by Mark Dapin
‘Well, that’s sure kicked the crap out of my evening,’ said Nashville. ‘I’m heading home.’
‘You stay,’ said Tâm. ‘I make you feel better.’
He wondered if she could.
‘No,’ said Nashville, ‘I’m done with this place.’ He staggered to the door.
The old man sat in the street grinding sugar cane. He watched Nashville with indifference as the corporal dusted himself down.
‘Which way did the other American go?’ asked Nashville.
The old man pointed uphill, along the paths that led to the clearing where Nguyễn Van Tran was first buried.
Nashville jogged along the opposite path, in the direction of the beach, to douse his wounds in the ocean. He ran across grey sand and dived into the black sea, immersing his face in a slate of saltwater. The blood in his nose had dried, but the ocean found smaller grazes rubbed raw by the gravel and dust.
The night water was shallow. He had to swim half the length of a football field before he found the comfort of waves.
The water was the ending for Nashville, the bath at the finish of a game. He stepped out, cleansed. The night was warm – the nights were always warm – and Nashville let his clothes dry on his back as he ran at the hill. He felt as if he’d been in a round but not a fight, like a trainer had thrown in the towel when Nashville still had a full tank.
Nashville hadn’t enjoyed the crowd outside Le Boudin. He had never liked the audience at a boxing night, always screaming to see things they wouldn’t do themselves. But what Nashville planned now was best kept private, between two men.
He caught up with Caution in ten minutes. He found him marching up the hill, as if he were on parade on a ladder. Nashville climbed up behind him, then veered off the path and passed unnoticed on his left.
Nashville reached the clearing first and whistled. Caution looked up. Nashville imagined himself the way Caution must see him, looming like a tree, with the face of a spirit in the bark. Nashville was a folk tale. He was Caution’s unhappy ending.
Caution saw him and nodded. ‘What’s your business here?’ he asked, although instantly he knew.
Nashville smiled. ‘We’ve got no business left,’ he said. ‘You beat me fair and square.’
‘Damn right I did,’ said Caution.
‘Everybody saw that,’ said Nashville. He stood with his hands on his hips, watching the other man climb.
‘You fat fuck,’ said Caution. ‘I’m surprised you’re even standing there, the whupping I gave you.’
Nashville nodded and smiled.
‘I put you on your ass,’ said Caution.
‘You did that, TJ,’ Nashville agreed.
And Caution realised he never had.
‘I showed you who’s boss,’ said Caution, as if there were still spectators to convince.
Nashville spat. ‘Yep, you showed me and you showed Bucky,’ said Nashville.
The way he said Bucky frightened Caution.
‘He asked for it,’ said Caution. ‘You don’t know.’
Nashville sucked on his tongue. ‘No,’ he said, ‘I don’t know how a retard can ask for it.’
He loosened his shoulders again; this time they fell soft. ‘Why’d you come up here, TJ?’ asked Nashville.
Caution nodded to the shrine to the ancestors of Nguyễn Van Tran. The urn bristled with a fresh flowering of joss sticks. Around them lay cigarettes and oranges, and a full tin of Ba Moui Ba.
‘What now?’ asked Caution.
‘You know,’ said Nashville.
EIGHTEEN
In a moment, Caution realised everything that was to come, as clearly as Nashville had seen it a couple of hours before. He took out his pistol and dropped it onto the sand.
‘I don’t know what makes you think it’ll end any different,’ said Caution.
Nashville waited.
‘You think you’re special,’ said Caution, ‘but you ain’t.’
Nashville took a Marlboro and passed another to Caution. Caution squeezed it between his lips. As Nashville leaned in to give him a light, Caution threw an uppercut than came all the way from his feet, a punch that could have stopped a streetcar. Nashville bent away to make him miss, the cigarette still in his mouth, and came back low and hard.
Nashville’s punches were fast and tight, but each one carried his body weight into Caution’s organs, his offal. They came in squalls, in bustles, like outbreaks, commotions. Nashville’s were a craftsman’s hands, skilled, apprenticed surgeon’s fists. He cut Caution in his bladder, his pancreas, his intestines. He punched him in his heart, his lungs and his liver. He dug around his ribs to find his spleen. He punctured Caution’s bowel.
