by John Lawton
For a fat boy Chucky was agile. He was over the bar with a baseball bat in his hands in seconds. But in less than seconds I’d hustled Huey to the door, and all but thrown him through it. We’d parked a few blocks away. I hoped the walk would cool Huey off.
A block from the car, right outside the Cactus Theater, three or four guys jumped us. I got suckerpunched and went down feeling as though half my teeth had been knocked loose. Huey came down on top of me and six or eight (or was it ten?) boots began to kick the living shit out of us. Silent guys, grunting some, but letting their feet do the talking. I was on the verge of spewing, when it suddenly stopped. I heard a few thwacks of wood on flesh, and then I could see just one pair of boots standing there. I looked up, my neck shot sparks into my skull, but I could just make out Mouse standing over us. An ax handle in his fist. I leaned over the curb and threw up.
Mouse must have tucked one of us under each arm. The next thing I remember is being in the men’s room of the Cisco Bar on the other side of the street, hunched over the basins washing the blood from my mouth. Huey was next to me, bruised, battered, but unvanquished. Arrogant and snotty as he’d been ten minutes ago. Not one flicker of recognition on his face that we’d just escaped broken ribs, ruptured spleens, maybe even death.
‘Who are these guys you think are following you?’
‘What?’
‘You said something about guys you thought were following you. You know, in Chicago. Looks like they found you.’
‘Huey, you can be one stupid sonuvabitch. Those guys weren’t after me. They were after you. They’re just a bunch of Lubbock barflies, with some shred of national pride. You insulted them. You insulted everyone in that room, dammit. They just slipped out of Chucky’s ahead of us and waited. You and your big mouth. And where do you get all this jive talk? “Whitey’s on the moon”? What the fuck was that about? Whitey? Do you know what those guys would have done to Gabe if they’d caught him instead of us? Godammit, Huey!’
‘Aw—they all know Gabe. Gabe is one of the guys.’
‘No, Huey. In there Gabe was a target. You made him a target with your bullshit. Why do you think he cut and run? Do you think he wants to get his head kicked in just because some white kid decides to pull a jive-brother number on him?’
Huey ran wet fingers through his hair, pulled it back from his face and loomed at the mirror as though he were looking for zits. He let his moptop fall back and blew himself a kiss. Just a tad, I was beginning to think my little brother was a punk.
‘We could of taken ’em.’
Right.
I emerged from the can still spitting blood. Mouse was waiting, idling the motor on his pickup. He called out to me.
‘Get in. Sure my momma’d be glad to see you.’
It was not what I expected. I looked at Huey. Blood on his shirt split lip and shiner of a black eye coming, but a cocky little shit of kid all the same.
‘Go ahead,’ he said, ‘I’ll be OK.’
He threw the car keys high in the air, reached out a hand and snatched them back at arm’s length. The brazen certainty of youth. I climbed in next to Mouse.
§
In a couple of blocks we bumped across the railroad tracks—that was where the Kylies had always lived, between the Fort Worth and Denver Railway and Dunbar High School, east of Avenue A, in a red shingle house from which you could hear freight trains hoot the whole night through. Mouse and I had met here just before the end of World War 2. Billy and I were down at the depot, trying out his home-made pinhole camera—he had to photograph a steam engine, nothing else would do—and this big, eight-year-old black kid had come up to us, all questions: ‘What’s that?’ ‘What you got there?’ That was fine by Billy, he was all answers. I knew Mouse from that day until the day he joined the army.
Every house we passed was lurid with the flicker of TV screens, the glimmering water-green light bouncing off the walls into the windows. Mouse’s house was dark. If Mrs Kylie was home, she’d already gone to bed. Moon or no moon. Mouse’s father, Ed Kylie, had come back to this house from Germany in 1945, clutching his Congressional Medal of Honor. Lubbock hadn’t much wanted to honor its local hero, nor did Ed much want to be honored. There was no parade—he just nailed his medal to the front door and let the world see. After he died Mrs Kylie prised the medal off and put it back in its velvet case. The nail head remained. I could see it as Mouse slipped the catch on the screen door—now is that symbolic or what?
