My heart and my groin overrode my brain. I slipped the note to my Dragon Lady, my Mata Hari, saying YES!!! TOMORROW?
She asked when and where. I suggested eleven in the morning and would she like to go to the zoo? I’d been meaning to visit it anyway. Yes, she wrote back, she would love to. She’d meet me there, by the big cats.
When she was gone, I consulted Ziggy.
“Whadduya think, Zig?”
His face was in a story anthology. The jacket depicted a free-for-all battle of flying saucers and spacewalkers brandishing ray guns. A wacky scene then, but commonplace decades hence in video games.
“It’s your ass they’ll fry.”
“I always cherish your advice, man.”
***
The Saigon Botanical Gardens and Zoo, on the northeast edge of downtown by the Saigon River and National Museum, wasn’t as rundown as I thought it’d be, but it was getting there. The larger animals, such as the big kitties, appeared moth-eaten and on short rations. Some showed their ribs. I pictured French men and ladies in the 1920s taking their kiddies here, the girls carrying parasols, the boys in knickers, rolling hoops.
I’d halfway decided to bag it, to stand her up. I didn’t need her kind of trouble. But when I spotted my Dragon Lady at a distance, my heart rate accelerated to the redline. To hell with the perils of associating with an enemy agent. Fuck it, bring on the firing squad.
“My entire life,” she said when we met and shook hands, “I no go to zoo.”
Giving her a unique experience in her homeland puffed my chest. “My first time here too.”
After the zoo, we both wanted to walk around, and central Saigon was compact. I showed her what was left of the U.S. Embassy. Boarded up and in the process of being cleaned out, it was ugly and chilling. I was gauging her reaction, a half-assed loyalty test. To be a spy was one thing, to wear the sapper’s hat quite another. She shivered in real or mock horror and made no comment.
At the Port of Saigon, vehicles and crates and pallets were filling up dockside space, with more ships queued up to unload. We came upon gray waist-high bales of raw rubber that caught my attention. They’d been trucked or barged in from plantations. And I’d thought all rubber was synthetic.
I told her about Ziggy, our bet whether he could sail a rock across the river.
“You were bored?”
“I’m not now.”
“Me neither, Joe.”
“Too bad it’s not earlier. The Central Market is closed for the day and hosed down,” I small-talked. “It has it all if you can stand the smell. I once bought a whole pineapple from a lady for three piasters. The lady peeled it for me like an apple and stuck it on a stick.”
Mai insisted on my trying an encore performance. We did find a pineapple lady on an adjacent corner, and to Mai’s delight, I ate it all and made a sticky mess of myself to boot. As she dabbed me with her hankie, laughing, I fought off wasps and various flying critters on the attack. Great fun.
There were smaller markets and shops on nearby streets. I pointed at cans of cottonseed oil stacked at a sidewalk stall. Below the clasped hands on the label was DONATED BY THE PEOPLE OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. NOT TO BE SOLD OR EXCHANGED.
“Our tax dollars at work,” I said.
Mai didn’t get it.
“See, we send Vietnam all these goodies,” I explained. “The cooking oil’s useful, but it’s in gallon tins. I’d be worrying it’d go rancid in the heat. Look beside it. Canned sardines. Catsup. Mustard. I’ve even seen peanut butter, which the average Vietnamese will upchuck at the sight of. Folks don’t always steal this stuff. They buy it from somebody who sells it to buy food they appreciate, like dried fish and rice.”
“I buy oil. I no have more oil. I fix you dinner again, Joe.”
As if nothing had happened, pun intended. As if our first dinner date hadn’t been a fucking disaster (adjective intended). Was I in for an intelligence grilling? Were her espionage colleagues lying in wait in her apartment to inject me with truth serum until I told all? And/or to shove bamboo shoots under my fingernails? I visualized nasty pieces of work who looked like Richard Loo in The Purple Heart and an Oriental Peter Lorre.
I recklessly blurted, “Okay, but my turn, Mai. I’m cooking.”
She smiled and nodded in acquiescence.
As a food preparation expert, I had one tiny problem. I hadn’t boiled an egg before the army made me into a cook. In their cooking school, my skills regressed.
