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  Sean wasn’t simple, the way people at first supposed. It was just he needed time to think things through. In Bendigo, Victoria, time had stretched as far as the horizon and beyond. Hour to hour, day to day, on the farm and in the town, there was never much cause to hurry and rarely much reason to talk. He’d worked with his dad, who knew everything there was to know about Sean and, at the end of the day, they went home to his mum, who knew even more. On Saturdays, he played football with boys he’d met at primary school. After a game, they’d have a drink in the Shamrock Hotel, and they might talk about a kick or bounce or mark, but not much, because they’d all seen them, and what could you do anyway but celebrate the result or sink your sorrows, which were never particularly deep since they were an indifferent team who played for fun.

  They spoke about people in the town, but they all held the same opinions: Sean’s mum baked the best meat pies this side of the black stump; the landlord of the Shamrock Hotel was as ugly as a hatful of arseholes. Similar thoughts marched through every mind when each familiar name was mentioned. There really wasn’t much to add.

  But they loved Sean, the boys from the footy team and the pub. He was the spirit of Bendigo, Victoria, a small-town star: the fella you could rely on, if it came to a blue, to always be behind you – or in front of you – milling and threshing to Queensberry rules, never kicking, butting or biting, and always buying the other bloke a drink afterwards, whether he won or lost.

  And he didn’t have a bad word for anyone. Every man was a good bloke to Sean, every sheila a good sort. He’d never talk your ear off or bite your head off or piss in your pocket and tell you it was raining. He was the same as the rest of them, only more so. He was the way they’d like to think of themselves.

  As for his feelings, if Sean had the urge to open up about something, he’d talk to his dog.

  But the army changed things. He lost his name and became ‘Shorty’. He met men who lived different lives, scores of fellas who had office jobs and never saw the sunshine. He realised there were blokes who didn’t even own dogs, never mind work them, and who couldn’t tell a .22 from a .303. On the other hand, men from cities seemed to have rooted scores of sheilas, and could talk ten to the dozen about anything under the sun. He liked them, of course – they were all good blokes – but he understood they thought he was slow.

  Shorty felt lucky to be in Vietnam. He hadn’t been selected to be among the first provosts in his intake who had left Australia for Vietnam. His commanding officer had kept him in Victoria, helping to return runaway national servicemen to the camp at Puckapunyal. Shorty had been in the army nearly seventeen months when one of the MPs in Vietnam caught rabies in Ba Ria. Reluctantly, and with a peculiar feeling of guilt, the CO had sent Shorty to replace him.

  ‘Watch yourself,’ the CO told him, ‘and make sure you come back the same bloke that left.’

  Harry Long had driven to Sydney to see Sean off at the airport. He had been studying the situation in South-East Asia by reading Shorty’s Australian Military Forces Pocketbook South Vietnam. Even though the pamphlet was classified as ‘restricted’, Shorty felt he could show it to his father because of Harry’s position in the bush fire brigade.

  ‘The threat from Communism can only be overcome in the long term by social, economic and educational programmes in conjunction with the establishment of a sound government administration,’ said Harry. ‘But, in the short term, we’ve got to deprive the VC of a military victory.’

  He returned the pocketbook to Sean, and recommended he read it and take special note of the sections on how to recognise the different types of enemy soldiers.

  He also drew on his own experiences in the Second World War. ‘The diggers like to have a few beers and let off steam,’ said Harry, ‘and that’s fine within limits, but they have to remember they’re guests in a foreign country. If they get drunk, play up and chase women, they hand a propaganda victory to the Viet Cong. That’s why the provosts’ role is so important: you’ve got to help the men to stay in line.’

  Shorty listened to Harry, because Harry was his dad, and fathers knew best.

  Nashville, who didn’t have a father – not any more – hitched a ride with Adams to Le Boudin.

  ‘Has he met Moreau yet?’ Adams asked Nashville.

  Nashville nodded. He knew Adams from the bars.

  ‘You know what I heard?’ said Adams to Nashville. ‘Your amigo’ – he thought the word was French – ‘was a volunteer in the Waffen-SS.’

  Nashville shook his head.

  ‘That brothel ought to be closed down,’ said Adams. ‘Or burned down.’

