by William Boyd
She paid no attention to him, her frail body moving among the tables, her straight, shiny hair framing her face.
At night, Lydecker tossed in his bed and found his thoughts turning again and again to the thin girl. He stayed away from the bar a whole day before crashing in late at night in a beer haze to seek her out. He found her in the corridor that led out to the cabins at the back, her arms full of dirty sheets. Lydecker bore down on her, maddened by her inscrutability and at the same time potently aroused. He wrenched the sheets from her hands and forced her against the wall, drunkenly nuzzling her neck.
She made no move to resist him. He gazed into her eyes.
“Whassa fuckin’ matter with you? Damn you,” he implored slurringly, “whyncha like the others? No-good chicken-shit …” His voice tailed off into a wet, whispering pant. He looked at her and saw why she wasn’t like the others. Beneath the stretched oblique lids her brown eyes stared out defiantly in candid, unalloyed hate.
Lydecker stepped back, suddenly dismayed and shocked. “Ach, no-good fuckin’ …” he grunted to himself and staggered off down the passage. The girl stood there, a grubby snowdrift of soiled sheets around her ankles, and watched him go.
During his last day of leave Lydecker took three cheery whores to bed. They giggled when he stared into their eyes.
“You like G.I.?” he would ask uncertainly.
“Sure, you number one,” they would smile. “U.S. number one.”
So, no hooker fell in love with her John, Lydecker reasoned, but where did that little bit of skinny ass get the right to condemn him like that, to look at him in that way? It troubled and nagged at him, her contempt. It marred his swaggering progress through downtown Saigon; it sapped his confidence and aloof reserve as he pushed his way through the pimps and beggars; it made his hurried sex with the other prostitutes more grimy and unsatisfactory. Nobody, he declared, knew more about hate than he did; surely no one had hated so intensely; but this chick … He was prepared, even willing, to accept the scorn and spite of the peasant for the armed invader, but the look in that girl’s eyes had seemed to mark him out personally for her wrath.
So on the last afternoon of his last day, Lydecker sat in the bar and studied her, his mind a jostling crowd of vague tensions, obscure guilts and unresolved lusts. He was due to pick up a helicopter in a few hours that would ferry him back to the fleet on the Yankee Station. He felt disturbed, hung over, sullen. Saigon had proved no release, no real solace. He felt immensely fatigued at the thought of returning to the catapult maintenance crew.
The bar was quiet in the afternoon’s torpor. The whores lounged in groups around the wall; some ARVN soldiers played cards in a corner. Lydecker stared at the girl as she swept the floor. Her hair was tied up with a scrap of pink ribbon; her chemise shone crisply white. Once her gaze passed over him as he sat there but there was no flicker of recognition, no revulsion or even acknowledgment in her motionless face.
As the time drew nearer for his departure, Lydecker was seized with a restless panic at the thought of leaving with so much uncertain and unfinished. He felt the sweat pool against his body, and his uniform chafed. He drank beer after beer in an attempt to keep cool.
With an hour to go, he beckoned one of the whores over. She had become something of a favorite with him and she now slid easily onto his knee. Her smile was wide and at once she started to whisper endearments and run her sharp fingers through his hair. Lydecker shrugged her hands away. For some reason the artifice and dishonesty repulsed him. He pointed to the thin girl.
“What about her?” he demanded hoarsely. “How much?”
The whore looked archly offended, hurt. “She no good. Not for G.I. She number ten, Johnny, she quick-time girl. No ficky-fick.” She made a contemptuous jerking with her hand.
With a sudden movement Lydecker brutally tipped her from his lap and strode across the room toward the girl. He dropped a handful of notes on the bar in front of the startled patron and, seizing the girl’s hand, dragged her out to the cabins at the back.
He pushed her into the first room. Solid slabs of sunlight beaming through the shutters sectioned the floor and the grubby coverlet on the bed. It was stiflingly hot. With a finger Lydecker sluiced perspiration from his forehead and upper lip. He stuffed the rest of his notes into the girl’s unresponsive hand.
“Okay,” he croaked. “Christ damn you. Let’s really give you something to get riled over. Take ’em off.” He pulled off his own clothes in a hasty flurry of movement, leaving only his shorts. The rough concrete of the floor cooled the soles of his feet. Sweat dampened the sparse black hairs on his pale chest. There was the distant sound of a Honda revving.
