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Nashville dug into his pocket. ‘Here,’ he said to the headman, handing him two dollars. ‘Buy yourself your sister.’

  The chief took his money, pressed his palms together and dipped his head.

  ‘Claim assessed,’ said Nashville to Shorty, ‘compensation paid. No need to write it up.’

  Nashville, Shorty and Mickey climbed back into the jeep.

  ‘You’re not going to report this?’ asked Shorty.

  ‘Hell no,’ said Nashville. ‘I hate fucking paperwork more than . . .’

  ‘Other types of work?’ suggested Shorty.

  Nashville scowled.

  ‘All we’ve got here,’ said Nashville, ‘is the shooting of three chickens.’ He mimed the massacre with his gun hand. ‘It’s a tragedy, maybe, from the point of view of poultry, but I predict it will have only a minor effect on the course of the war. Will the chicken stage a “coop”?’ Nashville asked the sky. ‘Will poultry “flock” to join the VC? I believe fucking not.’

  They passed a hut at the edge of the village. A collage of blood and feathers lay on the porch.

  ‘I think the ghost was Sergeant Caution,’ said Shorty to Nashville.

  ‘Could be,’ said Nashville, ‘since we’ve been reliably told he’s dead.’

  Shorty pointed to the hut. ‘We should take a look around.’

  ‘Nah,’ said Nashville. ‘Even if it was TJ, he’d be long gone by now. And sure, we should do our best to find that sorely unmissed piece of uniformed dogshit – but not if it interferes with our other cases.’

  ‘But we haven’t got any other cases,’ said Shorty.

  ‘Jesus, Shorty!’ cried Nashville. ‘What do you want to me do?’

  ‘Police work,’ mumbled Shorty.

  Mickey lay down across the back seat.

  ‘You’ve got police work on the fucking brain,’ said Nashville to Shorty.

  He stopped the jeep, and reversed through the sand to the hut. Shorty clambered out and paced around the leaf shack, as if he were patrolling its perimeter. He prodded the remains of the chickens with a stick, as if the answer lay in the entrails. Nashville watched him, hot and bored, until he lost patience.

  ‘Okay,’ said Nashville, ‘here we are, at a fucking crime scene. Why don’t you tape it off, Shorty? Why don’t you dust it for prints?’

  Shorty smiled tightly.

  ‘Or you could take a crime-scene photograph,’ said Nashville. ‘They might print it in the Geese Gazette.’

  ‘I’m sorry for wanting to do my job,’ said Shorty.

  He threw his stick into the scrub.

  Nashville led Shorty back to the jeep. He shook his head at the strangeness of the morning, trapped a pair of Marlboros between his lips, lit them both and passed one towards his partner.

  ‘I don’t smoke,’ said Shorty.

  Nashville shrugged, as if the world were full of wonders. He fixed one cigarette in his left hand and the other in his right, and sucked on each in turn.

  ‘I don’t like this,’ he said, eventually. ‘Cowboys dancing on police vehicles, ears going missing from heads, ghosts massacring chickens, cops greasing zipperheads who’re already dead. There’s been a change in the atmosphere of this town, a wave of unmotivated, profitless, pointless crimes.’

  Nashville looked hard at Shorty.

  ‘Things like this never happened before you came to Vung Tau,’ he said.

  The helicopter’s rotors beat the air with savage determination, like if they hit it fast enough, hard enough and often enough, it might stay down. Tommy Callaghan looked out from the passenger bay, over the shoulder of the port-side gunner, and studied the tree line as a relief map below him. He turned his head to see Mike Gordon’s fly-catcher mouth and exhausted, tearless eyes, and Paddy Newell’s lips drooping over devastated gums. Callaghan leaned back against the webbing and tried to ask the medic for water, but he had no voice.

  There was a field dressing wrapped around the stump of his left elbow. He imagined his hand trying to claw after him as the medics loaded him onto the chopper. He knew it still wanted to be a part of him.

  He was surprised he had been mutilated, because he had known he would be safe. That’s why he had made plans. Otherwise, there would have been no point.

  Tommy Callaghan’s platoon had been on patrol in the bush, five days out of Nui Dat, setting up night ambushes that caught nobody. He had been alert but preoccupied, building a hut in the mountains, a hunting cabin to use with his butter-skinned son. All the time, he looked ahead to the forward scout, mindful of his step, the turn of his head, the perch of his Armalite.

