R&R

by Mark Dapin

  ‘Isn’t that right, asshole?’ he said to Mickey.

  Caution ordered Mickey to march Bucky off the road. They took him behind a fortune-teller’s shop, where the sour-sweet smell of refuse settled as a taste at the back of their mouths, and Caution made Mickey search the boy. He was carrying nothing.

  ‘You know why they call him Bucky?’ Caution asked Shorty. ‘It ain’t because he’s got buck teeth, else they’d call every asshole zipperhead Bucky. No, Bucky is named after Captain America’s pal, because the boys believe he’s on our side. But I’ve got a different theory, ain’t I, Bucky?’

  Bucky recognised his name, looked up at Caution, and wove a web of drool from his chin to his shoulder.

  ‘That’s fucking disgusting,’ said Caution. ‘Give it to him, Mickey.’

  Mickey smiled and shook his head.

  ‘That ain’t a joke,’ said Caution. ‘Hit him, son.’

  Bucky cowered, wrapped his arms around his chest, but Mickey didn’t move.

  ‘You got to wonder how much they really understand,’ said Caution.

  Caution raised a fist, and showed it to Mickey.

  ‘Punch – the – fucking – retard,’ he said.

  Mickey would not.

  ‘My theory,’ Caution explained to Shorty, ‘is Bucky is a postman for the VC. There he is, every day, hiding in plain sight, zipping in and out of every bar and brothel like Nashville with a hard-on. I’ve seen the whores in the morning, passing him their red envelopes.’

  He stepped towards Bucky and stamped his boot. Bucky cringed.

  ‘Where are your fucking envelopes now, asshole?’ yelled Caution.

  Bucky shrank, and tried to make himself even smaller.

  Caution shook Mickey by the shoulder. ‘Let him have it, son,’ he ordered.

  Mickey tried to twist away. He was very small, thought Shorty, not much bigger than Bucky.

  ‘Teeps,’ said Mickey.

  Caution stopped.

  ‘What was that, son?’ he asked.

  ‘In envelope is teeps,’ said Mickey.

  Caution cocked his head. ‘Tips?’ he asked.

  ‘Teeps,’ agreed Mickey.

  ‘You can speak English, then,’ said Caution.

  ‘Little bit,’ admitted the interpreter.

  Caution clapped him on the shoulder. ‘ “Leetle beet?” ’ he said. ‘Well, how about you just beet up on the reetard, asshole?’

  ‘He’s done nothing,’ said Mickey.

  ‘Is that right?’ asked Caution.

  ‘Everybody knows him,’ said Mickey. ‘He’s the baker boy.’

  Bucky curled up with his eyes closed, as if he believed Caution couldn’t see him.

  He’s just a baby, thought Shorty. ‘We should leave him,’ he said.

  Caution raised his nightstick and prodded Shorty in the chest. ‘You – keep – out – of – this,’ he said, emphasising each word with the truncheon.

  Bucky crouched behind Shorty’s legs.

  ‘No,’ said Shorty.

  He stood statue-still. Caution saw sculpted stone and smiled.

  ‘You’re all right, kid,’ said Caution, and slipped his nightstick back into his belt loop.

  Bucky clambered back onto his bicycle and pedalled quickly away.

  Caution did not speak to Shorty again until midday, when he told him to drive to Le Boudin.

  ‘Come on, asshole,’ he said. ‘Let’s go inside and let Moreau buy us a drink.’

  They left Mickey in the jeep.

  Tâm and Baby Marie saw Caution and glided into the kitchen. Quyn stayed behind, for Shorty. She caught him looking around for Baby Marie, and smiled as if she really thought he was hoping to find her.

  Shorty and Caution took seats at the bar, and Shorty asked Quyn for ‘biscuit’.

  Caution bought drinks and told Shorty he had enjoyed his time in Australia, although he had only seen Darlinghurst Road and Orwell Street. It reminded him, in many ways, of Vung Tau. He asked if Shorty knew Jake Mendoza, the King of the Cross. Mendoza had Jew power, he said. He was a controller.

  ‘I liked the guy,’ said Caution. ‘We whipped a prostitute together.’

  Quyn shuddered.

  Caution broke fresh bread, and ate soft white cheese and smoky oysters, barbecued fish and sliced potatoes. He drank a bottle of cabernet franc, always pouring two cups and finishing them both. Then he ordered two glasses of Dubonnet, which Moreau kept behind the bar because the legion drank it in North Africa to mask the taste of quinine.

