TWENTY-EIGHT

Shorty was carried in a chopper back to Vung Tau. When he stepped off onto the landing pad, he felt like he was home. He reported back to ALSG, then marched out to Le Boudin. He had an urgency, a purpose, a reason for every step he took. Shorty refused to believe Nashville would die with the colonel. He was determined to save his partner, and he understood now that only he could help him. The answers, he knew, lounged in Le Boudin.

‘Cherry man!’ called Quyn as Shorty paraded into the bar, and she seemed pleased to see him, which was her job. She wrapped her arms around his neck, kissed him on the nose and said, ‘Where you been?’

Shorty looked at her breasts and wanted to go to bed with her. He whispered in her ear and she answered, ‘Maybe . . . pussy patter.’

‘Now,’ said Shorty.

‘You were nicer when you were a cherry boy,’ said Quyn, and pouted.

Quyn led Shorty to the long room. She kissed him softly and laid her hands on his ribs. He eased her onto the bed. The straw mattress was stiff with memories. They made love quickly, and as soon as Shorty was spent, he began to question her.

‘Who killed Caution?’ asked Shorty, a naked, limp interrogator.

Quyn rolled away. ‘Who knows?’ she asked.

‘You do,’ said Shorty.

She turned back to him. ‘No, I don’t,’ said Quyn. ‘You think I know everything because I know how to fuck, because you know nothing, and don’t know how to fuck.’

Shorty forced his face not to show his hurt. ‘Who was Caution’s girl?’ he demanded.

On the other side of the curtain, they heard Baby Marie licking, kissing and giggling.

‘He didn’t have a girl,’ said Quyn. ‘He was like you.’

‘Was it Tâm?’ asked Shorty.

‘Tâm?’ repeated Quyn, and laughed.

He reached for her. She pushed him away.

Shorty clenched his fists and banged them on his thighs.

‘I know you know something,’ he said.

‘I know a cherry boy goes off like a firecracker,’ said Quyn, ‘but with a shorter fuse.’

Shorty glowered at the woman who had allowed him inside her. ‘What’s happening in this town?’ he asked.

‘Nothing,’ said Quyn. ‘It doesn’t matter. It will soon be over, and Nashville will be fine.’ She seemed certain.

‘How do you know that?’ asked Shorty.

‘Tâm read the leaves in her jasmine tea,’ said Quyn. ‘They made the shape of a happy ending.’

Shorty left Quyn on the bed, her knees pulled up to her chest. At the door of the long room, Baby Marie, in a soldier’s shirt, kissed her GI goodbye, then she whispered to Shorty, ‘I will help you.’

She took Shorty’s notepad and pen, and made a sketch. She leaned into her drawing, so Shorty could look down her buttons at her breasts, and she traced a map of the village of Long Tâm Thu. She drew houses like eyebrows, or half-birds in flight.

‘Here,’ she said, dabbing her pencil on a house near the middle of the map. ‘You go this place tomorrow. You take bookoop soldiers.’

The sun rose over the bamboo treetops and cast first light on the paddy fields around Long Tâm Thu, sparking agitated chatter between cicadas and frogs. The mist was the tears of mourners, giving form to the spirits of the dead.

They came early, Shorty, Simpson and Hauser, in the jeep with a submachine gun mounted on the back. Each man carried an Armalite and said nothing, as if they were worried they might be heard, as the rice plants rustled in the breeze.

Simpson was angry at pulling another jerk-off detail. He knew there were no VC in Long Tâm Thu. Eagle was silent and curious, too dumb to question orders. They were the only US soldiers on a bullshit Australian operation, acting on intelligence from a crazy bar girl about the man who had killed TJ Caution, which everyone at the PMO knew was Nashville, and they loved him for it.

Their driver was an ARVN interpreter. His constant smile reminded Shorty of Mickey, the Vietnamese mouse. He said he was born in Vung Tau, but the MPs had to tell him every street to cross and each corner to turn. He’d never had reason to visit Long Tâm Thu, as it was a Buddhist village. He touched the bone crucifix that hung beneath his throat and drove quickly and clumsily, wrestling against the wheel.

Behind the MPs, riding in an armoured car, were two sections of Tommy Callaghan’s Ten Platoon, although Callaghan was buried under a plaque in the war cemetery at Carr Villa, Tasmania, and one or two of the men could no longer even remember his face. The rest of the platoon was out in the bush, but a dozen had been spared to make a ring around the village and guard the cops, who wouldn’t know VC if they jumped out at them from behind a bush which, of course, the VC wouldn’t, because there was no point in brassing up provosts, which is why they hadn’t knocked the American sergeant in the first place.

