Dragon Lady (4 page)

His focus was on his sci-fi magazine, probably at the section in the story where
Troy
was obliterating an invading armada of the potato salad critters. The closer Mariner 4 got to Mars, the less interested Ziggy was in this planet. A sci-fi yarn could be set anywhere in the universe.

The planet Mars, relatively speaking, was right around the corner from us. Mariner-4 was bringing reality and escape together for him. I hoped it wasn’t gonna be a head-on collision. His sci-fi was Ziggy’s greatest of escapes.

My reality was the twelve months I was spending in Vietnam. That was the standard tour. Then it was
Back
to the World, the Land of the Big PX, the U.S. of A. You didn’t have to extend unless you wanted to. I had four months left. When you hit one hundred days to go, you were entitled to ownership of a short-timer’s calendar. Everyone counted the days before boarding a Boeing 707. Ziggy, as of now, had eighty-five and a wake-up, but he couldn’t care less. I’d had to buy his calendar and
maintain it for him, for Chrissake.

We got back to the 803rd, gone a mere three hours. When the captain saw what we’d parked at the curb, he looked at us as if we walked on water. “Men, I’m putting in papers to immediately elevate you to private first class.”

I thanked him as humbly as I could manage. As happy as I would’ve been to be promoted, the clerk-typist slot was foremost on my mind. As PFCs, we’d be booted out of the 803rd sooner or later. It was inevitable. I did not wish to be helicoptered into the godforsaken to hunt Victor Charles and for Victor Charles to surely reciprocate.

I wanted a clerk-typist MOS on my résumé. I wanted to be where Charlie would have to barge into my clean, dry office and fire a round through my Underwood to get me.

“Thank you, sir. I request that you send Private Zbitgysz and me to typing school so we can improve our skills on the job and become improved soldiers and lighten PFC Bierce’s burden.”

Bierce didn’t look up, but his clickety-clack-clack ceased.

“Out of the question, Joe.
Haven’t you been listening? We’re mobilizing on a comprehensive wartime footing. We have to sacrifice and do the job that best serves our country. You’re on permanent special assignment.”
 

“What kind of special assignment, sir.”

“Whatever kind I see fit to assign you,” he said. “In appreciation of your efforts to date, take the rest of the day off.”

I had a brainstorm. “Sir, the Jeep.”

“What about it?”

“Sir, it is the colonel’s Jeep, is it not?”

“So?”

“Well, sir, I thought that if before turning it over to him, you might care to avail yourself of it for any mission you so desired. It was your foresight that began the process.”

“True,” he said thoughtfully.

“If there is
any
special assignment in which you are taking a field leadership role and it’s convenient to have transportation and a driver and an assistant, Private Zbitgysz and I hereby volunteer. Discretion is guaranteed.”

Ziggy grunted in confusion.

Colonel Lanyard yelled from his office, “Papersmith!”

Up the captain popped like a jack-in-the-box. As he scurried down the hallway, I pocketed his Dragon Lady Polaroid. If Papersmith swallowed the bait, I’d be seeing her in person soon.

We heard heavy trucks brake at the Annex. We went out and saw that they were escorted by Jeeps. MPs piled out of Jeeps. They formed a perimeter around the trucks. I thought that they were dropping in to grill Ziggy and me about our day’s activities, but they paid us no attention whatsoever.

They were babysitting as oddballs unloaded boxed air conditioners from the trucks and rolled them into the Annex on handcarts.

One after another after another.

5.

THE FOLLOWING morning, Ziggy and I went in early. I finished writing a letter home and left it in the mail room, which was in a corner of the supply room. The versatile PFC A. Bierce would pick up the mail later on.

My feeble, prosaic correspondence:

Dear Mother and family,

Having semi-wonderful time, am glad you don’t have to be here. As a member of an elite alternative matériel resource team, I’m doing special assignments, but can’t discuss them as they are classified, as is the military organization to which I am assigned. I have enhanced my personal security, so I’m as safe as anybody over here can be.

Cordially,

Joseph J. Joe IV

The distance between Mother and me was greater than the seventy-four-hundred statute miles between Seattle and Saigon. Our formality was a long story, which I’ll explain as we go. It was in retaliation to Mother’s coolness, or perhaps she’d retaliated against me; it’s unclear how and when it escalated in earnest. We’d been remote since my time in her womb--she’d joked that I’d kicked her black and blue, and had been a long, painful delivery. I sensed she’d suffered postpartum depression ever since.

To be honest, my behavior since I’d been weaned had strained our relationship. Stepfather very recently leaving Mother for a younger woman had not perked up her or her prose.

While I haven’t encountered her in my afterlife surroundings, I know she’s here. Mother preceded me by twenty-two years, victim of a stroke. I expect Mother to be in a burb, not too awfully far from me. Mother and I will connect in The Great Beyond. Time is not of the essence. When we do cross paths, we shall cling and hug and cry. I know we will.