The two of us tiptoed to the back of the house. No sooner had he pulled on the refrigerator door than a voice from upstairs yelled, ‘That you Mo’reece?’
‘What’d I tell you? That woman can hear a icebox open at a hundred yards, and the flipping of a beer cap at a mile.’
He handed me a bottle of Lone Star.
‘Yeah, Momma. S’me. I brung back a face you ain’t seen in a whiles.’
A light went on. Mrs Kylie appeared at the top of the stairs, staring down at us. A graying woman in her sixties, wrapped in a blue robe.
‘Hoozat?’
‘’Member Johnnie Raines, don’t you, Momma? We was buddies back in my high school days.’
‘Step into the light, son.’
I stepped. She peered.
‘You walk into a tree, son?’
‘Something like, Mrs Kylie.’
‘Well, you sure do have a look of your momma ’bout you. How long is it now? How long’s she been gone? Must be a while.’
‘Twenty-four years come August,’ I told her.
‘My, my. And where you been all this time?’
‘I live in New York City. Mostly.’
I added the mostly out of pure cowardice. I lived in New York period, and I was trying to diminish if not negate the inevitable response.
‘My, oh my. No good ever came of livin’ in New York.’
She bade us both goodnight, told Mouse not to drink too much beer and my-myed herself back to bed.
Mouse flipped the caps on the beers and led the way out to the back porch, a flaking whitewashed porch onto which he had, mercifully for the night and the chiggers, fixed a brand new screen. It looked out onto the scrubby backyard, baked dry and plantless by the sun. Mouse had built a barbecue. I found myself wondering if that was where he’d burned his uniform.
It was past ten, dark and still blistering hot out there. Mouse seemed to have created the only cool spot in West Texas. He stared at his beer. Sat a while. Stared some more, and I began to wonder if he was ever going to speak.
‘You were asking,’ he began in a tone and style utterly different from that in which he addressed his mother, ‘about the New Nineveh Nine.’
I said nothing, decided to let him cue himself.
‘Like I said, I trained those boys. Taught every one of them to shoot. Every last damn one. You got that picture you were toting at Chucky’s?’
I took it out of my pocket, more battered and creased than it had been an hour ago.
‘You know these boys by name?’
‘Just Marty Fawcett.’
Mouse pointed to each one in turn.
‘Front row. Pete Chambers, college boy from private schools and Harvard. Came from Connecticut. Stanley Mishkoff. Brooklyn Jewish. They kinda made him the squad mascot—too short to be anything else. Marty. Notley Chapin. From San Diego. Man, Notley was weird to begin with. I used to wonder how he ever managed to get hisself conscripted in the first place. But I guess it got so the board saw so many dodgers pretending to be weird they couldn’t tell if he was faking it or not. He wasn’t. Notley was off the wall. Question is, what planet was the wall on? Back row. Al Braga, another New Yorker. Had his good side I guess, but mostly a mean son of a bitch, a hoodlum in the making. Grew up in the Italian myth—all his uncles were Mafia. At least that’s what he said. Sort of thing I wouldn’t
have boasted about. Truth is, the kid was a car thief who got told it was prison or ’Nam by the judge. Fool chose ’Nam. Marcellus Gore—Gus we called him. Only black kid in the squad. Nice kid, but lost. Never been out of the county in his life before let alone out of the state. Tod Foster, from Arkansas, one of the two comedians—the other’s standing next to him. Bob Connor from south Boston. Never figured out what Boston Irish had in common with an Arkie, but they were inseparable and the gags never stopped coming. Curtis Lee Puckett, from Kentucky. As mean as Braga when he wanted to be, but hellbent on becoming a soldier. Took orders and discipline like they were milk and honey. That boy could drill till he wore a hole in the parade ground. And then there’s me. On the end there, looking like a beached whale. That was the New Nineveh Nine. Now I know what you’re asking. Thing is, Johnnie, you don’t, do you?’
‘No. If I did I wouldn’t be here.’
‘So what do you think you’ve found. A fragging? A platoon that ran amok and killed a few gooks too many?’
‘Something like that. Is that what it is?’