Very slowly the girl pocketed the money and tugged her hair free from the ribbon. She slipped the sandals from her feet and gently unwound the cloth from around her waist. The swish of material sent dust motes spiraling among the sun bars.
Without removing her chemise she went and lay on the bed. Lydecker stood, his chest heaving, his erection straining against his cotton undershorts.
“I said take it all off.” He spoke quietly, a tremble in his voice.
The girl did nothing, her hands clenched by her slim brown thighs.
“All of it, baby. That means the fuckin’ shirt.” Lydecker awkwardly slipped down his shorts and moved over to stand by the bed. The girl didn’t look at him.
“I’m waiting,” Lydecker said harshly.
In response the girl raised the hem of her chemise to her waist and spread her legs. Lydecker gulped. A blob of sweat fell from the tip of his nose.
Suddenly he grabbed the girl’s hand and jerked her roughly to her feet.
“Take it off!” he shouted. “I fuckin’ paid you.”
“No,” the girl said evenly. “No good.”
Lydecker seized her and crushed his mouth on hers, clashing their teeth together. Then Lydecker drew back. He had seen her eyes. On fire with disgust. Ashamed and angry, he wrenched at the chemise. It tore slightly at the shoulder. At the sound of the ripping cotton the girl’s eyes registered alarm.
“No, Johnny,” she said as though only half-remembering the unfamiliar whore’s argot. “No good.” She made vague passing movements with her hands in front of her face and soft explosion noises in the back of her throat. “Number ten. No lie G.I. Not good for you, Johnny.”
What the fuck was she talking about? Lydecker wondered in desperation, as her thin hands still swooped to and fro.
“Strip, damn you. Off. All of it,” he gasped.
She saw she could do nothing more. His purple swollen sex stood out from his belly like a clenched fist salute, an absurd symbol of his domination. Crossing her arms in front of her, she swiftly pulled off the chemise.
Lydecker looked at the firm, pubescent girl’s body. “That’s more like it, baby,” he said, trying to sound kind. “I ain’t gonna hurt you.” His gaze cautiously returned once again to her eyes, hoping to find some more amicable response. “What’s all the trouble been about, eh? C’mon, honey.” But then he was perturbed to see a look of almost contemptuous triumph cross her face. She turned abruptly to reveal her back. And as she turned, Lydecker’s beer-numbed mind grasped feebly at the reasons for her evasiveness. “It’s all right, baby,” he said reflexively, but it was too late by then.
When he saw her back, Lydecker’s brain screamed in silent horror. His hands rose involuntarily to his mouth. The girl looked at him over her shoulder.
“Nay-pom,” she said quietly in explanation. “Nay-pom, G.I.”
Lydecker wrenched his bulging eyes away. Her back was a broad stripe, a swath of purpled shiny skin where static waves of silvery scar tissue and blistered burn weals tossed in a horrifying flesh-sea.
Lydecker emptied his stomach into his cupped hands, and his vomit splashed over his naked body.
On the Sea King taking him back to the Chester B., Lydecker sat slumped in white-faced, silent depression. The throb of the rotor’s beat sounded remorseles
sly in his head. He considered his hatred and the girl’s. Now he knew why he had been so fascinated by her. They were the same. Siblings. He looked into her eyes to find himself staring back. They were both burning up inside with their hate and it was wrong. Their hate had no consequences outside of themselves. It made them sick, ate them up. It accrued only inside of them, like a miser’s hoard, poisoning everything. Their bodies couldn’t nourish such a parasite for long. Lydecker saw that. He didn’t want to end up like that girl. Infernal decades of grief and agony beamed out from those eyes. Perhaps what he needed was to cast it out into the world and let it flourish there. Like Pfitz did.
As the Sea King approached the carrier, a great steel playing field plowing through the choppy waters of the South China Sea, Lydecker was aware of a palpable change going through his body. He felt his breathing become shallower and perspiration break out on his forehead. It seemed as if his chest were hollow and filled with throbbing, pulsating air.
