R&R Page 7

  They began to eat out, and developed a taste for Chinese food. They knew their horizons were broadening and they were growing as people. Betty’s mother and father came up from Adelaide to meet Shorty and assess him, to measure, weigh and test him, to kiss his cheek and shake his hand and see how they could love him. He took them out for a Cantonese meal, and Betty’s father worried he might be a bohemian.

  Betty tended to men who were malingering and Shorty patrolled a base that was free of serious crime, until Betty’s posting suddenly came through. She packed her bags, made a will, and arrived at 1 Field Hospital in March 1967, just before the monsoon broke.

  Shorty missed her even more than he’d missed his dog. When the Australian MP in Ba Ria caught rabies, Shorty volunteered to replace him every day, until the CO tired of reading his laboriously composed petitions and ordered him to take his final leave and go. On the plane, Shorty carried a roll of blankets sent to Betty by her parents, who believed it could turn chilly in Vietnam over Easter.

  Shorty gave Nashville half the story of his life with Betty, which was more than he’d ever disclosed to anyone before. When he had finished, Nashville stared at him, as if he had just learned his partner lived in a gum tree and ate grubs.

  ‘You’re telling me,’ said Nashville, ‘that you came to a brothel to be with your girlfriend?’

  ‘You can laugh at me,’ said Shorty, ‘but I’m an honest bloke with a good heart, and I’m just trying to do the right thing.’

  Dr Clarke had never been married. He supposed he had never found the right woman. Or, rather, whenever he felt he had found her, she did not feel he was the right man. It was difficult for anyone outside the medical profession to understand the demands on a physician in civilian life, let alone the pressures and constraints on an army doctor, who could not even choose where he wanted to practise. Except, of course, war. Dr Clarke had chosen war. He had come out of compassion, but he stayed for the excitement.

  He offered Anderson another shot of whiskey. They were drinking in the stores tent, hidden among shelves of catheters and gauze, where Anderson had first discovered Dr Clarke, waiting to be found one dry afternoon, singing softly to his bottle.

  It was a kindly, cashless blackmail. Anderson wanted to never go back to his unit as a combat medic, and to keep his temporary posting at 8 Field Ambulance for the rest of his time in Vietnam. He was terrified of going out again with the infantry. They needed skilled men in the bush, not half-trained stretcher bearers like Anderson, who had joined the Australian Army because he loved to play the trumpet and he’d heard they had a brass band.

  ‘What about the new sisters?’ Anderson asked Dr Clarke. ‘Seen anything you like?’

  Dr Clarke looked at the whiskey bottle, curved like a woman and full of comfort. ‘No,’ he said, ‘not really.’

  ‘What about the big girl?’ asked Anderson. ‘The one who nearly went to pieces?’

  ‘Betty?’ said Dr Clarke. ‘I believe she has a fiancé here.’

  A couple of Australians weaved into the bar, half-drunk yet sombre. They stood beside Shorty, each supporting the other with his body. Shorty realised they’d come down from the hospital, where they’d helped to unload wounded. They talked about the boy who wouldn’t make it, and their voices throbbed with hurt and wonder.

  Shorty felt he ought to go back and check if Betty was all right. Nashville watched him walk carefully to the door. He guessed he should maybe see his partner into a Lambretta taxi, but surely the Australian was big enough to take care of himself. Nashville had seen smaller pine trees. Christ, he’d seen shorter gun towers.

  Outside, darkness hid the highway. The only light was cast by a brazier burning charcoal, beside an old man selling sugarcane juice from a cart. The Lambretta drivers were asleep in their cabs. Shorty had been warned not to walk to ALSG, although he was sure he could find his way back along the shoreline. He searched the sky for the Southern Cross, and saw a plane drop from the constellation like a falling star.

  Twenty yards from Le Boudin, there was silence – as if the music from the bar had blown out to sea – and the blackness a child resists when she struggles against sleep. Shorty felt suddenly afraid and turned back, with the idea of waking one of the Lambretta men, but the taxis had gone. He could not understand how none of them had passed him on the road.

  Shorty told himself he would walk because he’d started walking, and it wasn’t far, only two or three miles, and once he’d begun it would soon be over. He jerked into a quickstep, as if to surprise himself into action. He imagined he was lost on a route march, an exercise, and the worst that could happen was he’d fail a navigation test and spend the night sleeping in a barn.