And through it, Nashville stayed calm and measured, interested but distant, aware enough to know when to move on and when to come back. He didn’t like to waste violence, to repeat what had already been done.
Caution moved with him, almost for him, always too slow to get out of the way.
Caution had his noises, thought Nashville, little noises – his grunts and gasps and sniffs. It made Nashville want to stroke him, to reach out and hold his hand.
Then Nashville straightened up, and punched Caution in the larynx. He whacked Caution in the cranium and put bruises on his cortex. Caution, a brawler, an attacker without defence, lost his step in the dance. He was just a murmur now, a rumour that had passed.
Nashville sliced him up, a coroner dissecting a corpse. He inflicted each injury deliberately, dictating notes for the autopsy.
You knew I’d come for you, TJ, thought Nashville. You wanted this.
It must burn like sticky fire to live in Caution’s nightmare, to be so keen to die. He couldn’t even find his place in a war, where people like him were valued, promoted.
I’m being too scientific, thought Nashville; but he was moved by the spirit of inquiry. He wanted to see if he could make Caution’s eyes disappear.
Nashville took Caution by the neck and pulled his head up close, and bared his teeth as if he were about to bite Caution’s throat. Instead, he simply let him fall.
Like salami, thought Nashville. Like a thin, curly slice of ham.
Nashville looked down at Caution stupefied in the sand, and he unzipped his fly and pissed in his hair. When Caution tried to move his head, Nashville directed the stream towards his eyes.
Caution coughed blood, and Nashville pissed in his mouth.
A breeze blew up behind the dunes.
Nashville threw back his head, tore open his shirt, and whooped at the stars.
‘I am one sick motherfucker!’ he cried.
Nashville wore a new pair of Ray-Ban Aviators to hide his grape-purple eye, but an ink-stain bruise had spread to his cheekbone, and made a band under the lens. He was asleep in the sun when Shorty arrived, his feet crossed on the dashboard of the jeep, a rag wrapped around his forehead.
Shorty wiped his brow. The days seemed to be getting hotter. Like a cattle dog before the thunder, he could feel the storm rolling closer. He shielded his eyes, looked up at the sky and saw dreary, pregnant clouds.
Shorty stepped into the jeep. Nashville raised his sunglasses and opened his one good eye. He looked, thought Shorty, like an ostrich.
Shorty was sweating Vietnam, dripping Vung Tau. His skin crawled with insects, even when there were no bugs in the air.
‘I heard you got into a blue last night,’ said Shorty. ‘You okay?’
Nashville took a drink of water.
‘I ain’t as pretty as when I was born,’ said Nashville, ‘but I’ll be uglier when I die. Specially if some motherfucker cuts off my ears.’ He spoke slowly, sounded drunk and drowsy.
‘What happened to Caution?’ asked Shorty.
‘Probably sleeping it off,’ said Nashville. ‘Who gives a fuck?’
‘What’re you going to do now?’ asked Shorty.
‘Grease him,’ said Nashville.
Shorty had an urge to put his arm around Nashville, and stroke his bruised hea
d.
‘Maybe you should let bygones be bygones,’ said Shorty.
‘Uh-huh?’ said Nashville. ‘And what exactly is a fucking bygone?’
‘I don’t know,’ Shorty admitted.
Nashville surprised Shorty by starting the jeep. He drove into town with tired determination. He stank of perspiration, alcohol and women.
‘Where were you last night, anyway?’ asked Nashville. ‘Playing cops and nurses?’
‘I had business in town,’ said Shorty.
‘Berger again,’ said Nashville. ‘What’s he gonna do? Make you into one of his acts? The Bendigo Sergeant Bilko?’
Nashville was exhausted. His arms flopped to his thighs. ‘I can’t do this no more,’ he said.
‘We don’t have to go on patrol,’ said Shorty. ‘Nothing’s going to happen. Nothing ever happens.’
‘I won’t lose a sick day to that bastard,’ said Nashville. ‘He can be the shitbird that misses his shift.’
Goddamn, I need to fucking sleep, thought Nashville, and it felt like the thought was coming from somewhere else, a voice in his ear.
Shorty suggested they go to Le Boudin, but Nashville said no. It was the first time Shorty had known Nashville miss a chance to visit the bar.