  ‘Were you ever in North Africa, Moreau?’ Caution asked him. ‘I hear it’s the birthplace of taking it up the ass.’

  Moreau, dusting a wine bottle, paused to feel his fingers around its neck.

  Baby Marie brought Shorty a pink macaron. He regarded his biscuit with baffled resignation.

  Caution told Shorty that Nashville wasn’t a real cop. He was just a GI in an MP’s pot. That’s why he never arrested anyone. He stumbled through the days, making out like he was everyone’s friend, but there was a darkness inside Nashville that you couldn’t see unless you knew, and Shorty was too Australian to understand.

  ‘Guys make out I’m the asshole,’ said Caution, ‘but it’s Nashville who’s the real bad guy.’

  When he’d finished his food, Caution nestled up close to Shorty, with fish scales in his bristles, and said, ‘Listen, Aussie, I know why you stepped in for that retard out there. You thought I was out of line, and maybe I was. I’m old-style police. I grew up hard.’

  TJ Caution had been born in an itsy-bitsy hole in nitty-gritty nowhere. In a town full of drunks, his pa was the town drunk. Everybody called his pa Corn Whiskey, and most thought that was his actual name. They guessed he must be part Indian, because of the flat face and name and the drinking, but the first two came about on account of the last.

  When TJ was five years old, Corn Whiskey disappeared for two months, and came back with a broken arm and an even meaner temper. He thrashed TJ’s mother with a branch torn from a tree, and kicked TJ across the room like a football. TJ’s head hit the fireplace, and it gave him headaches all through school.

  TJ loved his pa, who had tattoos of mermaids and tall ships, and a samurai sword he had taken from a Japanese officer. TJ wished there was a way he could be better behaved, so Corn Whiskey wouldn’t thrash him.

  Neither Corn Whiskey nor TJ’s ma – known as Mrs Whiskey, although she never touched a drop – thought it important that TJ should regularly attend school, because he couldn’t seem to get on with other children. When a little round new boy started class, TJ kicked him across the room like a football.

  When TJ turned twelve, he tried to stop Corn Whiskey from beating his ma, so Corn Whiskey decided to learn TJ a lesson. He tied the boy to a tree and battered him with a pole, until his face lost most of the small things that made it recognisable. Once Corn Whiskey had tired and sickened himself, he went off into town for another drink.

  TJ was a week in bed, waiting for his pa to come home, worried he had driven him away. After that, TJ looked different. His pa had changed him. Now he was ugly. The girls didn’t talk to him.

  His ma had bathed him and taught him and sang to him, made his clothes, set his bones and prayed for him. The only thing his ma loved more than TJ was God.

  ‘I swear,’ said Corn Whiskey, ‘my wife adores the Lord like a nigger.’

  So TJ grew up knowing right from wrong. His pa was the devil and his ma was a saint. But when he saw himself in the mirror, he knew who he looked like, even more now his face had been pounded into features that were no more than bumps.

  ‘So you see,’ said Caution, ‘I was raised fighting for my own sweet life while you were out hopping around after kangaroos. So you can stand like a fucking graven image, with a face like John Wayne, until your hogs-butter skin melts in the sun, but if you ever fucking disobey me again, in front of a zipperhead, I will take this pistol’ – he laid his gun on the bar – ‘and I will shoot whichever slope you have c
hosen to humiliate me in front of. And I will kill them. Do you understand me, asshole?’

  The afternoon patrol was torpid and vague. Mickey fell asleep. Caution dozed off and jerked back. He drank his own canteen of water and Shorty’s too. After an hour, he indicated Shorty should stop at Sam Singh’s. He had seen Bucky’s bike.

  Bucky loped out of the lane that ran alongside the tailor’s shop, wiping at the damp patch at the front of his ragged pants.

  ‘Stop there, boy,’ Caution ordered Bucky.

  Sam Singh and his daughter watched from the shop window, human heads among the mannequins. The tailor was older than he appeared. He dyed his grey hair black and, since his wife had died, nobody knew. The sight of Caution wearied him. He had grown tired of cruel men. He too had been a soldier. He had followed sergeants like Caution, and seen them die.

  The girl touched her father lightly. He admired her golden-polished nails, and the henna patterns on the back of her hand. Everything he did now, he did for her.