  Anyway, he guessed a patrol would soon pass.

  He swung his arms and pumped his legs, breathing heavily, trying to hide his nerves from the night.

  A light bobbed towards him on the road, floating swiftly but unsteadily, like a beacon in a current. It slowed as it came closer, and a boy on a Honda called, ‘G’day, Aussie. Need a ride?’

  The kid wore a large, loose US flight jacket with sergeant’s stripes sewn onto the sleeves. Shorty squinted at his face. His mouth was hard, and he was laughing because Shorty was a soldier who was worried about climbing onto a scooter with a fourteen-year-old.

  ‘C’mon, digger,’ said the boy. ‘I know all the Aussies. They call me Ginger Meggs.’

  He didn’t look like Ginger Meggs. Shorty hurried off.

  ‘Oi, mate,’ said Ginger Meggs. ‘You’re going the wrong way.’

  Ginger Meggs patted the seat of his scooter.

  ‘Best taxi service outside the Cross, mate,’ he said. ‘Get on.’

  ‘I don’t need a ride,’ said Shorty.

  Ginger Meggs turned off his engine, which snuffed out the headlamp. He jumped off the scooter and followed along beside Shorty, pushing the bike by its handlebars. Shorty hastened into the darkness, his hands in his pockets and head bowed.

  ‘You’re new here,’ said Ginger Meggs.

  ‘Get lost,’ said Shorty.

  ‘You’re the one who’s lost, mate,’ said Ginger Meggs.

  Shorty looked up and around and there was nothing to see. He must’ve turned off the main street while he’d been watching his feet. A Lambretta rumbled along on an invisible road beneath him. Shorty became aware of the waft of monstrous vegetation, stale cooking oil and small, angry men. He quickened, tripped and almost fell.

  ‘You can’t run,’ said Ginger Meggs, invisible in a lake of tar.

  SEVEN

  Nashville sat with Quyn, describing the second funeral of Nguyễn Van Tran. Quyn did not say, but she had grown up with the old man as an uncle, and played in the dirt with the son who had gone to the guerrillas. She remembered the boy pelting buffalo with dry mud at daybreak, to herd them to pasture. She knew the bride of the blossoming ao dai, a kind woman driven inside herself with grief. It had saddened Quyn that Nguyễn Van Tran had gone to the ancestors unnoticed. She recalled his woodworker’s hands, carving furniture outside the cainha, before his family were all gone and he drifted like duckweed towards the town.

  They had buried him, for the second time, in a tomb in a rice field on ground that had once been worked by his father. The landlord allowed it as a gesture to the people. There were many such signals in these times, when the property owners were eager to show they too were Vietnamese and loved their homeland more than rent.

  The wife of Nguyễn Van Tran had taught Quyn to sew. Quyn would have liked to help make his shroud, but even diligence to the dead was viewed as political in this year of the goat, and Moreau had barred his girls from the funeral. Nevertheless, Quyn had stolen away to climb the hill where Nguyễn Van Tran was first interred, to burn incense at his altar and curse softly his killer.

  She had recognised Nguyễn Van Tran when those fools had dragged him into Le Boudin. For a moment, she had thought the uncle had come back from the ancestors, to sit with his little Lotus Flower one last t
ime. He had called her Lotus Flower, although that was not her name, any more than her name was Quyn. She, among all of them, would have helped Nashville, if she thought any good could come of involving the Americans. She could still see their frustrated virtue, despite everything they had done.

  The room grew smaller. People pushed closer together. Baby Marie whispered to Quyn that she’d seen the dustoff chopper, and heard the cry of a wailing soul. Quyn said it must have been the song of a seagull. Baby Marie wanted to talk to Tâm, but Quyn told her to leave Tâm to the reporters, who had been in Vung Tau so long without a fuck they would soon burst and spore.

  Quyn spoke gently to Baby Marie. She believed Tâm could see the future, and knew it was best to learn bad news late.

  Nashville watched Baby Marie duck around the lizard men with her drinks tray when, bobbing above her head, he noticed a bright yellow paper boat. The boat sailed past, and Nashville realised it was a pork-pie hat, worn by a short man with a busy face, who was walking briskly towards Nashville as if they had some business together.

