Dragon Lady

by Gary Alexander

  If you believed Oswald hadn’t pulled the job alone, and I had severe doubts, who was he working for? Possibilities ranged from the Mob to the Cubans to the Russkis to LBJ to the CIA. You could make a case for any of them, and who’s to say they didn’t reward Oswald for his work, by faking his murder, and switching a double for Jack Ruby to plug.

  I nudged Ziggy. He put aside The Devil’s Dictionary by PFC Bierce’s granddaddy Ambrose. He’d found it in the Tan Son Nhut “libarry.” Grin on his face, moving his lips, turning pages, damned if he wasn’t memorizing Devil’s. At least Bierce’s quotes would be jazzier than those in the Little Red Book by that fat ChiCom with the wart on his chin.

  And speaking of the devil, where was PFC A. Bierce? His appearance at the Fighting 803rd was now intermittent. Once he’d cranked out the morning report, he seemed to come and go as he pleased.

  I asked Ziggy his opinion on the JFK assassination. He sure did have one. Naturally, it was a unique theory.

  “Hit squad from the Planet Clarion, Joey,” he said. “I seen this story in a magazine and there’s no proving it ain’t true.”

  It was my own damn fault for consulting him, toppling him to yet a lower ledge of unreality. “Where’s Clarion, Zig?”

  “Clarion’s in Earth’s orbit on the exact other side. You never see it cuz the sun’s always in the way.”

  “Okay, sure, right.”

  “Oswald was a Clarionite who was teleported here. They was afraid of our space program, the Clarionites were. They listened in to Kennedy saying we’d have a man on the moon before the end of the decade, so they was afraid we’d discover them. Them and the fake Oswald had to do what they had to do to Kennedy. But JFK or no JFK, we’ll be on the moon when he said.”

  “A man on the moon by December 31, 1969? C’mon, man. Fat chance. The odds have to be a trillion to one.”

  “There’s times you don’t know shit from Shinola, Joey. You ever hear of them Mercury and Gemini satellites we went and launched?”

  “Who hasn’t?” I rebutted lamely.

  Ziggy then rambled on about Alpha Centauri, our nearest star. At 4.4 light years distant, it was practically across the alley. Little green men in a yarn he’d read lived there. He said Alpha Centauri was actually three stars, one orbiting a second that both orbited the third. He said the Alpha Centaurans were in cahoots with the Planet Clarionites.

  I couldn’t wait for Mariner 4 to ride into Marsville. Maybe Ziggy would snap out of it. I got off my bunk and said I’d see him at the 803rd, where we were supposed to be anyway.

  I walked in as Captain Papersmith double-timed out of General Whipple’s office in a frenzy. Before I could confide that a cabby had told me that South Vietnam’s state color was gonna be red, Papersmith blurted, “Private Joe, are you familiar with Saigon’s finer restaurants?”

  Captain Papersmith was irritable and depressed, routine for him. I rocked a hand.

  “Can you recommend an establishment that will accommodate a banquet-sized party?”

  “How big’s banquet-sized, sir?”

  “Fifty.”

  Roughly the number of warm bodies at the 803rd, the oddballs, and cooks and MPs who had lent a hand. “Factoring in security, sir?”

  “Pardon me?”

  “You know, sir, security against plastique. Fifty’s an attractive target. Nice round number.”

  “Security is irrelevant,” he said.

  Where were we, Elm City, U.S.A.? “Excuse me, sir?”

  “Security is irrelevant. Clean the wax out of your ears, soldier.”

  I described a nice rooftop restaurant a couple of blocks off Le Loi Boulevard. Ziggy and I had eaten there once. It offered a good mix of quasi-American, Chinese and Vietnamese cuisine. In my humble opinion, Victor Charles was not irrelevant, and a roof was safer than street level. You’d have to have Sandy Koufax’s arm to sling a satchel charge up to it.

  “Is there a separate meeting room with ample space for us?”

  “Don’t remember. I think they can probably partition off a section.”

  “Would there be adequate privacy?”

  How the hell would I know? “Sure, no problem.”

  “Are they flexible? Available on a day’s notice?”

  Did I publish the town’s restaurant guide?

  “Enough grease on the palm and anybody’s flexible,” I said, shrugging.