Lydecker reported sick on landing and was found to be running a high temperature. The shipboard medics shot him full of penicillin and told him not to report for duty for two days. During that time Lydecker uneasily roved the corridors of the ship, a thinner and more consumptive figure than before, his mind obsessed with the violent images of his shore leave; of his casual unsatisfactory sex, fragments of obscene anecdotes he had heard, murmured accounts of battle-zone atrocities, and above them all, endlessly repeating itself like a video film loop, the vision of the young girl’s ghastly pirouette to expose her ravaged back.
Even Lydecker’s normally uninterested crew-mates commented on his yellowish pallor, the sheen of sweat forever on his forehead and upper lip, his staring red-rimmed eyes. They jokingly accused him of contracting some recondite strain of venereal disease and roared with laughter when he tried haltingly to tell them about the whore and her loathsome scars.
Gradually the nomadic circuit of Lydecker’s thoughts began to focus once again on Pfitz and his Crusader. Covertly, he haunted the below-deck hangar, distantly supervised the fueling and rearming of the plane, observed Pascual and Huq trundle the fat napalm canisters from the magazine elevators. He even took to following Pfitz discreetly whenever he moved from the officers’ quarters, studying the man’s corridor-filling bulk, the contours of his large skull revealed by his razored crew-cut, the pink fleshiness of his neck above the stiff collar of his flying suit. The glimmerings of an idea began to form in Lydecker’s mind. He started to plot his revenge.
His nervous debility persisted, his temperature was regularly above normal and he collected sickness chits without problem.
Then one afternoon he was lounging in a hatchway a few feet from the Crusader’s arming bay. Pfitz was talking to Lee Otis as the mechanic checked a faulty shackle on a napalm canister. Lydecker strained to catch his words.
“… Yeah, there just ain’t nothing to beat this jelly, man. It’s gonna win us the woah. Shit, I can remember the original stuff. It wasn’t so hot. If the dinks were quick enough they could scrape it off. So the scientists come up with a good idea. They started adding polystyrene—yeah, polystyrene. Hell, man, now it sticks better ’n shit to a blanket.” He chortled. Lee Otis’s eyes were glazed with boredom but Pfitz carried on, unaware in his enthusiasm. “Trouble was, if the dinks were fast enough and jumped underwater, it stopped burning. So some wise guy adds white phosphorus to the mix, and—get this, boy—now it can burn underwater.” He reached down and patted the nose cone of the canister. “That thing on okay, now?”
Crouched in his hatchway, Lydecker waited and watched until Pfitz hauled his bulky body into the narrow cockpit of the Crusader. He tasted acid bile in his throat, his fretting hands picked unconsciously at his olive green jacket and a slight shivering ran through his wasted body. It was clear now. Beyond doubt. He couldn’t understand why he had waited so long. Pfitz was the guilty one. For that girl’s sake, Pfitz had to suffer too.
It didn’t take Lydecker long to work out the technicalities of his revenge. The next day he was back on the catapult crew, silent and withdrawn, waiting for his time. In the evenings, with a rubber-based glue bought from the PX, and with sand from the fire buckets, and spare bolts and shards of metal from the machine rooms, he packed the beer can Pfitz had thrown at him with this glutinous hard-setting amalgam until it weighed heavy in his hand, a bright solid cylinder. To his fixated mind it had seemed only right that the beer can should be the agent of Pfitz’s destruction. There was a kind of macabre symmetry in the way events were turning out that he found deeply satisfying.
Patiently, Lydecker studied the mission rotas and the catapult launch schedules, waiting for the day when Pfitz was to be first in line.
It was a bright, windy afternoon that day on the Yankee Station. The mission was close support on some hostile ville on the Cambodian border. Pfitz was in a good mood. He had just heard that he was getting a new Phantom the day after tomorrow. First in the flight, he was towed into position on the catapult and waited with his canopy up for the Chester B. to get up steam and turn into the wind. He saw the rescue helicopters take off and assume their positions a hundred yards out from the sides of the carrier. Pfitz looked at the catapult crew hunched against the rush of wind with their thick goggles and macrocephalic helmets. He saw the thin figure of that shithead Lydecker staring up at him, the wire launch bridle dangling from his hand. Little bastard. He began to feel uncomfortable at the insistent way Lydecker was looking at him. He seemed to remember seeing too much of the little creep around lately. He’d have to kick his butt in when he got back, get the S.O.B, to keep his distance. He hauled down his canopy as he heard the crackle of instructions in his earphones preparing him for takeoff and the Rose Train’s thirty-fifth mission. As he ran through the final cockpit checks he noticed the hunched, beetling figure of Lydecker scuttling up to the nose wheel to secure the catapult bridle. As he moved out of his vision, Pfitz reflected that he’d never really taught the little shit a proper lesson; he should have had him transferred right away.
