Monkey on a Chain (44 page)

“Yes. Too bad.”

He noticed my bottle was empty and picked it up. “This number ten shit,” he said. “You wait.”

He ducked behind the bar and came up with a bottle of cognac, Martell’s. “This number one shit,” he said. “You drink, on Bob.”

“We drink together, Bob,” I said. I poured him one and we touched glasses.

“You tell me something,” he said. “You army, right? You ever kill people?”

I nodded.

“Vietnamese people?”

I looked him in the face and nodded again, slowly. “You army too,” I said. “You kill people? Vietnamese people?”

He met my gaze levelly. “Kill all kind people. Even kill Chinese, one time. All kind people. No difference.” He took a sip of cognac. “Too bad,” he said.

I agreed. “Too bad. Vietnam number one. Too bad.”

We drank together. Later, he asked me, “You have girl, Rainbow? You have baby?”

I shook my head. No girl, no baby.

He shook his head. “Too bad. Two babies for me,” he told me. “One boy, one girl. Boy go fight. Dead now. Girl okay though. She number one daughter. Take good care of me.”

“You don’t have wife?”

“One wife. Bomb get her, then boy go fight.”

“American bomb?”

“Number ten bomb.”

I nodded. “Too bad. Maybe things get better.”

“Maybe.” He shook his head though. “I don’t think things get better for me. Maybe they get better for my baby.”

He looked around, noticing how late it was getting. “I go lock up now,” he said. “You drink. Miss Winnie take good care of you, bring you more bottle.” He paused, then offered his hand. “Good luck, you.”

I shook with him. “Good luck, Bob. You take care of your baby.”

“I try,” he told me. “Always I try.”

Winnie had pulled on some kind of shift. She came and sat beside me. I offered her some of the cognac, but she shook her head. “No drink,” she said firmly. “Bad shit. You go sleep now?”

I nodded and picked up the bottle. She led me down a hallway behind the bar to a small, windowless room with a cot, a table, and a wall full of pictures cut from American and French movie magazines.

“This my room,” she told me. “Number one. No take GIs here. You sleep here?”

I smiled at her and set the bottle on her table.

“My father say you okay GI,” she said. “You want me?”

“Yes.”

She nodded matter-of-factly. “Good. Tonight we fuckee-suckee. Tomorrow you give me present. Maybe I don’t call you no fucking queer.”

She stepped out of her dress and started working on my pants. When she finished, we lay down and danced the old dance. She was strong. She held me tightly and ground her teeth at the end, and I was completely drained when we finished. She slept with her back to me on the narrow cot. The room was hot. No air moved, and we stuck together with our sweat. I didn’t sleep until late, very late, and I woke up early. She made us a breakfast of rice and an egg with a little hot sauce. I gave her all the piasters I had left and caught a cab back to my quarters.

Given the time and place, it hadn’t been such a bad twenty-first birthday. Remembering it had made me thirsty, though. I called the bartender over and asked if he stocked Martell’s. He did, and I bought a snifter, for whatever the memory was worth.

April showed up as I was finishing it. She had showered and put on a summer dress in some fabric that looked like silk. Pale yellow, with a pair of sandals that matched.

I gave her a low whistle and she grinned happily at me.

She marched up to the bar and ordered a beer in a loud voice. The bartender asked what she wanted, and she looked at me. “Bring her a Bohemia,” I told him.

“What’s Bohemia?” she asked me.

“Mexican beer.”

He brought over a bottle, a frosted mug, and half a lime and set them in front of her. She didn’t reach for them, but just stared at him. “Well?” she demanded.

He looked confused. “Well, what?”

“Aren’t you going to check my ID?”

I laughed.

He sighed. “Okay. May I see your ID, miss?”

She dug the driver’s license and passport out of her purse and handed them over. He looked at them carefully, checked the pictures against her face, and handed them back. “Thanks,” he said, and walked away shaking his head.

April leaned over to me. “They must serve just anyone in here,” she said. She wanted me to share her outrage. “The first time I’ve ever been legal, and he didn’t ask for my ID!”

