Nashville watched the dustoff chopper grow from a pinhole on the horizon to a crater in a cloud, while the hawkers of Vung Tau laid bets on beetles wrestling in a pothole. They goaded the insects with sticks, as pieces of Australian boys were flown in from the scrub. Only the snakeman turned his head slowly up at the helicopter, like a cobra following the reed pipes in a charmer’s punctured hands.
It was late in the afternoon, and Nashville suggested he and Shorty should go for a drink, as it was important they run through the events of recent days, in case they might recognise a hidden pattern. This was the procedure Nashville used to follow with his previous partner who, before he’d joined the military, had spent one happy year selling life insurance to lonely housewives.
Shorty agreed, because he figured it was an order, and he had a head full of questions for Nashville. He left his partner idling the jeep as he returned to his hut to change into civilian clothes.
Shorty swapped his pants for Fletcher Jones slacks and dropped his weapon in the locker. Adams shook his hand as they hurried to the gate, and told Shorty there had been a mine incident: two diggers killed. Half their company was on R&C in town and there might be trouble when their mates heard the news, but it wouldn’t be much and it wouldn’t last long, because all the blokes knew there was nothing you could do.
Adams and Shorty stopped to report to the provost sergeant, who told Shorty he wasn’t allowed off the base at night for his first week in Vung Tau, and would he please fuck off back to his tent and have a wank into his sock.
‘He’s meeting Nashville,’ Adams explained.
‘That sick motherfucker,’ said the sergeant.
Adams nodded.
‘If you’re not back by twenty-two hundred, you’re on a charge,’ barked the sergeant to Shorty. ‘And if you tell the skipper I let you out, I’ll ram a pool cue down your throat and use your balls for billiards.’
Adams gave Nashville and Shorty a ride back to Le Boudin and again warned Shorty against Moreau.
‘You don’t meet crooks like that in Bendigo, Victoria,’ said Adams.
‘I’m expanding my partner’s horizons,’ said Nashville.
He didn’t know that in Bendigo, Victoria, the horizon stretched forever.
Le Boudin looked more imposing in the dusk, rising white from the sand and shrub against an ashen sky. It made Shorty think of a mason’s lodge. Nashville joked with the Vietnamese drivers who lingered outside in taxis built from Lambretta scooters, a fleet of puffing, coughing milk floats waiting to carry drunks home.
Inside, the bar was heated by warm blood pumping through the veins of soldiers, and soaked by their rumsweat and spittle. GIs laughed and swore over the beat of a black man drumming, and a voice as deep as oceans begging baby not to leave.
Shorty’s days in Vung Tau had made no sense. He found it hard to believe two white men would carry a body into a bar and buy it a drink, before another white man came in and shot it. Nor could he figure out why Nashville didn’t seem more interested in finding Sergeant Caution, a missing soldier from his own unit. He was hungry to hear what Nashville had to say about the case, and Nashville was eager to help Shorty understand what was going on.
‘First thing,’ said Nashville. ‘I think Baby Marie likes you.’
The girl with the hibiscus lips sat alone, looking over at the two men.
‘I’ve got a girlfriend,’ said Shorty.
‘Every guy in Vung Tau has a girlfriend,’ said Nashville. ‘In a surprising fucking number of instances, it’s the same girl.’
But Baby Marie was blind to both of them. The last thing her eyes had seen was the helicopter fly in from the scrub.
Nashville tried to fill in Shorty about the way things happened at Le Boudin. Moreau made his money from the drinks men bought the girls at the bar, and the fines paid by soldiers to leave the bar with the girls. The women chose who they took home, or to the rooms Moreau kept for them at the back of the building. Once a girl picked you, she was your girlfriend. That didn’t mean you couldn’t have other girlfriends in other bars, hotels, restaurants, massage parlours, coffee houses, barbershops or car washes, but in Vung Tau – as in Troy, Tennessee – it paid not to keep two women in the same establishment. While you were out in the field the girlfriend–boyfriend arrangement was cancelled until you returned to base. Also, while you were in town, and even while you were in the bar, your girlfriend did not need to advertise that she was your girlfriend to other men who thought she might become their girlfriend. Her job at Le Boudin was to convince lonely guys they were still in with a chance of more than just an ass grab if they fed her enough Saigon tea. This could be either infuriating or exciting, depending on your point of view.
It would be a mistake, however, to regard these guiding principles as fixed in the manner of, for example, the rules of baseball or the laws of gravity. The game was fluid and adaptable, the only certainty being the odds were stacked against both the girls and the soldiers, and in favour of the bar owners. Any number of additional charges might suddenly apply, if it looked as if a GI might leave the bar with his last dollar still in his pocket.
Shorty thought of his own girl, and wished she were with them in Le Boudin. She was a better judge of people than Shorty, and could probably help him recognise when Nashville was joking. Shorty loved Betty, but he also admired her. She knew what she was doing, where she was going. As soon as she had qualified, Betty had volunteered for Vietnam. She saw herself making her rounds of the ward, down lines of beds where limbless men smoked pipes and joked courageously about taking a wicket or riding a horse, and how they longed to return to the battlefield. The months passed in Puckapunyal, but she heard nothing, and her idea of her future dissolved into her feeling for Shorty.
They began to eat out, and developed a taste for Chinese food. They knew their horizons were broadening and they were growing as people. Betty’s mother and father came up from Adelaide to meet Shorty and assess him, to measure, weigh and test him, to kiss his cheek and shake his hand and see how they could love him. He took them out for a Cantonese meal, and Betty’s father worried he might be a bohemian.
