Fatal Light (9 page)

“Where'd you do your time?” The supply sergeant was playing solitaire, snapping the cards into place without interest.

I paused in front of my new locker, dress shirt on my palm folded down to an eight-inch square. “Central Highlands,” I told him. “Iron Triangle. Binh Duong Province. Around there. I'm on open travel orders.”

The sergeant looked up from his game for a moment, then back to his cards. “You don't really seem like the Special Ops type,” he said.

I jammed the shirt into a hole between socks and boots and sat down on my footlocker. “So who really is?” I asked.

The sergeant looked up. “Some,” he said. “Some. You can be sure of that.”

The sergeant was using the standard squad bay recreational table for his solitaire. I felt him look at me, at my back, and I turned around to see him softly pushing the cards into confusion. He stood and stretched, and lay down on the table face up, legs hanging off at the end. He got a cigarette lit and left it in his mouth, talking up through the smoke. “Livin' in the boonies with the dinks. Shit. I'd be fuckin' freaked out, too.”

The sergeant was silent after that, exhaling like a beached whale. I sat on my footlocker, staring at the space of gray concrete between my bare feet.

Hawley yelling at me in the Blue Star Bar, “I owe you one, you son of a bitch! Let me buy!” Then, to the man holding him by the arm, “Fucker saved my life. No shit, man. I gotta buy him a drink.”

He stumbled forward, collapsing over the stool beside me, elbows on the bar holding him up.

“Hey,” I said. “Little wasted?”

“Wasted, hell. Just getting started.”

“So what brings you to Saigon?”

“R and R, man, what you think?”

“R and R and you come to Saigon?”

He tried to wink but could not. “One of these goddam holes over here is just like all the rest. Know what I mean?”

I took a drink of beer.

“Hey, you son of a bitch,” Hawley said, the words slurred, “I buy the next round. Bartender! Hey!” He looked at me, head wobbling. “Where the fuck's the bartender in this establishment?”

“She's coming.”

A pretty Vietnamese girl in a black bikini stopped in front of us. She looked bored, and when Hawley grabbed at her breasts she pulled back, frowning; he began to giggle, laid his head on the bar, face down.

He giggled and said, “I love it.”

I shook my head at the bar girl, and she moved away.

Hawley turned his head to one side so he could look at me. “Hey, man. No shit. You saved my ass. And I never gave you a proper thanks.”

“Just the circumstances,” I said. “Anyone would have done the same.”

“Woo-wooo,” Hawley crooned with his left cheek flush to the bar. “Modesty becomes you.” He started to giggle again. I looked straight ahead into the mirror on the other side of the bar. The bar girl stood a few feet away, rearranging the top half of her bikini.

“You know something, man?” Hawley said.

“What's that?”

“I gotta take a piss.” He raised his head slowly, looking around wide-eyed, a child waking in a strange place. “Gotta take a piss,” he said, standing, one hand on the bar for support. He made his way to the table he'd left, falling into it, bottles and glasses spilling, rolling, shattering. Soldiers laughed and Hawley climbed onto the table, got to his knees, pointed at me. “Hey!” he shouted. “That man saved my life in the heat of combat!”

Hawley wobbled into a crouch and stood as if he were on a high wire, soldiers shouting him on, clapping, chanting as he pulled his zipper down, bellowing, “Here's a little tribute to the man that saved my worthless ass!” The bar manager was out from a back room, yelling in Vietnamese, pushing through the crowd.

Hawley had his penis in hand and let go, pissing a soft sparkle arc. The crowd made a space for the stream, laughing and applauding. The manager pushed in close enough to shove at Hawley's left leg; Hawley went down on his knees, pissing over his trousers, table rocking over on two legs with his weight, swayed midair and Hawley sprawled on the floor, on his back, laughter surrounding him and his prick hanging in the zipper's teeth.

The cocktail table banged over beside Hawley, rolled into a chair. I finished my beer, and waved to the bar girl to bring me another.

I picked up the taxi at the head of Tu Do Street, slipped in the backseat and gave my destination, and the driver moved off. Saigon at night: impassable sidewalks, mopeds squirting around and through traffic. Begging children ran to the taxi windows, pounding, yelling in, pushing scabby noses against the glass.

“Someday I blow this pop stand,” the driver said suddenly. He turned to flash a grin, proud of his English.