Lydecker paused for a moment at the nose of the Crusader, out of Pfitz’s line of sight, buffeted by the rush of wind. For an instant he rested his gloved hand on the side of the plane and felt it shuddering from the power of its engine. His ear-muffles dampened all noise to a muted seashell roar. Then he crouched down and fitted both ends of the cables to the shackles on the nose wheel, looping the middle over the protruding shark’s fin of the towing block. He knelt at the front of the plane for a second as if in supplication. And then, making sure his body obscured the view of the catapult officer, he swiftly withdrew the heavy beer can from his jacket and slotted it neatly into the recessed track, like a stubby bolt in a crossbow, just in front of the towing block.
Pfitz should have an unimpeded, normal takeoff until the towing block reached the end of the catapult track. Then there would be a slight but vital check to the momentum imparted by the tons of steam pressure driving the block, as it obliterated the solid can, jamming its clear run to the end of the track. It would be a slight, almost unnoticeable impediment but, Lydecker had calculated, a crucial one.
Lydecker ran back to his station and waved okay to the catapult officer, who barely acknowledged Lydecker’s signal. It was just one launch among hundreds he had supervised, another routine mission. Nothing would happen. You were remote on the Yankee Station, the battles were elsewhere, over the horizon. Nobody attacked you and you never saw the people you atomized, shattered and burned.
Lydecker saw Pfitz lock into full afterburn. The catapult officer swept his arm forward. The seaman across the deck punched the black rubber button on the console and the catapult’s release sent the Crusader blasting down the track.
Only Lydecker observed the tiny explosion as the towing block ploughed through the can, grinding it into the end of the track. A minute, inconsequential impact. But the effect on Pfitz’s Crusader was dramatic. Instead of being thrown up at an angle into the skies, the plane was flung down a shallow sl
ope into the sea some two hundred yards in front and to the left of the carrier. It was over in a couple of seconds. With a huge gout of spray, the Crusader was flipped into the sea, salt water flooding into the gaping intake, the screaming jets plunging the fully loaded aircraft deep under the surface.
There were shouts of alarm from the deck, but everything happened too quickly. Within moments they passed the spot where Pfitz had gone down; bubbling crazy water, a slick of oil, and men claimed to see the pale shape of the Crusader slipping ever deeper beneath the green surface of the sea.
Pfitz never came up and there was no further trace of the plane. The end of the catapult was found to be slightly warped and scarred, and the accident was put down to yet another malfunction. The day’s mission was aborted while the mechanism was taken apart.
Lydecker stood on the edge of the deck and looked out to where the rescue helicopters futilely hovered above the oil slick. Groups of men stood about and talked of the accident. Lydecker’s heart was racing and his eyes were bright. Pfitz and his napalm somewhere at the bottom of the South China Sea. He felt good. No, he felt magnificent. He wanted to bite the stars.
Histoire Vache
“So you are still a virgin,” Pierre-Etienne said triumphantly, stubbing out his cigarette.
It had to come out, Eric thought. They had been talking earnestly about sex all afternoon. Under cross-examination Eric had mentioned an older girl-cousin called Jean and suggestively introduced the notion of a seaside holiday and a sand dune picnic à deux. He had tried to keep the details vague, but conversations of this sort remorselessly turned towards the specific and Pierre-Etienne and Momo (Maurice) had been unsparing in their search for the truth. They had really pinned him down this time. Yes or no, they demanded; did you or didn’t you?
“I don’t believe it,” Momo said. “You never?”
Eric shook his head, trying to smile away his blush. They were sitting at a café in the main square of Villers-Bocage. It was market day and the place was full of livestock and people. Momentarily Eric’s attention was distracted by the sight of a red-faced farmer in the typical knee-length Normandy blouson, energetically tugging on the tail of a cow as if he were trying to wrench it out by the roots. Eric winced.