EIGHT

Nashville returned to the bar with Shorty folded up in the back of a Lambretta taxi. He cradled his partner’s head in his lap. Shorty’s blood stained the cuffs of Nashville’s shirt, made them look tie-dyed, psychedelic, like the sleeves of the albums the hippie chicks bought in Haight-Ashbury, and Nashville never got to see. The driver progressed slowly, as if in a funeral procession. He hadn’t wanted to take the fare.

When the girls heard the Lambretta, they hurried outside. The night air was clear, and tasted clean. The sugarcane man fed stalks into his grinder, squeezing sweet juice from the stems. A bat sailed out of the mangroves, a lazy omen.

Nashville carried Shorty out of the Lambretta. The tall man was groggy but conscious and babbling, and he kept an arm around Nashville’s shoulder and let him take most of his bodyweight and carry him into the bar, where Baby Marie met him with a damp towel. She took charge of him like a nurse. She needed another person to look after, a distraction from the rumours she’d heard about the dustoff. Nobody could tell her the names of the men who’d been killed and, when she asked too many questions, the diggers thought she was VC.

‘I’ve been stabbed,’ said Shorty, coughing.

The lizard men in the bar were slothful and incurious. It was late and there had been many drinks. They were all edging closer to sex, using their tongues to catch flies. Baby Marie helped Shorty out of his shirt, her eyes searching his torso for wounds. She found a stripe of blood across his ribs from the whipping, and touched it lightly with her fingertip. There were other marks on his body, but they remembered footy games and tractor accidents, a fall from a horse and a wrestle with a cow.

‘Where he cut you?’ Baby Marie asked Shorty.

Shorty pointed to his pants.

Christ, thought Nashville.

Quyn and Tâm carried over a Chinese screen. They made a private space for Shorty in the corner of the bar. He sat on the edge of a table as Baby Marie kneeled in front of him, unbuckled his belt and helped him step out of his slacks. His legs were hairy, like all the white men, like every jungle ape. As Shorty gripped the tabletop, she eased off his boxer shorts, leaving him naked. His hands moved to cup his balls. Baby Marie turned him onto his side, to examine his buttocks. She found a vertical cut on the left side, the length of a matchstick and the depth of a scratch. It had bled lightly but was now dry.

Baby Marie picked up his pants and turned them over. A blade had cut into the seam of the pocket and sliced away the fabric, taking the flap of the pouch and everything that had been inside.

Shorty saw that he had been robbed, not stabbed.

‘How you feel?’ asked Baby Marie.

‘Like an idiot,’ said Shorty.

She wrapped her small hand in his.

‘Yes,’ she agreed. ‘Nashville say you an idiot.’

Tâm brought Shorty a laundered pair of Australian Army greens. The girls in Le Boudin could have outfitted a battalion.

Izzy Berger approached Nashville at the bar, and passed him a beer.

‘We found him, then,’ said Berger.

He felt the rescue of Shorty had taken place in two parts. The first – and arguably more important – stage of the operation had been executed by Berger himself, when he’d scouted the enemy position and located the missing soldier. Then Nashville had gone in to complete the rescue mission.

‘It’s a tough way for the big guy to start his tour,’ said Nashville. ‘In my first week, I had Natalie Susan Mitchell riding on my hips and her sister sitting on my face.’ Nashville bumped beer cans with Berger. He felt a mild debt to the little man.

‘What is it you want again?’ Nashville asked Berger.

‘I’m looking for an American MP,’ said Berger. ‘Timothy James Caution.’

Nashville crushed his empty beer can in his hand, partly out of surprise, but more for the simple drama of the gesture. ‘Is this some kind of fucking joke? Why do you want Caution?’

‘Because he’s the entertainment manager at your base,’ said Berger.

Nashville suspected he was being mocked.

‘We’re a unit of the United States Military Police,’ said Nashville. ‘We don’t have no fucking entertainment manager.’

‘It may just be an informal thing,’ said Berger.

The little man explained that he had come to Vung Tau to clear up a misunderstanding over a joint venture between Kings Cross business interests and the US Military Police. The two parties had organised a tour of South Vietnam by a talented disciple group from Sydney, Australia. The US end of the deal had been negotiated by a Sergeant Caution, who was regarded with respect by men whose admiration meant a great deal in the ‘milieu’, a specialist branch of show business in which Berger himself was highly regarded. On these men’s recommendation, Berger had arranged contracts and visas for the girls, and provided generous per diem expenses for a month overseas, while Caution had purchased their air tickets. Both the concert takings and the financial risk were to be split sixty-forty in favour of the Australians. Unaccountably, however, Caution and the girls had left Australia a day early, with all Berger’s money, and were now incommunicado.

