Dragon Lady (10 page)

“Joey, this guy who wrote this book, he’s one inscrutable Chinaman.”

“All right, all right.
Whoever you are, what do you really want?” Buffet insisted, the whine partially out of his voice.

Mai delicately patted her mouth with a napkin.

She got up and said, “Must leave.
Must go.”

“Excuse me, gents.”

I followed my Dragon Lady out to the street. Five taxis miraculously materialized, desiring her and her fare.

“Mai, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to make a racket and to ignore you. Honest. It’s just that we grabbed this traitor and can’t let him go.”

“Am not angry at you, Joe.
You captured a horrible communist. You must do your work. Is time I
go.
”

“When can I see you? Just, you
know,
you and me.”
  

Mai took from her purse a slip of folded rice paper. “Day after tomorrow night, Joe?”

“Yes,” I said, opening a taxi door for her. “Not tonight?”

“No can do.”

“Day after tomorrow it is.”

“You come late, Joe.
At night.”

“Until then,” I said, hoping I came off as Cary Grant, but figuring I was again closer to Larry or Moe or Curly.

Back at our table, I read:
421 Hai Ba Trung Street.
I reread it, thinking how odd. This wasn’t the Cholon home of Cackling Quyen. It was walking distance from the Fighting 803rd.

Ziggy
had cleaned his plate and was working on CWO Buffet’s. “He
don’t
have an appetite, Joey.”

“I don’t have much patience left either.”

I knew our con game was petering out.
“Answer one question, Buffet.
The little red book is yours and we’re out of your life. What the hell goes on in the Annex?”

“We’ve been through this. That’s classified top secret crypto.”

I held up
Quotations
.
“The brass gets wind of this, Buffet, they’ll resurrect Tailgunner Joe McCarthy to ream you a new pooper.”

“Why are you so anxious to know?”

“Curiosity,” I said. “That’s all.”

“Tell me who you really are.”

Ziggy said, “
‘After
receiving political education, the Red Army soldiers have all become class-conscious and have learned―’”

“Please tell me who you are.”

I tossed the book to him. He almost ripped a pants pocket stuffing it in.

“I’ll give you clues to our secret identity, Buffet. Our primary MOS is Scrounger. Our secondary MOS is Fuck-up.”

Buffet snapped his fingers. “I have seen you. I’ve heard of you too. You work for Captain Papersmith.”

“Guilty as charged. We still have a deal?”

Buffet didn’t reply.

“Hey,” I said. “We forked over the book in good faith.”

“Curiosity is your only motive?”

“Scout’s honor.”

CWO Buffet sighed. “I can’t tell. I can’t.”

“If you can’t tell, then show.
Your choice.”

“Please.”

“C’mon.
Just a peek.
We won’t stay long.”

CWO Buffet sighed louder.
“Very briefly.
Day after tomorrow, at nightfall.”

“I’m tired of being put off a day,” I said, exasperated.

“It can’t be helped. I need time to invent an excuse to be away from the rest of the team.”

11.

I DO not dream in The Great Beyond.

Does anybody else?

Let me know when you get here. No hurry.

In The Land of the Living, shrinks say that if one cannot dream, one will go mad. Something to do with the release of whatever it is that must be released from the unconscious mind. Dreams are similar to a pressure-relief valve on a boiler. At a prescribed PSI, the valve pops and releases steam. If the valve doesn’t pop, the boiler goes
ka-boom
.

Where I am now, there is no
ka-boom,
not inside my head, or elsewhere, not that I’ve heard. I won’t go bugshit from not dreaming. I’m confident that I won’t. My higher-ups have more creative ways to tailor a straitjacket for me.

I wonder if Smitty dreams. He’s in The Great Beyond because of a
ka-boom
he himself triggered, the stupid murderous deluded little shit.

Can you keep a secret? It’s only been a few days since he appeared and I already miss him. I am
so
lonely I’d miss Adolf Hitler.

I’m
pitying
myself and wondering about Smitty in slumberland when I hear a knock. I double-time it to the front door. Of course it’s Smitty.

“Joe, we hate each other.”

A statement, not a question.
I say nothing.

“I am asking for your help. There is nobody else.”

“Nobody else” is a heartless understatement. Smitty looks different. He was thin the other day, but now he’s downright gaunt.

I ask, “What can I do for you? Would you like to come inside?”

He jabs a finger upward. “Does that music ever go away?”

I’d never before heard “Louie
Louie
” done on a harp. It
ain’t
half bad.

“Afraid not.”

“Come to my house, Joe.”

Not until I have a little fun. I quote an unlovely query that was whipped on me any number of times during my cup of coffee at Sunday school. “Smitty, have you accepted the Lord Jesus Christ as your personal savior?”

He ignores my sacrilege.
“Joe, to my house.”

