the KILL signal so that lightning will strike his PRC and he will be medevaced back to a hospital in Tokyo or some damn place, where a young nurse who looks like Raquel Welch will come and sit on his face — or the other way around, whatever flies.

  “Ramrod One, Toledo Six Actual, over,” the El Tee says.

  Fawwwzzzrrr “ — copy, Toledo Six.”

  “Toledo Blade’s Sierra Tango is a klick to the November of Lima Zulu Sierra Fox, Ramrod, over.”

  Craaawwwwzzzzzrrrrrr.

  “Ramrod One. Six Actual, how you read, over?”

  Rzzzzz “ — you lumpy chicken, Six, over.”

  “You got a copy on Toledo Blade’s Sierra Tango about one klick from our earlier Lima Zulu over?”

  “Copy, that is a rog. Proceed to Alternate and establish your November Delta Papa, over?”

  “Copy that, Ramrod.”

  “We gonna stay out here?” Vandervoort asks rhetorically.

  “That’s a big, fat rog there, Dutchman.”

  “O Dau?”

  “Kong Biet, motherfucker, wipeass me?”

  “Aaaahhhh, bust my balls, fer shit’s sake.”

  “We probably go back to that village and sleep in the water buffalo pen,” Big Merle adds helpfully.

  “. . . cannot be exaggerated,” a voice blasts out of the RTO’s radio.

  Dusty touches a knob and there is a screaming rape-victim noise, a sudden, mind-ripping sccccccrrrrrreeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee.

  “Ahhhhhh! Shit!”

  “Damn it, get that shit off!” A fingernail-down-blackboard electrojolt penetrates my fog, and I try to grab hold of the sl
ick sleeve of what passes for reality as it whips by.

  Slowly I turn. I quickly gulp a handful of quarter grains and take a swig of deliciously hot and nasty canteen water. I shrug off various circulatory and respiratory malfunctions and drive on.

  That was all I needed. I have the mercenary’s basic necessities: I am trilingual (broken French, pig Latin, and mother tongue), expert with a blow-gun, I have read all the dialectic doctrine (Hart, Shaffner, and what’s-his-name . . . ), and I have my autographed picture of Eric Ambler. What more do I need but my speed to do the deed?

  “Anyone who served under Captain Marvin Eddleston at Plei Mrong and would like to contribute to a special fund being set up to aid his surviving family, please write Vietnam War Memorial Fund, Post Office Box 3962-E, Wake Island, 96791.” Slowly I turn.

  I’m starting to feel it now. That good ole reliable death-cult optimism tingling along the raw ganglia. A ganglionic gang bang.

  “This is d’ bes station in the nation KUNT,” raps Oreo, the flakiest splib in the outfit, “and I am Jack d’ Ripsaw, devil’s own son-in-law, so cool I’m Frozen Jones. I lease my piece for grease an I’m thick when dey lick my prick as a slick brick name Toledo Dick, unafraid in d’ shade of my hotshot To-lee-do Blade!”

  “Signify, bro!”

  “Right on, blood!”

  “I know where d’ light go when it go out. I’m d’ only cat alive, no jive, who knows why white milk give yellow butter. I’m d’ bold, cold, solid gold raja of rock. My rap’s so fulla crap there ain’t no room for gloom. My shit is so down and I be so uptown that when shit roll downhill Bill, you can jump back Jack!”

  “All fuckin’ right!”

  “Nigger be smokin’!”

  “Smoke this, Chuck!”

  Oreo is stoked. “I am d’ head nigger and grave digger — ”

  “OK, less’ put a cover on it, girls, an’ goddammit watch it the way you’re all bunched up again. How many goddamn times I gotta keep tellin’ ya to spread it out?”