Dragon Lady (7 page)

“Doug, how do
they
know it isn’t loaded? Could be one of them is in there, us in his sights. His gun
is
loaded.”

Doug was mulling that over when the .45 went off, sounding like a cannon.
 

“Holy fuck!” he cried, looking at the smoking barrel. “I’ve seen the old man clean it a million times.”

We did have their attention inside the frat house. If you thought we’d be greeted by pipe-smoking, four-eyed weenies in cardigan sweaters, you are sadly mistaken. A dozen ROTC uniforms marched out. The cadet in the lead had a neck wider than his head.

“What’s your problem, turkey?” he demanded. “What are you doing with that weapon?”

Doug turned, gun at his side, and gave me a what-the-hell-are-we-doing-here look. I shrugged. I sure didn’t know.

Doug was listing a bit to starboard. “You’re the fucking problem, Rot-see shithead.”

The cadet held out a large paw.
“Fork over that weapon, Dilbert.”

Doug told a short tale that concerned the cadet’s mother and a German shepherd. Maybe his reply should’ve been less disgusting, but I guess he realized his face was gonna be busted anyway, so he decided to try to save some. The cadet decked Doug with one punch and yanked the pistol out of his hand on his way down.

He asked if I had a problem too. Well, you know me and how my fists engage before my brain does. But our new friends had vamoosed, nowhere to be seen. It was Doug and I by our lonesome, the former on the ground. I was just sober enough to dislike the odds, to do the smart thing. I said
no thank you sir
. The cadet told me to get my stupid drunken friend the hell out of here.

“I’m unloading this weapon before somebody gets hurt,” he added.

He was handling the pistol as if he knew what he was doing, but it went off again.

The cadet fell on his back, feet flailing in the air, howling like a banshee. He’d shot himself in a calf, a flesh wound by the looks of it, as there wasn’t much bleeding. His pals helped him stagger into the frat house. I heard one say that they weren’t due for .45 training until spring quarter.

I would’ve been more sympathetic if I’d known what I know now of that cadet in The Great Beyond. He did recover from the injury, and his military career was not blemished by the incident. Nothing ever came of the shooting. Because of what it could have done to their illustrious scholarly and military careers, the cadets closed ranks and patched up their leader on their own, mum’s the word.

I learned his name was Ron Gibbs. Two years later, First Lieutenant Ronald Gibbs was leading his men on patrol in the Delta, near Can
Tho
. He triggered a mine on a jungle pathway.

This was not the generic kind of land mine that got Father at Inchon. It was an especially nasty gizmo named a Bouncing Betty. Designed by the Nazis, Bouncing Betties spring up to waist level and detonate at the victim’s midsection and family jewels. It definitely qualified as a weapon of terror. It had to be an excruciating way to go.

Doug was sitting in a mud puddle, slimy water seeping into his mother’s pink silk panties. He spit blood and an incisor and said, “This wasn’t the way it was meant to go.”

“Gimme your hand, dummy.”

I poured Doug into his Chevy and somehow got us home. First thing in the morning, we volunteered at our friendly, local neighborhood draft board for the next call-up. The army would be a good place to hide. It was better than waiting for the inevitable, not to mention the cops.

Our “Greetings from the President of the
United States of America
” letters came within a week. By early February we were at
Fort
Ord
for basic training. Marching and shining our boots and pulling KP and being screamed at.
The more intense their pressure on me to conform, the fewer my inhibitions to do so.

After Basic, as you know, the army kept me at Ord and trained me to be their macabre version of a chef. Doug went to
Fort Rucker
,
Alabama
to aircraft mechanic school, where he received orders to
Vietnam
. Doug and I lost touch. Nothing happened, we simply drifted apart. In the last letter he ever wrote me, he said nine out of ten Rucker trainees had orders to Vietnam and that every map of the country had been torn out of every atlas in the post library. He’d had no idea where he was going.

I’d heard that Doug got into a disagreement with the Vietcong. While he was on night guard duty at his Bien Hoa airbase, they tried to blow up the place. They did so to a degree, but Doug went after them, expending his clips, making them pay, killing three of them. He went home with a Silver Star and a Purple Heart.

