Dragon Lady

by Gary Alexander

  He guzzled his beer. So as not to be rude, I did too.

  “Well, sir, that’s kind of swell, isn’t it? We can go home soon. You can be reunited with your family. Maybe take a shot at bringing whatshername with you.”

  “Mai.”

  “Mai. If not as a nanny, well, you’ll come up with something,” I said, thinking, not a chance, pal; we’ll send you a wedding invitation.

  The captain blinked, either summoning a reply or stifling tears.

  The floorboards creaked. Ziggy lumbered in and sat. He tossed a rolled-up magazine on the table. His eyes were redder than the captain’s.

  “What’s up, Zig?”

  “Lookie.”

  I unrolled the magazine, an August 6, 1965 Time, the airmail edition they sold in Saigon, its pages as thin as toilet paper. Ziggy had it open to an article entitled The Moon-Faced Mars.

  I didn’t have to read the piece in toto. The picture of Mars taken from Mariner 4 was worth a helluva lot more than a thousand words. Nothing but craters and rough lifeless terrain. No canals and gondoliers, no vegetation, no Martians. The Red Planet was a meteor-pocked chunk of moonlike rock.

  Flippancy may not have been the ideal approach, but I was desperate to lighten him up. “Hey, Zig, that’s good news, isn’t it? There’ll be no invasion from outer space.”

  The captain was trying to focus on the article. “Invasion? What invasion? I told you, soldier, we’ve won.”

  “They ain’t there, Joey,” Ziggy said.

  “What are you babbling about, Zbitgysz? They are throughout the countryside. They have neither the resources nor the resolve to prolong their godless communist aggression against our overwhelming numerical superiority.”

  A tear trickled down Ziggy’s cheek. “Don’t you see, Joey? They were and they weren’t there.”

  “Were and weren’t?”

  “Like I once told you, they’re on the street, disguised as humans. Soon as I saw this pitcher they went and started fading and vanishing, Joey. They’re going out of existence on account of they never were. I seen some by the newsstand. Seen ’em go poof.”

  Captain Papersmith’s head jerked from Ziggy’s to mine. “Who, what?”

  The Martians winking out before Ziggy’s eyes. They weren’t tooling toward Earth to herd us into feedlots. I tried to cheer him up.

  “C’mon, Zig. No radioactive death beams, none of that conquesting and enslaving shit they do in your magazines. That’s terrific. Drink your beer. We’ll talk later in length. I know it’s a blow, but I’ll help you through it. C’mon, man. Bottom’s up.”

  “Death beams,” Captain Papersmith said from his distant planet. “Ridiculous. The Vietcong don’t even possess aircraft.”

  Ziggy blew his nose. If I’d had any doubts why he was taking it so hard, I didn’t now. He’d rather the Martians came in and roasted us than not exist at all. Maybe he didn’t deep-down believe they were real. Ziggy’s not that loopy.

  He did believe they could be real. Now, all of a sudden, he didn’t and they couldn’t be. The insular world in which he was comfortable, within his piles of sci-fi reading material, in which he was accepted, was an imaginary one.

  In his own way, he was as crushed as the over-religious zealots in the Great Beyond. Fire and brimstone and eternal torture of billions of heretics and atheists and agnostics was preferable to having their convictions dashed.

  Ziggy would not give up. “Joey, you think they doctored them pitchers? A conspiracy by the government so people don’t panic?”

  I shook my head. “Sorry, Zig. I love high-level conspiracies too, but that’s a reach.”

  “Will you men make some sense,” the captain demanded. “Am I the only sane and sober person at this table? Am I?”

  Ziggy and I didn’t answer. I simultaneously saw what Ziggy saw. The captain could not have seen what we saw because his back was to the door.

  What he couldn’t see, what we saw, was what we didn’t see. The bartender and her girls had disappeared.

  We were alone, the three of us and the two young Vietnamese males who were riding their motorbike onto the sidewalk. The kid in the rear jumped off. He carried a satchel, as innocuous-looking as a kid’s book bag.

  We knew what was in the bag. Ziggy rose out of his chair with a banshee yell. I grabbed and shouted at him, “Down!”

  Our best chance was to hit the deck, but pulling down Ziggy was like grabbing onto a freight train. He charged to the door, still howling.