Betty tended to men who were malingering and Shorty patrolled a base that was free of serious crime, until Betty’s posting suddenly came through. She packed her bags, made a will, and arrived at 1 Field Hospital in March 1967, just before the monsoon broke.
Shorty missed her even more than he’d missed his dog. When the Australian MP in Ba Ria caught rabies, Shorty volunteered to replace him every day, until the CO tired of reading his laboriously composed petitions and ordered him to take his final leave and go. On the plane, Shorty carried a roll of blankets sent to Betty by her parents, who believed it could turn chilly in Vietnam over Easter.
Shorty gave Nashville half the story of his life with Betty, which was more than he’d ever disclosed to anyone before. When he had finished, Nashville stared at him, as if he had just learned his partner lived in a gum tree and ate grubs.
‘You’re telling me,’ said Nashville, ‘that you came to a brothel to be with your girlfriend?’
‘You can laugh at me,’ said Shorty, ‘but I’m an honest bloke with a good heart, and I’m just trying to do the right thing.’
Dr Clarke had never been married. He supposed he had never found the right woman. Or, rather, whenever he felt he had found her, she did not feel he was the right man. It was difficult for anyone outside the medical profession to understand the demands on a physician in civilian life, let alone the pressures and constraints on an army doctor, who could not even choose where he wanted to practise. Except, of course, war. Dr Clarke had chosen war. He had come out of compassion, but he stayed for the excitement.
He offered Anderson another shot of whiskey. They were drinking in the stores tent, hidden among shelves of catheters and gauze, where Anderson had first discovered Dr Clarke, waiting to be found one dry afternoon, singing softly to his bottle.
It was a kindly, cashless blackmail. Anderson wanted to never go back to his unit as a combat medic, and to keep his temporary posting at 8 Field Ambulance for the rest of his time in Vietnam. He was terrified of going out again with the infantry. They needed skilled men in the bush, not half-trained stretcher bearers like Anderson, who had joined the Australian Army because he loved to play the trumpet and he’d heard they had a brass band.
‘What about the new sisters?’ Anderson asked Dr Clarke. ‘Seen anything you like?’
Dr Clarke looked at the whiskey bottle, curved like a woman and full of comfort. ‘No,’ he said, ‘not really.’
‘What about the big girl?’ asked Anderson. ‘The one who nearly went to pieces?’
‘Betty?’ said Dr Clarke. ‘I believe she has a fiancé here.’
A couple of Australians weaved into the bar, half-drunk yet sombre. They stood beside Shorty, each supporting the other with his body. Shorty realised they’d come down from the hospital, where they’d helped to unload wounded. They talked about the boy who wouldn’t make it, and their voices throbbed with hurt and wonder.
Shorty felt he ought to go back and check if Betty was all right. Nashville watched him walk carefully to the door. He guessed he should maybe see his partner into a Lambretta taxi, but surely the Australian was big enough to take care of himself. Nashville had seen smaller pine trees. Christ, he’d seen shorter gun towers.
Outside, darkness hid the highway. The only light was cast by a brazier burning charcoal, beside an old man selling sugarcane juice from a cart. The Lambretta drivers were asleep in their cabs. Shorty had been warned not to walk to ALSG, although he was sure he could find his way back along the shoreline. He searched the sky for the Southern Cross, and saw a plane drop from the constellation like a falling star.
Twenty yards from Le Boudin, there was silence – as if the music from the bar had blown out to sea – and the blackness a child resists when she struggles against sleep. Shorty felt suddenly afraid and turned back, with the idea of waking one of the Lambretta men, but the taxis had gone. He could not understand how none of them had passed him on the road.
Shorty told himself he would walk because he’d started walking, and it wasn’t far, only two or three miles, and once he’d begun it would soon be over. He jerked into a quickstep, as if to surprise himself into action. He imagined he was lost on a route march, an exercise, and the worst that could happen was he’d fail a navigation test and spend the night sleeping in a barn.
Anyway, he guessed a patrol would soon pass.
He swung his arms and pumped his legs, breathing heavily, trying to hide his nerves from the night.
A light bobbed towards him on the road, floating swiftly but unsteadily, like a beacon in a current. It slowed as it came closer, and a boy on a Honda called, ‘G’day, Aussie. Need a ride?’
The kid wore a large, loose US flight jacket with sergeant’s stripes sewn onto the sleeves. Shorty squinted at his face. His mouth was hard, and he was laughing because Shorty was a soldier who was worried about climbing onto a scooter with a fourteen-year-old.
‘C’mon, digger,’ said the boy. ‘I know all the Aussies. They call me Ginger Meggs.’
He didn’t look like Ginger Meggs. Shorty hurried off.
‘Oi, mate,’ said Ginger Meggs. ‘You’re going the wrong way.’
Ginger Meggs patted the seat of his scooter.
‘Best taxi service outside the Cross, mate,’ he said. ‘Get on.’
‘I don’t need a ride,’ said Shorty.
Ginger Meggs turned off his engine, which snuffed out the headlamp. He jumped off the scooter and followed along beside Shorty, pushing the bike by its handlebars. Shorty hastened into the darkness, his hands in his pockets and head bowed.
‘You’re new here,’ said Ginger Meggs.
‘Get lost,’ said Shorty.
‘You’re the one who’s lost, mate,’ said Ginger Meggs.
Shorty looked up and around and there was nothing to see. He must’ve turned off the main street while he’d been watching his feet. A Lambretta rumbled along on an invisible road beneath him. Shorty became aware of the waft of monstrous vegetation, stale cooking oil and small, angry men. He quickened, tripped and almost fell.
‘You can’t run,’ said Ginger Meggs, invisible in a lake of tar.