“Say please.”

It obviously hurts, but he says, “Please.”

As I trail him next door, it’s dawning on me that his English is as good as mine. Was it before or have we been fitted with communication devices?
Yet another unanswerable question.

 
I go in to furnishings identical to mine. The style is Early Discount Furniture Store.
Lots of spindly legs and fake wood finishes.
The sofa and easy chairs are unadorned and covered by upholstery made of materials not found in nature. Colors are non-colors--gray, tan, beige.

Smitty angrily flings open his pantry. “Look what they give me to eat.”

Neatly stacked on floor-to-ceiling shelves is Spam, bags of pork rinds, canned hams, and pork and beans.

“This is worse,” he says, gesturing to his fridge.

I look at a freezer compartment filled with pork loin and chops.

In the refrigerator compartment is bacon, sausage, sliced ham, and cartons of eggs.

“I am Muslim. To eat pork is forbidden. I have been living on eggs,” he says, flapping his arms. “Soon all I can say is cluck-cluck-cluck.”

The demented little douche bag has a sense of humor.

I say, “Terrorist cannot live by omelet alone.”

 
Either he doesn’t get it or he is so starved he doesn’t care. “What can I do, Joe?”

I crook a finger. “Come on to my place. I think we can work something out.”

We do, swapping much of my chow for much of his. I don’t have sufficient variety to do the complex dishes for which I was noted as an executive chef, notably my creative sauces and soups, but now I can
cook
.
A small victory for my stomach and my masters’ sense of humor.

Smitty cannot get enough frozen mac and cheese.

***

I did dream in the Land of the Living. But can you dream when you cannot sleep? I could and did on that 1965 night, Mai with me on every toss and turn.

Day after tomorrow night.
421 Hai Ba Trung Street
.

That night was a cakewalk compared to some years hence, in my post-Vietnam, post-U.S. Army, worst Horse’s Ass Phase, when I was a walking disaster. My ability to sleep and/or dream was the least of my problems. I was drinking far too much and my second ex-wife had had a bellyful. Blaming
Vietnam
for my outrageousness had become the most cacophonous of broken records.

This was when Richard Milhous Nixon and Henry Kissinger were withdrawing us from Vietnam a barrel of blood at a time, railroad tanker cars of it while they negotiated the shape of the fucking table with the boys from Hanoi.

This was when
Vietnam
was also
Nam
. This was when I heard too many guys who hadn’t been there namedropping “Nam.” This was when I’d challenge them, asking what right did they have to refer to Vietnam as “Nam.” It was when I had the notion that only Vietnam vets were entitled to “Nam,” even Joseph Josiah Joe Goldbrick IV.

Realistically and honestly, I was not entitled to “Nam” either, but they were a helluva lot less entitled than I was. So I had believed--after swizzle sticks from my Johnny Red and water numbered in the double digits.

I’d swivel on my barstool and ask for justification of the “Nam.”
If the reply was an apology, no sweat.
But given the slightest provocation, him standing his ground, or worse, a smirk, or worst of all, an expression of pity, I’d un-ass him from his stool with a wild, drunken punch, and the donnybrook was on.

Back in Vietnam, as my alarm clock rang and rang, I slowly crawled out of bed. I didn’t recollect when I last climbed out of the sack so early voluntarily. Last time I was up at this wretched hour was in Basic Training when they switched on the barracks lights and blew whistles, à la Sergeant Spangler.

Our Vietnamese pal Charlie had invited us to a public execution, a firing squad, at which the guest of dishonor, a wealthy Chinese rice wholesaler and speculator from Cholon, was to be staked in front of sandbags and dispatched to his ancestors. He’d been convicted of withholding the Vietnamese staple to reduce supply and raise demand, and, concomitantly, price, the grist of Econ 101.

Charlie told me to be out front of our hotel and don’t be late. When they say dawn, he said, they mean dawn, a rare punctuality in this land.

After the execution, I’d have a normally abnormal day’s duty at the Fighting 803rd, then a going-away party for an old buddy tonight.
Tomorrow, a peek-a-boo into the Annex, then to Mai’s.

Two big
big
big
big
big
days.

The
mufflerless
jalopy on the other bunk was a snoring Ziggy. Although he’d never been to an execution either, he said to let him know when they started holding them at a decent hour, like high noon. He’d bring a box lunch.

Just as well. No way would both of us fit on the back of Charlie’s Honda motorbike. He was waiting outside, silently chastising me for being late. My tardiness was due to my scrounging for a water glass that’d serve as a vase. I’d keep Mai’s white lily in it until it turned into shriveled black goop.

Charlie and I slalomed through semi-dark streets, avoiding pedestrians and vehicles I couldn’t see till we blurred on by so closely I could smell fish sauce and tobacco layered upon the smells of humanity and the smells of inhumanity. Bugs pinged against the Honda and us. I could not ascertain if Charlie’s transportation had functioning brakes.

