Wag the Dog (29 page)

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Someone who had sex with or raped a woman and then killed her, common enough among American soldiers in Vietnam that there was a name for it.

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Lidice, a village in Czechoslovakia, was totally destroyed on June 10, 1942, by Nazis in retaliation for the assassination by Czechs of Reinhard Heydrich, the deputy chief of the Gestapo and the number-two Nazi officer in Czechoslovakia. All men over sixteen were killed; the women and children were deported. Many Nazi atrocities were not known or acknowledged until the end of the war. Lidice, on the other hand, was publicized by the Germans as a lesson to others who might try to resist. It was the use of terror as a weapon. In those days terror was a weapon of the state, and what we call terrorism today was then the heroism of the resistance, of partisans, of the underground, our friends.

So the massacre of Lidice was known. It was regarded with singular horror. Yet the Germans spared women and children. The Americans in Vietnam did not. Perhaps the fact that Lidice was a common decision, a policy decision, and My Lai was an action led by a low-ranking officer in violation of official policy, more like a riot than a tactical choice, might make a difference to those who didn't die there.

S
TEVE
W
ESTON IS
the voice on the line when I pick up. He says he read about me in the paper. I didn't know that many people read “Sherie.” I guess it's one of those things like picking your nose. You only do it in front of other people if they already know you do it. I hear jukebox and barroom noises behind him. It's a weekday, so that surprises me.

The first thing that you notice about Steve, if you see him, more than if you hear him, but still if you hear him, is that he's black. But that doesn't mean you expect to hear him calling from a barroom in the middle of the day. Steve came back from Nam with the attitude of “I'm glad that's over. I got out of that alive, and intact, and I'm going to live the rest of my life straight and peaceful-like.” A lot of people didn't come back that way. A lot of people came back thinking the world's a toilet and I'm going to shit in it. Or grab what you can as soon as you can because there's incoming coming. Or I went and I fought for you and now you owe me a hero's life and a hero's living and if I don't get it, I'm going to pout.

I'm lucky. I always knew the world was a hard and dirty place. That nobody cared for heroes. It's always “But what did you do for me lately?” That's what my daddy gave to me. He gave me no illusions to lose.

So when Steve came back, he found himself what he called a good woman. A churchgoing woman. Who wanted to have regular babies, get wide, keep a clean house and food on
the table. He got himself a steady job. First it was a car wash or something like that, a lot of people would have felt they were too good for. He went through several others, but he was always trying to get on the line at the GM plant down in Van Nuys. It took him a couple of years. But he finally got in over there. It's UAW and top dollar for unskilled labor, $17 an hour or more by now. That means a base of $35,000 a year, holidays, vacation, sick pay, plus medical and pension and all of that. Anybody who wants to can push that up to $45,000, even $70,000, with overtime.

“I seen that and I ax myself, is there more than one Joe Broz? But I says to myself this got to be the one, 'cause the one I know be the one with more balls than brains. And that's why she love him so, right, Joe?”

Four kids, a fat wife, four cars, all Chevies, what the hell is he doing in a bar on Wednesday before lunch sounding too merry and mournful all at once. “What's going on, Steve?”

“I'm alright. Al-right. I seen this, and I has to call. I calls you at the office and they says you gone. Gone for good. They gives me some number and a real nice lady answer the phone. I ax myself, is this Magdalena Lazlo I'm talking with? So I ax her, is you she? And she is. I tells her I'm a longtime friend from, you know, Vietnam. And she says she is sure you will be happy to hear from me because Vietnam was a central experience in your life and she gives me this number. Where is you?”

“My new office. What's wrong, Steve?”

“Nothin' fucking wrong. I's OK. You's OK. Semper fuckin' fi. Marines forever. I just seen you got this fine thing happen and so's I call you.”

“How's your wife?”

“She fine, she fine. She not so fine as yours is fine, but she fine.”

“The kids? How are the kids?”

“Kids fine. They trouble sometime, but that what they there for. Keep your mind occupied with their trouble, keep it off your own. No mo' trouble than the next kid.”

“Where you at?”

“This is a fine place. They calls it Ray's Sweetwater. Down here near where's I live.”

“Baldwin Hills? You gonna be there awhile?”

“Yes, I guess I am. I guess I am.”

“Why don't I come drink a few with you.”

“You come down but you best pass for high yaller,” he says. He thinks that's very funny and I hear him chortling away as he hangs up the phone.

I walk into Ray's Sweetwater. It's more what you'd call Watts than Baldwin Hills. It's cool and dark, especially after the high, hard Southern California sun. You've seen this scene in the movies. Mostly Westerns. A stranger walks into the bar. Sudden silence. Deadly stares. Cut away to the toughest hombre in the room. Insert shots as the bartender and various hangers-on look to him for their cue. Is he gonna kill the stranger right this second or toy with him first? Of course, what they don't know is that I'm not a real Chinaman, I'm David Carradine, a Shaolin monk and I can kick faster than an ordinary man can shoot. I'm Alan Ladd, but folks just call me Shane.

Suddenly, there's a voice from way in the back of the room, back at a booth behind the pool table. “Hey, you all, leave him the fuck alone. He's a nigger like us. Tha's just a flesh-colored Band-Aid on his face.”