‘Don’t you want breakfast?’ asked Shorty.
‘My teeth are loose,’ said Nashville.
Shorty saw blood dried on his gums.
‘You should see a dentist,’ said Shorty.
‘And you should see fucking . . . a fucking . . .’ Nashville looked at him with angry distaste ‘. . . a fucking shortener. You’re too fucking tall. Did you know that?’
‘Yes,’ said Shorty.
‘You ought to be in the fucking Harlem Globetrotters,’ said Nashville. ‘Or Ripley’s Believe It or Not.’
‘They told me that at school,’ said Shorty.
‘Well . . .’ said Nashville, ‘fuck them, buddy. You’re all right.’
Shorty wondered if he had concussion.
The snakeman passed, walking his python on a lead.
‘I never thanked you for the night out with Betty,’ Shorty said to Nashville.
‘I hope she thanked you,’ said Nashville.
Shorty half-smiled, a trick he had learned from Nashville. He hoped it looked knowing, and not like he’d had a stroke that had paralysed one side of his face.
‘Thing is,’ said Nashville, ‘once you get pussy, you ain’t gonna be able to stop. It changes you, Shorty . . .’
Nashville looked at him again.
‘. . . And you ain’t changed,’ he said.
Shorty didn’t want to change. He’d been ordered not to change. People liked who Shorty was. He didn’t have an enemy in the world except, he supposed, the Viet Cong.
‘Jesus,’ said Nashville, ‘what does it take to make an Aussie broad put out? They do it for half a bottle of bourbon in Troy, Tennessee.’
Shorty shook his head. ‘The ones you’d want to marry don’t,’ he said. ‘Natalie Susan Mitchell wouldn’t.’
Nashville banged his fist on the dashboard. ‘I do not want to marry Natalie Susan Mitchell!’ he shouted. Then he wondered if he did.
Nashville closed his open eye. He’d hardly slept in twenty-four hours. He was starting to confuse the truth with his story, and forget what he’d done. He felt as though he was slowly swimming then calmly drowning.
Shorty turned on the radio and listened to crackles and other cars’ calls. It was like hearing the ocean through a conch shell. The word was the VC were moving through the villages. The intelligence seeped through headquarters and down to the men, stripped of source or context, useless in itself.
As Nashville slept, he grunted and whistled through the crack in his nose bone and the split in his lip.
The radio operator read a list of AWOLs. Private Jacob Abbott had gone missing again. Spec 4 Graham Brown hadn’t been seen for twelve hours. Sergeant Timothy James Caution hadn’t returned from town last night.
Shorty let Nashville sleep. Caution would still be missing when he woke up, and Nashville still wouldn’t want to find him.
Shorty and Betty were trying to establish a routine whereby each evening they took a walk around the base and found a spot to watch the sunset together and love each other with their hands. Betty was waiting for him to pick her up when the duty sergeant stopped Shorty outside his hut.
‘There’s a car for you,’ said the sergeant, ‘to take you to the Yanks.’
‘A Cadillac?’ asked Shorty.
‘No,’ said the sergeant. ‘Not a fucking Cadillac.’
Shorty went to the gate. An MP’s jeep picked him up, but Shorty didn’t recognise the driver or his partner. They took him into the PMO and handed him over to the Captain.
‘Prisoner John Grant has asked to see you,’ said the Captain.
Shorty looked blank.
‘Nashville,’ explained the Captain.
He led Shorty to the holding cells, a block of meat safes. Nashville sat in a timber cage, his bruised head in his nobbled hands. When he heard Shorty, he looked up and smiled.
Shorty sighed Nashville’s sigh. ‘What’s happened to you now?’ he asked.
Nashville rubbed his knuckles.
‘I’ve been arrested for the murder of Timothy James Caution,’ he said, ‘who’s managed to get himself fucking killed yet again.’
PART THREE
NINETEEN
A monsoon cloud burst over Back Beach, unwinding rain into the MP post and flooding the latrines. The Captain and Shorty dragged a table and two chairs into Nashville’s bare cell. The Captain locked the door, but did not leave the men alone.
Nashville told Shorty that Caution’s body had been found on the hill.
