R&R

by Mark Dapin

  ‘They shot me through the head,’ said Moreau. ‘The baker’s boy and I have very much in common. So you see, you can question me all you like, and shout across my bar, where you drink for free, in the space below my home, where you were invited for dinner with your fiancée, where you sit now with your arm around the woman I provided for you to lose your virginity. You can yell and you can pout in the seat once occupied by a harmless, friendly imbécile, who did you no injury but whom you helped a madman beat almost to death, and you still will not get the answers you would prefer to hear.’

  Shorty reddened.

  He had no answer for Moreau. He had not planned for things to turn out this way and, as soon as he had freed his partner, he hoped once again to live a life of which Harry Long could be proud – or, at least, one he might understand.

  Until then, Shorty had to figure out what was really going on in Vung Tau. He felt the Captain’s theory missed important points. Shorty was convinced everything was connected, from the shooting of the chickens at Long Tâm Thu to his attack by the boy who called himself Ginger Meggs, and the Captain took neither incident into account. Shorty did not understand how Ginger Meggs could speak Australian, and he was frustrated because he couldn’t tell allies from enemies. He had thought about what Jack Adams had said, and he was not sure if the Australians – or any of the foreign troops – were really doing any good in Vung Tau.

  ‘I will answer one of your questions,’ said Quyn, ‘then you will shut up and buy me a dress.’

  She asked Moreau if she could take Shorty from his stool for ten minutes. Moreau said she could remove him for the rest of his life. Quyn took his hand and led him outside. The bright sunshine startled him after the darkness of bar. He had forgotten it was early afternoon. Quyn walked him across the road and behind a row of bars used by Korean soldiers, up a dirt path to a timber building with an open door. Inside, forty children sat at desks beneath a ceiling fan, facing a blackboard. Their teacher was a white man wearing Australian military uniform, but Shorty didn’t recognise the insignia of his corps.

  On the walls were postcards from Adelaide, Brisbane, Perth and Sydney: churches, koalas, beaches and the harbour bridge. There was even a picture of Puckapunyal.

  ‘This is the Australian school for orphans,’ said Quyn. ‘Your engineers built it. Your soldiers teach the classes. Their education is a gift from your government.’

  The teacher noticed Shorty. ‘G’day, dig,’ he called, and smiled.

  He waved his hand, and the children cried, in a shrill, tinkling chorus, ‘G’day, dig.’

  ‘Now,’ said the teacher, ‘let’s give our visitor a song.’

  The children rose from their seats and stood to face Shorty. They wore approximations of uniform, dirty cream blouses, flapping blue pants and skirts.

  ‘Once a jolly swagman camped by a billabong . . .’

  Shorty wiped a tear from his eye.

  He applauded the class, even bowed to them, and kissed Quyn on the cheek, as if she too were a child.

  ‘Thank you,’ he said to Quyn. ‘You’ve shown me it’s not all worthless.’

  She stared at him, astounded, and wondered if he could ever be made to understand a single thing about the city of Vung Tau.

  The bootsteps of the guards at Long Binh stopped at the door of Nashville’s Conex. As they fell still, Nashville heard insects singing in the night. The first guard unbolted the container door, and looked around for the prisoner. They had expected him to be asleep against the wall, but Nashville lay in the middle of the floor, waiting.

  The first man scanned the Conex with his flashlight, bouncing the beam off each corner. Nashville grabbed him by the ankles and tore him down. The man flapped around on the ground, his feet caught up in his own white robes. He strained to stand, but Nashville sprang up first, raised his foot and stamped on his head. His heel burst the man’s nose. The blood ran red through the white of the man’s hood, and Nashville thought he looked beautiful, a swan dying in the snow.

  The others rushed in, and Nashville slipped into his chosen corner, so they could only come at him from a single angle. They all wore their glory suits: white belted gowns, pointed cloth masks, and a cross in a circle painted over their hearts.

  Nashville thought they might be the same men who’d moved him, and, for a moment, believed he could take them all. They found it awkward to fight in robes. Their eyeholes kept slipping from their eyes.

  Nashville ducked his second attacker and dug a fist beneath his ribs, then opened his fingers to pull out his spleen, a faith healer in a trance. The man screamed as if he really had been eviscerated. Nashville the sorcerer would have liked to show him his entrails. Instead, he rolled his gutted body into the man behind. The third guy was the biggest, and Nashville realised it was Hillier.

