by Mark Dapin
‘What’re you trying to tell me, partner?’ asked Nashville.
Shorty swallowed. ‘They’re going to charge you for it,’ he said, ‘once they find out who he was.’
Shorty drew a convoy-escort detail to the Australian Task Force HQ at Nui Dat, a day trip to nowhere. The Vung Tau MPs rode shotgun with supply trucks to a bridge halfway down the highway, where the Nui Dat MPs took over. The guys from Vung Tau then escorted empty vehicles from the Dat back to ALSG.
The night before the convoy, he lay on his bunk worrying about the coming weekend with Betty. He didn’t want to disappoint his fiancée, but he felt younger than his years when it came to women, younger than his job as a policeman and a soldier, younger than the boys he’d left behind in Bendigo, Victoria, working in hardware shops and wool stores, who walked home girls from milk bars and dances, and led them into fields like cows and dogs.
Shorty knew the diggers went into town to learn about women from the bar girls. He wondered if he would be the only Australian in Vietnam not to sleep with a Vietnamese woman. If he was, that was okay, because he was pretty much the only Australian in Vietnam with an Australian girlfriend in Vietnam, but he wasn’t sleeping with her either. He’d thought that was because he was respectful, but now he knew he was frightened. What if he couldn’t do it?
Then there was Baby Marie. Maybe it was just because he saw her more often, but he felt he imagined her more than he thought about Betty. Betty was beautiful to Shorty but Baby Marie, he knew, was lovely to every man. And she could teach him. If there was a secret, she could show him. Shorty couldn’t admit to himself he wanted her. He knew it wasn’t right, especially with Nashville in jail. But maybe he could get some information from her about the night of the murder. Shorty could think of a dozen reasons to go to Le Boudin and see Baby Marie, and none of them were the kind of excuses other men might have. He wasn’t going to do anything; he was only going to talk to her. About the two things, the two problems that he had.
Shorty walked over to the MPs’ bar and bought a VB. Jack Adams sat alone at a table, writing a letter home to Toowoomba, Queensland. He was going into town later. Did Shorty want to come?
It wasn’t Shorty’s fault. It wasn’t even his suggestion.
They drank a couple of beers. Adams wanted to know all about Nashville, but Shorty wouldn’t gossip, especially as he felt he’d already betrayed his partner by pushing his finger into the small holes in his story and teasing them into wider wounds.
Adams said it didn’t matter what happened, every event in Vung Tau meant the same thing.
‘The nogs don’t want us here,’ he said. ‘Even the nogs who hate the Commies hate themselves more, because they need us and it makes them feel weak. It doesn’t matter what the Yanks do, or how long they stay, if the good nogs can’t hold the country on their own. And they can’t, because it’s not a real country. It’s just a part of Bad Noggyland that we’ve made into a sort of national park for good nogs, but as soon as the park rangers go home, the bad nogs’ll break down the fences and eat all the animals.
‘Also,’ said Adams, ‘the good nogs’re only good compared with bad nogs. The best nogs are the sheilas. They’re tough and hardworking, like Queensland farm girls, but with more talent for rooting. The best thing we could do for this country is pull out now and leave it to the nogs to fight it out among themselves, and each of us take one sheila back with us to America or Oz. Then you’d have the best nogs living in the best countries, and the bad nogs would be left without a root.’
Adams laughed but Shorty couldn’t tell if he was joking or just trying to get him ready, to put the thought of rooting noggies into Shorty’s mind. Or maybe Adams could see the idea was already there. People always seemed to be able to read Shorty. He’d never been able to lie, except to himself.
Adams said he was tired of looking at blokes in the MPs’ bar, and it was time to go somewhere with better scenery. As he and Shorty walked out the door, the barman watched the cop who thought about politics leave with the drainpipe boy who didn’t go with whores, and muttered, ‘Pair of poofs.’
They picked up a Lambretta waiting outside the gates of ALSG. The pig-eyed driver asked for twice the regular fare, but Adams talked him down, in bar-girl Vietnamese.
At Le Boudin, Shorty and Adams chose the same table as Boston and Skokie had, although they didn’t know it. Quyn joined them immediately. She dropped onto Shorty’s knee, as if she belonged there.
Baby Marie arrived quickly, angrily, and took a seat between Adams and Shorty.