  Sam Singh led his daughter away from the glass. ‘That man will bring the war to Vung Tau,’ he said.

  Bucky glanced up, and saw Sam Singh turn away.

  ‘What were you doing in the alley?’ Caution asked Bucky.

  The boy shook his head.

  ‘The backstreet’s your drop-off point,’ Caution told him. ‘You leave the money under a pile of shit.’

  The sergeant grabbed Bucky and pulled him back into the passageway. Shorty followed, with Mickey behind. Pats of human droppings lay in an uneven row along the wall of Sam Singh’s shop. Caution put his hand around Bucky’s neck, and pushed his head towards the ground.

  ‘Which one’s yours, asshole?’ he shouted.

  Bucky struggled to stand. Caution tripped him and pressed him down.

  ‘Is toilet,’ said Mickey. ‘Everyone uses the Indian’s shop.’

  Caution held Bucky with one hand on the back of his neck, an arm’s length above a fresh pile of muck, and took his club from his belt with the other hand. He thwacked Bucky across the back, driving his face into the shit.

  Shorty jumped to grab the nightstick, but it was a part of Caution, the third section of his arm. He knew its range and power and weight. He could flick it, stab it, twist it. He could whip it, jab it, hook it. He drilled with it in the mornings, bashing the stuffing out of a pillowcase on a rope. He even had a name for it, a fucking name. He pulled the weapon out of Shorty’s reach.

  ‘Mickey,’ said Caution, ‘this is your job.’

  Mickey backed away.

  ‘Either Bucky eats shit or you do, asshole,’ said Caution.

  Mickey, who had been brought up in Vung Tau and knew all its secrets, who had seen his parents and their parents before them humiliated by foreign soldiers and survive, who had been forced many times to erase himself in order to exist, made the sign of the cross. Then he came slowly to his knees.

  Shorty looked on, astonished, as Mickey crawled towards the muck.

  ‘No!’ yelled Caution, and he hit Mickey with his nightstick.

  Mickey fell flat, a few inches short of the shit.

  ‘If you don’t stand up,’ said Caution, ‘I will beat you to fucking death.’

  Mickey came to his feet, mumbling a prayer.

  ‘Now,’ said Caution, ‘earn your pay and punish the retard.’

  Mickey, shaking, took his own nightstick in hand. He looked at Bucky cowering, and Caution crowing, and struggled to come to a decision.

  ‘Do it!’ commanded Caution.

  Mickey lifted his club. Bucky, eyes open now, stared up at him.

  A silver-green lizard darted between the two men, and scuttled into a hole in the wall. It left its tail poking through the crack, as if pointing to an escape.

  Mickey had tears in his eyes. ‘No,’ he said, ‘no.’

  ‘Jesus Christ,’ said Caution. ‘Just – fucking – do – it!’ He kicked Mickey in the thigh.

  Mickey turned to Caution, teeth bared, and realised all his choices had collapsed into one. He spun around and struck Bucky with his club with such force that it bounced back and almost hit Mickey. But it didn’t seem to hurt Bucky. The baker’s boy reached out, almost smiling, and seized the club, twisting it from Mickey’s hands.

  ‘Okay, ally in trouble,’ said Caution to Shorty. ‘We can act.’

  You couldn’t win against Caution with a nightstick. The day it happened, Caution would hang up his pot and get out of the army, go back to Tennessee and open a hunting lodge in the hills. But Bucky had been attacked before. He knew how to use the poor man’s weapons, branches and sticks, rakes and brooms. Once he had Mickey’s club, he grew taller, stronger, smarter. He was snarling. It looked to Shorty like, for the first time, Bucky fully understood what was going on around him. Bucky dropped his weight, came down to Mickey’s waist, and whacked him across the knees. Then he came up to meet Caution’s descending nightstick, blocked it with his own, forced it down as if he were chopping bamboo, and thrashed Caution on the cheek.

  He kicked Caution in the shin, with bare feet as hard as house bricks, then came up under his chin. Caution wrapped his right arm around the boy, to hold him close while he dug short punches into his ribs.

  ‘Get him, Aussie!’ Caution cried.