  ‘Kneel for the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan,’ said Hillier.

  Nashville hit him with a left hook, which swung into Hillier’s jaw from out of his line of sight. Hillier staggered then toppled onto Nashville.

  I’ll bet his eyes rolled, thought Nashville. I wish I could’ve seen that – his eyes looking up at his brain.

  When their faces came together, Nashville bit a piece out of Hillier’s cheek. Hillier screamed inside the hood, and rolled aside, his hands tearing at the cloth.

  Nashville was animal now, bloodied and exhilarated. The next man who touched him, Nashville chewed into his finger, and turned his head so as to tear the flesh from the bone. He kicked at his kneecaps, and grabbed another man’s testicles and twisted them up to his stomach. He would’ve taken them off, except his buddy punched Nashville hard in the ear, and a man he’d put down clawed at his shins, and the boys at the back of the group turned out to be the toughest of all, and they’d just been waiting until Nashville was worn out before they came in, punching straight like fighters, not swinging wide like hopeless dopes in clowning cloaks and pillowcase veils.

  Nashville knew he wouldn’t feel anything until the blow that took him down, and even that would be no more than a heavy caress. Two men grabbed his arms and dragged him out of his corner, and another jumped at him and Nashville thought he was going to die, but he jerked forward and butted the leaping clown with such force that Nashville blacked out for a moment. The other man fell unconscious and everyone stopped to look, as if some kind of magic had been performed.

  Finally they overwhelmed him. Nashville felt their merciful hands on his wrists and ankles, their kind knees on his chest, their gentle fists battering his head.

  Then he came back up, with a strength he had never known. He thought maybe he was dead and feeling his spirit rising, but Klansmen fell around him as he roared. He saw Hillier cowering, clutching his cheek, and Nashville mounted him and arched his back. The hair rose on his forearms, his calves and the back of his neck. His hands were his claws and they tore at Hillier’s eyes. His teeth were his fangs and he bit into Hillier’s ear.

  Shorty couldn’t get to visit Nashville until the weekend, when he rode up to Long Binh with a US truck transporting filing cabinets shipped from Dayton, Ohio. The guard at the stockade refused to let him see the prisoner. Shorty wouldn’t leave and, eventually, Sergeant Doughface came to pick him up. He told Shorty he could take a look at Nashville, but he couldn’t speak to him. Shorty thought that must be a rule but, when he reached the Conex, he realised it was just a fact. Nashville paced his container, naked and unshaven, stooped and smeared with gore. When he saw Sergeant Doughface, he leaped at his bars and roared. Nashville’s eyes were glazed. He was blood-drunk, a vampire.

  ‘What did you do to him?’ asked Shorty.

  ‘He put three of my guys in hospital,’ said Sergeant Doughface. ‘They ought to shoot that mad dog. Or drop him on the Viet Cong.’

  When Nashville noticed Shorty, he cocked his head like a hunting dog and pissed on the floor of his Conex.

  Shorty caught a chopper back to Vung Tau with a pilot who flew because he loved to fly, and never felt free on the ground
. Some people were lucky, the pilot told Shorty, and they found the thing that completed them. For many guys, that might be a woman. For the pilot’s brother, it was his son, but for the pilot – Shorty thought he was going to say it was his helicopter – it was the war.

  Shorty and Quyn lay on the mattress, talking. She was naked, he wore underpants. Her nipple pressed against his skin. Her fingers twisted at the dusting of hair on his chest.

  ‘Have you ever had another job?’ Shorty asked.

  ‘Yes,’ said Quyn. ‘I used to be a professor at the Sorbonne.’

  She laughed, so Shorty realised it was a joke.

  ‘You are thinking what could I do if I came back to Australia with you,’ she said, because she’d had the same conversation many times on many different mattresses. ‘I could do nothing.’

  Shorty cupped one small breast.

  ‘But it does not matter,’ said Quyn, ‘because you will not take me back. I can do nothing for you, Shorty, but this.’ She stroked him, slowly. ‘I cannot bear children because of what has been done to me.’

  ‘By who?’ asked Shorty, ready to avenge.

  ‘Men,’ said Quyn. ‘A Chinese came for me when I was nine years old. He took me away from my village to Cholon, to learn. They taught me how to read and write, to sing and dance, to recite poetry and play pleasing music.’ She smiled. ‘And how to fuck like a dragon.’