The platoon hated cordon-and-search operations. They had come to Vietnam for a fight. The one thing they wanted was to meet an enemy the same size as them – no, bigger – and fight him hand to hand, toe to toe, eye to fucking eye, to shoot at men in uniform and be blasted in return. They craved their fathers’ war, not this one.

The platoon had lost four men, including Callaghan and Reffo, and never even seen a VC. They were fit and hard and armed and angry, trained up like first-grade footballers, moving instinctively as a team, working exactly the way they had been drilled. And every week – every single fucking week of the season – they were promised a fixture against the opposition, but when they arrived at the stadium the ground was deserted, with only a handful of old men in the stands, who hated them for their stupidity and their audacity, and turned their backs when the team waved to the crowd.

They were infantry soldiers, and none of them enjoyed frightening farmers. They felt they’d been lied to, but they couldn’t say by whom. And now here they were again, marching into the dawn, bogeymen for the village children.

The women in the fields saw the jeep coming, and whispered a small child back to the hamlet. Hai was a second son, five years old, small and fast. When he ran, he hardly disturbed the grass. He had eyes like polished onyx, and he could remember everything that had happened to him since he was two – his grandmother’s tales of the elves in the mulberry trees; a drawing of his mother in the dust; the timber scent of a freshly cut boat. He could count to twenty-five.

The old men were smoking in the shade of their homes. They watched Hai dash into a hut, and remembered him as a baby, rolling in the dirt. So they knew about the jeep and the APC before they saw the MPs, but there was nothing old men could do except bear witness, and remember the dead at altars, in temples and by roadsides, with incense and oranges. In the village, girls looked like boys and boys looked like men and children couldn’t be made to stay inside until the MPs passed, because their fathers and brothers were gone.

The headman rushed out to meet the jeep, wearing a Rolling Stones T-shirt, Ray-Ban Aviators and fresh flowers in his hair. He had been drinking rice liquor at breakfast. His mouth slipped around his face. Shorty showed him the map, and he chattered desperately.

‘What’s he saying?’ Shorty asked the interpreter.

‘He’s lying,’ said the interpreter.

The unarmed interpreter pushed past the headman, as if he too were carrying a gun, or the MPs were his weapons. Shorty found the hut circled on Baby Marie’s plan. It was close to the headman’s home, and newer than many of the village buildings. Outside were children’s toys – sticks, wheels and painted masks. Shorty felt alert to every sound, every insect in the air. He could hear his own heartbeat as if it were something outside himself, a drumming to pace his steps.

It seemed strange that he should have been taught to kill VC in country Victoria, where the ground froze in the winter, and a sentry’s breath steamed like a campfire. He imagined himself tall and hunched, jittery and angular, misplaced in the tropics, pale-skinned and fair, and wondered if he looked foolish. Then he saw the faces of the villagers watching him, and realised they saw him as death.

The infantry made their ring around the village, scowling and cursing. According to doctrine, they were supposed to corral the civilians then search their empty homes, but the provosts didn’t seem to know how things were done and were making up their own operation as they went along. The platoon sergeant didn’t even go forward with the MPs. He felt he would be better used on the perimeter, looking after his men while this bullshit squeezed itself out.

Shorty approached the door of the hut scattered with toys, and kicked a wheel aside. The interpreter stood beside him and shouted in Vietnamese. He was supposed to say, ‘Come out and we won’t hurt you’, but he could have shouted anything, even a warning to run from the soldiers.

The headman ran behind them, calling, ‘No, no, no!’

Eagle caught him in a headlock and rubbed his knuckles against his skull, a schoolyard bully, cruel simply for the distraction of it. Shorty’s fingers trembled like Caution’s used to do, jumping like a typist’s over invisible keys. The morning had seemed balmy, doused by the breeze, but now the air was on fire. Shorty’s scalp tingled and sweat gathered at the roots of his hair.

The interpreter barked sounds that could have been words, but the door to the hut remained closed. The interpreter shouted more loudly, and scraped his heel in the dirt, like he was about to charge.

Shorty couldn’t stand for much longer, fixed in the fearful moment outside the hut. He tried to picture what might be happening inside, whether the VC had a machine gun trained on the entrance, or a bomb fixed over the door. What if they were hiding behind the children?

‘Do it,’ said Eagle.

Shorty stepped up, threw out his foot, and kicked down the door. It fell inwards. He rushed inside the hut with Eagle behind him, their rifles turning to each corner. He kicked through a bamboo screen, kicked over a bowl of water, kicked a picture off the wall, kicked the head off a doll, kicked a book in the spine and kicked an altar to pieces, strewing joss sticks across the floor.