Luckily, Berger felt secure in the knowledge he was dealing with a representative of the finest army in the world, which wouldn’t risk a public-relations disaster by ripping off an ally in a war which, even Berger was forced to admit, was not as popular at home as certain earlier conflicts in which the enemy had appeared to pose a more direct danger to Australia.

‘So where do I find Sergeant Caution?’ he asked. ‘And my twelve hundred dollars?’

Nashville laughed.

Berger frowned. Although he recognised that he himself didn’t cut a particularly imposing figure, he asked Nashville to understand that the interests behind him were deadly serious.

Nashville bridled at the implied menace, but sometimes you had to let a man have his bluster – especially in a bar – because some guys had nothing else.

Shorty came out from behind the screen, draped over Baby Marie. Nashville envied him, despite the bruising.

‘Here’s your countryman,’ said Nashville to Berger. ‘Explain it to him.’

But Shorty ignored the man in the yellow hat, and spoke excitedly to Nashville.

‘I think it was the Mamasan,’ he said. ‘She did this to me.’

Nashville raised an eyebrow, characteristically.

‘You think the Mamasan is a boy on a scooter called Ginger Meggs?’ he asked.

Shorty wished he had a partner who took him – or anything – seriously. ‘No, he was just her messenger,’ said Shorty, ‘and the message was meant for you.’

Shorty hoped his words would hang in the air, but Nashville waved them away.

‘I get it,’ said Nashville. ‘The zipperheads don’t like me driving their retard around, so they kidnap my retard and drive him around. Message received. Both from you and Natalie Susan Mitchell over here . . .’

He grabbed at Tâm’s ass. She scowled. Nashville squinted, as if that might help him see her better for what she was. But the clearer he viewed her, the more he wanted her.

I’m some world-class pussy-hound, he thought.

Nashville took Tâm by both hands, savouring another excuse to touch her.

‘Okay,’ said Shorty, ‘if it wasn’t the Mamasan, it must’ve been the VC.’

Nashville, about to take a drink, laughed the top off his beer. ‘The fucking VC now?’ he said, shaking his head.

‘He spoke perfect English,’ said Shorty, ‘like an Australian.’

Nashville rested his can. ‘There’s zipperheads that talk English,’ said Nashville, ‘and there’s zipperheads that talk French. When you’ve got to start to worry is when you hear a zipperhead talk Russian.’

Shorty turned away from Nashville, and bumped shoulders with the man in the yellow hat.

‘G’day,’ the man said, holding out his hand. ‘I’m Izzy “the Deal” Berger. You may have seen me in Pix magazine.’

Shorty, for the first time since he was five years old, burst into tears.

‘He’s in shock,’ said Izzy Berger, knowledgably.

Berger put his arm around Shorty, and his lips close to Shorty’s ear, and whispered a story in a voice too low for Nashville to hear.

‘Listen, kid,’ said Berger. ‘My first night in this town, I didn’t know my way around. I got a room in the Grand, and it looked like a classy enough joint. I went down to the bar and bumped into a broad’ – Izzy Berger nearly always used American terms – ‘named Hong and I invited her back to my room to see my etchings, which I carry with me wherever I go. She took her massage oil out of her bag, I undressed and lay on my back. She tried to bring me off in her hand, but I’d given her five bucks, and that buys you a pair of shoes where I come from, so I told her I wanted the lot. She turned out the lights, bent over the bed, took me in her hand and guided me inside her.’

Shorty did not want to listen to Berger’s story, could barely hear it really. Berger found it difficult to continue, but seemed compelled to finish.

‘It was the finest ass I’d ever had,’ said Berger, ‘because it was an ass. When she’d finished, I turned her over to pat her pussy, and I discovered she was a man.’

Shorty vomited on the bar-room floor.

‘Yeah,’ said Izzy Berger, ‘that’s the way I felt.’

A cowboy with a bucket came to mop up the mess.

‘I chased Hong out of the room,’ said Izzy Berger, ‘down the corridor, back through the bar and out of the hotel. He was carrying his frock in his hands and I was just as God made me, except circumcised.’

Berger was barely addressing Shorty now. His audience was himself. ‘I stood in the lobby, yelling and screaming and threatening to find Hong and grease him. I even borrowed a piece from a Yank to do the job, but I was naked and couldn’t find a place to put it.’ Berger shook his head at his own foolishness.

‘Anyhow, it all came to nothing,’ he said, ‘as these things generally do, and you know what? I feel good about it now. I mean, it wasn’t as if he fucked me, right? It doesn’t make me queer. My ass is still as virgin as Mary’s when she rode her ass into Bethlehem. And a fuck’s a fuck, right? I mean, I can’t count it towards my score, but it’s nothing to be ashamed of either.

‘Do you see my point, kid?’ said Berger, his confession complete. ‘When we’re new to a place, we all make mistakes.’

Shorty turned to Nashville.

‘I want to go home,’ he said.