Harris snapped his legs closed and then crossed them, tucking his shorts tight. “Don’t even fucking joke like that, man,” the suddenly shy Marine deserter said.
“You find that offensive?” Pitts asked.
“Fuck yeah, man,” Harris said, and then carefully eyed the blond-haired fellow Marine deserter dressed only in a royal-blue silk calf-length afghan-style shirt with matching velvet slippers. “You ain’t queer on anything. I see you with them bitches and all, but you dressed kinda sweet, too.”
“No, not a faggot,” Pitts said casually, lighting a cigarette. “However, I think that you should consider how you might offend other people by flashing your cock and balls. If you want to fuck one of the girls, just say so. Don’t go trolling for it.”
“Fuck you, man,” Harris said, standing, angry. Turd jumped up from the floor, ready to beat a hasty retreat with his master. “I want pussy, I say it. I ain’t like some pervert flashin’ my dick an’ all.”
“Sit down then, and shut up,” Pitts said, taking a long drag from his smoke. “We have some business.”
“Like what?” Harris said, sitting. Turd laid back down at his feet.
“Tomorrow, while Huong and the boys make some distributions, we’ve got to attend Sunday Mass, and you’re driving,” Pitts said, looking at Harris and not showing any expression.
“I ain’t no Catholic,” Harris said.
“Nor am I,” Pitts retorted. “We have some collections, and Sunday services have proved a good cover. Lots of Marines going and coming, nobody asking many questions, Sunday and all.”
“Fuck, man, that’s smart as shit,” Harris said, and smiled at his newfound boss and friend.
“We go in uniform, and you’re driving the jeep,” Pitts said.
“That’s cool.” Harris nodded. “I feel best in uniform anyway, ’cause wearing something else, CID be asking all kind of questions, you know.”
“Yes, I suspect so,” Pitts said through a cloud of smoke that came from his mouth as he talked. “Tomorrow you will sit in the jeep, armed with a pistol and rifle. When I meet these people, you will watch me. Anything funny go down, you start taking down everyone around me.”
“We on base, man?” Harris asked. “At chapel and all?”
“Yes,” Pitts said, finishing his cigarette. “We’re in a jeep with numbers that do not appear on any missing-vehicle report. I am dressed as a first lieutenant with an ID card and dog tags that match. You will dress as a sergeant, fully identified. Why would anyone question us?”
“Just gets me all scary and shit,” Harris said, shaking his shoulders as he spoke. “You got giant-size balls do shit like that.”
“We have more eyes looking for wrongdoing off-base than on-base,” Pitts said, taking a sip from a tall glass of iced tea he had sitting on an end table by a tall, silk shaded lamp. “Besides, why would they even be looking for us?”
“They be looking for my ass,” Harris said, shaking his head.
“They’ll be looking for a dirt-bag nigger named James Harris who smelled like a pile of shit and looked worse, not a squared-away black Marine sergeant,” Pitts said, and then added, “no offense.”
James Harris looked cold-eyed at Brian Pitts, not liking the racial epithet but clearly understanding what he meant by it. He nodded and said nothing.
“You ever hear tell of a guy called the Snowman?” Pitts said, sipping his tea.
“A few times I hear guys say that name, but never knew nothin’ about the dude,” Harris said, flipping the lid open on a gold cigarette box and taking out a smoke. “They say he the big man out here. They mostly scared of him. Say he kill lots of guys, ship dope by the truckload back Stateside. When I meet you I think about that, too. Maybe you the Snowman.”
“Fair-complected, blond hair, rather snowy-looking, don’t you think?” Pitts said, smiling.
“You be selling lots of shit, too. Snow, you know,” Harris said, igniting his cigarette with a gold lighter that matched the case and gold ashtray. “This pad laid out with some heavy shit, too. Ain’t no cheap stuff in this place. Ain’t no brass. Anything yellow metal, it’s gold. I checked it out. It’s nice. Like a palace or Hollywood mansion.”
“Then you understand where you are, then?” Pitts said. “What I expect of you. From my end you get loyalty and a fair cut of what we take. It’s a commitment with your life.”