The hut was empty.

Shorty kicked a hole through the wall.

Eagle pointed to a panic of disturbed dust by the fireplace. Shorty bent to touch it, felt a hatch door, and opened a tunnel. He dropped one foot inside and kicked the tunnel wall. Other units were supposed to wait for engineers to clear tunnels for booby traps, but the passageways under the huts in Long Tâm Thu didn’t lead to any sprawling underground guerrilla HQ; they were more like back doors onto a yard. They ran the length of a truck then resurfaced behind a rock or a bush.

Shorty lowered himself into the opening. Outside, he heard a shot, and knew Simpson had spotted a runner. There was no return of fire, so Shorty assumed they had taken him down, sorted him out, brassed him up. There would be a man on the ground with a hole in his body, and through that gap would stream his life.

Shorty scrambled through the tunnel on his elbows and knees, long, white and thin like a pipe-cleaner man, and crawled out on the other side. He saw a woman’s body, her hands clasped behind her head. She was bleeding from the mouth where she had dived into the dirt, and sobbing because she’d wet her pants.

He reached to touch her. ‘Quyn . . .’ he said.

‘Fuck you fucking bastardstinkingstickcockcunts!’ she cried.

Simpson covered Shorty with his Armalite as the interpreter bullied Quyn from yards away.

‘You smash my sister’s home, you fucking thindickboyballscherry­queer motherfuckers!’ screamed Quyn. She began to stand.

‘Stay down!’ shouted Simpson.

‘Tear off your fucking head,’ said Quyn to Simpson, ‘and suck your own cock.’

Shorty grabbed her. ‘Are you okay?’ he asked her.

‘Drown in cherry sperm,’ said Quyn.

Eagle jogged up to them, thrusting out his rifle, almost prodding Quyn on the breast with the barrel. Shorty pushed the gun away.

‘Forget it,’ said Shorty. ‘She’s just a girl from Le Boudin. She’s not VC. Her friend wanted to scare her. We’re a fucking prank.’

An old woman lit a fire to boil water for tea. The headman shouted and waved his arms, demanding compensation for the damage to his village. The MPs relaxed into relief, their hearts slowing to a sentry’s pace. Eagle and Simpson smoked cigarettes. A small boy begged for candy. Eagle tossed a handful of jelly beans into the air. They scattered in the sand like gems torn from a necklace.

‘This fucking country . . .’ said Eagle.

A cloud crossed the sun.

‘So this was all just a round in a fight between whores?’ Simpson asked Shorty. ‘Over what? You? Jesus Christ.’

Quyn was sobbing, and a small stream of friends flowed towards her. She was the aunty to their babies. She loved to have children in her home. They passed close by the interpreter, almost rubbing against him, and the interpreter heard a whisper from a woman who was not like the others. He didn’t acknowledge the sound, but he came to Shorty and spoke softly, describing, without pointing, a hut on the perimeter of the hamlet, near the mouth of the tunnel.

‘That is the right place,’ he said.

Shorty believed nothing the Vietnamese told him. ‘Who lives there?’ he asked the interpreter. ‘A man you owe money? You want us to kill him?’

‘VC,’ said the interpreter.

‘Oh yeah,’ said Shorty, ‘there’s VC everywhere.’

‘They tell me he was there,’ said the interpreter.

‘Do you want to take his wife?’ asked Shorty. ‘Is that it?’

The interpreter carried on smiling and Shorty wanted to smash in his teeth with the butt of his Armalite, to knock them down like a door.

‘This is a war,’ said Shorty. ‘Do you people understand that?’

The interpreter grinned.

‘You should get on the radio,’ said Eagle to Shorty. ‘Send the zipperheads to pick up the whore who sent us here.’

Shorty shook his head. ‘You know what they’ll do,’ he said.

‘They’ll question her,’ said Eagle. ‘The hard way.’

Shorty would not let that happen. ‘She’ll be gone when they get there,’ he said.

Eagle spat. ‘How do they always know when someone’s coming for them?’ he asked.

‘Because they don’t know diddly fucking else,’ said Simpson. ‘The place they live is their whole fucking world. They don’t even know to shit in the bathroom.’

He turned on the interpreter. ‘Look at you,’ he said, ‘you dime-show fucking Chinaman. I’m from Illinois. Do you even know where that is?’

‘South of Wisconsin,’ said the interpreter, ‘north of Louisiana.’

Simpson shook his Armalite.

The interpreter turned away from the MPs and headed towards the hut he had indicated. Shorty sighed and followed him. Eagle flanked Shorty as they approached.

Everyone in the village was watching them, silently.