  He said to drive him there. So off we went in the rattletrap Jeep. In front of the restaurant, he ordered me to occupy myself while he negotiated with the restaurateur. The captain was gone an hour, came back, and said he had a deal. Then he asked for the name of a reliable printer that did no business with, to my knowledge, any USMACV organization.

  A peculiar proviso. Again, I wanted to ask how the hell should I know, but said sure, no problem, pulled over at the next print shop we came to, and said they were the best in town. He told me to wait in the Jeep and was gone half an hour.

  On the return trip to the 803rd, I caught a glimpse of a sketch on Captain Papersmith’s order that he hadn’t completely slipped inside a binder. He’d written in 1965 and left the day and month blank. Also written on it: USMACV VV Day Celebration and the name of the rooftop restaurant.

  VV?

  VV Day?

  Later in the afternoon, I slapped my forehead for missing the obvious. We had VE Day, Victory in Europe Day in honor of pounding the Nazis into rubble. We had VJ Day after vaporizing Hiroshima and Nagasaki. No VK Day. The Korean War was a stalemate, a gory zero-zero outcome that could go into overtime any moment.

  VV Day.

  “Holy Fucking Toledo!” I said to nobody, flabbergasted.

  Victory in Vietnam Day.

  Was he nuts?

  On second thought, maybe we would have the situation mopped up pretty soon. Marines continued to land up north at DaNang. Infantry divisions were coming en masse. The First Airmobile Division was in the Central Highlands, chasing Charlie by chopper. No question, we were kicking ass and taking names.

  Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara had stated that most of the military task should be wrapped up by the end of 1965, with a limited number of U.S. military personnel hanging around to train the locals. Since the troop numbers were moving up, not down, the press had been giving McNamara a ration of shit. But what did they know?

  Communism in South Vietnam had less than six months before going belly-up. If McNamara and the bigwigs were true to their word, how did the piddly-ass, rinky-dink 803rd Liaison Detachment and their Cerebrum 2111X and CAN-DO electrical computational machine fit in? So what if it would be the size of a barn when it’s together and running? That didn’t make it miraculous. A dinosaur was as big as a locomotive and had a pea brain.

  It may be all over but the shouting, except for one tiny detail.

  Had the ants been clued in?

  18.

  HOW MANY times have I said that the gang that runs The Great Beyond are Pranksters with a capital P. A barrel of laughs. I know, I know, far too many.

  I’m talking about filthy lucre here. In The Great Beyond, all our physical requirements are compliments of management. Just like in the army, which provided us with “three hots and a cot.” We neither need money for our subsistence--not for discretionary purchases we can’t make anyhow.

  Suddenly, I have money, U.S. currency. After my morning shower, I try to step into a shoe. I can’t. There’s a roll of cash inside. It’s simply there. In my cookie jar too, the cookie jar I didn’t have that is on the counter next to the toaster I’ve never been able to use because I have no bread to toast. And in a piggy bank from nowhere that’s on my bedroom dresser.

  I sniff the roll. It smells like money. I hold a bill up to the light. The paper has those little blue and red threads. I do a quick shuffle. The front sides look normal on all, a mix of twenties, fifties and hundreds. Wait, almost normal.

  Here’s where the fun comes in. They’ve tweaked our greenbacks a tad. Bill Clinton has replaced Andrew Jackson on the obv
erse of the twenty. There’s a gaggle of nude, frolicking Biblical babes on the reverse.

  I pull several three-dollar bills out of the roll. They feature Richard M. Nixon’s painfully-smiling puss on the front, an engraving of the Watergate Complex on the rear.

  My boy Smitty, he comes running as I count.

  I answer the door and before I can say hello, he says, “Joe, what is this, please?”

  He’s holding up a piece of currency that has to be from his homeland. It’s colorful, with squiggly writing, guys on horseback, and what looks like a mosque. On the back is 10,000 and oops--

  I ask, “What’s ten thousand of these worth in real money?”

  He’s insulted. “If you mean my beloved homeland’s money, four U.S. dollars.”

  “Must be inconvenient having to roll a wheelbarrow full of these around to go shopping.”

  “This is new,” Smitty says. “What is this and why is it on my money?”

  The “new” is my “oops.” He’s referring to a picture of some folks from the olden days sitting at a long dinner table.

