FOURTEEN

Beneath the awning of Sam Singh the tailor’s, a woman bound the feet of a hen. It accepted without protest the inversion of its world. The chicken hawker heard cries from the alley, and shouted over them with the price of her birds.

Now Bucky was unarmed, Mickey struck him on the crown, aiming for the join that he believed held together the skull. He hoped to split Bucky’s head into two halves, but Bucky protected himself with closed arms, so Mickey thwacked him on the collarbone, which cracked.

Mickey kicked him hard in the stomach, and Bucky’s mouth gave a sound like a punctured kiss. Mickey broke Bucky’s nose and knocked out a tooth. It came away from his gums with a snap.

‘He’s going to kill him,’ said Shorty.

It was a statement, a piece of reporting.

‘Enough!’ Caution shouted.

Mickey turned to Caution and laughed, because of course it wasn’t enough. You can’t leave a door half-closed, a horse half-lame. You can’t half-take a life without giving up your own. Surely they could see that.

Even as Shorty tried to pull him off, Mickey was still thrashing Bucky, but Shorty wrestled him and locked him, dragging him away.

Caution dog-whispered Mickey, pillow-talked him. ‘Okay,’ he breathed. ‘Good job.’ He moved his face close to the panting Vietnamese MP.

‘That showed the asshole,’ said Caution. His lips brushed Mickey’s cheek.

Shorty released his grip on Mickey, who leaped at Bucky again. It took both Shorty and Caution to wrestle away the club and force Mickey to sit against the wall.

Bucky’s head rested in a crown of blood. Shorty thought he had died, but the boy let out a moan. When Mickey heard Bucky whimper, he struggled to get at him again. He kicked Shorty in the shins and tried to push Caution aside.

‘Easy, boy, easy,’ said Caution.

Bucky, soaked in his own fluids, strained to stand.

Mickey reached for his pistol. Caution batted away his hand. Mickey tried again, and Caution put his big, heavy body in front of Mickey, crowding him back to the wall.

When Caution moved off, Bucky had gone.

Caution dropped Mickey at the police station, and the two white men were left alone in the jeep. Shorty would have liked to get out too. He wanted to go back to Bendigo. He needed to talk to his dad.

‘You did well, partner,’ said Caution, and shook his hand.

Shorty gave him no grip.

‘Did you see what happened there?’ asked Caution. ‘I got a fucking mouse to act like a man. The grunts say you can’t make the slopes fight, but I just proved you can.’

Shorty had nothing to say to Caution.

‘You’ve got to go in and show them what to do,’ said Caution, ‘and if they get in shit, you’ve got to help them out.’

Shorty looked at his hands. They felt stained.

‘I know what you’re thinking, son,’ said Caution. ‘The kid might not even have been VC, right? Well, maybe he ain’t, but I’d say I had a damn sight more idea about that than you.’

Shorty looked away.

‘You should feel good about today’s work,’ said Caution. ‘I know I do.’

Shorty felt sick.

‘Life is cheap here,’ said Caution. ‘Bucky’s got no kin. He lives off the charity of whores. He’s like the zipperhead I shot in the bar. No one gives a damn.’

It was the first time Caution had mentioned the incident to Shorty.

‘Why did you do that?’ Shorty asked him. ‘Why shoot him when he was already dead?’

Then Shorty realised it was a dumb question. ‘I suppose you didn’t know,’ he said.

Caution examined Shorty’s face, as if he were trying to see how it held together.

‘Of course I knew the asshole was dead,’ he said. ‘That’s why I shot him.’

There was less of the war in Saigon than Nashville had expected, but still more than he would have liked. It disturbed him that GIs walked around carrying weapons. He felt safer in Vung Tau, where only military police had guns. But his speech was well received, and gained credibility from not being used as a warm-up act for a troupe of mediocre Australian strippers. He had spent a happy evening beforehand making a collage of photographs copied from medical textbooks at the 36th Evac Hospital, and matching them with captions such as ‘VD will leave you scabrous, pustulating and infectious – just like Communism’. Another showed a picture of a vagina, a skull and the Sacred Heart of Jesus, with the warning, ‘While venereal diseases primarily affect the genital region, Communism infects the head and the heart.’

