R&R

by Mark Dapin

  That was when Shorty knew he’d bought Adams Baby Marie, not Quyn, with his grubby, folded ten-dollar bill.

  The black cop was known as Blacksmith, not because he shod horses but because he had been through basic military training with a white man also named Smith. Blacksmith didn’t lock Nashville in the back of the truck. He let him sit next to Seamus in the cab, where both men spoke to Nashville like a buddy.

  ‘I don’t recognise your badge,’ said Nashville to Blacksmith.

  ‘We’re under a different command,’ said Blacksmith.

  At Long Binh, they drove Nashville directly to the stockade, which was closed off from the rest of the camp by high and tight cyclone fencing and razor snakes of concertina wire. The guard at the gate asked them to unload their pistols and dry fire into a bucket, then he took their weapons.

  Unarmed, Seamus and Blacksmith uncuffed Nashville, then followed him through processing. Seamus stood over the clerk as he filed Nashville’s paperwork, and both men waited while the smiling rhino Hillier ordered him to strip.

  ‘You guys come here to look up his ass?’ asked Hillier.

  ‘Perk of the job,’ said Blacksmith, although Hillier had addressed the white man.

  Nashville took off his clothes, showing the bruises left by Caution’s boots.

  He bent down, lifted his balls, and moved them to either side. Hillier’s gloved fingers probed his armpits. The guard held down his tongue with a spatula as he looked into his mouth. He parted Nashville’s hair, as if he might be wearing something stapled to his scalp, and pulled back his ears. He was thorough but not rough.

  ‘Prisoner’s clean,’ said Hillier to Doom.

  ‘I ain’t clean,’ said Nashville. ‘I got a hundred dollars and a box of matches shoved halfway up my ass.’

  ‘You’re a sick motherfucker,’ said Hillier.

  Hillier waited for Nashville’s escort to leave. They did not move.

  ‘How come I ain’t never seen you guys before?’ Hillier asked Seamus. ‘Why didn’t they send him up with his buddies from the PMO?’

  ‘Couldn’t be trusted,’ said Blacksmith. ‘Had to be somebody from outside.’

  ‘I don’t get it,’ said Hillier. ‘You ain’t from here and you ain’t from there. Neither asshole nor cunt.’

  ‘That’s right,’ said Blacksmith, ‘we’re the taint squad.’

  ‘Then you must be a black taint,’ said Doom.

  A barber planed Nashville’s head, gave him a boot-camp cut, as short at the top as it was at the sides. Nashville blinked as bristles rained into his eyes, and he spat out hair from the corner of his mouth. An orderly gave Nashville a bar of soap.

  Nashville was assigned to Compound Three, with the other pre-trial cases. Hillier and Doom marched him off towards a line of tents. Seamus and Blacksmith followed behind, as if guarding the guards.

  The compound was without shade, overlooked by gun towers. Hillier put Nashville in a tent with five black GIs and two whites. There was no floor or furniture, only wooden boxes to sleep in.

  Nashville thought he saw the biggest negro make a sign to Blacksmith. Hillier thought he saw it too.

  ‘You two know each other?’ asked Hillier.

  ‘That ain’t easy to say,’ said Blacksmith. ‘We all look the same.’

  Nashville peered into the empty box that was to be his bed.

  ‘I don’t know what you’ve been told,’ said Hillier to Nashville, ‘but you ain’t got nothing to fear from us. Tomorrow, you’ll get given work, and if you keep your head down and do your job, you’ll be treated fairly. Ain’t that right, boys?’

  None of the prisoners answered.

  ‘That’s right,’ said Doom.

  ‘If you make trouble,’ said Hillier to Nashville, ‘you’ll get trouble, but that’s just the way of the world. There ain’t nothing special about Long Binh. If you’ve got any complaints about the way you’re treated, just come to me or Doom and we’ll see you get a hearing.’

  Nashville was satisfied he could whup every man in the tent. The biggest negro had muscle but no grace.

  Seamus and Blacksmith walked the length and width of the tent. Blacksmith put a hand in Nashville’s box and tapped the side.

  ‘We’re finished with the prisoner now,’ said Hillier to Seamus. ‘You guys want to come for a beer? Tell us a bit about yourselves?’

  ‘We’ve got to get back,’ said Blacksmith.