Shorty stood at the wall, listening. ‘There’s someone inside,’ he said.

‘That’s because it’s someone’s fucking house,’ said Eagle.

‘Come out!’ shouted Shorty.

The interpreter called the command in Vietnamese.

‘Fuck it,’ said Shorty, and kicked down the door.

Inside the hut, a rope hung over a spent fire. Shorty was in a smokehouse, for curing pork. A hatch opened in the floor and the onyx-eyed boy Hai sprang out like Elmer Fudd on his short, fat legs. He’d jumped down the tunnel from its exit in the bush, and scrambled twenty-five yards through a darkness of spiders to get to the hut before Shorty.

Hai stared at Shorty, terrified, but darted towards the line. Shorty trained his gun on Hai’s head, which was almost as big as his body.

I didn’t come here to kill children, he thought.

The boy grabbed meat from the rope and disappeared into the hole.

When Eagle followed Shorty inside, he didn’t know Hai had ever been there. He saw the open lid of the tunnel, but his eyes fixed on the last item on the line. Fastened to the rope, above the embers, among ham hocks and loins, was the head of a man, mouth open, eyes wide, as if it were looking for its body.

‘I know him,’ said Shorty.

The head had belonged to Mickey, the Vietnamese MP whose body had been discarded outside Le Boudin. It had been smoked, to preserve it.

The boy had run off with the other two human parts on the cord. Pegged next to the head had been a pair of ears.

The troops built a compound from fence posts and wire, rounded up the villagers and herded them inside, sullen cattle with flies resting in the corners of their eyes. The interpreter took out suspects one at a time – the women bovine, the men bucking – and threatened them with white mice, the ARVN and US bombs.

Shorty took Quyn to the headman’s empty hut. He gave her tea and cigarettes, and watched and loved her while she sat and hated him. He asked her few questions, but she spoke readily, with the detached, ethereal voice of a spirit that has already joined the ancestors.

‘I was with Caution the night he killed Nguyễn Van Tran,’ she said. ‘He was drunk, driving his jeep too fast in the dark, and he hit the uncle by accident. Caution stopped and I thought he would try to save him, but he cradled the uncle like a baby and felt him die.

‘I looked in Caution’s eyes and he was happy, because he had finally taken a man’s life. I hated him, Shorty, but I had to be his woman. I only went with him because he could get what Moreau needed.’

Shorty wanted to reach out and hold her.

‘He liked to tell me about the body,’ said Quyn, ‘and how the old man had changed as his spirit slipped out. He talked about it when we were fucking. He kept his hands around my throat.’

She touched her own neck, which Shorty had kissed a dozen times.

‘When he was excited,’ she said, ‘he squeezed.’

Shorty found he wanted to kill a man who was already dead.

‘When the corpse was with the coffin maker,’ said Quyn, ‘Caution got drunk. He drove me to the workshop in the night. I thought he wanted to look at the body one more time before the burial. But when he took the lid off the box, he gave me a knife and told me to cut off the ears. He couldn’t do it himself because his fingers shook, because there was only beer and whiskey in his blood and in his brain. He knew the old man was my uncle, but he wanted the ears to take home to America. He’d heard the stories the GIs tell to frighten the whores, of men who wear necklaces of ears, who hang them outside their tents, who collect them for their officers to show how many little Vietnamese they have killed. This was the kind of man Caution wanted to be, not just a fucking cop. He needed evidence that he too had taken a life. I worked for a butcher, Shorty. I knew how to cut clean.

‘Afterwards, he fucked me on the lid of the casket.’

Shorty tilted back his head to hold the tears in his eyes.

‘When the body first came into the bar, I sent the note,’ said Quyn. ‘I didn’t know Caution would shoot him. I hoped it would drive him mad. Later, when he was drunk and looking for a fight, I sent the note to Nashville. Yes, I hoped Nashville would kill him, but I know he did not.’

‘How do you know?’ asked Shorty.

‘I sent the note before the fight,’ said Quyn. ‘I didn’t know he was already in the bars. He went home after Caution had beaten him, and found it on his pillow.’

‘Quyn . . .’ said Shorty, stretching out his hand.

‘Fuck you, cherry boy,’ she spat. ‘I hope you die in this war.’

She turned her back until he had left the hut.

The smokehouse belonged to nobody, the headman assured the interpreter. The terrorists must have used the tunnel to get in.

Was the beheaded soldier killed in Long Tâm Thu?

Nothing had been killed in Long Tâm Thu but chickens.

Did the headman realise what would happen to his village?

Yes, but what could he do? He hoped his people could be moved together and would be allowed back to tend the graves.

And what of your future, the headman asked the interpreter.