In a moment, Caution realised everything that was to come, as clearly as Nashville had seen it a couple of hours before. He took out his pistol and dropped it onto the sand.
‘I don’t know what makes you think it’ll end any different,’ said Caution.
Nashville waited.
‘You think you’re special,’ said Caution, ‘but you ain’t.’
Nashville took a Marlboro and passed another to Caution. Caution squeezed it between his lips. As Nashville leaned in to give him a light, Caution threw an uppercut than came all the way from his feet, a punch that could have stopped a streetcar. Nashville bent away to make him miss, the cigarette still in his mouth, and came back low and hard.
Nashville’s punches were fast and tight, but each one carried his body weight into Caution’s organs, his offal. They came in squalls, in bustles, like outbreaks, commotions. Nashville’s were a craftsman’s hands, skilled, apprenticed surgeon’s fists. He cut Caution in his bladder, his pancreas, his intestines. He punched him in his heart, his lungs and his liver. He dug around his ribs to find his spleen. He punctured Caution’s bowel.
And through it, Nashville stayed calm and measured, interested but distant, aware enough to know when to move on and when to come back. He didn’t like to waste violence, to repeat what had already been done.
Caution moved with him, almost for him, always too slow to get out of the way.
Caution had his noises, thought Nashville, little noises – his grunts and gasps and sniffs. It made Nashville want to stroke him, to reach out and hold his hand.
Then Nashville straightened up, and punched Caution in the larynx. He whacked Caution in the cranium and put bruises on his cortex. Caution, a brawler, an attacker without defence, lost his step in the dance. He was just a murmur now, a rumour that had passed.
Nashville sliced him up, a coroner dissecting a corpse. He inflicted each injury deliberately, dictating notes for the autopsy.
You knew I’d come for you, TJ, thought Nashville. You wanted this.
It must burn like sticky fire to live in Caution’s nightmare, to be so keen to die. He couldn’t even find his place in a war, where people like him were valued, promoted.
I’m being too scientific, thought Nashville; but he was moved by the spirit of inquiry. He wanted to see if he could make Caution’s eyes disappear.
Nashville took Caution by the neck and pulled his head up close, and bared his teeth as if he were about to bite Caution’s throat. Instead, he simply let him fall.
Like salami, thought Nashville. Like a thin, curly slice of ham.
Nashville looked down at Caution stupefied in the sand, and he unzipped his fly and pissed in his hair. When Caution tried to move his head, Nashville directed the stream towards his eyes.
Caution coughed blood, and Nashville pissed in his mouth.
A breeze blew up behind the dunes.
Nashville threw back his head, tore open his shirt, and whooped at the stars.
‘I am one sick motherfucker!’ he cried.
Nashville wore a new pair of Ray-Ban Aviators to hide his grape-purple eye, but an ink-stain bruise had spread to his cheekbone, and made a band under the lens. He was asleep in the sun when Shorty arrived, his feet crossed on the dashboard of the jeep, a rag wrapped around his forehead.
Shorty wiped his brow. The days seemed to be getting hotter. Like a cattle dog before the thunder, he could feel the storm rolling closer. He shielded his eyes, looked up at the sky and saw dreary, pregnant clouds.
Shorty stepped into the jeep. Nashville raised his sunglasses and opened his one good eye. He looked, thought Shorty, like an ostrich.
Shorty was sweating Vietnam, dripping Vung Tau. His skin crawled with insects, even when there were no bugs in the air.
‘I heard you got into a blue last night,’ said Shorty. ‘You okay?’
Nashville took a drink of water.
‘I ain’t as pretty as when I was born,’ said Nashville, ‘but I’ll be uglier when I die. Specially if some motherfucker cuts off my ears.’ He spoke slowly, sounded drunk and drowsy.
‘What happened to Caution?’ asked Shorty.
‘Probably sleeping it off,’ said Nashville. ‘Who gives a fuck?’
‘What’re you going to do now?’ asked Shorty.
‘Grease him,’ said Nashville.
Shorty had an urge to put his arm around Nashville, and stroke his bruised head.
‘Maybe you should let bygones be bygones,’ said Shorty.
‘Uh-huh?’ said Nashville. ‘And what exactly is a fucking bygone?’
‘I don’t know,’ Shorty admitted.
Nashville surprised Shorty by starting the jeep. He drove into town with tired determination. He stank of perspiration, alcohol and women.
‘Where were you last night, anyway?’ asked Nashville. ‘Playing cops and nurses?’
‘I had business in town,’ said Shorty.