  ‘Where to?’ asked Doom.

  ‘Base,’ said Blacksmith.

  ‘You two are the most mysterious pair of taints I ever met,’ said Hillier. ‘I think the CO’d be interested to meet you.’

  One of the white prisoners started driving push-ups on the floor.

  ‘Afraid we have to leave now,’ said Blacksmith. ‘Got to be home before dark.’

  ‘Base must be a way away,’ said Doom.

  A black prisoner played with himself in his pants.

  ‘We’ve got things to do along the road,’ said Seamus.

  ‘I don’t know if I could keep it up,’ said Hillier, ‘being as mysterious as you guys. But then, I ain’t no taint.’

  All the MPs left the tent. Nashville shook hands with the big negro.

  ‘Wagner,’ said the black man. His handshake felt like a threat.

  Nashville’s bed reminded him of Nguyễn Van Tran’s casket.

  ‘It’s to guard you from scorpions,’ said Wagner, ‘but scorpions ain’t much of an issue in the stockade. The problem here is guys hanging themselves from white sheets.’

  ‘There a lot of suicides?’ asked Nashville.

  ‘Look around you,’ said Wagner. ‘See any white sheets?’

  At eight p.m., Nashville was sitting on the edge of his box, flipping coins with Wagner, when the chanting began.

  ‘Pig! Pig! Pig!’

  It rose from the tents around them, a high, angry song, deepened by the bass of open palms drumming timber boxes.

  Wagner pulled a drowsy fly out of the air.

  ‘Kill the pig! Kill the pig!’

  Nashville mouthed the words to himself.

  ‘We ain’t never had a military police in here before,’ said Wagner. ‘You must be one sick motherfucker.’

  The chant grew louder, as if the voices were drawing closer, but it was just that more men had joined in the call.

  Six white guards came into the tent. They all had the same raisin eyes and doughfaces, too fat to be fit.

  ‘Prisoner Grant,’ said Sergeant Doughface, ‘you’ve got to move.’

  Nashville didn’t.

  ‘You’re being transferred to maximum security for your own protection.’

  ‘I don’t need no protection,’ said Nashville.

  ‘If you stay here, where they can get you, you’ll start a riot,’ said Sergeant Doughface.

  ‘I won’t start nothing,’ said Nashville.

  ‘Funny thing,’ said Sergeant Doughface. ‘Seems like you’ve got buddies in Saigon looking out for you. And they’re mighty vexed about the hostility you might face from your kith and kin here, after you butchered a Southern boy and cut off his ears. So they try to push us simple men around and tell us they know best, and order us to lock you up with the niggers and – how about this? – the shitskins want you dead too. On account of the fact you’re one of us.

  ‘Ordinarily, we wouldn’t be able to move you without permission, but in this case – with your life in danger and all – we ain’t got no other choice. Let’s go, prisoner.’

  Nashville figured he could go or he could not go. It was the same feeling he’d felt when he’d followed Caution up the hill. No matter how it began, the end was going to be the same. He looked at Sergeant Doughface and felt a brief, cold sympathy.

  Is it going to be you?

  Executioner or executed, it was all the same.

  The doughfaces appeared to be men, but Nashville saw meat. He frightened himself, but he laughed.

  Sergeant Doughface thought he heard defiance, but Nashville of
fered him the opposite. He bowed his head.

  Like Jesus, thought Nashville, being led to the cross.

  The doughfaces – Roman soldiers – formed an escort around him, and marched Nashville out. He carried his bar of soap, a poor crucifix. The Stations of his Cross were dour and unremarkable.

  ‘We’re going to Silver City,’ said Sergeant Doughface.

  That was the Sentence.

  Nashville thought of a ghost town in Idaho, the miners all gone, a screaming Indian baby left behind in a shaft.

  The doughfaces cuffed him, so they could prod him and push him around. Even after sundown it was as hot as Golgotha, and Nashville was hungry, excited and nervous. It came out of him as sweat, which dripped from his shaved head and into his eyes. Nashville tripped first in the compound, but quickly found his feet. A guard wiped his face with a rag, and Nashville fell a second time.

  The doughfaces marched him through the compound to a segregated area, lit by beams from lights on poles. They brought him to a row of shipping containers with barred doors, corrugated boxes lined up like cargo unloaded from a wharf.