  She lit a Lucky Strike, drew the smoke into her lungs and breathed fire through her nostrils.

  ‘But the fat Chinese beat me,’ she said, ‘so one day, I ran away, back to my village. While I ate rice with my mother, my father sent a messenger to Cholon. It was only then I understood I had been sold. The second time I ran, I came here. It was in the time of the French, this town was Cap St Jacques, and I was fifteen. I found a Frenchman who would take care of me. I learned his language, I read his books, I sucked his cock. And when the Chinese came after me, he shot him. It made him feel like a good man. As if he’d saved me. But all he had done was buy me. Or steal me.

  ‘He was a butcher,’ she said. ‘He taught me how to cut meat.’

  Shorty listened to her story, sad but distracted.

  ‘When my Frenchman tired of me,’ she said, ‘I could have returned to my village, but I chose to stay in Vung Tau until my father died.’

  Shorty imagined an evil man, a hunchback.

  ‘So you see, Shorty,’ she said, ‘there is no one you can kill for me. They are all already dead.’

  She wriggled beneath him and guided him inside her. Shorty gasped.

  ‘I wanted to know,’ he told her, ‘because I was wondering if you could write.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Quyn. ‘I can write.’

  Nashville had been awake for four days when he finally lost consciousness and the guards poured into his Conex. They manacled and straitjacketed him, injected him with a tranquilliser and stretchered him to the camp hospital, where the nurses washed, dressed and shaved him, and the guards laid him down and cuffed him to the frame of a bed.

  It was a real hospital, thought Shorty, with clean walls, scrubbed floors and air conditioning, and a garage of gleaming, wheeled machines to put men back together after other machines had blown them apart. It made the wards at ALSG look like a camp site.

  A man with a gun stood over Nashville as Shorty fed him cigarettes. Nashville spoke slowly and clearly. He told Shorty there’d be no additional charges laid against him, since none of the men he wounded were even supposed to be on duty.

  ‘Did you find out who killed Caution?’ Nashville asked.

  Shorty shook his head.

  ‘Do you know who wrote the notes?’ Nashville asked.

  Shorty looked into his lap.

  ‘Do you have any fucking news for me at all?’ asked Nashville.

  ‘Bucky’s still alive,’ said Shorty.

  Nashville smiled.

  Shorty wondered if he should tell him the rest.

  ‘And I’ve split up with Betty,’ he said.

  The news seemed to wake Nashville up. ‘You won’t never lose your cherry now,’ he said, and laughed.

  ‘I already did,’ said Shorty.

  Nashville almost jerked upright in his bed, but the cuffs held him down.

  ‘No!’ he shouted. ‘That’s amazing! Congratulations! So you and little Baby Marie . . .’

  ‘Not Baby Marie,’ said Shorty.

  Nashville was puzzled. ‘Tâm?’ he asked, looking up though hooded eyes.

  ‘I’d never do that,’ said Shorty.

  ‘So who?’ demanded Nashville, who’d forgotten he was beat up and chained up in hospital and charged with killing a fellow soldier.

  Shorty found he couldn’t say.

  ‘It don’t count,’ said Nashville, ‘if it was your hand.’

  ‘A gentleman doesn’t tell,’ said Shorty.

  ‘Baby Marie, Tâm, Betty . . .’ Nashville counted them off on his teeth with his tongue. ‘You don’t know any other girls.’

  Shorty blushed. ‘It wasn’t a girl,’ he said.

  Nashville became even more excited. ‘Was it an ox?’ he asked. ‘Was it a chicken?’

  Shorty whispered Quyn’s name.

  ‘No!’ shouted Nashville. ‘You did it with your mom!’

  Shorty scratched himself behind the ear.

  ‘Thank you, Shorty,’ said Nashville. ‘None of this seems so bad now I know that.’

  Nashville sat grinning with his eyes closed, chortling and snorting.

  Shorty let him enjoy himself for a minute, then said, ‘They say you ate a guard’s ear, Nashville. That doesn’t look good, considering everything.’

  ‘That’s bullshit,’ said Nashville, ‘I didn’t eat it. I bit it. There’s a big difference. You ask Quyn.’

  Shorty wished he hadn’t told Nashville, but he was pleased Nashville knew.