I suppose I’ll bump into Stepfather too, as chronology is the only demographic I can discern. I don’t anticipate seeing Joes I and II. No ladies in hoop skirts, no men with powdered wigs. Nor folks decked out in loincloths or chain mail or togas.

According to our busy rumor mill, the afterworld occupies separate levels, partial century by partial century, as if floor by floor in a department store. Housewares on Six, Seventeenth Century on Nine, in that vein. As in
Vietnam
, the grapevine is proving to be the most reliable media.

I have to believe these stories, although I am unable to participate in the chitchat.

And why can’t I?

Let me back up a bit.

If your conception of The Great Beyond is running along conventional lines in terms of leadership, forget it. There is no St. Peter pulling sentry duty at any gate, pearly or otherwise. Please be assured, too, that I did not arrive after paddling up the River Styx in a leaky kayak. I simply materialized where I am, wherever that is.

God?
A big, cranky bearded guy in a robe, flinging lightning bolts? Haven’t seen him yet and am not anxious to.

I’m in a middle-class subdivision on a cul-de-sac. I’m the center home of three, in a split-level identical to the other two, right down to the beige-and-blue paint scheme. I rattle around in what must be eighteen-hundred square feet of space. Our infrastructure can use work. I have lawn and landscaping care that I never see, but they are lousy edgers and miss too many dandelions. My patio sliders stick and there’s peeling paint in the third bedroom.

My kitchen takes up half the ground level. With its granite countertops, stainless steel appliances, and copper cookware hanging above a center island, it’s far too upscale for the neighborhood.

Food is provided and mysteriously replaced when consumed.
If you can call it food.
The freezer compartment is crammed with TV dinners. The pantry is floor to ceiling with army MREs and the earlier C-rations which we had when I was in. The Cs
include
delicacies I’d had to eat such as ham and lima beans and chicken and noodles. The only appliance required for meal preparation is the microwave.

I have a two-car garage but no car. I have not seen a motor vehicle in The Great Beyond.

I have cable television with 8,720 channels. All except three are snow and static. I tune in any of the three, and five minutes later I want to throw a chair at the fifty-two-inch HDTV screen.

Channel 82 is an afternoon talk show that runs endlessly without commercial interruption. It is as banal and excretal as any I’d ever seen. The hosts work in shifts and are all the same. They smile and ask cutting-edge questions that are stupid beyond belief (“How do you feel now that you’re dead?”). There is one topic: Vietnam. Their guests range from U.S. generals to LBJ to Ho Chi Minh to killed veterans of all nations participating to protesting hippies. Never is a conclusion reached.

 
Channel 316 is reality TV as foul and moronic as any in The Land of the Living. There is one topic: multiple marriage and divorce. Nobody who is less than a three-time loser qualifies. Serial brides and grooms remarry. The camera follows them everywhere including the bedroom throughout weeks or sometimes days of marital bliss. The program then foots the bill for a trip to Vegas and a quickie divorce.

Channel 667 is solid documentaries. Guess the topics?
Yeah, the French Indochina War and our conflict.
They are narrated by unseen voices that range from close facsimiles of David Frost to Eric Sevareid to Edward R. Murrow to Oprah.
The war stories alternate with sensational biographies of famous serial brides and grooms.
You know who I’m talking about.
Liz and Mickey and Zsa
Zsa
.
Lesser
knowns
too.

The boy-girl has nothing to do with Vietnam. If I were paranoid, I might take this insipid fare personally, me and my matrimonial disasters.

Nonetheless, it’s a struggle shutting off the tube. At one elevator music stretch, “You Light
Up
My Life” played for a week, permeating the walls of my home. The headaches I had that ticketed me here are gone, but an hour of The Great Beyond Television Network makes me wonder why I don’t have one.

I go for long walks. Winding narrow streets bristle with deserted cul-de-sacs, carbon copies of mine. Every quarter mile or so there is the same dreary strip mall. I’m through wondering how they do this or anything else.

Dry cleaners.
Nail salon.
Teriyaki.
A payday loan outfit that loans money that does not exist to non-people who are on no payrolls.
Phỡ
cafes.
A hairdresser with no customers (note: my hair never grows. Or it’s trimmed at night by the same beings who stock my fridge and larder).
A tax preparation place.
Since we have no income, it logically follows that we don’t pay taxes. It’s staffed by a middle-aged woman with hair pulled into a gray bun and horn-rimmed glasses held by a chain. She just sits there.

Again, I have seen no vehicles in The Great Beyond, but the strip mall lot is stained with dripped oil from the beaters that never park here. Empty pop cans and candy bar wrappers are scattered. I try to police them up, to make myself useful. They’re holograms.

Those aforementioned rumors?
Why am I unable to participate in the chitchat?
Because the people who operate and frequent the shops, who exchange gossip regarding multi-levels of The Great Beyond, are nonexistent.
You can walk right through them, as if you’re in the middle of the field in Madden Football. So fiendishly lifelike are
these
holograms that at first sight I’m deceived. I shake a hand and squeeze air.

I am the only visitor.
Ever.
A non-customer, if you will.