I watched in the mirror as she sampled her beer. Her first sip was hesitant; her second was enthusiastic. Looking at her, I was tempted to play her game. I had lived with her for four days, talked to her, even slept with her if you count sleeping. She had brought some heavy questions to my door. Who killed Toker? Who set the second explosive device in Toker’s house, and why? Who was rooting around in Johnny Walker’s business in Phoenix? What did Toker mean when he said that Squall Line was broken? Who had been waiting in our motel room that last night in Phoenix? And on, and on.

But the question that interested me the most, the one question I had no handle on at all, was why Toker brought April home from Hong Kong. He had despised the Vietnamese. As far as I knew, he had known Miss Phoung only peripherally. And yet her daughter had grown up in his house. He had been as good a father as he could to her, apparently. Why? There are always reasons for killing people. The reasons for caring for them could be more elusive.

April had finished half of her beer. I reached over, took the lime, squeezed it over her mug, dropped the rind in the beer. She looked dubious, but tried it and smacked her lips.

I grinned at her. “Let’s go eat.”

We carried our drinks into the restaurant and ordered the surf and turf special. It wasn’t bad. After we’d eaten, I asked April when she was born. “November 25, 1969,” she recited.

“No, I mean your real birth date,” I said.

She looked at me suspiciously. “Why do you want to know?”

“Just tell me, damn it!”

But she saw an advantage and decided to take it. She looked at me impassively. “Truth or Consequences.”

I sighed and said, “Let’s go then.” I was going to have to play, eventually, and might as well get it over with. April looked triumphant. I wondered what she had planned for me.

I ordered a snifter of Martell’s and another Bohemia for April and paid the bill. We carried the drinks back to the room and sat on the balcony overlooking the city.

It was early evening, pleasantly cool after the day’s heat. The city lights fell away from our location on the side of the mountain, down toward the black strip that marked the Rio Grande. On the other side, the lights were few and farther between. Juarez. It would be easy to get lost there.

The balcony was as wide as the room, but only about five feet deep. April leaned back in her chair and propped her feet on the wrought iron rafting that fenced us away from a three-story drop to the parking lot. Her dress slid up to mid-thigh. There was no moon, but there was enough light from the room behind us to see her face. She looked excited.

“Me first,” she said.

“I’ve already started,” I told her, “but I think you better tell me the rules.”

“Simple. We take turns asking questions. We can answer or not, but if we answer we have to tell the truth. If we don’t answer, we have to take the consequences.”

“Isn’t this a little silly?”

She laughed. “Your first question. No, it’s not silly. You swear to either tell the truth or take the consequences. So there’s no reason to lie. And if you take the consequences, that tells me something too. My question.” She looked at me. “What is Squall Line?”

“That’s outside the game. I told you I’d tell you about it if the time came that I had to. Not otherwise.”

“Then I’ll rephrase it. Why does Squall Line have to be outside the game?”

“Squall Line was the code name of a government operation. A top secret operation. Knowing about it could get you in trouble. I wish I didn’t know about it. My question. When and where were you born? I want the exact date and place.”

“I don’t know the place. A house outside Ho Chi Min City, I think. It was on April third, 1971. Why?”

“That’s your question. Because it means you were conceived in early July of ’seventy. I wanted to know when so I would know who was in-country.”

Her eyes widened. “Who was?”

I shook my head. “That’s your next question. How did Toker find you?”

“I don’t know. We were living in a kind of shed in the camp in Hong Kong. One evening a policeman and an immigration officer came. It was about dark, and we were eating. We had rice, I remember, and a little bit of fish, and I didn’t get any of the fish because I was not part of the family, and also maybe because I was only a girl.

“When they came in, I was scared, and I went to the place where we slept and tried to hide. They talked to Mr. Nguyen for a little while and then he yelled for me. He looked very angry. I didn’t come right away because I was afraid, but the other kids pushed me out so that he wouldn’t be mad at them. And also because they didn’t like me because I wasn’t a real Vietnamese and I was a burden on their family. Then Mr. Nguyen grabbed my arm and handed it to the policeman. He looked like he hated me.

“But the policeman didn’t look mad at me, so I stopped crying after we left. They took me to an office. It was the first time I’d been inside the camp offices. A man came in, an American with a funny beard, and asked me some questions, and then they took me to a nice place. They gave me food. Fish and a sweet bun. I stayed with the American for a day, and I was in a different part of the camp for almost a week. Then Mr. Bow came and told me he was going to adopt me and take me to America where I could be an American too. I asked if he was a cowboy, and he looked surprised, but he said that he wasn’t.”