There is reasonably universal laughter. Some of it more amused than the joke deserves, but entirely welcome. The place relaxes. I have been vouched for. I'm passing for black. I walk to the back. The music is not too bad. Old-fashioned, more R&B than rap. It comes out of an extravagant jukebox that plays CDs.

Steve's at a table with four other guys. Three of them are late forties, early fifties, the fourth guy is older, sixty or more, hair gone almost white. They all have beer and snacks too. Peanuts and fried pork rinds. I sit down. Conversation stops. It's not hostile, just still. A young waitress wearing Lycra top and bottom, pink against purple, saunters over and sticks out an ample hip. The old guy with the white hair pats it fondly. She tells him he's too old. He says the problem is not that he's too old, it's that he's too
big. I ask for a bottle of Bud and one more of whatever everybody else is drinking. I offer a twenty, she snatched it up.

“Give the man change,” Steve says. “Don't you be playing no games.”

“He a white man,” the old man says to one of the younger ones. “Why don't we ask him?”

“Well, that don't mean he know the truth. He could be iggerant.”

“I says we ask him.”

“I says you're full of shit.”

“This here, with the white hair and the big mouth, is Marlon Mapes,” Steve says. “That's Red, and Kenny, and Shavers.”

“We got an argument going. And these fools, they can't see the truth,” Red says. “Are you ready for the truth, white man?”

“This a friend of mine,” Steve says.

“He's a white friend of yours,” Kenny says. “And that's the truth.”

“There's times and places black and white don't matter,” Steve says.

“Always matters,” Red says.

“Always,” Shavers says.

“Like when don't it matter?” Marlon asks.

“It always matters,” Red says. “That's your bottom line.”

“Fuckin' A. Black, white. Bottom line. You right, you right.”

“OK, Steve, when don't it matter?”

He can't just say, “Nam—didn't matter in Nam.” Because it did. It mattered on leave. It mattered back at the base. It mattered when there was music to be played, liquor to be scored, dope to be used, promotions to be handed out, orders to be followed. It mattered all the time and every day. We both knew that.

But sometimes it didn't matter. It didn't matter on patrol. At least for Steve and for me. It didn't matter in a firefight. It didn't matter when the VC and the NVA announced that they had business that transcended race.

“It didn't matter when I lay dying,” Steve says. He's pretty drunk to be saying this, I think. He stands up. He pulls his shirt
out of his pants. He's gone to fat. That isn't any fresh-from-Parris-Island lean Marine standing there, bare belly poking out over his pants, scars twenty years old. “Carried me bleeding. Out of an ambush on his back.”

“Prob'bly kept your fat body 'tween the bullets and his-self,” Red says.

These are fightin' words because that's a sacred memory. Everybody gets that and the others tell him to shut up. Kenny stands between Red and Steve. The Lycra girl shows up with the beers and a gin and tonic.

“I di'n't go no Vietnam,” Red says. “Me and Muhammad Ali. Ain't no Viet Cong ever shot at me. White man usin' black men to fight their war. Cannon fodder.”

“Fuck you, Red,” Kenny says. “You stupid. I been to Nam. You don't shut up I hits you myself.”

“What you got to understand,” Steve says, “is what it was like.”

“They don't need to hear this. This is an old story,” I say. I pour my beer into the glass. It doesn't look golden like it does on TV. It looks yellow, like piss. Must be the lighting.

“What the VC liked to do, they liked to get one man, wounded, in a killing zone. Screamin'. It works better if he's screamin'. Then his buddies try to come for him. And they pick them off, one by one. Maybe gets two out there screamin'. You gots two choices. You sit there and you listen to your buddy screamin' and don't do nothin' and feel like you is shit, cause your buddy is screamin' and you're doing nothin'. Or you goes and tries to get him. Then, you know what? Not only is you dyin', you feelin' like a fool while you dyin'.”

“Don't want to die feelin' like no fool,” Marlon says. “That is addin' your insult to your injury. Umm-hm.”

“That's what it was like,” Steve says. “You got to understand that. I was screamin' and this man . . . this man, he came and he got me and he carried me out.”

That shuts everybody up. At least for a moment. The air-conditioning is humming. There's condensation on the bottles. Aaron Neville is on the jukebox.

“Listen here, Joe. That's you' name, Joe? Right? Listen
here,” Red says. “I want you to tell all these people here, sittin' at this table, the truth. The white man is afraid of the black man. That is a fact, right?'

“Don't play into his shit.”

“Go on, answer the man.”

“A lot of white people are afraid of black people,” I say.

“Of black
men,”
Red says. “The white man is afraid of the black
man.
He don't mind the black woman. He like dark meat from time to time, ain't
that
a fact.”

“Ain't nobody afraid of the black woman,” Kenny says. “Except you. You ‘fraid of your mama and your wife, the blackest womens I ever seen. And they got your ass whipped.”

“I am making a serious point here,” Red says. “So shut your jive mouth. That's what you do, Marlon. Somebody saying somethin' and you lay your nonsensical jive on it, 'cause you don't have the concentration of mind to deal with the issues. You see what I'm saying. No concentration of mind.”

“So is you is or is you ain't gonna make a point?”

“I am. You shut up and you wait. The white man will do anything to cut down the black man. That is an undeniable philosophical truth. Is it not?”

“Amen.”

“Uh-huh.”

“The truth,” Marlon says.