  Shorty slid to the side, found his angle, prepared to strike a blow, but froze. Bucky kicked Caution away and hit him again, landing his club on the sergeant’s fingers, shaking his grip on his nightstick. Mickey clambered to his feet and charged at Bucky, who simply raised a leg and flicked him away. Bucky made himself small again, winding up for another attack on Caution. Shorty couldn’t move, trapped between what he thought was right and what he knew was necessary. If he did nothing, he might as well never have come to Vietnam, because a soldier who didn’t obey orders was a mutineer, and if every man second-guessed his officers, the army that had saved Europe from the Nazis and Australia from the Japanese would crumble and leave Vietnam to the Viet Cong. Sometimes you had to do wrong to do right. That was what war was all about.

  ‘Help me, you fucking street-lamp!’ shouted Caution.

  Shorty tried to imagine what Nashville would have done.

  ‘Now!’ yelled Caution.

  But Shorty wasn’t Nashville.

  Caution and Mickey tried to twist and prise the club from Bucky, but Bucky held on until a finger cracked, a knuckle popped, then Shorty hit Bucky with his nightstick, just once, and only to distract him, but that made Shorty a part of it. Bucky dropped his weapon. Mickey reclaimed his club. Caution whipped Bucky below the eye with his unbeaten nightstick, crushing a cheekbone, then stepped aside and waved Mickey back in.

  ‘Okay,’ said Caution to Shorty. ‘Let’s leave it to the locals.’

  FOURTEEN

  Beneath the awning of Sam Singh the tailor’s, a woman bound the feet of a hen. It accepted without protest the inversion of its world. The chicken hawker heard cries from the alley, and shouted over them with the price of her birds.

  Now Bucky was unarmed, Mickey struck him on the crown, aiming for the join that he believed held together the skull. He hoped to split Bucky’s head into two halves, but Bucky protected himself with closed arms, so Mickey thwacked him on the collarbone, which cracked.

  Mickey kicked him hard in the stomach, and Bucky’s mouth gave a sound like a punctured kiss. Mickey broke Bucky’s nose and knocked out a tooth. It came away from his gums with a snap.

  ‘He’s going to kill him,’ said Shorty.

  It was a statement, a piece of reporting.

  ‘Enough!’ Caution shouted.

  Mickey turned to Caution and laughed, because of course it wasn’t enough. You can’t leave a door half-closed, a horse half-lame. You can’t half-take a life without giving up your own. Surely they could see that.

  Even as Shorty tried to pull him off, Mickey was still thrashing Bucky, but Shorty wrestled him and locked him, dragging him away.

  Caution dog-whispered Mickey, pillow-talked him. ‘Okay,’ he breathed. ‘
Good job.’ He moved his face close to the panting Vietnamese MP.

  ‘That showed the asshole,’ said Caution. His lips brushed Mickey’s cheek.

  Shorty released his grip on Mickey, who leaped at Bucky again. It took both Shorty and Caution to wrestle away the club and force Mickey to sit against the wall.

  Bucky’s head rested in a crown of blood. Shorty thought he had died, but the boy let out a moan. When Mickey heard Bucky whimper, he struggled to get at him again. He kicked Shorty in the shins and tried to push Caution aside.

  ‘Easy, boy, easy,’ said Caution.

  Bucky, soaked in his own fluids, strained to stand.

  Mickey reached for his pistol. Caution batted away his hand. Mickey tried again, and Caution put his big, heavy body in front of Mickey, crowding him back to the wall.

  When Caution moved off, Bucky had gone.

  Caution dropped Mickey at the police station, and the two white men were left alone in the jeep. Shorty would have liked to get out too. He wanted to go back to Bendigo. He needed to talk to his dad.

  ‘You did well, partner,’ said Caution, and shook his hand.

  Shorty gave him no grip.

  ‘Did you see what happened there?’ asked Caution. ‘I got a fucking mouse to act like a man. The grunts say you can’t make the slopes fight, but I just proved you can.’

  Shorty had nothing to say to Caution.

  ‘You’ve got to go in and show them what to do,’ said Caution, ‘and if they get in shit, you’ve got to help them out.’

  Shorty looked at his hands. They felt stained.

  ‘I know what you’re thinking, son,’ said Caution. ‘The kid might not even have been VC, right? Well, maybe he ain’t, but I’d say I had a damn sight more idea about that than you.’

  Shorty looked away.

  ‘You should feel good about today’s work,’ said Caution. ‘I know I do.’

  Shorty felt sick.

  ‘Life is cheap here,’ said Caution. ‘Bucky’s got no kin. He lives off the charity of whores. He’s like the zipperhead I shot in the bar. No one gives a damn.’