The
Terry and the Pirates
Dragon Lady could not have been a fraction as complex as mine.
Could not.
Not that the comic strip counterpart was a dummy, but c’mon. No way was she a math whiz, a teen prodigy at geometry and trig and algebra and drafting.
Terry’s
was no ant either.
I sucked in a deep breath. “You did one helluva job. Why the hell are you telling me this, Mai? I am your enemy.”
“Not personally an enemy. I like you, Joe. I may love you.”
“I know I love you, Mai. You drive me crazy, whoever and whatever the hell you are!”
“You suspected I was a communist spy, but that knowledge did not dissuade you from climbing into my bed at every opportunity. You are so devoted and courageous.”
I had no reply but a neck-scorching blush.
“I came to
Saigon
months ago when the 803rd began operation.”
“From
the
north.”
“Yes, Joe.
From the north.
Again, utter secrecy?”
I raised my right hand. “Mum’s the word.”
“I am a native of
Haiphong
, where I continue to reside. Until I was conscripted into this duty, I taught algebra and calculus at
Haiphong
University
. I learned rudimentary English in secondary school. They enrolled me in advanced English classes at the university. The bar-girl pidgin was a ruse.
As was my concomitant promiscuity.
It was loathsome to me, but necessary for access to the American serviceman.”
“Thanks a bunch.”
“Joe, you are again behaving like a spoiled adolescent. It is beneath you. What was I to do, ‘accidentally’ bump into my targets and discuss quadratic equations over coffee, then segue to secret projects on the second cup?”
“I know, I know, I know.”
“You and I are different, Joe.”
“God, how I wanna believe that!”
“I did what I had to.”
“Who’s this ‘they’?”
“Use your imagination.”
“I’m afraid to. Our boy Dean-o taught math too. Was that a factor in zeroing in on him?”
“We thought so at first.
But no.
His expertise was levels below mine. He was not helpful in those disciplines
nor
in computer science, which is in its infancy at home. It and the machines themselves are spoon-fed to us by our benefactors in Moscow.”
She shifted to a whisper. “Do you know what we call the Soviets?”
“No.”
“Americans without dollars.”
I laughed and said, “Mai, let’s talk about love.
Romance.
Why me?”
“I was not to you merely a surrogate in an unhappy marriage or an ejaculatory depository.
Your longing, your passion for me.
Your idealization of me.
The allurement of you being smitten by me as a result of a fantastical cartoon.
Your attraction to me was beyond exceptional.”
“There are kinkier fetishes. I know there are,” I said in my own defense. “Did Lanyard, like Dean, have an unhappy marriage?”
“Jakie’s wife was a penitentiary guard before they wed. He did not complain constantly about his Helen as Dean did about his Mildred. I drew some disturbing conclusions from snippets. Helen knows how to use her baton, but the marriage is barren otherwise.”
“Wow.
To be a fly on their bedroom wall.”
“To paraphrase our Mrs. Browning, Joe, let me count the ways I love you.”
“Take your time. Don’t leave anything out.”
“Brazenly letting you see Jakie’s uniform in my wardrobe was a test. If intimidation overruled affection, you would be out the door, as you would when you discerned my political allegiance. A roll in the sheets would not be worth the risk to you, when sex is available on numerous street corners and in the numerous bars of this decadent cesspool of a metropolis.”
“I was intimidated, if you’ll remember. At least a part of my anatomy initially was.”
“You are a loyal if misguided American. You and yours have not an inkling why you are here, only the domino theory propaganda. Forgive my redundancy on this, but you risked and continue to risk your freedom and even your life to be with me. I cannot emphasize that too often.”
“Don’t remind me. In retrospect, I guess I’m finally realizing that my subconscious mind told me I could reform you, and we’d both be in the clear. My heart and my, you know, overruled, as they so often do. One thing I really
really
need to know,” I said, having a harder than hard time spitting it out.
“Mai.
In a word.