In Basic, I’d taken the cowardly route of ignoring Judy. After ten unanswered letters, she reciprocated. My immaturity was one of the luckier events in her life. While on leave from
Vietnam
, Judy and Doug eloped in
Coeur d’Alene
,
Idaho
. Doug re-upped and became a lifer. Judy became an army wife and Doug retired after twenty years as a master sergeant.

A month following my MRI, Sally and I attended my high school class reunion. Thanks to Sally’s TLC and my medication, I was still in pretty decent shape, able to stay on my feet and converse normally, in good enough condition to say I was in the pink and get away with it.

Doug and Judy were there, too. She looked okay, matronly and pleasant, but I couldn’t conjure the Judy I’d known from that Judy.

I’d know Doug anywhere. He was a little heavier, and what remained of that carrot top was silver. He still had his goofy Howdy Doody smirk.

I believe he would have taken me up on a dare, but I couldn’t think of one.

8.

I AM awakened one morning in The Great Beyond by noise that sounds close, noise like a door slamming, noise that drowns out the soft piano tinkling of “Tiny Bubbles,” courtesy of those responsible for our multi-ultra-quadraphonic elevator music. A door slams again. This cannot be.

I rush to the living room and peek through drapes. A dark-complected young man is sitting on the front steps of the home to my left. He has shaggy black hair and Bambi eyes. He’s Middle Eastern, from somewhere in that part of The Land of the Living. His chin is cupped in his hands. He is not a happy camper.

Another cruel joke on me, I think. It’s one thing to people a strip mall with humanoid holograms, but to install one as a next door neighbor--. It isn’t much classier than whoopee cushions and exploding cigars.

I take the bait, though. I dress, walk outside and up to him. He looks up at me in surprise.
 
I extend a hand. He extends his. In frustration, I squeeze air hard, expecting fingernails in my palm.

But it’s not air,
it’s
flesh and bone.

“Ow!” he cries, pulling his small, soft hand back.

I damn near jump out of my shoes. “Who the hell are you?”

“Who are you and where
am
I?”

“I’m Joe. The second part of the question is a bunch more complicated.”

He introduces himself. I catch only parts, syllables like “
smi
” and “eth’.

“Okay, Smitty.” I say.

“Smitty?” he says, gaining his feet.

Smitty is five-foot-five tops.
“
Smitty’sa
fine, upstanding name.”

“If you say so.”

He’s still a sourpuss, so I say, “It’s not perfect, but it’s okay here in The Great Beyond. It could be a hell of a lot worse, pardon the pun. Nobody’s mistreated me. Not physically.”

“Tell me then, Joe, where are my virgins?”

I’d lay money he was one himself. “Well, Smitty, that’s a tough one to get your hands on, as is sex in general hereabouts.”

“But I was promised seventy virgins,” he wails.

Seventy.
Holy shit! Smitty’s in The Great Beyond thanks to a dynamite undershirt he detonated. I yearned and yearned for human companionship and this is what I get. Wherever you are, dead or alive, kind reader, be careful what you wish for.

“Where did you blow yourself to smithereens, Smitty?”

He replies as blithely as if I’d asked him for directions to the public library.
“In a market.”

“What market?”

 
“A crowded one.”

My neck is burning. “I think your bosses fibbed to you, Smitty.”

“No, cannot be! They promise seventy virgins if I do it.”

I’d like to stomp the homicidal little son of a bitch into a grease spot, but I force a smile and say, “Really and truly, they made that promise with their fingers crossed. And trust me, virgins are overrated. When I was your age and younger, I dated some. I’ll tell you, they were projects. When I dropped them off and we had our good-night kiss, after all that sweating and heavy breathing and ear-licking and kissing and
lies
at the drive-in movie or lover’s lane, they were still virgins, their panty girdles in place. Man, those things, they were like a suit of armor. No fun at all.”

He doesn’t reply.

“You were
bullshitted
by cowards who didn’t have the balls to do it themselves, pal.”

I had blasphemed. Smitty gives me a hateful glare before I head back home.

Which makes my day.