I am in the midst of sadistic and well-planned chaos.

 
I trudge home from the mall, so alone.

That is about to change, but the craziness of 1965 Saigon is not.

Captain Dean Papersmith came into the 803rd and summoned us to his office. We reported with snappy salutes. Something was different I couldn’t quite put my finger on.

“Are you men cigarette smokers?” he asked, knowing the answer if he’d had one ounce of observational skill.

Smoking was the one bad habit Ziggy and I had somehow declined to take up.

“Uh, no sir,” I said.

“That’s splendid, troopers. Smoking isn’t good for you. It cuts down on your wind and stains your fingers and teeth. Let’s saddle up. We have important work to do.”

Now it registered what was different. There were dark perspiration spots at the captain’s armpits. His air conditioner was gone.

“Sir,” Ziggy said, pointing at the naked window. There was nothing on the sill except the deep gouges we’d made wishing the unit into the tight opening.
“How come, sir?”

“As you were, Private Zbitgysz.
We are embarking on a special assignment. Keep your mind on business and come along.”

We trailed him out of the 803rd like faithful puppies.

I sneaked a peek into Colonel Jake Lanyard’s office. Captain Papersmith’s air conditioner was in the colonel’s window, humming a sweet tune and dispensing chilly air. I knew why Colonel Lanyard had called Captain Papersmith into his office yesterday. He’d pulled rank on the captain and re-requisitioned the air conditioner. We were all afraid of Colonel Lanyard, but Captain Papersmith was terrified of him.

All the
better for me, as it distracted the captain from the missing Dragon Lady Polaroid.
Which had spent the night under my pillow and in my heart.

We hopped into the colonel’s Jeep, which was still the captain’s Jeep. He told me to drive. Ziggy rode shotgun. The captain sat in the rear, ramrod stiff, as if he were Patton advancing into Germany. He directed us to his bachelor officers’ quarters.

“Those air conditioners that arrived yesterday at the annex, sir? Couldn’t they spare one for the detachment adjutant and company commander?”

“This isn’t
Twenty Questions
,
soldier. Pay attention to your driving.
Left at the corner.
That door.
There.”

Yes sir, no sir, yes sir, no sir, fuck you, sir. We triple-parked and he went in to his BOQ. You couldn’t blame people for not telling us things, but I couldn’t help but be offended.
Phantom air conditioners and the captain asking us if we smoked.
Gimme a break.
Nobody was concerned about our health in general and our lungs in particular.

An astronaut the spitting image of Pat Boone starred on the cover of Ziggy’s magazine. He was negotiating a path in a forest of giant asparagus. The asparagi had eyeballs, but Pat didn’t seem to notice. Twin suns beat down on him, reminding me how toasty it was in
Saigon
, even in the morning.

I walked to a Howard Johnson. That’s what GIs called the food and drink carts that were all over town. I bought a sandwich and a
Biere Larue
. I didn’t know what went into the sandwich, didn’t want to know, but it tasted edible.
Same with the
Larue
.
Brewed nearby,
Larue
looked like watered-down piss, but it’d been cooled in a bucket of water. I chugalugged, cutting the sharp edges of yesterday’s Johnny Red.

Ziggy was so intent on his sci-fi reading and so anxious about Mariner 4’s Mars approach that we hadn’t commented on the Annex’s new air conditioners. I asked what he thought the Fighting 803rd Annex actually was.

Eyes on his magazine, he said, “Joey, our outfit and the Annex, it’s gotta be high
muckety
-muck shit they’re doing on account of we’re hiding in plain sight where the Cong and everyone else thinks the 803rd is a zero or it’d have a big fat title and be at Tan Son Nhat or Washington, D.C. and be guarded by like a division of Marines, but since it ain’t, you think it’s so diddly-shit nothing, it’s invisible, which is the highest security in the world for what them oddballs are doing over there, whatever it is they’re doing.”

Ziggy could throw you a wicked curveball. From being more silent than any strong silent type, he’d go logorrheic. His cockeyed insights had a stunning clarity. My hunches agreed with that assessment, but no way could I put them into words so inarticulately logical. I thought of Ziggy as an idiot savant with an IQ of either fifty or three hundred, depending on what side of the bed he got up on.
Most of the time he was scarily smart.
These days, you’d call him dyslectic and autistic and introverted and disturbed and brilliant, any and all of the above.

His outrageous opinions careened out of nowhere. The other day he’d blathered on about the 1964 Olympics in
Tokyo
. He said the Games were like
Pearl Harbor
, except they were jamming a foot in the door instead of firing a torpedo into a hull. He said that they’d be flooding our market. Before we knew it, we’d all
be driving Jap cars, watching their TVs, playing their record players, and snapping pictures with their cameras.

Crazy.
Looney Tunes, I’d thought. Not a chance. A popular saying of the day was that Japanese cars were made out of American beer cans.
 

Yeah, uh-huh, crazy
, I think now, as my mortal remains decompose in a Japanese-made coffin.