Ziggy
.”
“I am so sorry you lost your best friend, Joe. I swear it was not my doing. Yes, the NLF, the National Liberation Front, the Vietcong as they are to you, is a close ally. We do not always agree and one is not always informed of what the other is doing. Friction between us is commoner than your side realizes.”
Office politics, I thought, giddily speechless. I was so
relieved,
she could be Ho Chi Minh’s mistress
“If I had known what was planned and that you and Dean and your Ziggy were going to be in that bar, I would have insisted that Quyen use her influence to put a stop it.”
“At one helluva risk to yourself, Mai.”
“Perhaps, but there is no shortage of Americans to kill.”
I shivered at her matter-of-fact statement. “A couple more questions.
Your full name?”
She smiled.
“Sorry, Joe.
I must be a Jane Doe.”
“Where were you the night I raised a fuss when I couldn’t find you?”
“A cell meeting, endlessly rehashing the 803rd.”
“And what did you decide?”
She looked at me and put on her shades. “I do not want to talk now, Joe.”
I caught her meaning and gulped down my Scotch. “Me neither.”
We got a room upstairs. Sans a gold dollar, we were all over each other the second the door shut. With apologies to Sally, Mai and I made the most intense, ferocious, gratifying love of my lifetime. I held her so tightly I feared I’d cracked her ribs. Her nails raked my back so relentlessly I feared I’d lost a quart of blood. No matter. We could not restrain ourselves. I licked and kissed and nibbled and bit every square millimeter of her flesh.
In the middle of the night, she said, “Joe, you have not questioned in detail my interest in the 803rd.
In you and Jakie and Dean and General Whipple.”
“General Whipple too?”
“You and your dirty mind.
With profound apologies, he professed such love for his wife, Katherine, that chastity was his only alternative.”
“All outfits have weirdoes in them.”
“Adultery was as toxic as a DDT dusting on a food crop, the general said to me. I rarely fail in seduction. I was trained well. I was at once charmed and insulted. Once more, why have you not relentlessly demanded an explanation of my interest in your liaison detachment?”
“I thought it was obvious. You were spying on us because of Cerebrum 2111X and CAN-DO.”
“At the outset, yes.
But early on, my superiors discovered the mission of the computer was to predict the end of the war. They deemed it ludicrous.
Hilarious.
They felt that when the computer’s conclusion did not come to pass, it would demoralize your generals and political leaders.”
“In hindsight, you were very correct.”
“Joe, we have been fighting the same war intermittently for two thousand years. Only the invaders are different.
The Chinese, the French, and the Americans, among others.”
“Yeah?
Your
Russkis, your Americans without dollars? I bet they’re getting more and more like a snoopy, bossy mother-in-law.”
“In 1945, Ho Chi Minh was quite amenable to being allies of the West, but you gave us back to the French.”
I shook my head. “Trying to debate politics with a commie is like debating religion with a Southern Baptist.”
“May I return to the issue at hand, Joe? I related to Quyen what Dean said drunk, what Jakie said in his sleep, and what you said voluntarily about Cerebrum 2111X and CAN-DO.”
“As Ziggy once said, I’d’ve given you the recipe for the H-bomb if I had it and you asked nicely. Slight exaggeration, but you get the message.”
“To become the most reviled traitor in American history because of me, that is so sweet of you, Joe,” She kissed my cheek. “Quyen and her superiors thought the 803rd mission was hilarious. We have people on
Saigon
’s docks who knew exactly what the components were. They took pains to ensure that the machinery wouldn’t be stolen or destroyed in an NLF attack. Quyen had a terrifying tantrum when you almost did it yourselves that night you damaged the power grid. She can be indiscriminately murderous when she is in a rage.
“They were ready to withdraw me and bring me home when a serious problem occurred.
A growing initiative for South Vietnam to be America’s fifty-first state.