  They think I’m ballast, thought Nashville.

  He stumbled a third time.

  ‘Silver City,’ said Sergeant Doughface, opening the door to the Conex. ‘They can’t get you in here. You sleep well, now.’

  He freed the prisoner from the cuffs.

  There was a floor in the Conex, so Nashville didn’t need a box to sleep in. He was alone, without witnesses, freight in a derailed car. The roof of the container was six feet two inches off the ground, about the same height as Nashville. The boxing books said Jack Dempsey used to train in a five-foot cage, shadow-boxing from a crouch to build power in his legs. Nashville dropped low and threw sharp punches in the air. He danced around the Conex in the dark, mapping out the ring. He found the corners and leaned into the walls as if they were ropes. After a couple of rounds, Nashville’s knees began to shake, not through the effort of the exercise but out of fear of the night.

  It was two a.m. when Nashville heard them come for him, eight pairs of marching feet.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  Betty met Shorty as he came in off his patrol. The whites of her eyes had run pink, a dye from her blood, and she didn’t look like anyone he knew. She said they had to talk, so he let her take him to the wire, where they could stand together and look out to sea. She asked how he was. He told her he was fine, but that Nashville was still in trouble and he would have to go and help him.

  ‘I’m so sorry about what happened,’ said Betty. ‘I never meant to hurt you.’

  Shorty knew that. ‘We were never right for each other,’ he said.

  Betty dabbed her eyes. He watched the water. She put a hand on his arm. He moved gently away.

  ‘Don’t go cold on me, Shorty,’ said Betty.

  He was impatient with this. ‘It’s just over,’ he said.

  Betty wondered how he could be so composed. ‘You’re relieved, aren’t you?’ she said. ‘You never wanted me.’

  Shorty wasn’t sure any more. ‘It didn’t seem right,’ he said.

  ‘I don’t even know what that means,’ she said.

  ‘Well, you did it with the orderly,’ said Shorty. ‘Did that seem right?’

  He noticed for the first time that Betty had very big hands.

  ‘I must’ve been mad,’ said Betty. ‘But you won’t hurt him, will you?’

  ‘No,’ said Shorty.

  ‘Some men would,’ said Betty. ‘After what he did.’ She despised Anderson.

  ‘I’m a provost,’ said Shorty.

  ‘You’re not even jealous, are you?’ asked Betty. ‘What’s happened to you, Shorty?’

  ‘Things’ve changed,’ he said.

  ‘What things?’ asked Betty.

  But she still had beautiful eyes.

  ‘It doesn’t matter,’ said Shorty.

  Betty lit a cigarette, her cosmopolitan affectation. ‘Were you seeing someone?’ she asked. ‘Was it that girl from the restaurant?’

  Shorty blushed, because he thought she meant Quyn, but Betty had only seen Tâm.

  She watched him redden.

  Shorty closed his heart and pretended to himself he was some­where else.

  ‘What if she had a disease, Shorty? Did you ever think about that?’

  No, he didn’t.

  ‘I never did it when I was with you,’ said Shorty.

  Betty froze. ‘So it’s true?’ she asked. ‘That you did it?’ She looked around for somebody to help her. She started to cry, but hid her tears behind her hands.

  ‘You were just waiting for an excuse,’ she said.

  ‘I wasn’t . . .’

  She wiped her eyes with a handkerchief. ‘How long did you wait?’ she asked.

  Shorty didn’t reply.

  ‘It must’ve been hard for you,’ she said, ‘being around those whores every day, and watching your mates do whatever they wanted with them.’

  ‘It wasn’t like that,’ said Shorty.

  ‘How did it feel when you finally did it?’ she demanded.

  ‘How did you feel when you did it with the orderly?’ asked Shorty.

  She began to cry again. ‘I felt filthy,’ said Betty, ‘and guilty and horrible and stupid and used.’

  Shorty watched her try to calm herself. He took her in his arms and stroked her shaking shoulders.

  ‘Was it the same for you?’ she asked. ‘Did you know straight away what a terrible mistake you’d made? Did you feel like you hated her?’

  ‘No,’ said Shorty.