“A gallon’s too big,” I guessed, delaying the subject by hunting for her oil.
We found a one-liter bottle of sesame oil from Thailand.
“You are expert army cook, Joe?”
“I can cook. Sort of,” I said. “Not as well as you, but the army made a cook out of me.”
Mai asked, “Have you ever cooked Vietnamese food?”
“No.”
“What food you most like to cook?”
“Uh,” I answered, stumped.
“When you boy-san, you dream of you a chef?”
Little did either of us know that the chef dream came far later. From this moment to my zenith as an executive chef at swanky downtown restaurants, it was a jump from kindergarten to grad school.
“No, and they don’t train chefs in the army, Mai. They train cooks. They assigned me to cooking school after Basic, not on aptitude or personal choice, but because there was a slot. An opening to fill. I was happy because it was preferable to the infantry. Mess halls are warm and have roofs and you don’t get KP because the KPs are accountable to you.”
“You proud of your work?”
“One time only. It’s the highlight of my army career. Have you eaten Italian spaghetti?”
“No.”
“I love spaghetti. Not army spaghetti. The way they do it, you have a sauce mix that comes in powder in gigantic cans,” I said, stretching my arms, exaggerating slightly. “You cook hamburger in pots. You add water and the powder. You can drain the hamburger grease if you feel like it. Some cooks do, many don’t, so what they’re ladling up in the chow line is an island of red goo inside a moat of orange grease. It’s served on noodles that are either wet and mushy or stuck together like glue from being dried out.”
Mai made a face.
“One spaghetti day there was a crate of tomatoes we’d forgotten to cut up into a salad, and they were going overripe. I ran to the post library and checked out a cookbook. I chopped the tomatoes into the standard sauce to simmer. I cooked the hamburger and drained the grease. Added some herbs I found nobody’d touched in years. You had to wipe the dust off the labels and it was hard getting the lids off the bottles.”
“GI like?”
“Oh yeah. The troops gobbled it down and asked for seconds. It’s unheard of to ask for seconds in a mess hall with the exception of lifers whose taste buds are shot. My timing was lousy. The post mess officer made a surprise inspection. He gigged us, saying my spaghetti didn’t follow regulations. He warned me not to do it again, and the mess sergeant chewed my butt royally.”
“I am not good cook.”
“Yes you are, Mai. You’re a wonderful cook. I know that to be a fact.”
“Cook Italian spaghetti for me, Joe.”
“Today?”
“Yes.”
We shopped, improvising: Chinese noodles, a can of clasped-hands stewed tomatoes, mushrooms that looked like eels, a long, skinny loaf of hot-out-of-the-oven French bread, and a jug of Australian red wine.
At an herb stall, the wares were aromatic and alien to me. After I sniffed my approval of a half-dozen of them, Mai negotiated in mile-a-minute Vietnamese, and I paid. In Saigon, shopping was same-same as buying a car at home. You did not pay the figure they wrote on the windshield with shaving cream.
At her place, hers and the colonel’s, I didn’t beat around the bush. I opened the wardrobe. No fatigues, no sign of “Jakie.” For whatever reason, the technical books were gone from her nightstand too.
Were we star
ting from scratch?
“Just you, Joe,” she said, reading my mind and kissing my cheek.
Perhaps it was just me now or perhaps Colonel Jakie Lanyard was temporarily unavailable. Everyone at the 803rd was working long hours, as I would have been too today if I weren’t presently AWOL.
I could’ve pressed her for specifics, but I quit while I was ahead. I didn’t know what I could believe. I did know what I wanted to believe.
I nuzzled her. She giggled, punched my gut, and shoved me into the kitchen to get to work. Recalling the sequence of my fabulous army spaghetti, I busied myself with the meal. I’d forgotten to buy grated cheese. That was fortunate. Dairy products were as palatable to many Vietnamese as peanut butter.
The dish didn’t turn out badly. It was a seminal meal too, a subconscious trigger to my eventual profession. Mai cleaned her plate and proclaimed it a feast.