Your 803rd Liaison Detachment seemed at the center of it in a secret function we are still unable to determine. Oddly, when the 803rd was disbanded, the statehood talk faded and quickly fizzled out. Was it a coincidence, Joe?”
I wondered if Vo Nguyen Giap’s
People’s War People’s Army
dealt with outrageous rumors of enemy annexation. If it did, I missed it.
I grinned.
“My turn for hilarity.”
“How so?”
I gave her a complete rundown on PFC A. Bierce and his rumor-mongering, tossing in his
exponents
primer for validation.
She breathed heavily. “That is a sigh of relief, Joe. It never was, never will be anything but a practical joke by an aspiring novelist?”
I kissed her cheek. “You got it, kiddo. President Johnson went apeshit when he heard.”
“You have madman generals who would bomb Hanoi and Haiphong with nuclear weapons if we occupied American domestic soil, which the State of South Vietnam would be. This was our primary concern.”
“You’re on the mark.
You and Bierce.”
“So I have to go home, Joe.”
“No you don’t. Piss on them. Stay, Mai. Please. If they discover who you are, I’ll try to arrange amnesty, I’m a great negotiator.”
“I cannot, Joe, and this is why. I lied to you about my mother and father. They are alive. They live as man and wife. I have three brothers and two sisters. We live within a block of one another in
Haiphong
. There are veiled threats what would happen to them if I did not explicitly obey orders. Quyen was here to keep me on the correct path.”
I
didn’t
know
if I was relieved she wasn’t a gung-ho commie spy or devastated since the heartless bastards had her over a barrel, extorting her. Whichever, I was euphoric.
“Hold me, Joe.”
I held her, gradually admitting to myself that I could not take her to the Land of the Big PX. We fell asleep clinging.
How she slipped out of my arms and out of the room before morning I’ll never know.
I had thirty-eight and a wakeup.
THE LAND of the Living is gorged with surprises. The Great Beyond is, too.
Today in the latter is a stunning example.
I call Smitty down for breakfast. He doesn’t answer. “Rocket Man” is on, and maybe he’s stuffed toilet paper in his ears. I go upstairs. His room is littered with empty mac and cheese cartons, but he’s not there.
I scramble eggs and eat alone.
On my way out for a walk to the strip mall, I check my neighbors. To my left, the door is ajar. I go in. Smitty’s not there either. The nuns are gone, too. I don’t smell baking and there are no cookies or brownies set aside for me.
I go to the other place. No Slick. No nothing. I find a large rock in the landscaping, between a
couple
of shrubs that could use water. With all my might, I throw it at a side window. It breaks, glass tinkling inside and out.
This is a surprise,
a vulnerability
, albeit a trivial one. I go around the house, find more rocks, and break each and every downstairs window. I have proven nothing. I have behaved like a “baby-san.” It feels damn good.
I walk on to the strip mall, which is no longer there. It’s been replaced by another deserted cul-de-sac.
I head home, feeling so fucking alone.
All windows remain broken at my neighbor’s. Good.
A red, white and blue The Great Beyond Postal Service (TGBPS) truck pulls in. I stand in front of my mailbox to play my little hologram game. The truck does not run through me. It stops five feet away, bad brakes squeaking.
The blue-uniformed driver is redheaded and weedy. He leans out and says, “What’s the matter with you? I run you over and I lose my job.”
I smile and crack the corniest of jokes. “I have a death wish.”
He does not smile. “That’s your problem, man. I got a schedule to keep.”
I salute and step aside.
And touch the side of his box as he passes.
And feel a slipstream and smell exhaust when he accelerates away.
With a shaking hand I reach into my box and pull out material addressed to:
OCCUPANT THE GREAT BEYOND
It’s all printed matter--books and paper-clipped studies on chaos and the chaos theory.
I am in the midst of sadistic and well-planned chaos.
I have found a pattern and a solution to the enigma. There is no pattern and there is no solution.