  Today the scout was Reffo, who’d been with him since recruit training. There was something temporary about Reffo, something unfixed. He liked to go crazy in the bars.

  Reffo stopped suddenly and stood still, a statue of an Anzac on a plinth. He had heard something, or felt it, in the ground beneath his feet. He looked over his shoulder at Callaghan and giggled.

  A Claymore mine jumped out of the long grass and tore away the legs that had carried Reffo with grace and speed through early-morning runs at Kapooka and Singleton, as cockatiels sang marching songs from the branches of stringybark trees.

  Callaghan had thought legs were more firmly attached than that. They shouldn’t just come away, as if at the twist of a key. He raised his own left hand, to guard his face from flying steel, and his arm was taken off at the elbow and carried into the trees.

  Callaghan was smiling as he strode confidently towards Reffo to pick up his legs – with his right hand – and put him back together. A dozen voices yelled, ordering him to get down or roll up or stand-to or dance, but all he could hear were fragments, the shrapnel of words.

  When he reached Reffo, he kneeled beside him and touched first his body and then his legs, then Reffo screamed and died.

  Hands – perhaps one was his own – grabbed Tommy Callaghan and pulled him away.

  Petersen the medic wrapped the stump in gauze, then took a knife and cut through Callaghan’s greens. There was blood on his chest like a map of Australia.

  But with no Tasmania, thought Callaghan. So how will I get home?

  The helicopter hovered and dropped.

  The rest of the patrol surrounded the chopper, pointing their weapons outwards at the idea of enemies. They put the pieces of Reffo in a bag.

  ‘My arm,’ said Callaghan.

  Rocky the corporal turned to look for it, but had to stay on the cleared trail.

  ‘I can’t . . .’ he said.

  There was a tear in Rocky’s eye because it seemed like the smallest thing you could do for a mate was to find his hand, but Rocky knew there could be other mines, planted like onions near the surface of the ground.

  I wonder if Baby Marie will still love me with only one arm, thought Callaghan. He realised how lucky he was to have been called up. He would not have known Baby Marie if it hadn’t been for the army. He would never have made love to a girl like that.

  The medic spoke to Callaghan while he bandaged up his chest. He told him he’d got himself a homer, that he would be going back to Launceston in the summer. He touched him below the heart and asked if it hurt.

  The others crowded around, trying to keep him awake.

  ‘Typical Monkey,’ they said, as if he got blown up by a jumping-jack mine every day of the week, and had spent most of his service looking for his arm. ‘Half your luck,’ they said. ‘You’ll be right in no time.’

  He vomited.

  What did I drink that was black? he wondered. When did I swallow blood?

  His chest seemed to swell and sag, swell and sag. Each time it fell, he felt a boot crush his lungs. Darkness drifted down behind his eyes. The faces of his friends became fingerprints, then blobs of light, flickering candlewicks. He knew suddenly that he should have asked the girl in the blue dress to dance with him in the memorial hall when he was fifteen years old and feared rejection more than death. The girl in the tall shoes. The girl with the green eyes. The girl with the long sm
ile.

  He hoped someone had remembered to bring the bag full of Reffo.

  Tommy Callaghan was glad to have been a soldier, grateful to have known his mates, but wished he’d had more time.

  The new sister had heard the sirens before she saw the dustoff chopper, and ran into the operating theatre to scrub up and tie on a gown. The helicopter squatted on the vampire pad, where the medical orderlies stretchered off the casualties, calling and yelling and trying to figure out who was hurt the most. The bag containing Reffo was taken away. The sister and the other nurses swarmed around Tommy Callaghan, telling him he was fine and handsome and young and strong and fit and Australian and safenowsafe, and everything was going to be all right.

  Callaghan used his right hand to point to the place his left hand used to be, as if they hadn’t seen, in case they didn’t know. He could see the smile of his baby boy – unconceived, unborn – and it warmed him like the sun, as if the sun were shining for Tommy Callaghan, on Tommy Callaghan, to keep Tommy Callaghan warm while he was shaking with chills.

  A soldier screamed and didn’t stop.