We left the kitchen mess and made out primly on the edge of the bed, as if we were nervous teens on her parents’ living room sofa after the prom. Mai groped my crotch and confirmed that erectile dysfunction was a thing of the past. Mai went into the bathroom and emerged in her red Dragon Lady dress.
Oh, boy, she had my number. Call it a fetish, call it kinkiness. I didn’t give a diddly damn. I removed the dress, carefully lifting it over her head, my hands grazing her sides.
In her underwear, she retired to the bathroom. Water ran. I went to the window, to pull the curtains entirely shut and the shutters too. Across the street, sitting at a phỡ café smoking a cigarette was CWO R. Tracy. I think it was him. We were all beginning to look alike to me.
A dim bulb finally flicked on. Tracy and the CID weren’t hounding me. Not me individually. Not her individually. Tracy was bird-dogging Mai and me, a spy and her stooge. CWO Tracy was building his dossier for my arrest and trial.
Let him prove it, I thought. He was facing our way, L. H. Oswald smirk on his puss. I flipped him the bird. If he saw my middle digit, he pretended not to.
Mai came out of the bathroom, my evil Dragon Lady. I dropped to my knees, lifted her negligee, and kissed her between her legs, tasting honey. If I had it, I’d’ve given her the H-bomb secret if she asked, not caring if she was Uncle Ho’s daughter.
She lifted me by the hair and shoved me onto the bed. I was all over her, she all over me. I was embarrassingly quick. If I wasn’t a limp noodle, I was hair-trigger.
I apologized. Mai pinched my butt and said not to. She said we had all night. Sure enough, the second and third times, she beat me to the moon. We fell asleep in each other’s arms.
There was no probing on Cerebrum 2111X and CAN-DO and statehood for South Vietnam, then or throughout the night. Nary a word.
Why not?
I’d mull that later.
17.
KNOCK ME over with a feather, I have a dream.
In it, I wander off my cul-de-sac not on to another, but to what can best be described as a Hooverville. It is a filthy dirt street lined with tarpaper shacks with roofs of scrap tin. A ditch alongside the street is a lazy creek of piss and shit.
“Refinance your mortgage?” someone calls out from a hovel.
“Don’t have a mortgage,” I say truthfully.
“Have you researched gold futures, friend?” a slicky boy across the way asks. “Come on in and we’ll talk. We can double your money in fifteen days.”
The scent of greed and cologne makes my eyes water. I walk faster.
“By golly, before I repair your TV, the first thing we have to do is fix you up with a service contract.”
It’s becoming stereophonic. Where is the elevator when I really need it?
“Free investment seminar, lunch on the house, choice of chicken or fish.”
“I’m not a spammer. I provide information.”
“All we need is a credit card number.”
“No, friend, it isn’t a time share. It’s interval ownership. View of the ocean. This offer is good only today.”
The last is the scariest and creepiest of all. A recruiting sergeant in a booming voice: “Mr. Joe, enlistment gets you the school or duty station of your choice. Choice not chance. Get drafted and you’re at their mercy.”
I run out of there and wake up.
***
“Your shit is flaky, Private Joe. Get your shit together or I’m gonna jump all over your shit,” our Basic Training platoon sergeant had advised me in triple-digit decibels.
This had been directly following a barracks inspection. Our bunks were mandated to be made so tightly that a quarter would bounce on the blanket. My bedding had no elasticity whatsoever. It was the texture of cottage cheese. Forget a bouncing quarter. A Ping-Pong ball would’ve landed on it with a dull thud.
I’d considered telling the sergeant that housekeeping wasn’t my long suit. If he didn’t believe me, ask my mother. I’d had the good sense not to, but thanks in large part to my pathetic effort, our platoon failed the inspection. The sergeant had “jumped all over my shit,” doubling my KP duty.
I was back in the luxury of our hotel room with Ziggy recollecting that experience. Our room was luxurious compared to those World War Two wooden barracks, the worst part being the latrine. Toilets were not partitioned. Of all the indignities to which low-ranking enlisted soldiers were subjected, boys and girls, communal shitting was rock bottom.