  The Captain didn’t have an evidence cabinet per se, as his MPs rarely gathered the type of physical evidence that might require storage. He kept the letter to Nashville locked in the office strongbox with his Montecristos, in an envelope marked ‘evidence’ to distinguish it from cigars. He allowed Shorty to look at the note, but warned him it could not leave the office, due to the rules of evidence.

  Shorty asked if he could copy it. The Captain said yes. Shorty asked if there was a photocopier in his office. The Captain said no. The Captain was force to bend the rules of evidence only moments after he had invented them, and allow Shorty to take the letter to the next-door office, where a duplicator sat beside an old, empty filing cabinet.

  The letter read: My darling, Come quickly. My body is ripe for you. It was signed with a kiss, or a cross.

  ‘It’s just like Caution’s,’ said Shorty.

  ‘That’s because the same person wrote it,’ said the Captain. ‘Nashville.’

  The Captain had the story figured out. Nashville – or an accomplice – had planted the note on Caution’s pillow, to lure Caution to Le Boudin, where he knew he would be rattled by the sight of a corpse with no ears drinking at the bar. He’d then used the stolen paint to mount a sham campaign around town, culminating in daubing Caution’s own hut, to divert suspicion towards genuine local protestors who, in this case, were both peaceable and had a perfectly good reason to be angry. Once he’d given the zipperheads a motive to come after Caution, and laid a false trail of evidence to suggest they were chasing him down, he’d set up a sham fistfight for everyone to see, and lost the contest – even though every man in the PMO knew Nashville could whup Caution’s cracker-ass all the way back to Asshole, Tennessee. Nashville thought everyone else was stupid enough to believe Caution had beat him, and so they wouldn’t think he’d go back to the hill where Nashville had first dug the old zipperhead out of the ground, and finish off Caution in private. Of course, Nashville was too clever for his own good. He had cut off Caution’s ears, to make it a revenge attack by the locals, and planted a note on his own rack to make it seem as though he’d been elsewhere at the time of the killing. It was an elaborate plan, the Captain admitted, and it might well have succeeded, if it hadn’t been for the Captain ordering a search of Nashville’s room and finding the paint, and Moreau and the bar girl being unwilling to provide Nashville with an alibi. Now the low-lifes at Le Boudin had got what they wa
nted – which was Caution out of the way – they weren’t looking for any further trouble with the military, so they’d given Nashville up. They’d hung him out to dry. It would be easy to feel sorry for Nashville. He was probably Moreau’s patsy in this whole affair. But the truth was, Nashville was both a murderer and a traitor – almost certainly led into the conspiracy by the tip of his cock – and he deserved everything that was coming to him, which was plenty.

  Shorty tried to find a sample of Nashville’s handwriting, to prove he had not written the notes, but as Nashville had never filed a single report, or even written a word in his notebook, all Shorty had was a signature, which Nashville signed J G, for ‘John Grant’, followed by a wiggly line.

  A cloudburst tapped a cramp roll on the tin roof of Le Boudin. Quyn thought Shorty had come to see her. She brought a drink for each of them, kissed him on the lips and found a perch on his long, bony knees. He eased her aside and called out to Moreau, who turned reluctantly to face him.

  ‘I need you to do something to help Nashville,’ said Shorty. ‘I know you’re a civilian, but can you write a statement to the military police, describing what you saw before the blue? Explaining how Sergeant Caution started it?’

  Moreau said, ‘I cannot.’

  Shorty waited.

  ‘As you may have noticed, Inspecteur,’ said Moreau, ‘I am missing a finger on my right hand. The digit next to it is paralysed, and I have no feeling in my thumb. Writing is a difficult task for me, and I try to avoid it when it is futile. I have already made a statement.’

  Shorty looked at the stub of Moreau’s knuckle. ‘What happened to your finger anyway?’ he asked.

  ‘I was captured,’ said Moreau, ‘by men who cut it off, in an effort to make me talk.’

  Shorty dipped his eyes, out of respect for Moreau’s torture.

  ‘And did you talk?’ asked Shorty.

  ‘Yes,’ said Moreau. ‘I did.’

  Shorty could have guessed Moreau was the type who would break under interrogation.

  ‘I told them,’ said Moreau, ‘in their own language, to go fuck their mothers.’

  He put down the cloth and the cup he was holding, took his kepi by the peak, and removed his hat. There was a small, round scar on his right temple. The flesh inside looked burned.