  They pulled up among the Lambos, which fed off Le Boudin like plankton on a whale.

  ‘Enjoy yourself,’ said Adams to Nashville, ‘you sick motherfucker.’

  Moreau came down to the bar from his apartment upstairs. He looked vague, as if the journey had disoriented him. Every evening, he struggled for a moment to recognise Nashville and even, it seemed, the contours of his bar. It was as if he’d expected to wake up elsewhere, or not at all.

  Dusk was a slow time at Le Boudin. Most of the tables waited unoccupied while soldiers in darker bars drank beer to borrow the courage to buy love. There was a quiet threat of GIs, a chatty crew of airmen and a small, weaselly guy, whom Nashville took to be a journalist, wearing a yellow pork-pie hat, like the target in a shooting gallery.

  There were a number of other civilians in Le Boudin that night, older men with rubber faces. They could’ve been reporters or detectives, thought Nashville.

  Listening types.

  Lizards.

  Moreau poured Nashville a drink. ‘Bonsoir, mon ami,’ he said. ‘How is l’investigation?’

  Uncharacteristically, Nashville had been thinking about that. ‘Did you know TJ got a note the night he disappeared, telling him to come to this bar?’ he asked Moreau.

  ‘How would I have known it?’ Moreau asked.

  ‘I thought you might have sent it,’ said Nashville.

  ‘Why?’ asked Moreau.

  ‘You work in mysterious ways,’ said Nashville. ‘Like God, if he smelled of garlic.’

  In fact, Moreau carried the soft scent of hill flowers.

  ‘And you speak as though you have an audience,’ said Moreau. ‘It is a sign of madness.’

  Tâm came in from the back room in a strawberry mini-dress. Nashville felt as though a fist had pressed down on his breastbone, and realised he must be smoking too much. He stood up to watch as she put her arm around one of the listening types and tickled his chest with her fingernails. Baby Marie went to entertain his friend, trying to separate them. Tâm pretended Nashville wasn’t in the room.

  What did Nashville care? It wasn’t as if she really was his girl. There were hundreds of women like Tâm in Vung Tau. But when he thought of most of the bar girls he knew – which was pretty much all of them – he imagined their tits and ass. When he remembered Tâm, it was her mouth, her lips.

  I must be busting to get blown, thought Nashville.

  He bought Tâm a drink and tried to lure her into a conversation about his week at work, as if he were a man come home from the office winding down over a Friday-night dinner with his wife. She listened without expression to his story of the dancers on the jeep.

  ‘You’re an idiot,’ she said. ‘You made monkey boy look like an informer.’

  Nashville slumped. It grieved him that she couldn’t be sweeter, like other men’s girlfriends, but he figured her sourness must be part of her attraction, the lemon in her bourbon.

  ‘You can’t see that things are different here,’ said Tâm. ‘You think you are still back home in your toy Tennessee.’

  ‘Troy,’ said Nashville.

  ‘No, toy,’ she said. ‘Because it is not real. Vietnam is real. Here, people die.’

  She spat the last word, as if it were an invitation to him.

  ‘They die in Troy, Tennessee,’ said Nashville.

  ‘They die when they’re old,’
said Tâm.

  She finished her glass of wine-turned-into-water and returned to the lizard men with their cameras and questions. Nashville watched her move confidently among them, every reporter turning to look. Quyn came to stand beside Nashville, her breast pressed to his shoulder. She couldn’t remember if she had slept with him, and Nashville did not know if he’d ever been with Quyn.

  ‘Americans number one,’ said Quyn to Nashville.

  ‘Fuck you,’ said Nashville, and bought her a drink because he liked her.

  ‘Now you’re the big detective,’ said Quyn. ‘Like Maigret.’

  Nashville smiled. ‘You read those books?’ he asked.

  Quyn hid her mouth with her hand. ‘Oh no,’ she said. ‘Me suckee suckee fuckee fuckee bookoop boom-boom.’

  ‘Which ones do you like?’ asked Nashville.

  ‘Maigret et le Corps sans tête,’ said Quyn. ‘I had a Frenchman. He looked at me the way you look at Tâm.’

