The Intruders (24 page)

A wF-EK AFrER JAKE AND FLAP VISMED CUBI POINT FOR three whole hours,
Columbia maneuvered herself against the carrier pier.

Subic Bay, Olongapo City across the Shit River, the BOO pool, the Cubi O
Club with its banks of telephone booths and the Ready Room Bar out
back-Jake Grafton had seen it all too recently and it brought back too
many memories.

He got a roll of quarters and sat in a vacant telephone booth with a gin
and tonic, but he didn’t make a call. Callie wasn’t in Hong Kong—she
was in Chicago. Mail was arriving regularly but there were no letters
from her; in fact, she hadn’t written since he called her from Hawaii.

Somehow he had screwed it up. He sat in the phone booth smoking a
cigarette and sipping the drink and wondered where it had gone wrong.

Well, you can’t go back. That’s one of LIFE’s hard truths.

The song only goes in one direction and you can’t run it backward.

Morgan McPherson, Corey Ford and the Boxman were gone, gone forever.
Tiger Cole was undergoing rehab at the Naval Aeromedical Institute in
Pensacola and working out each day in the gym where the AOCS classes did
their thing, in that converted seaplane hangar on the wharf. Sammy
Lundeen was writing orders at the Bureau of Naval Personnel in
Washington, Skipper Camparelli was on an admiral’s staff at Oceana. Both
the Augies had gotten out of the Navy-Big was going to grad school
someplace and Little was in dental school in Philadelphia.

And he was here, sitting in fucking Cubi Point in a fucking phone booth
with the door open, listening to a new crop Of flyers get drunk and talk
about going across the bridge tonight and argue about whether the whores
of Po City were worth the risk.

They’re up there now near the bar, roaring that old song:

“Here I sit in Ready Room Four, Just dreaming of Cubi and my Olongapo
whore.

Oh Lupe, dear Lupe’s the gal I adore, She’s my hot-fucking, cock-sucking
Olongapo whore . . .

All his friends were getting on with their fives and he was stuck in
this shithole at the edge of the known universe. The war was over and
he had no place to go. The woman he wanted didn’t want him and the
flying wasn’t fun anymore.

It was just dangerous. That might be enough for the Real McCoy, but it
wasn’t for Jake Grafton.

He finished his first drink and began on his second-he always ordered
his drinks two at a time in this place-and lit another cigarette.

He was just flat tired of it-tired of all of it. He was tired of the
flying, tired of the flyers, tired of the stink of the ship, the stink
of the sailors, the stink of his flight suit. He was tired of Navy
showers, tired of floating around on a fucking gray boat, tired of
sitting in saloons like this one, tired of being twenty-eight years old
with not prospect one.

“Hey, whatcha doin’ in there?” Flap Le Beau.

“What’s it look like, dumb ass? I’m waiting for a phone call.”

“From who?”

“Miss June. The Pentagon. Hollywood. Walter Crankcase.

The commissioner of baseball. Whoever.”

“I’m getting drunk.”

“You look pretty sober to me.”

“Just got started.”

“Want any company, or is this a solo drunk?”

“Are you waiting for a call?”

“No. The only one who could conceivably want to talk to me would be the
Lord, and I ain’t sure about Him. But He knows where to find me if and
when.”

“That’s comforting, if true. But you say you’re not sure?”

“No, I’m not.”

“Life’s like that.”

“Come on up to the bar. I’ll buy the next round.”

“Some of that Marine money would be welcome,” Jake admitted. He pried
himself from the booth and followed Flap along the hallway and up the
short flight of stairs into the bar room.

Flap ordered a beer and Jake acquired two more gin and tonics. “Only
drink for the tropics,” he told Flap, who cheerfully paid the
seventy-five-cent tab and tossed an extra dime on the counter for the
bartender. These Americans were high rollers.

“Miss June, hub?”

“Yeah,” said Jake Grafton. “I wrote her a fan letter about her tits.
Gave her the number of that booth. Told her when I was gonna be in
Cubi. She’ll call anytime.”

“Let’s go play golf. We got enough time before dark.”

“Golf’s a lot of work. Whacking that ball around in this heat and
humidity …”

“Come on,” Flap said. “Bring your drinks. You can drive the golf
cart.”