I nodded. “May be a good idea,” I said.

The car stopped in traffic and the driver looked at me in the rearview. “Really,” he said. “I go to America. Get the hell out.”

I did not say anything.

The driver held his right hand in the air, rubbing first finger and thumb together. “Money,” he said. “Still drive cab, but live lot better. Maybe buy cab.”

“Maybe,” I said, watching the streets.

A horn behind us. The driver crept the car forward about twenty feet and turned back to look at me. “Got a brother Washington, D.C. You hear of D.C.?”

“I've heard of it,” I told him.

“Got a brother there. He got a restaurant. Gonna work there.”

“Good,” I said. “Best of luck.”

The driver's expression went suddenly grim. “That's what my brother write to me,” he said. “Best of luck, he tell me.”

I nodded at the windshield to let him know the traffic was moving. He nudged ahead, pushing against massed pedestrians, shouting out the window, turning across oncoming traffic into an alley. We moved into the dark slit. Naked and half-naked families crouched against the walls. A woman covered with open sores sat next to a trash can, staring straight ahead. She appeared to be dead.

“I get you fine girl,” the driver told me.

“No, thanks. Got one already.”

“Yeah?” He looked at me in the mirror. “Vietnamese?”

“Look out for the kids,” I said.

He honked viciously at two children playing in a puddle in the middle of the alley. They ran to the wall and he looked into his mirror again. “Gotta do Vietnamese girl,” he said. “Best pussy in-a world.”

I repeated my destination. He took on his grim expression again.

We left the alley and turned right onto a broader boulevard, traveling briskly in lighter traffic. I rolled the window down, and the air that came into the cab was filled with the smells of fish and salt water and diesel fumes. The flag over the American embassy rippled on an easy breeze, lit dramatically from below by a spotlight hidden in the garden's foliage. Light gushed from a point in the ferns, humidity steaming over the garden, insects clouding into the beam. The driver slowed; at the next intersection the street was congested by a marketplace throng. I told him to stop. “I take you on, man,” he said.

I told him again to stop.

“You gonna walk?”

I got out, walked around the cab to his window. He said the fare was twenty U.S. dollars. I gave him three. “Hey, man,” he said, “not enough.”

“Hey,” I said. “Plenty.”

He cursed me in Vietnamese.

Where I walked the streets were full, people and light and noise, shouting and garbled music and distant horns, cooking smells, the smell of urine, of cologned sweat.
Hey Yankee, you buy a watch?
and he was rolling a sleeve up to show the bright train of watches to his tattooed bicep. I shoved past into the fishmongers and noodle sellers and whores and boy soldiers, Chinese cowboys and begging children. A night like any other here, a dream disappearing in a sleeper's mind downrange of the moon, sleepwalkers' parade, a night drowning in its own breath. I looked up and saw a prostitute watching me from a balcony: we watched each other for a moment, then she smiled, waved. I waved and walked on, and at the Blue Star I turned into the tight room with too-loud American rock and roll, Jim Morrison singing “Light My Fire.” An Americanized whore wooed a black boy in some kind of foreign naval uniform, shifting her hard hips against his leg, leaning forward so her little breasts fell into view in her halter. The black boy didn't know what to do.

I pushed past the crowd, through the back door, and up the stairway. Wicker stairs; bamboo lashed, lit by a single forty-watt bulb at the top. There was a boy sitting halfway up, eaten
by shadow, maybe ten years old, and as I passed he said
Hey GI, you wanna acidy? Co-keen?

I told him I didn't and moved on, stairs wheezing softly and giving with my weight as I went. At the top I knocked on the single door and a voice said, in English, to come in.

She sat alone at the small table with a dim lamp, dealing herself cards from a tarot deck. There was a black-lacquer bowl of rice and water chestnuts to one side, chopsticks laid neatly across the bowl. Every time I came it was the same: the small and dignified Vietnamese grandmother dealing fortunes, hundreds of different fortunes, amusing herself, passing the time.

She smiled at me. “Good see you, son,” she said.

I put my right index finger on the queen of clubs. “Good fortune?” I asked.

She shrugged. “Good picture,” she said.