‘I can see why the Captain’s had me arrested,’ said Nashville, talking loudly to Shorty but staring at the officer. ‘If I’d heard a guy had been in a fight with his sergeant, and that same fucking sergeant turned up beaten to death, I’d point the finger at the poor motherfucker who’d been rolled in an ass-kicking he’d done everything to try to avoid. Especially if my role model as a police officer was Inspector Lestrade of Scotland Yard, described in The Adventure of the Cardboard Box as a “little sallow rat-like fellow”, who’s built his whole fucking career on the achievements of others.’
The Captain, leaning against the door, arms folded, returned Nashville’s sneer.
‘You haven’t got any achievements, Nashville,’ he said. ‘I’ve put up with a bucketload from you. I cut you ten miles of slack because you were amusing to have around, but once you start killing my men, that makes you the enemy, as sure as the V-fucking-C.’
Nashville scratched his armpits and rolled out his lower lip.
‘The fact of the fucking matter is,’ said Nashville, ‘they found Caution’s body with its ears cut off, and I’m no more an ear-cutter than I am a pussy patter, whatever the fuck that may be.’
Shorty wished he’d never mentioned pussy patting.
‘This is the second time Caution’s been presumed killed,’ said Nashville, ‘and I’d say we should be looking at all the same fucking suspects: the zipperheads, the niggers, the Aussies, the Mamasan, chickens . . . Basically, everyone in town but me – since I had the chance to fucking kill him and I let it go.’
Nashville’s hands mimed wringing a man’s neck, then relaxing the pressure at the final moment.
‘You think you’re clever,’ said the Captain, ‘and that’s your problem. I had complaints after your speech in Saigon, Nashville. Some of the officers said you were a Communist.’
‘I am not a Communist, sir,’ said Nashville. ‘There’re no Communists in the state of Tennessee, no socialists and no liberals. In fact, I don’t believe I have ever even met a fucking Democrat.’
‘You put the words of the Declaration of Independence into the mouth of Ho Chi Minh,’ said the Captain.
‘He put those words into his own mouth,’ said Nashville. ‘When the founding fathers drafted the Decla
ration of Independence, how’d they know it might be corrupted to mean the independence of Vietnam, which didn’t even exist? How would Our Lord Jesus feel if he walked the earth today and saw how men have twisted his words to justify brutal wars like the French annexation of Indochina for the Catholic Church, but unlike our police action in Vietnam?’
‘Are you comparing yourself with Jesus, Nashville?’ asked the Captain.
‘No, sir,’ said Nashville. ‘Because I will not be fucking crucified.’
Nashville thumped his knee. ‘This is “The Adventure of the Good Guy Who Got Pinned as the Bad Guy by the Stupid Guy”,’ he said. He glared again at the Captain. ‘Also known as “Lestrade’s Last Stand”.’
The Captain smiled intolerantly. ‘What about the paint?’ he said to Nashville. ‘Did you tell your partner about the paint?’
Nashville shook his head and swore.
The Captain marched out of the cell. Nashville offered him half a salute.
‘They searched my room and found spraypaint under the rack,’ said Nashville. ‘Same colour paint as has been used to paint ears on walls and cars.’
‘But who put it there?’ asked Shorty.
‘The Green Paint Fairy,’ said Nashville.
Shorty frowned. Nashville sighed.
‘I fucking put it there,’ said Nashville, ‘after I’d lent it to Simpson to spray the Captain’s car.’
‘But why?’ asked Shorty.
‘So he’d have to have it cleaned. So we could use it to take you and Betty out to dinner,’ said Nashville, wearily.
Shorty couldn’t make sense of what Nashville was saying.
‘Did you paint the other ears, then?’ he asked. ‘At Le Boudin and on your hut?’
Nashville made fists again. ‘Of course I fucking didn’t!’ he shouted. ‘What kind of fucking moron are you? Oh, that’s right – an Australian moron.’
Shorty knew he didn’t mean it.
‘So you didn’t kill Caution either?’ he asked.
‘No,’ said Nashville. ‘I did not grease TJ. Not this time, not last time, not next time. I have never killed anybody and I never will kill anybody. It goes against the word of the Lord.’ Nashville bowed his head, as if God were in the room with them.