“I done got that all clear in my head when old Huong there slap me on my ear with his .45,” Harris said, smiling. “I be loyal with you. Honest, too. I don’t tell no lie. Don’t you go lyin’ to me neither.”
“We do not tolerate lies from anyone within my house,” Pitts reaffirmed his American cohort. “I will never lie to you. Huong will never mislead you, either. No one will. Ever. Like betrayal, a lie reaps a bullet.”
“Cool,” Harris said, smiling nervously, thinking about the few times he had fibbed to his old supplier, Lance Corporal James Elmore, when he held back a little extra cash or skimmed a few grams of dope.
“Nanna has your uniforms nearly finished,” Pitts said, speaking of the woman who ran his household, and bossed the intern hookers who lived there. “She’ll have one of them ironed tonight so you’ll have it for tomorrow. Huong picked up a pair of size 12 double-E Corcoran jump boots for you this morning and got them all spit-shined. Here’s your new dog tags and an ID card to match, Sergeant Rufus Potter.”
“Fuck, man,” Harris said, sitting up, looking at the dog tags and identification card with his photograph on it that Pitts tossed to him. “Rufus Potter? What kind of fucked-up name you calling me? Man, that’s the fucked-upest name I ever heard. Rufus fucking Potter! Man, you makin’ fun of me!”
Huong suddenly swore a stream of Vietnamese profanity and looked at his two cowboys, and then with his left hand swept the mah-jongg tiles from the table onto the floor. As he stood from his chair, he pulled his .45-caliber pistol and put it to the forehead of the man sitting to his right.
“No, fuck, no!” Pitts screamed at Huong just as he pulled the trigger and sent the man’s brains spraying from the back of his head, showering the mahogany dining chair and the oriental carpet below it with blood, bone, and pulverized gray matter.
The two girls screamed, fully terrified, and fled upstairs, wailing for Madam Nanna. Mau Mau said nothing, and sat motionless in his chair while Turd snuggled close to his feet. Such sudden, unbridled violence made him realize that the seemingly tranquil, family-style atmosphere that Pitts sought so hard to engender in his household offered but a very thin veil over raw brutality, explosive and lethal.
In junior high school, a teacher had given James Harris a copy of Jack London’s,
Call of the Wild
to read. He had loved the book for many reasons. The dog and the black kid from the bad side of Chicago held much in common. Seeing Huong’s deadly tantrum made him think of Buck’s life as a sled dog, becoming leader and killing Spitz. He identified with the dog and his plight at surviving in a merciless place, akin to the nature of his own life back on his block in a neighborhood where life clashed with death daily.
“That man, he cheat me,” Huong said. The other cowboy stood and nodded, affirming what Pitts’s senior Vietnamese henchman told him. “He cheat at silly game. He do that, then he steal money, too. He sell us out too, if Benny Lam or Major Tran Van Toan pay him. He no good. I no like him long time.”
“YOU GUYS KNOW Tommy Touchdown?” Jack Hembee said out of the blue, sitting up from his lawn chair and wiping out his canteen cup with a handkerchief. “He’s a lawyer up at First MAW. I bet you guys know him.”
“Not by that name. Only Tommy I’ve met there is First Lieutenant McKay,” Kirkwood answered, holding out his canteen cup for Terry O’Connor to pour him some of the raisin jack from one of the two containers that King Rat and Elvis had brought them from Golf Company. “I heard a couple of guys call him Tommy, but mostly he goes by his initials, T. D.”
“Same guy. I know for a fact he’s at wing legal,” Hembee said, stuffing a fresh wad of Beechnut chew inside his cheek and then offering the pouch to O’Connor. “Some of this cowboy candy goes good with that jack, Terry, if you’ve got the gut for it. Just tuck it to one side, and try not to swallow too much juice when you take a drink.”
“Okay, I’m game,” O’Connor said, taking some tobacco from the major’s pouch and putting it in his mouth. “Chewing and drinking, I’m learning fast.”