“Oh Lupe, dear Lupe’s the gal I adore, She’s my hot-fitcking,
cock-sucking olongapo whore…

There was a line of taxis in front of the club. Jake and Flap went to
the one at the head of the line. Jake took huge slurps of both his
drinks before he maneuvered himself into the tiny backseat, so he would
be less likely to spill any.

And away they went in a cloud of blue smoke, the little engine in the
tiny car revving mightily, the Filipino driver hunched over the wheel
and punching the clutch and slamming the shift lever around like Mario
Andretti.

The golf course was in a valley. Hacked out of the jungle were long,
rolling fairways and manicured greens with sand traps and fluttering
hole flags. Somewhere up there in the lush tropical foliage beyond the
rough was the base fence, a ten-foot-high chain-link affair topped by
barbed wire. Beyond the base fence were some of the world’s poorest
people, kept in line by a Third World military establishment and ruled
by a corrupt, piss-pot tyrant. The native laborers who maintained this
golf course, and were of course not allowed to play on it, were paid the
magnificent sum of one U.S. dollar a day as wages.

The whole damned scene was ludicrous, especially if you were working on
your fourth drink of the hour. The best thing was not to think about
it, not to contemplate that vast social chasm between the men running
lawrunowers and raking sand traps and the half-tanked fool driving this
shiny little made-in-Japan golf cart. Best not to dwell on the shared
humanity or the Grand Canyon that separated their dreams and yours.

The heat and humidity made the air thick, oppressive, but it was
tolerable here in the golf cart with the faded canvas top providing
shade. Jake stuck to piloting the cart while Flap drove, chipped and
putted.

“Hotter than hell,” Jake told Flap.

“Yeah. Fucking tropical rain forest.”

“Jungle.”

“Rain forest. Nobody gives a shit about jungle, but they bleed copious
dollars over rain forest.”

“Why is that?”

“I dunno. I got a seven on that last hole.”

“That’s a lot of strokes. You aren’t very good at this.”

“When I play golf, I play a lot of it. The object of the game is
whacking the ball.”

“Keep your own score. I’m just driving.”

“Driver has to keep score. That’s the way it’s done at all -9 R

the top clubs. Pebble Beach, Inverness, everywhere. Gimme a six on the
first hole and a seven on this one.”

“You wouldn’t cheat, would you?”

“Who? Me? Of course I’d cheat. I’m a nigger, remember?”

Jake wrote down the numbers and put the cart in motion.

“You shouldn’t call yourself a nigger. It isn’t right.”

“What do you know about it? I’m the black man.”

“Yeah, but I have to listen to it. And I don’t like the word.”

“Bet you used it some yourself.”

“When I was a kid, yeah. But I don’t like it.”

“Just drink and drive. It’s too damn hot to think.”

“Don’t use that word. I mean it.”

“If it’ll make you happy,”

“I’m out of booze.”

“Well, you can get drunk tonight. Right now you can sit half-tanked and
enjoy the pleasure of watching the world’s greatest black colored Negro
African-American golfer while you contemplate your many heinous sins.”

“It seemed like a good day for a drunk.”

“I’ve had days like that.”

The problem was, Jake finally admitted to himself, somewhere along the
fourth fairway, that he had no dreams. Everyone needs dreams, goals to
work toward, and he didn’t have any. That fact, and the gin, depressed
him profoundly.

He didn’t want to be skipper of a squadron, or an admiral, or a farmer.
Nor did he want to be an executive vice president in charge of something
or other for some grand, important corporation, luxuriating in his new
Buick and his generous expense account and his comfortable semi-custom
house in an upscale real estate development and his blond wife with the
big smile, big tits and purse full of supermarket coupons. He dit want
a stock portfolio and ie n’t want to spend his mornings poring over the
Wall Street Journal to see how rich he was. Just for the record, he
also didn’t give a damn about French novels and doubted if he ever
could.

He didn’t want anything. And he didn’t want to be anything.

What in hell do people do who don’t have any dreams?

True, he had once wanted to be a good attack pilot. To walk into the
ready room and be accepted as an equal by the best aerial warriors in
the world. He had achieved that ambition. And found it wasn’t worth a
mouthful of warm spit.