The men had cheered the vagina, and listened respectfully to Nashville’s Baptist digression about idolatry, brought on by the image of the Sacred Heart.

Afterwards, he found a bed above a bar with Natalie Susan Mitchell, a young and energetic hostess. When Nashville left in the morning, she kissed him with ferocious enthusiasm, and he considered requesting a transfer to Saigon.

He got back to the PMO midafternoon and retired directly to his rack, where he put Alice’s Restaurant on the stereo, folded his hands behind his head and closed his eyes. As Arlo began to explain that Alice’s Restaurant wasn’t the name of a restaurant, Caution turned up at Nashville’s doorway, uninvited and unwelcome.

‘Got to talk to you, Corporal,’ he said.

Nashville put his finger to his lips. ‘Hush until this song finishes, TJ,’ he said.

Caution waited sixteen and a half minutes.

After the audience’s applause, the sergeant spoke. ‘I’ve got a business prop­osition for you.’

Nashville picked up the cover of Alice’s Restaurant – it was just large enough to obscure Caution’s face – and began to read the liner notes.

‘Offence intended, TJ,’ he said, ‘but I wouldn’t go into business with you selling whiskey to the Cherokee.’

Caution cracked his knuckles. ‘Hear me out,’ he said. ‘You remember Diane Arouse and her pals? Those broads ain’t musicians.’

‘Damn right they ain’t,’ said Nashville.

‘I can’t get them another gig,’ said Caution, ‘It’s a godawful fuck-up. They’re eating me out of house and home, Nashville. And you know what they’re eating?’

‘Rice?’ hazarded Nashville.

‘Cock,’ said Caution.

Nashville began to understand. ‘They’re whores?’

‘Well, they ain’t fucking Motown artists,’ said Caution.

‘And you’re their pimp?’ asked Nashville.

Caution bridled, as Nashville had intended. ‘I’m their business manager,’ said Caution. ‘I take forty per cent. Have you any idea how much those sluts can make in a single day?’

‘I have not,’ said Nashville.

Caution told him.

Nashville was startled.

‘It’s an officers-only service,’ said Caution, ‘the only round-eye un-slanted pussy, dead cert, on tap, twenty-four hours a day.’

Caution dropped his police notepad onto Nashville’s table, as if it were a wad of dollar bills.

‘This is my proposition,’ said Caution. ‘I’m going to rent out white pussy in Vung Tau, all year round, and I want you to join me.’

Nashville looked at the ceiling.

‘There ain’t no white pussy in Vung Tau all year round,’ said Nashville. ‘Only nurses. And they ain’t pussy, or so I’ve been told.’

This was Caution’s moment.

‘There’s a joint in Australia called Kings Cross,’ he said, ‘and it’s like Vegas, excepting it ain’t in the desert. The streets’re paved with whores, and they’re all looking for a vacation, Nashville. Diane Arouse and the others are just the tip of a cuntberg. There’ll be no call for the boys to go to Sydney on R&R. We’ll fly the Aussie pussy in to Vung Tau and save them the price of a hotel.’

Nashville lit a cigarette. ‘You had Aussie partners, TJ,’ he said. ‘Why’d you rob them?’

Caution laughed. ‘Look what they gave me!’ he said. ‘The only thing the whores needed to do – apart from the obvious – was sound like entertainers, and those circumcised kangaroo-bangers gave me the three worst singers this side of, I don’t know . . .’ he waved at Nashville’s stereo ‘. . . Arlo Guthrie.’

Nashville realised he disliked Caution more than any man on earth.

‘They robbed me, buddy,’ said Caution. ‘Anyhow, we don’t need no hymies on the payroll. This is America.’

Nashville lit a fresh cigarette from the butt of his last.