  ‘I heard you’re a police officer,’ said the man in the yellow hat. ‘I’m looking for an American.’

  Nashville took a drink. ‘You’ve got the wrong kind of cop, sir,’ he said. ‘I’m MP. Civilians should be invisible to me – as you would be, if it weren’t for your fucking magnificent yellow hat.’

  The man touched his crown.

  ‘You’re a reporter,’ said Nashville.

  The man smiled tolerantly, as if Nashville had mispronounced a difficult surname.

  Izzy Berger felt it was important to look like the man you were. People such as fighters, basketballers and blacks found this easier than entrepreneurs. Berger dressed carefully, in a yellow hat, dog’s-tooth sports jacket, wrinkle-resistant white pants and two-tone spats, so that he would be both easily recognisable and attractive to women. Girls, he had found, liked a man who was stylish and made them laugh. His hat alone had opened bedroom doors.

  ‘I’m trying to find one of your compatriots,’ said Berger.

  He plucked a business card from his hatband, and offered it to Nashville, who leaned away. Berger took a small step forward, and Nashville considered hitting him with an uppercut, just to watch his yellow hat fly into the air.

  The man jabbed his business card at Nashville’s chin. Reluctantly, Nashville caught and examined it.

  ‘Isaac Berger,’ read Nashville, ‘impresario.’

  The address on the card was a post-office box number in Potts Point, New South Wales.

  Berger offered Nashville a Lucky Strike. Nashville took it, pushed it into his packet, and lit his own Marlboro. Berger smoked with him, like a boy learning from his father.

  Nashville looked across at Tâm. He could’ve followed her all night, he realised. It wouldn’t matter what she was doing. She could have sat for a portrait and Nashville would have stared at her until the painter finished.

  Berger, ignored, watched Nashville watch Tâm. She wasn’t his type. Berger’s women were bustier and noisier, more maternal.

  When Berger neither spoke nor left, Nashville felt he had to fill the space.

  ‘May I ask,’ said Nashville, ‘out of fucking politeness rather than curiosity, what your business is here?’

  ‘I’m a showman, corporal,’ said Berger. ‘They call me Australia’s PT Barnum.’

  There had once been a story in Pix magazine, in which a rival promoter had said, ‘Berger thinks he’s Australia’s PT Barnum, but he’s just a thieving greasy kike.’ Berger had felt hurt but it was important to have his name in the public eye, and he often used his edited version of the quote to help him seal a deal. And for Berger, the deal was the thing. If he could have chosen his own nickname, he would have been recognised around Kings Cross, Sydney, as Izzy ‘the Deal’ Berger. But nicknames come from others, and so it was that Berger was known in Australia as ‘the Twat in the Hat’.

  Nashville brightened at the mention of Australia.

  ‘You’re an Austral-alien?’ said Nashville. ‘I have a buddy who is Austral-alien. His name is Shorty.’

  ‘Is he one of the tallest blokes you’ve ever seen?’ asked Berger.

  ‘That’s right,’ said Nashville. ‘Do you know him?’

  ‘No,’ said Berger, ‘but I saw him just now on the road, getting bashed.’

  Nashville spewed out of the bar like Jonah from the whale, his flesh clammy with its sticky juices. He knew the quiet of a Vung Tau night, but this was deeper, a staged silence. It seemed as if a whisper had hushed the insects and stilled the waves on the sea.

  ‘Where’re all the fucking Lambrettas?’ he shouted, to the old man selling sugarcane juice.

  The hawker thought Nashville was asking after Shorty, so he pointed towards the hills. Nashville saw the sugarcane guy every night of his life, but wouldn’t have recognised him without his cart, and couldn’t have described the face beneath the leaf hat.

  Nashville climbed onto Tâm’s melon-yellow Honda, paid for by Nashville and a dozen other soldiers. She kept it parked by the side of the bar, under invisible protection. Nashville started it up with a coin and rode shakily into the night, a gunfighter on a riding-school pony, too tall for the saddle.