  It is my great pleasure to inform him.

  “Smitty, this is an excellent representation of Leonardo da Vinci’s The Last Supper. You’re seeing Jesus and his Disciples, on the night before Jesus Christ checks out. Jesus has just announced that there’s an enemy agent in their midst. Judas, we know, but his merry band, doesn’t, not yet. The guys are having a conniption fit and--”

  Smitty has about-faced and is throwing a tantrum of his own, speaking angrily in his native tongue. I don’t know a word, but I can imagine “blasphemy” and every four-letter word he knows. He’s throwing his money around, scattering his lawn with it.

  All’s still quiet on the Madge front. I’m too curious. I rap on her door. Rap again. Ring the doorbell. Wait. Ring it again. Wait. Walk around the house, looking in every window. To the patio, where the drapes aren’t all the way shut. I see no sign of Madge, no sign the house has ever been inhabited.

  ***

  I was dreaming about money on my supply room bunk, what Mai and I were spending on our honeymoon in Seattle, figuratively throwing money around, too. We were splurging on champagne and a luxurious hotel room, cost be damned. Then I was rudely awakened by CWO Ralph Buffet.

  He was bent above me, shaking me, saying, “Wake up, wake up, wake up. We have an emergency.”

  I whiffed corrosive halitosis. Not that I had room to talk, surely reeking of Johnny Red. “What’s up?”

  “Sorry to barge in, Joe. Captain Papersmith sent me.”

  “You won’t even say hi to us on the street, Buffet. Remember? He can’t send you for us if we don’t exist.”

  “Sorry. Believe me, it’s best for both of us if we’re strangers. That’s your buddy?”

  He was referring to the mound in the bunk next to me, pillow over his head, who sounded like a Messerschmitt Bf109 fighter piloted by the German World War Two ace whose biography I’d been reading. I squinted at my watch: 10:50.

  I was bone-ass-weary from the manual labor, almost but not quite too exhausted to sneak out to my Dragon Lady’s whenever possible, to cuddle and smooch and snuggle and make love.

  Ziggy was semi-morose of late. Current magazine articles on his Mariner 4 reported that it’d flown near enough to Mars to transmit data that said what had been recently said by the scientists, that there likely wasn’t diddly-squat on the Red Planet except rock. I’d tried to console Ziggy, telling him to cheer up and relax and wait on the pictures. Besides, VV Day was coming up quick.

  “Ziggy doesn’t count sheep, Buffet,” I said. “He strafes them.”

  “Joe, could you please wake Private Zbitgysz? We have a crisis and time is critical.”

  “What kind of crisis?”

  “We lack vital supplies.”

  “What flavor of vital supplies?”

  “Electrical.”

  I yawned.

  He took that as a yes. “Thanks, guys. I’ll be at the Annex.”

  “We’re not authorized in there,” I said, yawning again. “We no can do for your top secret crypto CAN-DO.”

  “You’re authorized now on an emergency basis. That comes directly from General Whipple.”

  “Why don’t you roust the Zigster, Buffet?”

  “Please, Joe.”

  “Shit,” I said, tossing a shoe at Ziggy. Waking him up was like disarming a bomb. “Hey, Zig.”

  He sat up, snorting and coughing.

  I summarized.

  “What kinda ’lectrical?”

  “Whatever it is, I have a hunch we’re not requisitioning through channels. Buffet, give us ten minutes to powder our noses.”

  ***

  Colonel Lanyard’s and General Whipple’s office lights were visible under their doors. PFC Bierce was gone. We were admitted to the blacked-out Annex by CWO Buffet. A cluster of oddballs parted for us, a disconcerting gesture of deference.

  Buffet led us to a big electrical box that’d been wired to the local juice and thick cables connected to auxiliary generators. All the computing machinery gizmos were out of their crates, occupying three walls and much of the free space. The thing with the square buttons was on a table in the middle. In the movies, this was where the little green man in charge of cooking us earthlings into burnt toast punched buttons.

  Ziggy and I kept a discreet distance from the generators. Ziggy and I liked live electricity as well as we did snakes (me, going back to childhood for no good reason, as western Washington state has only harmless garter snakes) and spiders (Zig), especially when half-assedly jury-rigged like this.