  Nashville raised an eyebrow. ‘Like he wanted to take you up the ass?’ he asked.

  ‘As if he hoped he could escape inside me,’ said Quyn. ‘From himself.’

  Nashville laughed.

  ‘That’s quite a look,’ he said. ‘Was it like this?’ He turned his eyelids inside out and twisted his earlobes into his ears.

  Quyn’s laugh made Nashville feel lighter, as his skin popped back into place.

  ‘What happened to your Frenchman?’ Nashville asked her.

  ‘He found another way of escape,’ said Quyn.

  Nashville considered Quyn and noticed a younger, softer woman, camouflaged by her make-up, hiding beneath her hair.

  ‘I can imagine you in Paris, France,’ he said.

  ‘Have you been there?’ asked Quyn.

  ‘No,’ admitted Nashville, ‘but I once knocked out a middleweight in Paris, Kentucky.’

  He bought her another drink, because he could see she wasn’t going to find a man tonight.

  ‘There is only you,’ said Quyn.

  Nashville spent the night with Tâm, on a mattress in the long room behind the bar. She crouched by Nashville as he slept, listening to him breathe. In her hand, she held the blade she used to fillet fish for bouillabaisse. Baby Marie parted the curtain that separated the beds where the two girls fucked. She brought hot green tea, and poured for Tâm from the pot. Quyn joined them, all three women watching the rise and fall of Nashville’s chest.

  ‘Did you dream last night?’ Baby Marie asked Tâm.

  Tâm closed her eyes. ‘I saw your bones burst out of the ground,’ she said.

  Baby Marie shied.

  ‘Those were not Baby Marie’s bones,’ said Quyn, quickly. ‘You saw the dead uncle in the bar.’

  ‘No,’ said Tâm, ‘they were my little sister’s, small like a songbird’s.’

  ‘What does it mean?’ asked Baby Marie.

  ‘Your fortune has changed,’ said Tâm.

  Baby Marie ran out into the corridor. Quyn heard her sobbing, but Tâm was caught in other thoughts. She sat with the knife balanced between her fingers, the tip of the blade pressed lightly into her right thumb.

  ‘Could you do it?’ whispered Quyn. She pointed to Nashville’s soft, white throat.

  ‘I could,’ said Tâm.

  FIVE

  Bucky pedalled Nashville back to the PMO as the sun rose over the fishing fleet and speckled the harbour in silver. Nashville dropped for ten minutes on his bunk, before he woke to the angry percussion of Eagle beating on his door and hollering that his partner was waiting at the gate. Nashville stumbled outside, nauseous in the morning light. The jeep was a vague shape in the sandy lot, with Shorty crawling over it like a long, green worm.

  ‘I think Adams might’ve fixed the radio,’ said Shorty.

  Nashville leaned into the jeep, took hold of a dial between his thumb and forefinger, and snapped it off.

  ‘Nope,’ said Nashville, dropping the broken control into his pocket.

  He drove to his favourite shade tree and went back to sleep.

  Half an hour later, Nashville’s sleep was interrupted again, this time by the hoarse, unfamiliar sound of static, and Hauser barking for ‘car one’. He lunged at the radio and turned it off, which was more difficult since he’d removed the dial.

  ‘Who’s car one?’ asked Shorty.

  ‘We are,’ said Nashville. ‘Why they hell did you turn on the radio?’

  ‘I was bored,’ said Shorty.

  Nashville put his feet back on the dashboard and pulled his helmet over his eyes. As soon as he began to doze, Shorty jumped on the radio.

  ‘This is car one,’ said Shorty to the radio.

  ‘Car one, signal one hundred, Long Tâm Thu, code three,’ said the operator.

  Nashville grabbed the receiver.

  ‘Ten-oh-one,’ he shouted. ‘Unable to copy, signal bad.’

  Shorty tried to wrestle the receiver from him, but Nashville pushed him away with the flat of his palm.

  ‘Ten-one-two, proceeding!’ Shorty called out.

  The radio belched, satisfied.

  ‘I ought to fucking shoot you,’ said Nashville to Shorty.

  Shorty put up his hands. Nashville turned off the radio and spat over the side of the jeep.

  ‘Which way is Long Tâm Thu?’ asked Shorty.