I sit cross-legged on the soft grass on this perfect San
Diegoesque
day and browse the materials. Chaos theory, I read, is a newer science that permits us to see order in what we previously thought was erratic and random.
Weather in The Land of the Living is a prime for-instance. In our day and age, if a meteorologist in temperate zones can accurately predict weather four days in advance, that is an accomplishment.
Let’s say it’s January 2041 and computers are a trillion times more powerful than they are now, powerful enough to implement a program that accurately converts chaos into reality. The weather bureau can then inform you that Hurricane Sadie is going to come ashore where you live in September 2045. You can start stockpiling plywood to board up your windows. Look for sales on it.
Smitty and Madge and Slick and seedy strip malls and vacant cul-de-sacs and the rest are chaotic elements that are steps in a procedure. Will I ever be able to figure it out, to project what is ahead in my life after death? I have all the time in the netherworld to try.
I’ve told you this often and it bears repeating. Our honchos are antic and not always in an unkindly manner. They are playful, and their occasional largesse can be touching and flabbergasting.
I go inside and find on my dinette table a stack of blank invitations and a recommended guest list. Unbeknownst to me, a reunion has been arranged.
For me.
It will take place two weeks from today at our neighborhood cabana. We do not have a cabana, but I’m sure one will exist then. Punch and cookies will be served. If I can connect with whoever decreed my party, I’ll lobby for baby back ribs, cole slaw, garlic bread, and potables with a stronger zip than the punch.
A typed and unsigned (of course) note atop the tastefully engraved stock requests that I handwrite my signature to each and whatever else strikes my fancy.
I hear hammering. I look out a window and see a cul-de-sac halfway down the block that did not exist ten minutes ago. Workers are pounding nails on the wooden skeleton of a townhouse condo complex. I open the window and whiff fresh lumber. There is a sign at the curb: VIETNAM VET ESTATES.
OPENING SOON.
I return to the table and the guest list, which includes:
My mother.
We’ll hug and I’ll listen when she speaks to me and treat her with respect. I’ll try to atone for all those days and weeks and months and years that I didn’t as a child who knew everything.
My father, late of Inchon.
Him and his pipe smoke. We’d roughhouse some and play a little catch.
My mother and father.
Shouldn’t take much to match-make that pair.
Ziggy and his mom.
Where do I start with the Zigster and his mom I at last get to meet? I can hardly wait!
First Lieutenant Ron Gibbs, our ROTC antagonist who arrived here far too early because of that Bouncing Betty. No hard feelings about our frat house stunt on his part, I trust.
Chief Warrant Officer R. Tracy, a 1974 suicide by gunshot. Poor bastard, I hope I hadn’t contributed to his depression. I’ll be a good host and let him bring it up if he so chooses.
Tom Backstrom, my all-time favorite sous chef, a genius with sauces and stocks. He was a 2006 auto accident, victim of a drunk in a Cadillac Escalade crossing the centerline.
Wrong place at wrong time for Tom.
He had no luck even when he was lucky.
Further, Tom was in his red Pontiac convertible he’d just won on that game show where a blonde makes letters appear. He’d found out he had to pay income tax on the car. I’d offered to help by using my pull with the restaurant owner to give him salary advances, but it hadn’t been enough. The IRS lien sent him over the edge into bankruptcy. No luck, no luck at all. I’ll ask Tom if he’ll assist me with the ribs. His barbecue sauce is to die for (pardon the pun)
Stepdaddy and Wendi too, her of ovarian cancer, much too young.
When I came home from
Nam
, she and I did connect. It wasn’t me seducing her to spite her hubby. It wasn’t that she had grown to hate her hubby as much as he hated book editors.
We’d moved far beyond that. One thing instantly led to another, an up-close and personal extension of our correspondence. We got into her car and swerved into the parking lot of the first motel we came to. We fucked each other’s brains out. Lordy
Lordy
, Wendi with the bubble over the “i” was so sweet and needy. Last I saw her was when she dumped me, weary of my boozing. The only good thing I did for her was encourage her to unload Stepdaddy. I’ll graciously welcome them to my home, even him. Yeah, we’ll be an awkward trio.