  The captain stood up and swiveled his idiotic head, asking what Private Zbitgysz’s problem was now. Problem was that the satchel was now trailing sparks and the VC was slinging it into the GiGi.

  “Ziggy!” I screamed.

  His only chance, too, was to dive low and behind something.

  “Edward, no! Down!”

  Edward was Ziggy’s Christian name. I thought using it would trigger an obedience reaction, some dark family demon that’d make him listen. It didn’t.

  The disoriented captain was between me and the table, standing like a total dipshit. I lunged for Ziggy, but got my feet tangled with Papersmith’s. We went ass-over-teakettle, me landing on top of him.

  I dug for my peashooter pistol as the satchel bounced off Ziggy’s chest. He booted it and kept howling and lumbering ahead. The satchel blew up in midair.

  Wanna know what the real deal sounds like? A genuine ka-boom at close, close range?

  Find an old war movie on the tube, okay? When a scene comes on with big guns firing, crank the volume all the way up, and press an ear to the speaker. It’ll be almost as loud, a reasonable simulation. But it cannot simulate the cordite stink that’ll burn your nostrils like battery acid. It cannot simulate the screams of the dying and the stink of the dead. All it can do is give you a nasty case of tinnitus.

  The shock wave of the explosion slammed the captain and me upward and against the wall. Shrapnel pierced me as if I’d slow-danced with a porcupine. Other than that and gagging on the smoke, I was semi-okay. I was able to stand and move forward.

  Captain Papersmith was curled in a ball, his eyes clenched. At a glance, he appeared unharmed, thanks to me being on top of him. I staggered to Ziggy.

  The whole front of the bar was blown out. Ziggy lurched like a rummy but, incredibly, he hadn’t been knocked from his feet. I recollected his reformatory hack with the Louisville slugger.

  The sapper who’d flung the bomb was in pieces on the sidewalk. One of his arms, no longer joined to its shoulder, was twitching. Innocent civilians were on the ground too, wailing and bleeding.

  Ziggy playing soccer with the satchel, he’d saved my life and made one of the Cong pay with his. I stumbled outside after his partner. He should’ve gotten away clean, but the blast had sent him and his motorbike sprawling. He was in the street now, kicking at his starter.

  Sweat and blood in my eyes interfered with my vision. I wiped them with a sleeve and, son of a motherfucking bitch, it was Charlie! Had to be.

  Blue fumes came bubbling out the exhaust. He took off, weaving into traffic that was pretty well stopped. I ran at him and squeezed off a round. The accurate range of my .25 was ten feet, max. I missed.

  I fired again and saw his shirt fabric flutter and perforate at the right shoulder. He winced and nearly dumped the bike, but he recovered. Charlie was gone. I’d be firing wild, into a crowd, so I didn’t. We had plenty of bloody innocents for one day, thank you.

  Ziggy stood on the sidewalk. He wore a terrible, pained expression. His shirt had turned a solid glossy red.

  Ziggy hugged himself, holding his insides in.

  “Joey, they killt me.”

  His legs gave out. He hit the pavement on his knees and keeled over, dead when I got to him.

  That’s what they told me. They said I was screaming and crying and hugging his corpse. They said I was calling for my mother.

  They said that they’d had to peel my fingers straight, one at a time, to pry me loose, even though by then I’d pas
sed out.

  22.

  THEY FLEW me in a four-engine turboprop C-130 to Clark Air Force Base Hospital in the Philippines for surgery. I was hurt worse than I thought was, but I did not experience agonizing pain. I felt like I had a hundred bee stings. I felt like I had a mild headache all over my body.

  After they sliced into me and I came out of the anesthetic, a nurse gave me a little plastic vial of what the surgeons had tweezered out of my hide and innards, all but that vessel-grazing forearm dollop they didn’t remove. Could’ve been gold nuggets prospectors brought in from panning, but the metal was gray and silver, chunks of nail and pot metal and who knows what else they’d packed in their plastique.

  The little bastards were masters at improvisation, working with what they stole from us and were supplied by Hanoi and the Bolsheviks farther north. I was an accomplished scrounger, but an amateur in comparison.

  The nurse said ten or twelve of those fragments had barely missed something vital. I ought to feel blessed. I pissed her off because I didn’t act as if I felt blessed, and I refused to say why. My best friend was dead and my buddy Charlie had turned out to be a commie traitor who’d tried to kill me too. I would’ve told her, but then she’d’ve felt rotten and cried, and I’d’ve felt even shittier.