  That bloke’s finished, thought Callaghan, and then he realised the voice was his own.

  He had always imagined the soul to be a shadow, a silhouette. The essence of a man was the shape of man, and Callaghan was calling out because he could feel his life fleeing his body, and was shouting after it to come back.

  ‘Please! Please!’

  An intravenous drip hung from Callaghan’s remaining arm, with a line leading to a sack of fluid.

  The sack looked like an organ to Callaghan, although he couldn’t say which one. It was a part of his body outside his body, connected by a clear vein.

  Dr Clarke ordered all non-medical staff out of the area. He was a tall man who stooped. At forty-four, he had only recently given up playing basketball for the army. In his quarters, he composed poetry in classical Greek. He felt lonely in Vietnam, in Vung Tau, and in the field hospital.

  ‘Mum!’ cried Callaghan. ‘Help me!’

  Callaghan had been raised by his father, couldn’t recall his mother, had never seen his mother, was the only man born without a mother to hold him.

  ‘Mum!’ he cried. ‘Mum! Mum! ’

  The sister attended him, although there was no point. Dr Clarke tried to wave her towards one of the more lightly wounded casualties, but there was too much shouting and shoving and she was too new to understand.

  Callaghan clawed at the air with his good hand and his no hand, like a cat on its back, or a national-service trainee trying to pull himself up a rope ladder, anxious not to be left behind by his mates.The sister took his fingers in hers.

  Anderson the orderly barked at the sister. It wasn’t his place, since she outranked him, but he’d found a man who could be saved, and she was just standing there like some kind of fucking monument over the body of a boy who should’ve been dead when they brought in the dustoff and was only hanging on – by one fucking hand – because he had a woman to wipe away his tears.

  He should’ve gone to the Americans at 36th Evac, thought Anderson. And we’re giving him fucking penicillin.

  ‘Mum!’ yelled Callaghan.

  Blood bubbled over his lips.

  ‘Mummy!’ he screamed, then fell silent and dropped the sister’s hand.

  She watched his fingers fall.

  Anderson was a fat South Australian with black-spider hair. He smoked Lucky Strikes, and left long stubs crushed on the hospital floor for the Vietnamese cleaners to gather like rice. He was good at triage. He was a survivor himself, but some men, he knew, had only a light hold on life.

  The sister turned to face Anderson, as if she’d at last heard him call her.

  ‘It’s okay, love,’ he said, but she felt there was something mocking in his tone, and he should have called her ‘sister’.

  The sister didn’t think of herself as the kind of person who took against her workmates. She wondered if it was because Anderson was ugly. That made her feel shallow. Then she thought, Why is this even in my mind when a boy just died? And she felt shallower still.

  Anderson thought she was mourning the man who’d passed. ‘You’ll get used to it,’ he said.

  ‘I am used to it,’ the sister snapped. ‘I’m a trained nurse. What do you think I’ve been doing for the past four years, orderly?’

  Anderson didn’t care. Words were just noises. He hunched a shoulder and, without touching the sister, he bullied the air around her and had it push her towards a patient who would leave the ward with only a scar on his temples and a purple-rose burn mark.

  SIX

  Nashville watched the dustoff chopper grow from a pinhole on the horizon to a crater in a cloud, while the hawkers of Vung Tau laid bets on beetles wrestling in a pothole. They goaded the insects with sticks, as pieces of Australian boys were flown in from the scrub. Only the snakeman turned his head slowly up at the helicopter, like a cobra following the reed pipes in a charmer’s punctured hands.

  It was late in the afternoon, and Nashville suggested he and Shorty should go for a drink, as it was important they run through the events of recent days, in case they might recognise a hidden pattern. This was the procedure Nashville used to follow with his previous partner who, before he’d joined the military, had spent one happy year selling life insurance to lonely housewives.

  Shorty agreed, because he figured it was an order, and he had a head full of questions for Nashville. He left his partner idling the jeep as he returned to his hut to change into civilian clothes.

  Shorty swapped his pants for Fletcher Jones slacks and dropped his weapon in the locker. Adams shook his hand as they hurried to the gate, and told Shorty there had been a mine incident: two diggers killed. Half their company was on R&C in town and there might be trouble when their mates heard the news, but it wouldn’t be much and it wouldn’t last long, because all the blokes knew there was nothing you could do.