  He followed the old man’s finger, and noticed along the way all the people who weren’t there. A cuddle of street sleepers had taken up their bedrolls, leaving only the snakeman coiled around a candle. He opened one eye as the scooter stuttered by. Nashville skirted the spots where diseased girls waited in the street to lead Korean soldiers into the rubbish dump to fuck. Tonight, they were absent, or perhaps already rolling in rotting fruit and coconut husks, spent ammo and oil rags. Nashville rode through the shopping streets and saw a light burning in Sam Singh the tailor’s.

  There should be more going on, thought Nashville, men brawling and chasing girls, singing songs and crying out, patting down their pockets to find their wallets gone.

  Izzy Berger had tried to describe the place he’d seen the tall man fighting, but it shouldn’t have been hard to find Shorty. Vung Tau was only a town because the French had built a town hall. Without les colons, it would have been simply a port with a market, surrounded by a wreath of leaf huts. There were alleyways and trails, back streets and tracks, but they were few.

  Nashville noticed there was nobody manning the Vietnamese civilian police post. This would, he knew, make no difference to the amount of civilian police work that might get done, but was unusual because it meant the police were awake. He guessed maybe they’d found women.

  Then Nashville saw Shorty’s body, stretched out face down, as if he’d fallen asleep while searching for something he’d dropped.

  Half an hour before, Shorty had been listening in the darkness to the lilting, disembodied voice of the Vietnamese boy who called himself Ginger Meggs, when he was sure he’d heard a threat. Shorty’d had enough of the boy trailing him and taunting him, treating him like he was a harmless fool instead of a corporal in the Australian Army Provost Corps. Frustrated, he scraped his boot in the sand. The boy laughed, but not unkindly.

  ‘I’m not your enemy,’ he said.

  Shorty’s knees buckled. He realised he was coming down a hill he couldn’t remember having climbed. He was heading back towards the town, and people. A knot of men waited by a brazier. Shorty called out to them in English.

  ‘You’re a fool, Aussie,’ said Ginger Meggs. ‘Get on the bike.’

  The men turned slowly, interested at first only so far as they might be inconvenienced. They were shadows while gathered around the flames, but dissolved as they moved away from the light. Shorty felt Ginger Meggs behind him on the scooter, and realised he was being herded towards the others. They grabbed at him and called to him. He felt strong, bony fingers on his shoulders and elbows, tugging his arms, tearing his shirt, trying to drag him down.

  They pulled and they pushed and Shorty felt they might tear him apart. He lashed out, caught a man on the chin and another on the ear, but the shadows
seemed to multiply and they forced him to his knees. They were punching him now, with hard balls of fists, and spitting at him like birds. Two men struck him at once, and one bit into his shoulder.

  Then the ground opened up to swallow him. It were as if a fresh grave had been dug and covered by tarpaulin, and a hand in the darkness had pulled away the sheet. Shorty felt he was falling into a shaft. He grabbed at the lips of the hole, and small, bare feet stamped on his fingers.

  I’m sinking, he thought. He imagined quicksand.

  The shadows tore at his fingertips, but Shorty kept his grip and he was never going to let go, never going to give up, never going to drop. He was from Bendigo, Victoria, and that meant something, even out here.

  Ginger Meggs shouted to the shadows, no longer a cartoon. He revved up his scooter and turned the headlamp on their faces, blinding them with light. He stepped off the bike, pulled up the seat and whipped out a cane and cracked it across the face of the first man, and screamed at him in fierce birdsong. Shorty’s attackers backed away.

  Shorty pulled himself out of the hole and raised his hands to his chin, a punch-drunk pug ready to box on when the fight was over. The Vietnamese mimicked him and danced like puppets. Ginger Meggs revved up the scooter and drove at them, slapping his cane to one side then the other, catching them on the backs and thighs. They ran off laughing, and Shorty realised they were just kids, ten or eleven years old.

  ‘Okay, Aussie,’ said Ginger Meggs. ‘Okay, MP.’

  He’d known all along.

  Ginger Meggs wiped Shorty’s cuts with spit on a rag, then helped him onto the bike.

  ‘There might be others waiting,’ he said. ‘We’ll go back through the town.’

  The light turned on in the tailor’s shop. The peasants who’d lost their farmland, who gathered on the street each night in imitation of their village, paused in their murmurs. Ginger Meggs shouted to them and they rolled, turning away. The snakeman, their talisman, regarded him flatly, a poor source of food.