  ‘So what’re you doing to get me out of here?’ Nashville asked him.

  ‘I’m going to find the Mamasan,’ said Shorty.

  Nashville sighed.

  ‘She likes you,’ said Shorty.

  Nashville shook his head, which was one of the few gestures available to him.

  ‘That’s what Caution said,’ said Nashville. ‘That’s all.’

  Shorty produced his notepad. ‘Does Moreau know who she is?’ he asked.

  ‘I doubt it,’ said Nashville. ‘He hears things through hoochmaids and whores.’

  Shorty wrote down Moreau’s name, for the small pleasure of crossing it out.

  ‘Did Caution know?’ asked Shorty.

  ‘Maybe,’ said Nashville. ‘Maybe the Aussies did too. Maybe your buddy Izzy Berger did. For that matter, maybe your buddy Izzy Berger paid someone to grease Caution,  just like he fucking said he would.’

  Shorty thought Nashville was trying to make him feel stupid.

  ‘What happened to your R&C?’ Nashville asked suddenly. ‘Your weekend in Saigon? Who’s gonna go with you now? Quyn?’

  Shorty shrugged.

  ‘Go up there on your own,’ said Nashville. ‘I’ve got buddies in HQ supposed to be looking out for me. I don’t know who they are, but I need you to find them for me, and tell them what’s going on.’

  Shorty promised he’d do what he could, which, he suspected, would be nothing.

  ‘What’ll happen now?’ he asked.

  ‘When I get out of hospital, they’ll try to grease me again,’ said Nashville.

  PART FOUR

  TWENTY-SIX

  Shorty sat with Quyn in Le Boudin, playing with her hair at the bar. He tried to make conversation with Moreau, who would only reply in French. When Shorty’s can was empty, Moreau silently replaced it, but otherwise he barely acknowledged Shorty’s presence.

  ‘Monsieur?’ said Shorty, eventually.

  ‘Oui?’ replied Moreau, wearily.

  ‘Can I have a receipt for my dinner?’ asked Shorty. ‘I’m sorry, I don’t know how to say that in French.’

  ‘Pourrais-je avoir un reçu, s’il vous pla
it,’ said Moreau, and descended into the cellar.

  When he came back up, Shorty repeated his question in French.

  ‘Mais non,’ answered Moreau.

  Quyn squeezed Shorty’s hand.

  ‘Why not?’ asked Shorty.

  ‘Because you are a cunt,’ said Moreau.

  Quyn attacked Moreau with a stream of angry Vietnamese.

  ‘Well, he is,’ said Moreau. Then he answered her in Vietnamese.

  ‘I can guess your theory,’ said Moreau to Shorty. ‘You think I wrote letters inviting Nashville and Sergeant Caution to my bar, and signed them with kisses, perhaps because I am French. Because I will not say I saw Nashville when I did not, you suspect me of everything when I have done nothing.’

  Shorty nodded.

  ‘But,’ said Moreau, ‘if you were to think for a moment’ – he arched his eyebrows, as if this were impossible – ‘you might realise it was the late Sergeant Caution who needed an alibi for his visits to my bar, and not Nashville, who was here every day and night, in the same way as you now inhabit my bar stool as if it were your own. It was Sergeant Caution who needed an excuse to fire his pistol in my bar, and Sergeant Caution who needed Nashville to return here to meet him for the fight Sergeant Caution was so eager to start. Simply because Nashville found the note upon his return to bed does not mean it wasn’t planted there earlier in the evening, when Caution was not to know that Nashville was already in my bar. Do you understand me, Mister Short-cock?’

  Shorty wasn’t sure that he did.

  ‘Caution wrote the notes himself, Monsieur Maigret Minus,’ said Moreau.

  Nashville received a letter postmarked Stillwater, Oklahoma. It didn’t matter where you were in the US Army – they could send you to get your balls blown off on a jungle patrol outside Dalat, or lock you in a shipping container with the KKK banging down the door in Long Binh – you couldn’t escape the news about the cat and the dog and the power bills, the neighbours, the yard and the football.

  They had kicked Nashville out of the hospital and moved him back into his Conex. Every day, the guards promised to kill him, and pissed in his food. They weren’t all in on it – the black guards had their own thing – but the boys who called themselves the KKK ran Silver City at night, and Nashville knew they’d get him in the end.