‘First, you tell me why you’re asking.’
‘Friend of mine back East, my best friend as it happens, was working on this when he was killed.’
‘Killed?’
‘Murdered.’
‘What was he? Some kind of cop?’
‘A reporter, for a New York paper. He’d traced Marty. I don’t think he got a chance to speak to him though.’
‘And that’s it? That’s why you’re poking around here for the first time in more’n ten years asking me questions?’
‘Yes. And I’m sorry.’
‘Sorry to be asking me questions?’
‘Sorry it’s the first time in ten years.’
Mouse waved this away with a hand.
‘S’OK. We got this far. I’ll tell you what you came to learn.’
He picked up his bottle of beer. He wasn’t drinking any more than I was. I left mine sitting on the table. I still felt too close to blood and nausea for beer. I think he needed it just to have something to do with his hands. Mouse began his tale, and I could not begin to imagine how precisely he had chosen the word ‘learn’.
‘They got to ’Nam Christmas ’67. I got lucky. I had Christmas back here with Momma and Gabe and flew out from Seattle in the New Year. I got to Da Nang on a wet Thursday in January. But any day would have been a wet day. That was the season. It just rained all the time. I picked up a 35mm Kodak, a Rolleiflex and a Colt .45 from stores and followed them out across Quang Nam province in a Chinook. Three quarters of the way to the Laos border and a hell-hole called LZ Mighty Joe Young. LZ’s armyspeak for Landing Zone and Mighty Joe Young was pretty well what the Vietnamese name for the place sounded like to American ears. I never heard it called anything else by anyone under the rank of Colonel. Joe Young was nothing more than a big bunch of Quonset huts surrounded by jungle and swimming in mud. The front line in a war that didn’t have a front line. CeeBees made it with a thing called a Rome plow—an earth mover the size of a house, just tore through anything and flattened it. Ripped down trees till they got a space, threw up huts and watched it all turn to mud. Mud got so bad you couldn’t dig a hole and call it a latrine. You shit in pots, tipped out the pots into an oil drum and twice a week the Vietnamese gophers’d douse it all in diesel and set fire to it. Smell of burning shit used to hang over the place all the time.
‘The battalion had spread the Nine out across a couple of companies. Not many kids get to go through basic and then serve shoulder to shoulder. They were luckier then most. Five of ’em went into the same squad in Alpha company, three, Pete, Stanley and Gus, into the same squad in Charley and strangest of all, Al Braga got kept back in Da Nang because they needed a skilled mechanic at base. Car thief, mechanic—same thing as far as the army was concerned. Braga was already protesting about it when I passed through. Said he didn’t come to ’Nam to grease engines, he came to kill gooks, and if he didn’t get to kill gooks he’d look for somebody else to kill. They eventually let him go, gave him what he asked for, a front line posting. When most men were asking for the opposite. He got to Joe Young about ten days after me, but by then they’d all changed. I knew it as soon as I set eyes on them. They’d been three weeks in ’Nam and they’d aged three years. They’d patrolled some. They were all still alive, but they’d seen men wounded by sniper fire, watched some poor guy lose a foot to a booby trap and maybe they’d figured out it was only a matter of time and statistics before it was their turn. Nine of ’em. You could count for sure on one getting killed, another two crippled and another three wounded before the year was out. Four or five might make it back. Which four or five? God knows. They’d all changed. Marty got made a corporal almost at once, put in charge of the squad, but then he’d been pretty much their leader from the start. Notley got weirder than ever. Stopped cutting his hair, grew one of those tiny beards you get just in the dimple of your chin and one of those stringy hippie moustaches. And the dope that man could get through. I suppose you think we all got stoned? Man, I never touched the stuff till I got back here and Gabe turned me on to it. But that’s what people want to believe. Let ’em. Was true of Notley. But I guess you could say the change in them all was visible in the names they’d painted on their helmets. Like they wanted to be even more different then they really were. Like they were changing personas by changing names. Saying “I am not the kid you knew back home.” Only Marty still used his real name. Stanley, they called Sputnik, on account of that’s what he looked like. A round-faced little guy. All he needed was spikes and he got those when they made him a radio operator with one of them long, whippy aerials waving out above his head. Bob Connor was One-Line—after all the one-liners never stopped coming. Tod was Arkie—nobody seemed to exercise much imagination where that was concerned. Nor with Pete—he just got stuck with Ivy League. Braga was Hotwire—claimed he could boost any automobile without a key, so why not? Notley was Zappa, after Frank. Gus was Floyd, ’cause he looked a lot like Floyd Paterson. And Puckett was Shack, ’cause he was forever telling you how he grew up in one. Must have felt right at home in ’Nam. No drop in his standard of living whatsoever.