Quyn leaned across and whispered to Adams. ‘I fuck you both Aussies, same time,’ she said. ‘Twenty dollars.’
Adams laughed.
‘Okay, half price for cherry boy,’ said Quyn.
Adams didn’t seem surprised Shorty would qualify for the discount. ‘Cherry boys no last long,’ he said, as if he were brain-damaged. ‘Should be very cheap.’
Adams waved at Baby Marie. ‘How about her?’ he asked.
‘She fifteen dollars one man,’ said Quyn.
‘How much for cherry boy only?’ asked Adams.
‘He too tall,’ said Quyn, as if Baby Marie priced by height.
Shorty couldn’t understand why Adams was negotiating for him, or how everyone knew he was a cherry boy.
‘Cherry boy mine,’ said Quyn. She found him with her hand, as if she were Betty in the dark.
‘Ten dollars,’ said Adams, ‘for me and cherry boy.’
Shorty was hard under Quyn’s hand.
‘Okay, okay,’ said Quyn. ‘Special rate for Uc da loi.’
Shorty leaned away from Quyn and eased her off his lap. ‘No,’ he said.
He tramped to the toilet, and teased cigarette butts with a stream of piss.
When he came out, Baby Marie and Quyn had both moved, like pieces on a board. Quyn had taken Adams, won him. She sat facing him with her legs around his knees. Shorty wondered if Adams would kiss her. He knew you didn’t have to kiss them, but guessed you would want to.
Baby Marie had moved sideways, the rook. Shorty, the knight, came to the bar and castled her, so his body stood between her and the coil of Adams and Quyn.
‘You leave me alone,’ said Baby Marie. ‘I not for sale.’ Her lip quavered.
She was soft and gorgeous and small and he wanted to take her, protect her, be a policeman and soldier for her. He loved her eyelids, the tiny crease, the darkness in her pupils, the contrast of her whites, the thin plucked line of her brows, the feathered lashes – all these he had noticed but not known.
He wanted to see her ink-black hair spread out on a milk-white pillow: white square and black square, chess and chequers, eyeball and pupil, man and woman, Aussie and nog.
Baby Marie was lost and Shorty could see it, knew it, felt it like Tommy Callaghan had felt it. He reached for her.
‘You fuck off,’ she said.
Quyn had to get up to fetch more beer.
Adams talked to Shorty out of the corner of his mouth. ‘I know you, mate,’ he said. ‘You’re the bloke who couldn’t get a root in a brothel.’
Baby Marie liked Shorty. She was most comfortable with the quiet ones, the nervous ones, although she knew they weren’t always the gentle ones, and all men changed when they were alone. She would make love to the cherry boy, but not while Adams was paying for Quyn. The old whore would ruin it for Baby Marie if she behaved as if both of them could be bought like drinks. And Quyn knew that. She’d tried the same thing with Tommy Callaghan. Baby Marie thought Quyn hated her because she was young, and Baby Marie hated Quyn because she was old. Each lived as a reminder to the other.
Shorty didn’t want it to happen this way either, and he asked himself what he was doing, flirting with girls while Nashville was mouldering and decaying in jail. Shorty couldn’t waste the night in the bar, or the next day on the convoy. He should be asking questions, getting answers.
Shorty pulled out ten dollars. ‘I’ll tell you what, mate,’ he said to Adam
s, ‘your night’s on me.’
Timothy James Caution returned to his itsy-bitsy hole in nitty-gritty nowhere in a casket draped in the stars and stripes, as his ma had always known he would. The embalmers at Tan Son Nhut had pumped his veins full of glue. To each side of his head, they’d attached a rubber ear, and you couldn’t tell they weren’t the ears he was born with because they’d matched the skin tones with foundation. Even the funeral director didn’t know.
Caution’s ma sat by the bloodless body of her son for one full day, and she counted 112 people come to peer at him. Nowhere was as big or as small as you wanted it to be, and a lot of folk from nearby parts felt they had a stake in this particular death, because they knew Caution or his family, or they had kin in Vietnam. There was a whole heap of boys from nowhere in Vietnam, wandering around and getting shot.