She took a deep breath. “Now, who was there when I was conceived?” Answering my question had been hard for her. I tried to put my hand on her shoulder, just to touch her, but she shrugged me away. She didn’t want sympathy. She wanted an answer. “Who?” she demanded.

“As best I can remember, we all were,” I said. “Roy. He was a captain by then. Captain William Rodgers. He was getting short. And there was Sissy. Master Sergeant Juan Cisneros. He was the first man Roy took into our operation. He’d been in Manila and just rotated back in-country. He was killed later. Johnny Walker was Staff Sergeant John Coleman. He was about to ship out. He had just recruited Toker to take his place, to wind down the operation and close the books. Toker you know about.”

“And you.” She looked at me accusingly.

“Yes. And me.”

“So any one of you could be my father?”

“I don’t think so. I couldn’t, for sure. I never made love with…with your mother. It couldn’t have been Walker. You aren’t dark enough. That leaves Roy, Sissy, and Toker. But Toker had only been around for a couple of weeks. He didn’t know Miss Phoung very well. He didn’t know any of us very well yet, for that matter. I mean, as men. Of course, we were all in it together.”

“In the operation?”

“That, too. I meant in the war.”

“And this Sissy man?”

“That was Juan Cisneros. We called him Sissy. He was the first man Roy brought in. He was also the one who met your mother and introduced her to Roy. He was killed in ’seventy.”

“Killed how?”

“In Squall Line.” I cleared my throat. “It’s my turn. How did Toker treat you?”

“He was good to me.”

“I mean, did he treat you like a daughter? Or like a woman?”

She stared at me. I was a little embarrassed and didn’t meet her eyes. “You want to know about sex? Did he ever try to have sex with me?”

“It’s just that I don’t understand his motives.” I felt awkward talking about it and cleared my throat. “I told you that he didn’t like the Vietnamese much when we were over there. So I guess my question is, what was his motive? Sex? Did he act like he felt guilty about the war? Was he using you to make up for something? Or did he treat you like you were really his daughter?”

She thought about it. “I always felt he treated me like a daughter,” she said slowly. “He wasn’t a very warm, touching kind of man. I thought about it sometimes when I was alone, after I got older, and I decided that if he had a real daughter, he wouldn’t have treated her any differently. But of course he cut me out of his will. He wouldn’t have done that to a real daughter. And then I found out that he had never really adopted me. I guess I can’t answer your question. I don’t know what his motive was.”

We sat in silence, thinking about Toker. Then April shook herself. “My turn,” she said. “What was my mother like?”

That was hard to answer. Painful. I knew I wasn’t going to like this game. “She was a pretty woman,” I said. “She was about your age at that time. Shorter, though. Maybe five foot three. Slim. Long black hair, like yours. Her eyes were darker, and her cheekbones were very high. She had more slant to her eyes. Her hands and feet were long and narrow. She liked to wear Ao Dai’s.”

“I don’t mean that. Was she a prostitute?”

That came out of left field, but I could see where she might have gotten the idea. “No, she was a woman who made the best of a difficult situation. Her father was some kind of government official, but he died. Her mother died shortly before Sissy met her. I never knew she had a sister. They must have been pretty poor. Then Sissy fell in love with her. I guess it was love. Anyway, he set her up in the house off Tu Do Street. That was back in ’sixty-eight, I think. Over a year before I met her. Roy was doing a tour in the Southern Command, Panama, at the time. Sissy and Walker were running the operation by themselves. All that happened before I came on the scene, so I can’t tell you exactly how it was, but she wasn’t a prostitute. She just had some hard decisions to make, and she made the best ones she could.”

“How did she wind up with Roy?”

“Sissy finished a tour in March of ’sixty-nine and arranged a short tour in the Philippines. We had business there. After he left, Miss Phoung stayed on. It was her house. At least I think Sissy put it in her name before he left. The rest of the group, Roy and Walker at that time, kept meeting there. It had become a sort of headquarters. I don’t know exactly how it happened, but Roy was living there with her when I was brought in. That was in May. And now it’s my turn. Tell me about life with your aunt.”