He had worked awful hard to get there, though.

That was something. He had wanted something and worked hard enough to
earn it. And he was still alive. So many of them weren’t. He was.

That was something, wasn’t it?

He was still thinking about that two holes later when Flap dropped into
the right seat of the cart after a tee shot and said, “There’s somebody
in the jungle up by the next hole.”

“How do you know?”

“Two big birds flew out of there while I was in the tee box.”

“Birds fly all the time,” Jake pointed out. “That’s the jungle. There’s
zillions of ‘em.”

“Not like that.”

Jake Grafton looked around. He and Flap were the only people in sight.
There weren’t even any Filipino groundskeepers. “So?”

“So I’m going to hit this next one over into the jungle on that side,
then go in there to look for the ball. You just sit . the cart and
look stupid.”

“I’ve heard that some locals like to crawl under the fence and rob
people on this course.”

“I’ve heard that too.”

“Let’s get outta here. You don’t need to play hero.”

“Naw. I’ll check ‘em out.”

:’I hear they carry guns.”

“I’ll be careful. Just stop up there by my ball and let me slap it over
into the jungle.”

“Don’t go killing anybody.”

“They’re probably just groundskeepers working on the perimeter fence or
something.”

“I mean it, Le Beau, you simple green machine shit. Don’t kW anybody.”

“Sure, Jake. Sure.”

So Flap addressed his ball in the fairway and shanked it off into the
rough. He said a cuss word and flopped into the cart. Jake motored
over to the spot where the ball had disappeared into the foliage and
stopped the cart. They were still sixty yards or so short of the green.

“I think this is the spot.”

“Yeah.”

Flap Le Beau climbed out and headed for the jungle, his wedge in his
left hand.

Jake examined his watch-5:35 P.m. The shadows were getting longer and
the heat seemed to be easing. That was something, anyhow. Damned Le
Beau! Off chasing stickup guys in this green shit-if there were any
stickup guys. Probably just a couple of birds that saw a snake or
something.

He waited. Swatted at a few bugs that decided he might provide a meal.
Amazing that there weren’t more bugs, when you thought about it. After
all, this was the jungle, the real genuine article with snakes and
lizards and rain by the mile and insects the size of birds that drank
blood instead of water.

Jake had seen enough jungle to last a lifetime in jungle survival school
in 1971, on the way to Vietnam that first time. They held the course in
the jungle somewhere around here. He ate a snake and did all that
Tarzan shit, back when he was on his way to being a good attack pilot.

For what?

That had been a stupid goal.

It had been a stupid war, and he had been stupid. Just stupid.

He was still sitting in the cart five minutes later trying to remember
why he had wanted to be an attack pilot all those years ago when Flap
came out of the jungle up by the green and waved at hiiin to come on up.
He was carrying something. As Jake got nearer he saw that Flap had a
submachine gun in his right hand and his golf club in his left. The
shaft of the club was bent at about a sixty-degree angle six inches or
so up from the head.

He pulled the cart alongside Flap and stopped. “Is that a Thompson?”

“Yeah. There were two guys. One had a machete and one had this.” Flap
tossed the bent club in the bin in back of the cart.

“Is it loaded?”

Flap eased the bolt back until he saw brass, then released it. “Yep.”

“Did you kill them?”

“Nope. They’re sleeping like babies.”

Jake got out of the cart. “Show me.”

“What do you want to see?”

“Come on, Le Beau, you moron. I want to see that these dumb little
geeks are still alive and that you didn’t kW them just for the fucking
fun of it.”

Jake took three steps and entered the foliage. Flap trailed along
behind.

The vegetation was extraordinarily thick for the first five or six feet,
then it thinned out somewhat and you could see.

For about ten feet.

“Well, where are they?”

Flap elbowed by him and led the way. One man lay on his face and the
other lay sprawled ten feet away, on his back.

Jake rolled the first man over and checked his pulse. A machete lay a
yard away. Well, his heart was still beating.

Jake picked up the machete and went over to the second man. He was
obviously breathing. As Jake stood there staring down at him, taking in
the sandals, the thin cotton shirt and dirty gray trousers, the short
hair and brown skin and broken teeth, the man’s eyes opened. Wide. In
terror. He tried to sit up.