  Buffet pulled up a cluster of cables from the floor and showed us the plugs. “The wall sockets are three-pronged. These attached to the Cerebrum 2111X drives and the rest of the gear and the generators are four-pronged.

  “They are to connect to our generators and the generators connect to local current in case of overload. The generators are made in Japan, the existing wiring in France and England, the computer components in America.”

  “A United Nations of vital supplies. They aren’t compatible,” I said knowledgably.

  “I’m afraid I created unrealistic expectations. We promised General Whipple and Colonel Lanyard that we were powering up and running tonight,” Captain Papersmith said, appearing out of nowhere.

  “We desperately need adapters,” Buffet said.

  “Adapters,” I said. “No adapters handy? In a parts bin? Anywhere?”

  The oddballs responded with a chorus of headshakes.

  “How are we supposed to cough up―how many adapters this time of night? There might not be a single one in Saigon anywhere.”

  “Twenty-eight,” Buffet said.

  “Twenty-eight adapters,” the captain repeated in a six-syllable whimper. “I promised the general and the colonel.”

  The captain and the oddballs were looking at us as if they were villagers and we were witch doctors who could make the volcano quiet down. They had confidence in us and respect for us. A rare sensation.

  I asked Ziggy. “Singh?”

  “Nah. He’d be closed by now.”

  “Charlie?” I suggested.

  Ziggy grunted his consensus.

  I informed the crowd, “Before we can do, gents, you’ll have to pass the hat. Seed money.”

  They were bunched, reminding me of nature films of penguins on ice floes. To clarify, I rubbed thumb against fingers. They produced three hundred worth of dollars and piasters. Insincerely, the captain told us to be careful.

  “We will be in your debt,” he added.

  “Debt,” Ziggy intoned. “‘Forgetfulness. A gift of God bestowed upon debtors in compensation for their destitution of conscience.’”

  I grabbed a plug and dragged him and his Ambrose Bierce quotations out of there before Captain Papersmith could summon a reply or Ziggy could shift gears to The Little Red Book. We paid a motorcyclo driver a bonus to full-throttle it downtown. Ziggy and I knew a hole-in-the-wall coffeehouse where C
harlie and his cowboy buddies hung out when they weren’t racing their Hondas, snatching Seikos off GI wrists, and generally raising hell.

  We got lucky. Charlie’s and his pals’ motorbikes were parked on the sidewalk. The only lights visible were cigarette embers and table candles inside the coffeehouse. I whistled and yelled for Charlie.

  Nervously, Charlie came outside. He was not happy. We did not visit him on his turf. His draft-dodging buddies weren’t partial to Americans. I gave him the plug and told him how many adapters we needed.

  “It’s a long shot,” I said. “We’ll make it worth your while.”

  Charlie eyeballed our wad of green and Ps, then whispered, “Give me money. Then I yell. You speak okay, okay, okay. Okay?”

  I said okay and instructed Ziggy to cower without overdoing. Charlie then cut loose in Vietnamese and pidgin, accusing us of doing various disgusting things to our mothers, all the while jabbing a finger in my chest. He said we’d have to come up with a better offer. Ziggy and I said okay, okay, okay, and made a big deal of forking over more cash.

  Charlie had saved face and satisfied his buddies that he played cozy with Americans strictly for profit. Swindling the round-eyed butter-stinkers was the name of this tune. Charlie hopped on his bike, and we chased behind in the motorcyclo.

  He took shortcuts down alleys I wouldn’t enter in broad daylight. They were as pitch-black and narrow as caves. He stopped at a business on a narrow, commercial street. There were no lights and the iron gates were down and padlocked. I knew they were businesses because of the signs, but I didn’t know what kind as the signs were entirely in Vietnamese.

  Through the bars of accordion iron you could see in windows. There were baby clothes in one. Next door, domed hair dryers like helmets out of the Jetsons: a beauty parlor. With the cyclo and the Honda motors shut off, the silence made my ears ring. An unseen dog howled. I hoped it was a dog, not a VC signaling his colleagues.

  Charlie rapped and rapped and shook a set of bars. Eventually it creaked and groaned upward waist-high. He jabbered to someone inside, then came to me with his hand out. I gave him all of the money aside from a small commission I deducted for Ziggy’s and my finder’s fee.