Caution’s daddy turned up at the undertaker’s too, to curse and sob. All the men at the PMO had heard about Corn Whiskey, and how he used to beat his son when the boy was small, but Caution never told the rest of the story about how, when Corn Whiskey left, TJ had to carry for his ma and chop wood and clean gutters and mend fences and fix walls and scramble down the well. He grew big like an athlete without ever playing a game of sport. He swaggered around nowhere, looking for boys to change, by breaking their noses or blacking their eyes or smashing their fingernails with bricks.
He found a way to damage girls too. He could do something that stopped them from smiling. It enthralled him. He was altering their histories, the courses of their lives.
TJ moved into a barn. It was a good place to take girls, because no one could hear them. The cops didn’t care much what girls got up to on dates, which is what they called it when TJ dragged cheerleaders into the barn. They got off on hearing the stories was all. It made them wish they were young again.
And Mrs Whiskey would come out in her curlers and lie when the cops came calling like Corn lied to her. She’d say TJ had been at home all night, playing cards with his ma. She’d tell them he’d taken seventy-five cents off her. She’d tell them he had two aces and a queen. She’d say he was a good boy, and she didn’t know why folks spread stories about him, but she supposed it was to do with Corn, who had tangled with every family in town at some point in his drinking.
But one day TJ did it to a cop’s daughter. He kept saying, ‘I’m sorry, I didn’t know.’ But what they did to him gave him a tremble that never left his fingers, only passed for a while like a memory he could suppress but never forget.
TJ was run out of town. He had nowhere to go but the military, and they sorted him out in Fort Bragg, North Carolina. They made him stand up straight and march in line and wait his turn and do his best and clean his shoes and play his part. And when they’d done with the greasy-haired, snaggle-toothed, bandy-legged, redneckedcornbreaddumbshit, and changed him into a soldier, they saw how well he had absorbed the rules so they put him in military police and sent him to Vietnam.
Sergeant Caution had not thought of himself as Corn Whiskey’s son. That boy had gone. All that was left was the shakes in his fingers that made him cut himself around blades, but calmed with concentration when he focused on a gun. He changed his surname from his pa’s to his ma’s, to show he was a changed man, but also because there were a whole lot of folks who had good reason to hate TJ, and there seemed more soldiers in the army from Tennessee than any other state in the union.
TJ’s ma felt proud that so many had turned up to pay their respects. But at the end of the day, when the last of the mourners had left, she had to wipe spit off the cold, still face of her boy.
But it could’ve been a tear, she told herself. It could be someone wept into his eye.
TWENTY-ONE
Adams woke up in the bunk next to Shorty’s, and stared at the calendar on his wall. He only had sixty days to go. Shorty stirred in his bed when Adams got up for a piss, and reminded Adams he’d agreed to take the convoy detail.
‘I remember,’ said Adams, although he didn’t.
Both Adams and Shorty were speaking with their eyes closed. Adams groped around for a clear recollection of the night before. He knew he had talked about trading shifts, but couldn’t think why he’d agreed.
‘You said a man has to look after his partner,’ said Shorty.
Adams lurched out of bed, only partially convinced. He found it hard to dress. His shirt was complicated and uncooperative, the legs of his pants fought off his feet.
‘You said I should be trying to help Nashville,’ said Shorty.
Shorty drank from the bottle of water his father had advised him to always keep by his bedside in the tropics.
Then Adams realised his dream had not been a dream. ‘Did you pay for my root?’ he asked Shorty.
‘That was the deal,’ said Shorty.
He smiled and shook his head. Adams opened the hut door and cringed from the sunlight. ‘Sweet dreams, cherry boy,’ he whispered.
Shorty rolled over.
Sweating and mumbling, Adams pulled an M60 from the armoury and met the driver of the jeep, a reinforcement from Fremantle, Western Australia. Adams wished he hadn’t said he’d do the convoy escort. He could have bought the woman himself and spent the morning sleeping. The Reo from Freo wanted to talk. He asked Adams what it was really like in Vung Tau, and Adams told him to look around. It was fine if you liked slums and slopes, and neither of them was as bad as you might think if you’d only just got in from Fremantle via Holsworthy.
The Reo from Freo said he couldn’t wait to get back home, where his round-eye woman was waiting for him in black lacy lingerie. He pronounced it ‘lingery’. But he wanted to know about the girls in Vung Tau – if there were any you didn’t have to pay.