I was recollecting communal shitting as I read a letter from Mother, a bland, one-page litany of information, as if a wire service release--the weather, her job, Jack’s unsuitable new girlfriend. No mention of Estranged Husband/Stepfather or Wendi with the bubble above her “i.” I hoped Mother was starting to recover from the betrayal, but there was no indication in these sparse words.
A Sunday Terry and the Pirates strip was enclosed and much appreciated. The Dragon Lady was not featured, but I imagined her behind the scenes, conniving and seducing. I missed my fictional Dragon Lady as if she were real. I hoped she was being careful.
Our superiors were so consumed by their secret computing machine project in the Annex that they didn’t notice that Ziggy and I were out scrounging when there was nothing to be scrounged. We billeted in the supply room only when we felt like it. There’d been no shopping list for several days, so I presumed we were at the final assembly stage of whatever they’d wrought. When I wasn’t with Mai at 421, I was in our digs with Ziggy, plowing into my newest reading material as he devoured his sci-fi.
I was so irretrievably smitten that trifling worries such as joining Mai as a co-guest of honor at a firing squad for espionage was water off this duck’s back. Our lovemaking had blended the cartoon fantasy and the flesh-and-blood woman into one.
Insane as it was, I had no intention of cooperating with snoops and spooks of any flavor, should they contact me. I’d take a midnight swim in the Mekong River before I’d get Mai in a pickle with the higher uppity-ups and anybody’s secret police.
Besides, what had we done that was so heinous? What solid evidence was there that she was a commie spy? The one question she’d asked of late came within seconds of my arrival at 421 Hai Ba Trung Street.
“Joe, why do you still have pants on?”
Judging by her actions, Mai wanted my body and she wanted my companionship. Period. That didn’t jibe after my third degree on the first date. Over time, I became more and more suspicious and less and less able to let go. Even without my comic strip fetish, ours was not a normal American-Vietnamese romance. The majority of those romances were fraught with non-romantic concessions, usually with a quid pro quo of money and a ticket stateside.
So what did she really, really want? I was sorely tempted to demand she lay it on the line. I mean, how come the skip from unrelenting interrogation to unadulterated intimacy?
But challenging her probably meant the end of extramarital bliss. Sigh. Heavy sigh. If my brain hung between my legs, so be it.
I yawned and looked at the books I’d accumulated from the Tan Son Nhat Library. Piled willy-nilly along the wall as if sa
ndbags, they’d transformed my side of the room from a berm to a full-fledged bunker. I did plan to return them. Someday.
The heftiest volume of all was one of my two latest, a tome known as a coffee table book. Coffee table books were mostly pictorial. They outweighed a cinder block. They were pricey, costing upwards of ten smackers. You gave them at Christmas to loved ones who didn’t like to read but wanted others to think they did. You laid one out on your coffee table by the ashtray and candy dish. Instantly, your living room had class even if you didn’t.
This coffee table book presented the works of Piet Mondrian in luscious color plates. I’d checked it out in a futile attempt to jog my memory, to dredge from my pickled brain why and how I wore a map of the State of Montana instead of his Composition 1921. No luck.
I added it to my literary heap, took a pull of Johnny Red, and delved into my second new tome, People’s War People’s Army by General Vo Nguyen Giap, North Vietnam’s answer to Douglas MacArthur. Giap processed into The Great Beyond not long after me, by the way. He was an old timer, over one-hundred.
Vo Nguyen Giap was the architect of Dien Bien Phu, in charge of the ants who humped the artillery up the surrounding hills and pulverized the French. He went on to spring the Tet Offensive in 1968 and remained the military boss when NVA tanks rolled into Saigon in 1975.
I’d hardly begun the book when I realized it was a how-to manual for doing what Giap had done to the French and was doing to us. I wondered if a single, solitary American general or Department of Defense whiz or military intelligence guru had read a single, solitary page of People’s War.
I tossed it atop a JFK biography, which reminded me of Lee Harvey Oswald cum CWO R. Tracy. It’s said that we all have a twin. I was no conspiracy paranoid, but I didn’t know anyone who swallowed the Warren Commission Report hook, line, and sinker. As far as I was concerned, those fuddy-duddies and politicians on the Warren Commission had swept the dirty deed under the rug mighty fast.
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