“I know nothing, Mai. That is the honest truth.”
“What you know, Joe? You say you no big shot. Maybe you lie. Talk to me on computer and 803rd.”
“Mai, why do you want to know about some computer? I know of no computer.”
“Tell me. Show you love me.”
“Huh?”
“Is trust,
Joe.
”
Is bullshit, I thought.
“You trust
me,
tell all about you if you love me.
Can have no romance if no trust.”
“That’s romance?”
“Romance is
have
no secret, Joe. You no trust me, how can I trust you. No trust, no romance.”
So Mai had added spy to her Dragon Lady
résumé
. Terry Lee’s Dragon Lady’s politics were slick and expedient, but I didn’t recollect hardcore espionage in her curriculum vitae.
That demure servility jazz when I’d arrived tonight was right out of Miss Coquette’s Finishing School.
A setup.
It’d lull me into pillow talk after my femme fatale and I had screwed each other’s brains out. This evening was down the crapper, an unmitigated disaster. I climbed out of bed and started dressing.
“Jakie speak statehood, Joe. He say statehood make South Vietnam part of America. Fifty-first
state
will be America. He
say
statehood
fini
war. Dean
speak
statehood. People on street speak statehood for
Vietnam
. You know statehood, Joe? Is computer for statehood?”
When I enlisted in PFC Bierce’s Army of Misinformation, the budding novelist hadn’t specified that our rumor-mongering had to be confined to Americans.
“Statehood for sure, Mai.
In fact, a state gemstone has already been picked for the State of South Vietnam.”
“Gemstone?
Jewel?”
“Uh-huh. All American states have state gems and flowers and trees and various stuff.
South Vietnam
’s is gonna be the star sapphire.”
“When?”
Statehood, my ass, I thought. Her tactic was to pry open my mouth talking statehood guano,
then
segue to the computer.
“Statehood’s coming soon.
Mai.
“When?”
“Soon.
C’mon, once more, Mai, why are you so curious what the 803rd does?”
She replied by unzipping me and groping between my legs. No improvement.
“Cerebrum 2111X. What computer look like, Joe? What it for?
Statehood?”
“What computer? What statehood?”
“Joe, you go. We have next date when you not so upset, okay?”
“The 803rd is strictly a liaison detachment. We do liaison. All we do is liaison.
Detachedly.
Scout’s honor.”
“Scout?
Who is scout?”
“Long story.”
“What liaison mean? I never know.”
“Liaison is communication. Between groups, different army outfits. And whatnot.”
“Communicate what?
“You want the truth, Mai?”
“Yes.
Truth.”
I knelt to tie my shoelaces. “Liaison is usually gossip. You know, like old ladies at the market.”
“Communication on fifty-first state?”
“Oh yeah.
Definitely.”
“You say liaison is communication.
Communication on what else?
You like me, Joe, you trust me. You talk to me.”
I sprang up. “Talk to me about where you’re from, Mai. Romance is no secrets, right? No trust, no romance. So talk to me about your textbooks. Talk to me about who was before Dean and Jakie and me. Talk to me about your older sis, Quyen, okay?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“No!”
“Talk to me about―”
“You talk first, Joe. I ask you first to talk.”
Piss on it.
I skulked out. No goodbye kiss was offered or given, nor even a bon voyage.
When I reached the ground floor, it’d completely sunk in. My Mai, my Dragon Lady, wasn’t merely a high-class whore. She was without an iota of a doubt a
Commie spy
. A Mata Hari, an Ethel Rosenberg. My Dragon Lady was
the
Dragon Lady in spades.
Cerebrum 2111X. What computer look like, Joe? What it for?
Statehood?
Hell’s bells, she’d known of the computer machine in the Annex long before I had. What was she trying to squeeze out of me?
On the sidewalk, my erectile dysfunction was history. I sprouted a boner that wouldn’t quit and limped home.
I HAVE a permanent case of erectile dysfunction in The Great Beyond. Whether it’s been programmed into me by my masters or it’s just me, it’s a good thing. What am I gonna do with a boner? Unless Smitty’s promised seventy-virgin-strong harem appears and he’s willing to share, the desired outlet is
an impossibility
.
I’m thinking about this one morning as I lie in bed, looking at the ceiling and listening to “Bridge
Over
Troubled Water
.
”
And smelling cigarette smoke.
I’m dressing while I go to the living room window and open the drapes. Sitting on the porch of the house to my right is a plain and dowdy woman in early middle-age. She is of average height and weight, and appears shapeless in a flowered dress. Her hair is unkempt brown, streaked with gray. She stares off into some middle distance as she blows a smoke ring.
I tuck my shirt in, slip into shoes, and go outside. I’m too anxious to see who and what she is to tend to personal hygiene. I don’t think she’ll mind.
“Who the hell are you and where the hell
am I
?” she looks at me and asks in a husky voice.
“I’m Joe and where we are is a good question. I call it The Great Beyond.”
She takes a big drag, exhales, and after a pause, says, “The great beyond. Yeah, that makes sense. I’m Madge.”
“Your
cigarette, where did that
come from?”