Forty-five-plus years earlier, in 1965 Saigon, I awakened one morning by noise, too, to an earthquake, not a biggie like Prince William Sound, Alaska’s 9.2 last year, but no minor tremor either. It was a ground-rumbling, lampshade-quivering sensation that I, a Seattleite, knew too well.

I flew out of bed and flung open the shutters. It wasn’t tectonic plates shifting. It was tanks in the streets, a line of them rumbling along ours. We had us yet another coup, the latest chapter of
Götterdämmerung
, South Vietnam style. The generals were playing musical chairs for the second or third or fourth time this year, one kleptocracy replacing another.

Nervous ARVN troops flanked and trailed the tanks, carrying rifles and carbines, patrolling for nothing in particular. The ones who appeared the most scared were the scariest. They were young and didn’t know who they were working for today. There were few civilians or civilian vehicles out and about.

My first instinct was to crawl under something, like we‘d done in grade school air raid drills in the 1950s. A siren would sound, as if it was the real warning for Uncle Joe Stalin lobbing in ICBMs. We’d quickly hunch under our desks. I never understood. If it was the real deal, where they’d drawn an X on the principal’s office for the target, we’d be vaporized while curled on the floor, rather than seated, struggling with long division.

Ziggy and I dressed, to do our duty. On the way to the 803rd, we whistled and forced smiles. We did not look anybody in the face.

There’d been rumors of a coup, but there were constant rumors of coups, so as far as I was concerned, the coup rumors didn’t qualify as rumors. A coup was not a surprise. Only the timing was.

What of Mai, my Dragon Lady? Had she watered my flowers and gently arranged them in a vase? Had she been in bed with an ARVN officer when I had
come
calling? In retrospect, her expression had been dreamy. I conceded that she surely knew senior brass, knew them carnally. A woman of her beauty and presumed charms, she wouldn’t settle for a paramour below the rank of colonel. My Dragon Lady in the funny papers was always in the thick of the intrigue, her sexuality easily read between the lines.

What side of the coup were her partners on? Was
she
privy to the coup planning? Was the lover I’d concocted an important player on today’s winning team, Mai escorting him in his triumph, she the next Madame Nhu? If not, would they be dragged out of bed and taken for a ride, her along as a collaborator?

I paused and breathed deeply. I had to cease this madness before I upchucked the breakfast I hadn’t eaten.

Captain Papersmith wasn’t in, not a huge stunner. He must have blundered out of the sack with a head-splitter,
then
crawled back under the covers. There’d be no special assignments for us today.

Company clerk PFC A. Bierce was in, at his typewriter.

“Colonel Lanyard wants to see you ASAP, Joe,” he said.

“Just me?”

“Just you.”

“Whoever calls us on the carpet usually asks for both of us.”

I looked at Ziggy, who shrugged.

Bierce typed on. “I am only following orders.”

“Let me ask you a question, Herr Eichmann. Captain Papersmith said we were to assist you on your clerical duties as he sees fit, as you work like a dog, quote-unquote. What’ll that entail?”

“Don’t worry about it. I’m caught up.”

“Another question, PFC A. Bierce.”

He nodded and continued working.

“Is your first
name
Ambrose?”

The hunt-and-peck stopped.

He changed the subject. “That tattoo on your arm, are you from
Montana
?”

“No.
How about yourself?”

“
Nogales
,
Arizona
.”

I’d suspected that he was versed on many topics, fine art included. “Believe it or not, Bierce, it was supposed to be a Mondrian.
Long story.”

“Color fields.
Ho-hum.
I prefer the surrealists.”

“Dalí?”

“René Magritte is my favorite. That apple floating in midair, you can pluck it off the canvas and eat it.”

Before we drifted too far afield, I said, “I took a course on American humorists and satirists. Ambrose Bierce was prominent. He was a misanthrope. He was a sick puppy and he was hilarious.
Kept me rolling on the floor.

“I especially enjoyed
The Devil’s Dictionary
. His definitions had me in stitches. His short story,
Oil of Dog,
too, where the protagonist perfected a concoction with his wife’s aborted fetuses, it was the sickest thing I have ever read. I loved it.