‘You don’t always pay,’ said Adams, ‘but you get nothing for nothing.’
The convoy lurched off, a herd of snorting, farting trucks. The machine gun made Adams a real soldier, like his dad. He thought a lot about his father’s war, here in Vietnam. When he came back home, he imagined, man and boy would be closer. They’d march together on Anzac Day, wearing their medals, and drink side by side in the RSL.
Adams pointed his gun idly at a cyclo driver, who didn’t bother to move out of the way.
We’re already ghosts, thought Adams. They don’t even see us.
He had an idea he’d like to learn to scuba dive when he got out of the army. He loved the ocean. He probably should’ve joined the navy.
The jeep slowed as the convoy got stuck behind a school bus. Catholic kids in sailor suits waved to the soldiers from the back window. A boy stuck out his tongue like a dragon. Adams had nieces and nephews, and he missed playing with children.
Adams thought about hairless bodies and the night before. He wondered if his dad had found a woman like that, in a brothel in Egypt or a Libyan bar. He watched the highway, alert but elsewhere, imagining red lips and brown thighs.
The bus pulled off to the side of the road to let the convoy pass. The Reo from Freo swung wide of its flank, into the centre of the highway. There were no birds in the sky. There was no sound on the road.
Betty and Dr Clarke had more in common than people might think. For example, they’d both had a childhood pet called Bluey, although Dr Clarke’s was a kelpie and Betty’s a cockatiel – and Betty’s was actually spelled Blewy. Also, they were each the second-best tennis player in their families.
They had both chosen the medical profession and joined the army, which were quite different decisions from people they had known. Most emergency doctors and nurses wanted to work in big, clean, new hospitals in the middle of cities, and save the lives of blameless victims of car accidents and house fires. Betty and Dr Clarke looked after men who had put themselves in harm’s way. They tended to the casualties of duty.
Betty and Dr Clarke agreed about politics too. They both felt it should be left to the government.
They each enjoyed the sound of the other’s voice: Dr Clarke’s deep and cracked, Betty’s young and hopeful. They
complemented each other, thought Betty. One of the patients even said, ‘You two make a lovely couple.’ He should’ve said, ‘You two make a lovely couple, ma’am.’
The dustoff chopper drubbed on Betty’s thoughts.
Dr Clarke breathed deeply when the siren sounded, and he grasped himself by the hand. He closed his eyes for a moment, and tried to clear his mind.
Betty ran out with the others, but they didn’t need her. There were only three patients in the chopper. As usual, one of them looked fine. There was always a man who seemed to have come along for the ride. The other two wore blood like masks, from cuts the chopper medic couldn’t close.
Stitches, thought Betty, they probably just need stitches.
One of them had lost a lip.
Never mind, she thought, we can sew it back on.
She even said it out loud. ‘Never mind,’ she said, to a man without a lip.
He pressed something soggy into her hand. At first, she thought it was the tip of his penis, but it was the soft sadness of his lip.
The intact man with the clean face looked as though he were in shock. He didn’t move his arms. It was as if they were sewn to his sides, the way body parts could be reattached, provided you had the right surgeon and got to them fast enough, and Betty loved Dr Clarke’s hands. Oh, she loved his hands and would have liked to feel them on her knee, but the intact man wouldn’t even tell her his name and she wondered if the bomb had deafened him because they did that sometimes, if you were close to the blast, but he must have been the furthest from the blast because he was unhurt while his mates were bleeding like severed pipes leaking, and now they were moaning too.
The padre came in, to see if he could help. He wore his army greens and his dog collar. The intact man saw him and screamed.
‘You fucking vulture!’ he yelled. ‘Go to hell!’
The padre modelled his kindly smile, his bedside death’s head, and lightly touched the patient’s arm. The intact man screamed, and spat blood, like a demon.
Anderson the orderly wheeled the intact man towards Dr Clarke, knocking the bloodied soldiers aside. Betty got to him first. She cut open his uniform. His chest was undamaged. She tried to coax him out of his shirt and, when it came off, his forearms fell off too. And Betty realised the intact man was only eighty per cent of himself, and she looked at his mangled limbs and knew they would have to bury or burn them, and even the padre turned away from the work of man, who was made in God’s image, with two arms like God himself.