‘Whatever—they won their point with me. It was almost as though I didn’t know them. As though they’d got their war now, and it wasn’t my war. And the war I’d seen was nothing like this. Nothing was as hot, wet, dirty, rotten as Vietnam. They hardened up in a way I’d escaped. I thought back to all the bullshit those kids had taken in basic from drill sergeants who’d cut their war teeth in Korea or like me spent most of their service time on home postings, and I realized nothing had prepared them for this, and that if one of those bastards was flown out and dropped in now he’d have to learn from them. I followed. I was still “Sarge” but I followed. I did my job, not that anyone could define it for me. Information officer in a war of misinformation. I took pictures. I built myself a darkroom and I printed photographs no one wanted to look at.’
It seemed a moment to stop his flow. A risk but I took it.
‘I would like to see them.’
Mouse looked back at me in the gloom, said nothing.
‘Really. I would. I mean. You still have them, don’t you?’
He was gone several minutes. I began to wonder if I might not have shattered the spell, the mirror crack’d. But I heard him lightfooting down the stairs in his socks and he reappeared on the porch with a big red album under his arm and a glowing joint wedged between his fingers. He passed both to me.
‘My momma warned me not to drink so much beer. Like I said, Gabe introduced me to one of the finer things in life.’
I drew on the J and felt the smoke curl around the back of my throat and the familiar, unholy joy uncurl in my head. Like the man said, you can have quite enough of beer. I flipped open the album. Leafed through Mouse’s back pages. Treading through it on my fingertips as gingerly
as a faithless husband sneaking in after midnight. A shot of a painted woman outside a bamboo and timber shack. A Vietnamese whore trying to look like a skinny, pouty version of Jane Russell, toning down her otherness with the ubiquitousness of Western make-up, Western poise and Western know-how. It was parodic. I did not know how any man could find this attractive, but then I’d never been that man to whom she was appealing. Two dogs caught tussling over something in the road, who’d stopped to look down the lens at Mouse the way only dogs do. A burned-out jeep. A Chinook taking off, the grass all around it flattened like Kansas in a tornado. Three guys in fatigues, arms wrapped around shoulders, bonding and grinning.
Mouse read my mind. ‘Pretty basic stuff, huh?’
‘Something like that.’
‘You’ll be glad of something ordinary. Now, shut the book and pass the joint.’
Mouse took up his story again with the first exhalation, his voice smoky and dope-croaky, gaining depth and volume with every sentence uttered.
‘About a week after Al Braga rejoined Tet hit. The biggest, the bloodiest uprising so far. Could have been worse for the Nine. But it was a baptism of fire all the same. Could have been worse—they could have been in Hué or Saigon—it was cities saw the worst fighting. Probably lasted only a matter of days all told, but when it was over it was like a tidal wave had washed over Vietnam. Hué had been a nightmare. Cong occupied for a month, fought over street by street, house by house. There were companies in Hué I heard got wiped out to the last man. Got so the life expectancy of a front-line grunt was down to seventy-two hours. I saw a little of Hué when it was all over and Charlie had pulled back. They flew me and my cameras up there for a few days to put it on record and they flew me back again. I’ve never seen devastation like it. I found myself wondering what did the most damage—the attack or the counter-attack? Hard to believe what we did in Hué helped any. And by “we” I mean the United States not just the guys in uniform. Charlie took a ville or a suburb or a town—we pounded the shit out of it. Hué, Cholon, Ben Tre. You ever hear the line about Ben Tre? The one that made the papers?’