Should be interesting.
Larry Sibelius. No explanation other that he’s amongst us. Hopefully there’ll be time to take him aside and help him get his feet on the ground, so to speak. Am dying (no pun intended) to give him a blow-by-blow of Ziggy and me in the opium den.
Am dying to hear about his lady poets.
Were they all that he expected?
Former PFC A. Bierce too, the scalawag.
I should tell you that in The Land of the Living, Ambrose eventually finished
Jesus
of Capri.
It went through four agents who flogged it for six years to fifty-four different houses before it found a home at a small press who released a dinky number of copies. Didn’t sell many initially, but got terrific reviews, the publishing version of good field,
no
hit. Then, fortuitously, a foaming-at-the-mouth televangelist got his hands on it. This self-righteous, big-haired ol’ boy was nationally known and syndicated. He prayed on his knees with presidents and senators, and influenced their policies, so afraid were they of his public disapproval.
He noisily proclaimed
Jesus of Capri
as perverted, lecherous, sacrilegious smut, the handiwork of Satan, Zionists, and the Vatican. Fortunately for Bierce, this was accomplished not long before God’s representative was nabbed in an airport restroom, inappropriately wagging his weenie.
A bidding war by big publishing houses ensued.
Jesus of Capri
made every best-seller list and made Bierce a zillionaire.
My notable army superiors, Major General Whipple, Brigadier General Lanyard, and Majors Papersmith and Blue succumbed to various and sundry geezerhood-related maladies. Prostate cancer, hardened arteries, strokes, advanced liver disease--the usual. Also amongst us are high school classmates and members of the Draft Board who saw through my professional studentship. Won’t have time to do more than shake their hands, say hi, and gesture to the self-service bar.
I continue reading. The roster is long. I myself was a geezer, so it ought to be. Ah, Mr. Singh of Bombay Tailors, too. Remember when I told him he should’ve been running a car lot? Talk about self-fulfilling prophesies.
After Singh skipped to the States just prior to Saigon’s fall, he settled in Southern California and became one of the nation’s largest car dealers, with a string of sixty stores. Singh’s ubiquitous TV commercials featured himself and his gleaming white smile, standing beside his special of the day, speaking sincerely into the camera with his clipped colonial accent that car shoppers inexplicably deemed irresistible. I wonder how he’s handling The Great Beyond without money to change or cars to sell. I’ll give him a little good-natured teasing. Next to last is the cackler, Quyen, the NVA colonel, non-sister of my Dragon Lady. Quyen bought it during the 1968 Tet Offensive, where she’d been sent back south to lead an assault. Cut in two by a GI’s machine gun. Can’t imagine what we’ll have to converse about, though I’ll always be grateful for her subbing for Mai with
Papersmith
.
On the bottom is Mai Le Truong Johnston. Cause and date of death not specified. She’d been married over forty years to a GI, a lifer sergeant last stationed at Fort Lewis, Washington. They resided in Lakewood, in south Tacoma, near the post, a mere thirty miles from me.
For all those years.
How can this be? Had she had a bellyful of Quyen and her commie dogma, and her and her family being virtual prisoners in
Haiphong
? Had she gathered them up and sought political asylum or gone south after the 1975 collapse of South Vietnam under some pretence and
become
boat
persons?
And what of Sergeant Johnston?
I read the list again. His name was not on it, just hers.
If it
is
her.
If it really is, perhaps she hadn’t returned to
North Vietnam
after all. I’ll have so many questions for her.
If it isn’t my Dragon Lady, well, our masters’ sense of humor can be cruel. I’m already quite aware of that.
To say I have mixed emotions is the mother of all understatements.
I get to work on the invitations. I shall invite everyone on the list.
I can’t wait for two weeks to pass.
Can’t.