  Or maybe she wouldn’t’ve cried, the way I pouted, behaving like a pussy. For Chrissake, I hadn’t been in combat. Not like the infantry troops who were coming in faster and faster, more and more of them airlifted here every day. Some of them were airlifted home in short order, zippered inside body bags.

  I’d been at the wrong place, at the wrong time, in a bar, early in the day, malingering, drinking when I should’ve been working and contributing to the war effort. Hell, I couldn’t even give the Intelligence folk who interviewed me anything useful on Charlie, not even his real name. I fingered his hangout with his cowboy buddies, though I supposed they’d moved along. He wouldn’t be hanging out much at Mama-san’s either.

  Nobody at the hospital had heard of VV Day. Nobody had heard that the war was ending any minute, and they looked at me funny when I said it was. To keep out of the psycho ward, I learned to shut my trap on the subject.

  Given the tropical climate and the fact that the Vietcong surely didn’t bother to wash their hands before assembling their explosives, my doctor said controlling infection as it spread from wound to wound was like trying to eradicate fleas in a kennel. There was a limit to how much penicillin they could pump into me, and they’d already exceeded it. After an onset of diarrhea and a rash on the inside of my mouth, they reduced the dosage.

  I was informed that I’d be at the hospital for a while and not to make any plans. My immune system couldn’t clobber the germs overnight. I had so much time to spend in the sack, flat on my ass, so much time to think.

  Had my Dragon Lady orchestrated the attack on us? Had she been in cahoots with Charlie and his partner? I’d never mentioned her to Charlie, except at the Dakao coffeehouse as a boy-girl hypothetical, and never him to her.

  Had Mai ordered our deaths to whitewash our pillow talk?

  I shunted aside those paranoid notions to preserve what remained of my sanity. If my obsession with Mai had led to Ziggy’s death…

  To ease my mind, I let myself worry about VD instead. After all, if Mai could orchestrate a bombing, she might have liked infecting stupid-ass GIs like me. I ran into a medic buddy of Larry Sibelius’s, so I had him rush a blood test on me. The medic said it came back negative and I shouldn’t worry, as the syph didn’t capitulate to penicillin as easily as the clap did. It would’ve shown up and I was as clean as a whistle. My Dragon Lady and I had not exchanged virulent critters before I’d used gold dollars. Leaving that worry behind didn’t provide much relief. It just let the other bad thoughts back in.

  Brigadier General Whipple came by very late one night and awakened me. He was wearing a second star, now Major General Whipple. He was en route stateside for a new assignment that he did not reveal to me. The general sat at my bedside, like Ward Cleaver if The Beav was in bed with the mumps. He called me “son” and tried to whip a Bronze Star on me (à la Larry Sibelius at Nha Trang). Hearing “son” didn’t choke me up this time. Thinking about Ziggy did.

  After him reading a peculiar citation describing how I’d seen the sappers and warned off passersby who were able to duck to safety, I politely declined. I told him emphatically that Ziggy had been the hero, not me.

  I asked about the 803rd and Cerebrum 2111X and CAN-DO and VV Day and the war in general. He shushed me and changed the subject to injured plants. How when diseased or suffering a broken stem, they needed rest and additional nourishment and the proper medication. Us mammals were analogous.

  When I woke up in the a.m., I thought I’d hallucinated his visit, but there was a potted plant at my bedside (plenty of green leaves and tangled vines, genus unknown). A Purple Heart and Bronze Star were pinned to my hospital pajamas. I kept the first piece of hardware. The latter went out with the trash that also contained my pus-stained dressings.

  I had dreams by the shitload.

  I constantly dreamt about Mai. They were the most exotic and erotic dreams I’d ever had. If my skivvies weren’t wet when I woke up, my body and eyes were.

  Many dreams were of Mai in the Dragon Lady dress in the cartoon panel from my wallet she’d wadded up and contemptuously discarded. My Dragon Lady had the cartoon Dragon Lady’s face. She dressed per my fetish. She held an ivory cigarette holder that fizzled like a Fourth of July sparkler. She pitched it to me, and it became a satchel charge when it struck my chest.