  Adams and Shorty stopped to report to the provost sergeant, who told Shorty he wasn’t allowed off the base at night for his first week in Vung Tau, and would he please fuck off back to his tent and have a wank into his sock.

  ‘He’s meeting Nashville,’ Adams explained.

  ‘That sick motherfucker,’ said the sergeant.

  Adams nodded.

  ‘If you’re not back by twenty-two hundred, you’re on a charge,’ barked the sergeant to Shorty. ‘And if you tell the skipper I let you out, I’ll ram a pool cue down your throat and use your balls for billiards.’

  Adams gave Nashville and Shorty a ride back to Le Boudin and again warned Shorty against Moreau.

  ‘You don’t meet crooks like that in Bendigo, Victoria,’ said Adams.

  ‘I’m expanding my partner’s horizons,’ said Nashville.

  He didn’t know that in Bendigo, Victoria, the horizon stretched forever.

  Le Boudin looked more imposing in the dusk, rising white from the sand and shrub against an ashen sky. It made Shorty think of a mason’s lodge. Nashville joked with the Vietnamese drivers who lingered outside in taxis built from Lambretta scooters, a fleet of puffing, coughing milk floats waiting to carry drunks home.

  Inside, the bar was heated by warm blood pumping through the veins of soldiers, and soaked by their rumsweat and spittle. GIs laughed and swore over the beat of a black man drumming, and a voice as deep as oceans begging baby not to leave.

  Shorty’s days in Vung Tau had made no sense. He found it hard to believe two white men would carry a body into a bar and buy it a drink, before another white man came in and shot it. Nor could he figure out why Nashville didn’t seem more interested in finding Sergeant Caution, a missing soldier from his own unit. He was hungry to hear what Nashville had to say about the case, and Nashville was eager to help Shorty understand what was going on.

  ‘First thing,’ said Nashville. ‘I think Baby Marie likes you.’

  The girl with the hibiscus lips sat alone, looking over at the two men.

  ‘I’v
e got a girlfriend,’ said Shorty.

  ‘Every guy in Vung Tau has a girlfriend,’ said Nashville. ‘In a surprising fucking number of instances, it’s the same girl.’

  But Baby Marie was blind to both of them. The last thing her eyes had seen was the helicopter fly in from the scrub.

  Nashville tried to fill in Shorty about the way things happened at Le Boudin. Moreau made his money from the drinks men bought the girls at the bar, and the fines paid by soldiers to leave the bar with the girls. The women chose who they took home, or to the rooms Moreau kept for them at the back of the building. Once a girl picked you, she was your girlfriend. That didn’t mean you couldn’t have other girlfriends in other bars, hotels, restaurants, massage parlours, coffee houses, barbershops or car washes, but in Vung Tau – as in Troy, Tennessee – it paid not to keep two women in the same establishment. While you were out in the field the girlfriend–boyfriend arrangement was cancelled until you returned to base. Also, while you were in town, and even while you were in the bar, your girlfriend did not need to advertise that she was your girlfriend to other men who thought she might become their girlfriend. Her job at Le Boudin was to convince lonely guys they were still in with a chance of more than just an ass grab if they fed her enough Saigon tea. This could be either infuriating or exciting, depending on your point of view.

  It would be a mistake, however, to regard these guiding principles as fixed in the manner of, for example, the rules of baseball or the laws of gravity. The game was fluid and adaptable, the only certainty being the odds were stacked against both the girls and the soldiers, and in favour of the bar owners. Any number of additional charges might suddenly apply, if it looked as if a GI might leave the bar with his last dollar still in his pocket.

  Shorty thought of his own girl, and wished she were with them in Le Boudin. She was a better judge of people than Shorty, and could probably help him recognise when Nashville was joking. Shorty loved Betty, but he also admired her. She knew what she was doing, where she was going. As soon as she had qualified, Betty had volunteered for Vietnam. She saw herself making her rounds of the ward, down lines of beds where limbless men smoked pipes and joked courageously about taking a wicket or riding a horse, and how they longed to return to the battlefield. The months passed in Puckapunyal, but she heard nothing, and her idea of her future dissolved into her feeling for Shorty.