‘Berger again,’ said Nashville. ‘What’s he gonna do? Make you into one of his acts? The Bendigo Sergeant Bilko?’
Nashville was exhausted. His arms flopped to his thighs. ‘I can’t do this no more,’ he said.
‘We don’t have to go on patrol,’ said Shorty. ‘Nothing’s going to happen. Nothing ever happens.’
‘I won’t lose a sick day to that bastard,’ said Nashville. ‘He can be the shitbird that misses his shift.’
Goddamn, I need to fucking sleep, thought Nashville, and it felt like the thought was coming from somewhere else, a voice in his ear.
Shorty suggested they go to Le Boudin, but Nashville said no. It was the first time Shorty had known Nashville miss a chance to visit the bar.
‘Don’t you want breakfast?’ asked Shorty.
‘My teeth are loose,’ said Nashville.
Shorty saw blood dried on his gums.
‘You should see a dentist,’ said Shorty.
‘And you should see fucking . . . a fucking . . .’ Nashville looked at him with angry distaste ‘. . . a fucking shortener. You’re too fucking tall. Did you know that?’
‘Yes,’ said Shorty.
‘You ought to be in the fucking Harlem Globetrotters,’ said Nashville. ‘Or Ripley’s Believe It or Not.’
‘They told me that at school,’ said Shorty.
‘Well . . .’ said Nashville, ‘fuck them, buddy. You’re all right.’
Shorty wondered if he had concussion.
The snakeman passed, walking his python on a lead.
‘I never thanked you for the night out with Betty,’ Shorty said to Nashville.
‘I hope she thanked you,’ said Nashville.
Shorty half-smiled, a trick he had learned from Nashville. He hoped it looked knowing, and not like he’d had a stroke that had paralysed one side of his face.
‘Thing is,’ said Nashville, ‘once you get pussy, you ain’t gonna be able to stop. It changes you, Shorty . . .’
Nashville looked at him again.
‘. . . And you ain’t changed,’ he said.
Shorty didn’t want to change. He’d been ordered not to change. People liked who Shorty was. He didn’t have an enemy in the world except, he supposed, the Viet Cong.
‘Jesus,’ said Nashville, ‘what does it take to make an Aussie broad put out? They do it for half a bottle of bourbon in Troy, Tennessee.’
Shorty shook his head. ‘The ones you’d want to marry don’t,’ he said. ‘Natalie Susan Mitchell wouldn’t.’
Nashville banged his fist on the dashboard. ‘I do not want to marry Natalie Susan Mitchell!’ he shouted. Then he wondered if he did.
Nashville closed his open eye. He’d hardly slept in twenty-four hours. He was starting to confuse the truth with his story, and forget what he’d done. He felt as though he was slowly swimming then calmly drowning.
Shorty turned on the radio and listened to crackles and other cars’ calls. It was like hearing the ocean through a conch shell. The word was the VC were moving through the villages. The intelligence seeped through headquarters and down to the men, stripped of source or context, useless in itself.
As Nashville slept, he grunted and whistled through the crack in his nose bone and the split in his lip.
The radio operator read a list of AWOLs. Private Jacob Abbott had gone missing again. Spec 4 Graham Brown hadn’t been seen for twelve hours. Sergeant Timothy James Caution hadn’t returned from town last night.
Shorty let Nashville sleep. Caution would still be missing when he woke up, and Nashville still wouldn’t want to find him.
Shorty and Betty were trying to establish a routine whereby each evening they took a walk around the base and found a spot to watch the sunset together and love each other with their hands. Betty was waiting for him to pick her up when the duty sergeant stopped Shorty outside his hut.
‘There’s a car for you,’ said the sergeant, ‘to take you to the Yanks.’
‘A Cadillac?’ asked Shorty.
‘No,’ said the sergeant. ‘Not a fucking Cadillac.’
Shorty went to the gate. An MP’s jeep picked him up, but Shorty didn’t recognise the driver or his partner. They took him into the PMO and handed him over to the Captain.
‘Prisoner John Grant has asked to see you,’ said the Captain.
Shorty looked blank.
‘Nashville,’ explained the Captain.
He led Shorty to the holding cells, a block of meat safes. Nashville sat in a timber cage, his bruised head in his nobbled hands. When he heard Shorty, he looked up and smiled.
Shorty sighed Nashville’s sigh. ‘What’s happened to you now?’ he asked.
Nashville rubbed his knuckles.
‘I’ve been arrested for the murder of Timothy James Caution,’ he said, ‘who’s managed to get himself fucking killed yet again.’