“I guess it come here with me. They don’t let you smoke, but they do let you after your last meal.”
“Last meal?”
“Tater Tots and corn dogs.
My favorites.”
Madge touches a bruise on the vein between her forearm and bicep. “They say lethal injection ain’t bad if they do it right, and they did.
Beats the holy hell outta your other choice, the chair.
They say smoke curls outta your ears while you’re still alive.”
“Why?”
“Why what?” she says, flicking her smoke onto to her lawn after she lights another one from it.
I can’t be sure she’s real. “May I touch you?”
She treats me to a smile and a rotting picket fence of yellow teeth. “I
gotta
take off my panties?”
I feel myself redden. No erection is forthcoming.
“I don’t mean that way.”
“Maybe later on you can touch me where you wanna touch me, but I don’t know you good enough yet.”
I touch her arm and feel flesh.
“What did you do, Madge?”
Expressionless, she looks at me. “I went and poisoned three husbands for the insurance. They only caught me on the last one.”
“Oh.”
“His name was Earl and he deserved it, insurance or no insurance. He used to slap me around.”
“Uh-huh.”
“What’s that music we’re hearing?”
I say, “Elevator music without the elevator.”
“
Don’t they do nothing
decent like shitkicker?”
“Not that I’ve heard.”
“Who lives on the other side of you?”
“A young man named Smitty. He is--was a suicide bomber.”
“Like them over there in those A-
rab
countries?”
“You got it.”
Her face is a question mark. “Why would you kill somebody you don’t even know?”
I walk back home, wondering
why me
? Why did our gagster rulers give me neighbors who are multiple murderers? Yeah, I made my wives’ lives miserable, but I didn’t
take
them.
***
I shook Ziggy out of a sound sleep and told all, including my miserable miasmic mortifying manhood malfunction.
I told him of my subsequent arousal, concluding, “It’s as perverted as it gets, man.”
He was sitting up, wide-awake.
“She a VC secret agent, Joey?”
“Damn good question, Zig. It’s looking to be leaning in that direction. It is. Yes it is.”
“If she’s VC, it’s good you couldn’t do it to her. They stick razor blades up their twats, you know, before they take on GIs. That’s a known fact.”
“A real turn-on, Zig.
Yeah, I’m afraid it’s not a case of her subscribing to
Popular Science
and acquiring an interest in electrical computing doodads. I do not think that’s the crux of her curiosity. The weirdest is that she wouldn’t let up on the fifty-first state happy horseshit either.”
“Report her, Joey. If she’s a commie spy, she oughta be gangbanged by everybody in town, then hung up on a flagpole, and afterwards shot for treason.”
“Lighten up, Zig. Nobody’s perfect.”
He was sitting up in bed now, a fleshy pyramid. His blunt, often frightening features were soft with brotherly concern. Christ, how I loved the guy.
“Her letting you see Lanyard’s uniform and quizzing you on the Annex, I don’t get it, Joey.”
“That bothers me too. The way she had the closet door open, she might as well have had a neon light on his fatigues.
If she’s a secret agent, she wasn’t being very secret.”
“Who’s that dumb broad, she opened up this box and out flew this shitstorm that messed up the world forever?”
“Pandora,” I said, shocked that I knew something that Ziggy didn’t.
“Pandora’s box.”
“Yeah, her.
That’s how come she let you see Lanyard’s uniform. Your commie girlie, she was setting
Pandora’s box
in front of your nose and you went and opened it up. Irregardless of why she did it, that’s what she did and what you went and did.”
“Shouldn’t the captain and the colonel be turning her in? I mean, maybe the Cerebrum 2111X is no big deal. If it is, it’s not Mai’s fault they talk to her and talk in their sleep. They’re as guilty as she is.”
“You’re making excuses for her, Joey. You’re pussywhipped and you ain’t even got into hers yet. You’re a lovesick puppy dog. Lemme get back to sleep.”
“Sorry for the wakeup, Zig. Thanks for listening.”
“‘Things develop ceaselessly.’”
Him and his Chairman Mao.
I crawled into my bunk and dreamed horrific dreams.
***
In the morning, Captain Papersmith was in. Colonel Lanyard was in. We knew this since we overheard Colonel Lanyard in his office. He was reaming Captain Papersmith a new pooper. Coming through loud and clear were “can do,” “mission,” “behave like an officer in the United States Army,” and “you aren’t the only swinging dick in this outfit
who
has personal problems.” The colonel had a megaphonic voice when he was agitated. If he yelled “about face,” GIs from here to Quang Tri would snap to attention and do a one-eighty.
When Colonel Lanyard said, “that’s all, dismissed,” we scrambled outside, waited five minutes, and went back in, pretending to just arrive. Saving face wasn’t strictly an Oriental notion.
The captain pretended not to notice. He pretended to concentrate on paperwork. He did not appear to have been crying, but his eyes were red and he looked like death warmed over.
***
The next few days were routine, as routine as routine could be at this goofy time and place. Oh, with the exception of the tarantula. We came home one afternoon and there it was, on the wall above our swelling mound of library books. Ziggy damn near climbed the opposite wall, wearing an unfamiliar visage of fear, eyes widened to fill half his face.