I yelled, “This guy they’re shooting, how long was his trial?”

“Trial?”

“No trial?”

“Maybe trial, maybe no trial.”

“How do they know he’s guilty? How’d they convict him?”

“Rich Chinaman,” he yelled in explanation.

Charlie’s casual racism didn’t offend me. He had nothing on us. Soldiers from northern states stationed in our South in the early- and mid-1960s spoke incredulously of bus stations with segregated bathrooms for His, Hers and Colored, of White and Colored drinking fountains. Of cross burnings illuminating the night sky, a white-trash jamboree, as American to the good ol’ locals as apple pie.

I was reminded of Henri Michaux, an entertainingly-goofy
Belgium
writer. His
A
Barbarian in Asia
routinely referred to Chinese as Chinamen. In one sentence, he wrote that Chinamen should be thought of as animals. In another, he suggested that the Chinaman could’ve invented the fork, but that the instruments required no skill or manipulation (as opposed to chopsticks), and was thus distasteful to him. Talk about contradictory feelings.
 

The busy noises of a new day were in the air. Americans claimed that the “gooks” were lazy because of their afternoon siestas and their passive ways, but here they were, up at first light, raring to go. Ziggy and I were likewise partial to siestas when we could sneak one in, as performing our duty at the 803rd Liaison Detachment when it was 100 degrees and 100 percent humidity, as it was every day, tended to enervate, whether we were doing anything useful or not.

“Always the Chinese,” I yelled.
“Always the same offenses.”

“Chinaman
make
bookoo
money on rice. Hoard rice. Price
go
up. Sell.
Vietnamee
no can buy. No eat.”

If they shot everybody in this town who made a piaster under the table or on the war, they’d have to hold the executions in Arabia, where there was enough sand for the sandbags. Vietnamese Chinese had the rice trade sewed up, and Singh and the East Indians were the shopkeepers.

Both ethnic minorities were the engines of
Southeast Asia
’s economy. Leaders who crowed like roosters as they gave the Chinese and the Indians the bum’s rush in the name of nationalism soon had no economies. They were easy scapegoats, the Chinese in particular. Vietnamese
Vietnamese
liked Chinese Vietnamese as much as Vietnamese Buddhists liked Vietnamese Catholics.
And vice versa.

I asked, “The latest coup, what’s going on there?”

Charlie rattled off names, who was in, who was out.
Thieu
, Khanh, Minh,
Chieu
,
Ky
, Co, Thi. Some registered to me as major players in the ongoing soap opera. All were generals.

“Old general in
National
Palace
,” Charlie said, making a sweeping motion with a hand I wished he’d keep on the handlebars. “Fly out on Air France Caravelle jet. Go visit money in Swiss bank account.”

“The new guys, any improvement?”

“Same same.”

I wondered what the
Dien Bien Phu
ants thought of the
Saigon
political circus, the musical chairs. As much as I feared and loathed them, I severely doubted if North Vietnamese generals had Swiss bank accounts.

The execution was to be in a plaza between Cholon and downtown
Saigon
at an intersection of three wide streets. We made the scene as the sun was coming up. The crowd was jam-packed, jabbering,
shoulder
to shoulder. We dismounted and Charlie walked his bike through. If he’d put the kickstand down and left it, he’d be
Hondaless
in two minutes flat.

We were fifty yards out when we heard a volley of shots. Charlie cussed in his own language, using fully half of my Vietnamese vocabulary.

I’d been asking myself since accepting his invitation if I was being polite or if it was bloodlust. And was my fussing to find a flower vase subconscious procrastination? That I was relieved we missed the killing provided the truthful answer.

“No sweat, Charlie. We’ll catch the next one.”

“We go up and look, Joe,” he said, inching forward.

“In case they didn’t collect all the body parts?”

“Soul not
go
when you killed as bad man.”

“There’s something to see?”

“No.
Feel.
In the air.
For soul.
Feel if it
go
.”

“You believe that, Charlie?”

“Maybe believe. Maybe no believe.”

This was the closest we’d come to talking religion. I wasn’t sure if Charlie was Catholic or Buddhist or a member of my Atheist faith.

We pushed ahead, fighting a reverse tide. Spectators were listless and drowsy, yawning, breakfast on their minds. The fun was over, as if the gun ending a football game had sounded.
 

What remained were sandbags against a cement wall. There were holes in them, some traced with fresh blood. The guest of honor and the timbers they’d tied him to
were
leaving in the rear of an ARVN deuce-and-a-half truck. I saw a wooden post and the bottoms of his sandals. If Charlie felt a post mortem slipstream, he didn’t say so.