I placed my order, took the moist fold of bills from my sock, and counted out on the table in front of her, over the cards. She bent to a cardboard box beside her chair and brought up the neatly packaged half pound of marijuana.
Cambodian,
she said in Vietnamese. Then, in English, she said, “Very fine now,” and grinned. After a moment of grinning at me she gathered the money, counted it, slid it out of sight somewhere in her clothing.

“You good boy,” she said. “Good Yankee.”

“There is no such thing, Grandmother,” I said, pushing the plastic bag into the lining of my jacket. She nodded, and her smile dimmed only slightly.

He was standing in the short hallway outside her door, face shining wet in the bulb's weak glow.
Hey, GI.
A silvery whisper. Y
ou wanna work for Madame Lin? Make-a deliver?

It was as if the boy sitting on the stair as I came up had grown to manhood and was still working the same side of the street. This older counterpart had a bright nylon shirt opened down his slick chest, wearing five or six silver chains around his neck. I looked down; his hands were empty.

“Madame Lin?” I shrugged, lifted my eyebrows, held up open palms, a picture of innocence.

He pushed his head toward the old woman's door; “Make-a deliver,” he said again. “To American base. Business agent for Madame.”

I dropped my hands, sighing, shaking my head. “You and Madame Lin stay away from the base,” I told him. “They'll shoot you. Without a second thought.”

He studied me.

“Really,” I said.

He grinned abruptly: his teeth were filed, filling his smile like a yawning shark. I moved past him, hoping he was content
to leave me alone. At the base of the stairwell a prostitute languished, bittersweet, smoking a cigarette. The smoke slid in front of her face. “Hey, GI,” she said softly. “Take me home. I fuck you forever.”

Perelli came into the squad bay and said a couple guys wanted to see me downstairs.

“A couple guys?”

“Yeah.” Perelli shrugged. “Asked for you. Want to talk to you.”

“You recognize them?”

“What the fuck is this, Twenty Questions? What do I know? They said they wanted to see you.”

They were waiting in the watch room, a master sergeant with a civilian. The civilian looked a decade the sergeant's junior and wore a cheap summer suit under a blond crew cut. The master sergeant said my name when I came into the room.

I nodded, and he said, “Just a few questions.” He slid two photographs out of a manila envelope, and I realized who my two visitors were. He handed me one of the pictures: the little grandmother identified to me as Madame Lin. She was smiling warmly, looking directly into the camera.

“Ever see that woman before?” The civilian asked.

I took the picture, looked briefly, handed it back. “Nope,” I said. “Don't know her.”

“Really?” The civilian stared flatly at me, clearly unbelieving.

“Where you guys from?” I asked.

The civilian stared as the master sergeant passed the second photo across: my face in blow-up, at the bar where Madame Lin conducted her business. I am laughing, listening to the man next to me. I remembered the night.

“How about this one?” the civilian said. “Guess you recall who that is.”

I was feeling the first points of perspiration on my chest and belly. I looked at the sergeant and said, “Intelligence? Or military police?”

“I wonder if you could tell us where you are in this photograph,” the sergeant said politely.

I looked at my wide smile. Hawley's right elbow could be seen cutting into the frame. “The Blue Star,” I said. “You staking out the Star?” I handed the photo back, hoping I seemed casual, unaffected.

“That the first time you were there?” The civilian again.

“Been there maybe three or four times before that night. “

“That's all?”

“Yep.”

“What for?”

“Excuse me?”

The civilian spoke in carefully measured tones, as if I were stupid. “Why do you patronize the Blue Star?”

I laughed. “Why do you think? What do you do in a bar?”

The civilian ignored my response. “You know who owns the place?”

“No idea.”

“Ever been upstairs?”

“Didn't know there was an upstairs.”

The civilian looked at me as if he were preparing to crush a distasteful insect; the master sergeant shuffled the prints back into the envelope. “Ray,” the sergeant said quietly, “I think we've got what we came for.”

The civilian continued to stare at me. “I don't think we're quite finished yet.” He tried to speak without moving his lips.

I smiled sweetly. “Gentlemen? If that's all?” I moved back a pace.

The civilian turned to the master sergeant. “Let's take him in. Spend some time on this.”

The sergeant looked at me clinically, examining the specimen, took a breath. “It wouldn't get us anywhere,” he said after due consideration.

“Gentlemen,” I said lightly, “best of luck on the investigation.” I turned and stepped away, leaving them huddled together in the watchroom.