“Relax, Zig. They aren’t aggressive, and their bite, while painful, isn’t especially venomous, and not fatal.”
“You sure?
How do you know?”
“One quarter as a biology major was not for naught.”
“Maybe your girlfriend and her commie pals who planted it here don’t know they can’t kill you, Joey.”
“Well, while they’re common in the tropics, it’s odd we haven’t seen one before,” I conceded.
“Shit, Joey,
it’s
big enough to have tattoos.”
I selected a hardcover, John Updike’s
Rabbit, Run,
and nudged the novel under the remarkably compliant spider. Amused by Ziggy’s seismic footfalls in the hallway, I chucked it out the window.
The subject of critters in the arachnid persuasion did not come up again.
***
Days passed
July 4, 1965 did, too.
Independence Day of a nation far
far
far
faraway.
In Saigon, it was just another Wednesday. Even if I’d had firecrackers, I wasn’t dumb enough to light them off.
I wrote Mother, omitting sidebars on computers and large, hairy spiders. I received a letter from her the same day. Both hers and mine were terse and bloodless and excessively polite.
Mariner 4 was inexorably closing in on Mars. Ziggy spoke of little else. PFC Bierce worked like a dog, laboring ceaselessly and agonizingly on
Jesus of Capri
. Unless it was my imagination, his widow’s peak was in full retreat.
Ziggy and I had lunch with Charlie in Dakao. He was running low on Salems. We said we’d see what we could do.
My Dragon Lady was nowhere to be seen except inside my skull. She had become a cautionary tale. If she was a North Vietnamese operative, I was culpable by association. At best, I’d be tagged a commie symp.
Dean and
Jakie
, too.
If I were sent to a gallows built for three, it was scant consolation.
I reunited the Polaroid of her with horse-faced Mildred and the urchins.
Upside down.
Captain Papersmith seemed not to notice.
The oddballs stepped up their pace, to hell with nine-to-five. They came in earlier, left later, and had their meals delivered to the Annex by Tan Son Nhat mess hall cooks. Ziggy and I did our coolie labor, doing what the Vietnamese used water buffalo for.
We unloaded crated Cerebrum 2111X and CAN-DO parts, of which we remained officially ignorant. Each unmarked box that came via military trucks felt heavier than the last. We left them at the door for the oddballs.
As they clumsily schlepped the stuff into their inner sanctum, we’d overhear them chattering their computer gobbledygook. I mean, what the hell were central processors?
What were thyratron tubes? They were as excited as if rehashing an important football game.
Texas and Alabama in the last Orange Bowl, a topic of that magnitude.
CWO Ralph Buffet did not know us. It was as if we’d been zapped by one of Ziggy’s sci-fi invisibility rays. I didn’t like the snub. He could’ve nodded, for Chrissake. I was tempted to loudly inform him in the company of his colleagues that his latest issue of
Pravda
was waiting for him in the mail room.
At deliveries and within the Annex, General Whipple and Colonel Lanyard frequently supervised. Captain Papersmith was the odd man out. Every day at ten, he’d shuffle out of his office, his mind light years in outer space, like Ziggy’s. Off he’d go in the deathtrap Jeep the colonel didn’t need because he never went anywhere unless he was away on overnight business, the nature of which I knew all too well.
On one such morning our curiosity got the better of us. Ziggy and I flagged down a motorcyclo and said to follow that Jeep. Captain Papersmith drove straight onto
Tu Do Street
, made a left a few blocks from the Hotel Caravelle, and parked smack-dab in front of the GiGi Snack Bar.
Though “Snack” was commonly in their names, bars in this town that catered to American troops did not customarily serve food, not that you’d care to eat it. Snack, Ziggy and I presumed, was a misspelling of snatch, which they did serve…
That trip with Sally to D.C. and the Vietnam War Memorial? It hadn’t been our final journey together. While I was still able to get around unaided, before the morphine and respirator and canes, Sally had surprised me with a trip to Saigon, tickets already purchased, hotel reservations made. I could not say no and I could not love her enough, though I was no longer able to express my affection physically.
As we know, Saigon is now Ho Chi Minh City, and North and South Vietnam are simply Vietnam. The 17th Parallel that separated North and South is merely a dotted line on a map. Americans can ride a train from
Ho Chi Minh City
to
Hanoi
. They can tour the Ho Chi Minh Mausoleum. If they don’t mind the long lines, they can even have a peek at the old boy preserved under glass.
The GiGi is gone, surely victim of the campaign against counterrevolutionary attitudes that commenced when North Vietnamese tanks rolled into town in 1975. If the GiGi Snack Bar’s girls continued cadging
Saigon
tea (“You buy me drink, GI, okay?”) and selling short-times, they did so in a rural reeducation camp.
Sally gave me carte blanche to go anywhere, to do anything I wanted to do. I confined field trips to what I knew and where I’d been in
Saigon
. Like any city after decades, some things are different, some not. We didn’t address it in words, but I knew that carte blanche included a search for my Dragon Lady.