  ‘Who gives a fuck?’ said Nashville. ‘We ain’t going.’ He wiped his mouth.

  ‘I just told them we would,’ said Shorty.

  ‘Then catch a fucking bus,’ said Nashville.

  Shorty slumped into his seat and frowned.

  ‘I don’t think it’s right,’ said Shorty. ‘What if we had to call for help and nobody came to save us?’

  ‘Jesus fuck!’ snapped Nashville, and slammed his hand on the dashboard.

  He started up the jeep. It grumbled and lurched.

  ‘Signal one hundred,’ said Nashville, ‘it’s an emergency. Code three, lights and sirens. What a steaming heap of ass chocolate.’

  The road whined with scooters and choleric army trucks, but the sounds of traffic were drowned by clattering cymbals and screaming flutes, as four men wearing white headbands crossed the road carrying a monk on a chair. Soft clouds of incense masked the smell of gasoline.

  Nashville stopped the jeep to let the procession pass. Behind the monk wailed a line of mama-sans, scattering bank notes of no earthly currency, then men waving Chinese banners, like students protesting against a war. An altar came next, then a surprised and disappointed cooked pig. It looked like a fat pink snake because, Nashville realised, somebody had cut off its ears.

  A carved and painted casket was carried behind on the bed of a truck. A dance of junior monks, drowning in their robes, made up the lashing tail of the parade. Most of the mourners ignored the military traffic, encased in their own cacophonous grief, but the younger men paused to glare at Shorty, and point to their ears and scowl.

  ‘What’s going on?’ Shorty asked Nashville.

  ‘I’d guess,’ said Nashville, ‘that we’re watching the second funeral of the late Nguyễn Van Tran.’

  As the procession passed towards the edge of town, firecrackers blew in barrages, as if there had been an explosion at an ammo dump.

  ‘Do you think the Mamasan organised it?’ asked Shorty.

  ‘No,’ said Nashville. ‘This is a political demonstration. The Mamasan don’t take sides. She’s neutral in this war.’

  ‘Like you,’ said Shorty.

  Nashville looked at him with mild surprise. ‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘That’s right. Like me.’

  Nashville hadn’t realised it was so obvious.

  Since the emergency was supposed to be in a village, Nashville and Shorty were expected to take along an officer of the South Vietnamese Military Police. Nashville held a low opinion of both military and police generally, but saved his deepest mistrust for the local MPs in Vung Tau. While they were indolent and ineffectual – two qualities of which Nashville broadly approved – they also tended to be brutal, c
orrupt and stupid. The exception was a shy, serious young conscript the boys called Mickey – because he had once been slipped a Mickey Finn – who loved to ride with the Americans because it gave him a chance to practise his English. As a treat today, Nashville let Mickey hold the siren, which wailed indignantly as the vehicle forced a route between cyclists and cyclomen but was ignored by every person and animal on the road.

  The jeep found the hamlet of Long Tâm Thu, a flowering of leaf huts on the stem of a sandy path. Small children waving palm fronds chased cockerels in the dust, under ragged flags of laundry drying on bamboo frames.

  The MPs and Mickey were met by the village headman, a gaunt, shirtless elder with teeth the colour of plums. He beckoned them to follow him into his hut, where they sat beside a bamboo screen on a bare floor, while the headman’s toothless wife poured hot water from a thermos into an earthen teapot. Nashville leaned against a hammock as the headman told his story to Mickey.

  ‘There was a foreigner sleeping in the whore’s hut,’ Mickey translated. ‘He came in before the roosters rose. Only the children saw him. They say he was white, like a ghost.’

  ‘When did he leave?’ asked Nashville.

  ‘At dawn,’ said Mickey, ‘after he shot the rooster and two hens.’

  Nashville tapped his notepad with his pen. ‘Why exactly is this a fucking emergency?’

  The headman nodded robustly at the word ‘emergency’.

  ‘The ghost of the foreigner killed three chickens,’ said Mickey. ‘This is small to the US Army, but not to a village like this one, where all the men are away.’

  ‘Where are all the men?’ asked Nashville.

  ‘Fighting for the government,’ replied the headman and Mickey simultaneously, in Vietnamese and English.