  During a feverish catnap, after rerunning Papersmith and I hitting the deck in the GiGi Snack Bar, a variation of my life flashed before my eyes. Not events, but an amalgam of people promenading across the stage adjacent our grade school gym, participants in a spring pageant: Judy, Doug, Mother, Father, Jack, Papersmith, Lanyard, Whipple, Step-Pappy, PFC Bierce, CWO Buffet, Mama-san, and cackling Quyen. Even Wendi with the bubbled “i” and horn-rimmed glasses, and Mildred Papersmith, neither of whom I’d met.

  Ziggy was notably absent.

  I never ever dreamt about Ziggy. If was as if he’d evaporated with his Martians. Asleep, he was illusory. And when I was awake, I couldn’t bear to think about him standing outside the GiGi holding his insides in. Yet I couldn’t stop.

  Why haven’t I mentioned Ziggy in the post-death present? He’s with us somewhere beyond my Vietnamless quarantine. Of course he is, though he’s not in my useless The Great Beyond phone directory. Some folks are probably unlisted.

  I have an incredible coincidence to tell Ziggy, should we meet again. There were a dozen patients assigned to our hospital bay, always coming and going, bound for return to Vietnam or to home, dead or alive. A guy in the bunk next to me had superficial leg wounds. He was in for minor surgery and a trip back to his unit. He wasn’t especially talkative. Nor was I.

  He came out of the shower one morning, towel around his waist. I damn near fell out of bed. He wore a tattoo of Piet Mondrian’s Composition 1921 on an arm. It nearly wrapped a biceps.

  I managed to ask, “You dig modern art?”

  “Yep. Flames painted on a car.”

  “That’s it for art?”

  “Art pictures that look like something, I guess I like. You know, that one that was on the Saturday Evening Post cover where they’re sitting at the table at Thanksgiving with the turkey in the middle of it. I forget the guy’s name who did it. That’s art. This modern abstracted shit, you can shove it.”

  “Then why this tattoo?”

  He looked at his arm as if it were gangrenous and asked, “That’s what this is? Art? Nobody in my family knows what it was. Nobody I met knows what it is. We thought it come out of the tattooer’s head, like, you know, a kid with crayons.”

  I told him what it was and who Piet Mondrian was. He replied with a so-what look.

  “Why this tattoo?” I asked again.

  “Damned if I remember.”


  “Where’re you from?”

  “Billings, Montana.”

  Bingo. “Ever stationed at Fort Ord?”

  “Yeah, and Ord’s where the tattoo come from. I was on pass, a weekend in town. Monterey, Salinas, maybe Frisco, too. Dunno. Had some drinks and don’t remember shit except waking up in an alley with a brutal hangover and a sore arm.”

  I rolled up my sleeve, flexed Big Sky Country, watched his eyes bulge, and told my story. For a couple of fellas who didn’t talk much and had nothing in common except Uncle Sam and defaced skin, we yakked and yakked and yakked. We presumed we’d met in a bar and had gone pub-crawling together. We must’ve had quite a time.

  His unit was an aviation company in Qui Nhon up on the South China Sea coast. He was a mechanic and crew chief on a twin-engine Caribou, and got down to Tan Son Nhat once or twice a month.

  I gave him directions to the 803rd. He promised to look me up next time in Saigon and I promised if I was transferred anywhere, I’d write him. We’d connect and tie another one on.

  Didn’t happen. It usually didn’t in the service. Not because anybody’s insincere. It’s just that things and people change so damn fast.

  I’d already forgotten his name, but I missed him when he checked out of the hospital. I was lonely. No familiar faces, no mail. I’d written Mother and I knew she’d written me immediately after she’d received the telegram they sent when a husband or son was wounded or killed. I knew she had, but my mail hadn’t caught up to me in this pre-Internet, pre-cellular eon.

  Captain Papersmith had been taken to Clark, too. I didn’t know that for a week. He hadn’t visited me. This hurt my feelings since I figured he’d be ambulatory. Other than me falling on him, he couldn’t’ve been bunged up too severely. I’d taken shrapnel with his name on it.

  Being an officer, Papersmith was in a different wing, in a four-man room, not packed into a bay as I was. I found his room as a gaggle of brass was going into it, including two generals and a bird colonel. I hung around in the hallway and saw them huddled at his bed. They stayed fifteen minutes. I waited till they were long gone and went in.