“I love his quotes, too. The one about war is a classic.
War―a byproduct of the arts of peace.”

Bierce glared at me and said bitterly, “You know, Joe, the one reason I welcomed the draft is that I knew that nobody in this man’s army had ever heard of Ambrose Bierce.”

“I’m an exception to a lot of rules. I’ve had more college majors than Carter has pills. Like Ziggy, I possess a ton of trivial and absolutely useless information. My name is a bad family joke.
Yours too?”

“I’m Ambrose Bierce’s illegitimate grandson.”

“You’re jerking my chain, Bierce. I remember his bio. His children preceded him in death, and his own demise was a mystery. He went to
Mexico
when one of their civil wars was going on, 1910 or 1920, that era, and joined up with Pancho Villa.”

“It was late 1913 and no mystery to me. I’ll leave it at that.”

“May I ask you yet another question, Ambrose?”

He sighed.
“Why not?
I have all day for you, Joe. But please lose the ‘Ambrose,’ especially in public.”

“No sweat.
Can do.
If you’ll tell me what’re you working on, working like a
dog.
All that paper seems to go nowhere in the Fighting 803rd’s vast routing system.”

“Confidentially?”

I nodded.

“My novel.”

Okay, maybe Ambrose was who he said he was.
A writer.
Like grandfather, like grandson. “Tell me about it?”

“I’m unpublished. It’s bad luck for an author to divulge his story line. That’s common knowledge in the industry.”

“C’mon, Bierce, a brief summary, a synopsis.”

“In utmost top-secret confidence?”

“Top secret crypto.”
I crossed my heart. “And hope to die.”

“It’s called
Jesus of Capri
. Jesus lived during the reign of the Roman Emperor Tiberius, from 14 AD to 37 AD, you know. Tiberius spent most of his days as a recluse on the
island
of
Capri
. Tiberius heard of a rabble-rouser in one of their colonies, some sort of reformer
whose
following was growing. In my historical adjustment, Jesus isn’t nailed to timbers. Tiberius had Jesus hauled to
Capri
to see what made him tick and to quell whatever he was stirring up. Neither converted the other to their brand of politics, but something else clicked. They became lovers.”

“I think it’s a helluva’n idea, Ambrose.
Very slick and original and sacrilegious.
But the faithful are not gonna appreciate their Savior packing fudge.”

He resumed typing. “Bible thumpers don’t buy nonreligious books, Joe. They don’t read literary fiction. Some say that the Bible’s the world’s greatest sci-fi novel.”

“Sci-fi.
I’ll have to run that by Ziggy.”

“The colonel, Joe.”

“You can be court-martialed for blasphemy, Bierce.”

He shook his head in disbelief.

“Really.
You can be court-martialed for everything in this man’s army.
The resurrection after the crucifixion and so forth?
How’re you handling the supernatural bit?”

“I’m not there yet. I’m plotting as I go. You’d better get on in to the colonel, Private Joe.
Pronto.”

From my vantage point in The Great Beyond, I can tell you that jungle drums by bored merchants in my wretched,
unpatronized
strip mall say that Jesus and his Twelve Disciples are with us and they stay as isolated as Tiberius was, but not by choice. There are rumors they were hatching a coup d’état. There are rumors of heavy security.

I have to scratch my head. If Jesus could walk on water, do the fishes and loaves thing, and perform various and sundry miracles as I was taught in Sunday school (a failed experiment by my Mother to make me a better person), how hard would it be to break out of some detention camp? Are we talking urban legend here?

Ambrose Bierce the Youngest is not in my extra-worldly telephone directory. He remains flesh and blood, a ripe old age amongst the mortals. Like everyone, he will eventually check out there and check in here. I’m looking forward to sitting down with him over a cold one and chitchatting. If this isolation and/or censorship I’m enduring will ever end.

“We’ll have to sit down over a cold one and chat, Bierce.”

“I’d like that,” he said unconvincingly.

“Hey, a final question, Ambrose. You’re a company clerk. You’re in the know and you guys essentially run the army. South Vietnam as our fifty-first state, is there anything to it? The rumor’s hanging in there like a hemorrhoid. What’ve you heard?”