‘You’re next for R&R,’ said Caution. ‘All you’ve got to do is get to Sydney, find a bunch of broads who can suck cock and sing, and we’ll set up a tour as cover for them – maybe backed by the famous VD guy – and base them for a week in Long Binh, and two weeks in Vung Tau. I’ll run Long Binh, with Hillier and Doom, and you look after things. What do you say, Nashville?’

‘No,’ said Nashville. ‘It ain’t my game.’

Caution banged his fist into his hand. ‘You’ve got to join me,’ he said. ‘I need a cop the zipperheads get along with, and you’re the only one. The Mamasan wants you in.’

Nashville was tired of hearing about the Mamasan, and of listening to Caution’s voice.

‘You know what I think?’ asked Nashville. ‘I think there ain’t no Mamasan.’

‘That’s damn fucking strange,’ said Caution, ‘because she sure believes in you.’

Nashville blew a smoke ring. It was one of his smaller pleasures.

‘The whores like you,’ said Caution, ‘The Mamasan likes you. Seems I’m the only guy in town who can see through you.’

A bunch of medics from the 36th Evac Hospital were celebrating a twenty-first at Le Boudin, with a cake iced white and decorated with a bold red cross, like a crusader’s shield. The boy with the birthday sat in a wheelchair with tubes leading from his nose to an oxygen cylinder. Baby Marie cut the cake and helped him blow out the candles, her cheek touching his. Nashville thought maybe he hadn’t spent enough time looking at Baby Marie. He remembered the curve of her calves as he had watched her leave her bed, and the little grunts of passion she made, almost as if they were real.

Quyn passed Nashville on her way to the cellar to fetch cheap wine disguised as champagne, another kind lie. Nashville again tried to recall if he’d ever been to bed with her. He supposed he must have. He asked after Tâm. Quyn told him she was around the back. Nashville rose to go and find her, but Baby Marie said, ‘She with someone.’

He took another drink and thought, What do I care?

Nashville wasn’t like the other guys. He didn’t fall in love with bar girls. He never thought, This one’s different, because he knew they were all the same. He decided he’d go with Baby Marie – but when he looked at her again, he realised he didn’t want her. He was turning faggot.

He sat staring at the shelf of hard liquor on the other side of the bar, and attempted not to imagine Tâm with another man. An hour passed. Quyn tried to speak to him about Shorty. She wanted to know if he liked her. Nashville looked at Quyn – old and sharp and drawn, with long, thin fingers and cauldron eyes – and said, ‘Of course he likes you. You’re beautiful.’

And he meant for her to believe it, because once she had been lovely and that was her dignity.

‘What the fuck is she doing for an hour?’ Nashville asked Quyn. Most men, when they came in from patrol, couldn’t last five minutes.

Nashville stood up. Quyn put a hand on his arm. He touched her fingers.

‘I need a piss,’ he said.

He walked through the washroom, out the back, and into the annex where the girls met their men. It was empty. Behind the building was a small house where Tâm and Baby Marie lived. The door was open but there was nobody inside. Attached to the house was a courtyard, where Nashville could hear Tâm’s voice.

He opened the gate to find her bathing a boy in an oil drum, patting his brow with a wet cloth, using warm water she had boiled over a fire. She wiped his chin carefully, and dabbed the dried blood on his cheeks. As she worked, she sang a mother’s lullaby.

When she looked up and saw Nashville, she said, ‘You, fuck off.’

The boy in the barrel turned his head slowly.

‘Americans nambawan,’ said Bucky, grinning.

His smile split the corner of his mouth.

One of his eyes was swollen shut.

Nashville ran to him and took hold of his hands. Bucky seemed to think he was trying to lift him out of the barrel, so he stood up to help. His bruised knees trembled. His chest was a storm of lurid bruising, shredded by scores of small cuts, which rode over older scars raised by brandings and burning, torches and cigarettes.

Bucky reached out for Nashville, and cuddled his head.

‘I think he’s dying,’ said Tâm.