“Why Tommy Touchdown?” Kirkwood said as he handed the major the canteen full of raisin jack.
“Well, T. D.’s not his initials,” Hembee said. “That stands for touchdown. If you followed college football during the past few years you’d know that McKay has a G for a middle initial. Gaylord. Thomas Gaylord McKay.”
“No wonder he kept it a secret. Gaylord?” O’Connor yucked.
“Probably one of the best scatback, option-ball carriers the University of Texas has ever had play football,” Hembee continued. “Next time you see him, check out his legs. They’re like tree trunks. Your man grew up in Dumas, Texas, right?”
“That’s him,” O’Connor said. “He mentioned Dumas at the hail and farewell party last night. Never breathed a word about football.”
“I know that’s him,” Hembee said. “He’s a big reason why Texas won the national championship in 1963, T. D.’s junior year. They should have won it his senior year, too, back in ’64, when they beat number-one Alabama in the Orange Bowl, 21 to 17. But since Arkansas upset the Longhorns in a game in October, beating them by a stinking point, 14 to 13, the AP and UPI polls did not consider Texas national-champion material, dropping them to number five. The Razorbacks just won on luck, one lousy point. When McKay and his class graduated they took the heart of the lineup with them, so Darrell Royal has not had a Longhorn team come close since. What’s ironic, McKay got picked up by the Los Angeles Rams in the first round of the NFL draft, but went to law school instead. Talk about a bonehead move. Now he’s a first lieutenant in Vietnam.”
“He never let on, and I’ll bet not many of the guys at the legal office know it either,” O’Connor said, spitting. “Only football player they ever mentioned was that crazy observation pilot Lobo Gunn, who played at New Mexico.”
“I’m sure Dicky Doo knows, and it probably explains the resentment that he holds for McKay,” Kirkwood said as he took his first sip of the raisin liquor. “Wow! That tastes somewhere between a hundred ten and a hundred forty octane. Warm all the way down, like cognac.”
“You know, Major Danger, this stuff is not all that bad,” Terry O’Connor said with a satisfied purr as he reclined in the lawn chair and sipped more of the home-distilled raisin hooch. “Nice of them to give us two full quarts.”
“A couple of canteens, I bet, didn’t even make a dent in their supply,” Hembee said, sipping from his cup. “Everybody writes home and asks for raisins, along with the cookies and other crap. Anytime somebody goes up to Da Nang or over to Chu Lai they bring back raisins. Didn’t take long to figure out what they had going on, especially when I start getting people volunteering to burn the shitters. That’s when they cook off a batch. Burning the shitters.”
“Looks like the battalion commander or the sergeant major would start cracking down,” Kirkwood said. “Last thing you need are drunks on watch.”
“I’ve yet to see it,” Hembee said. “Our CO doesn’t go looking for trouble. We’ve got enough on our plate with the number of operational commitments out here. If a little UA raisin jack is all we’ve got in the line of personnel problems, then we’re doing pretty good, I’d say. I hear stories about army troops up north and down south of us refusing to go on patrols, getting all doped up and shit. We haven’t seen anything like that with our Marines.”
“That you know about,” O’Connor said, sipping his cup.
“True, Captain,” Hembee said. “Then I know about their moonshine operation, don’t I.”
“First time I ever drank raisin jack,” Kirkwood said, stretching out in the lounge chair alongside the two other officers reclining in theirs. The three Marines watched as the last light of the setting sun streaked across the sky, and gray dusk faded the distant rice paddies and grass huts into darkness.
“In New York, I tasted something very similar to this raisin jack,” O’Connor said, sipping the aromatic liquor with its almost oily alcohol film that sheeted down the sides of his metal canteen cup as he swirled it, breathing the vapors. “Just like this stuff, it burned all the way down, and left a man feeling a nice, warm glow all over.”
“Tastes like cognac to me,” Kirkwood commented, now savoring the drink as he sipped it.
“This stuff I drank in New York is like cognac, but not aged in oak. A cousin to it, I guess,” O’Connor said, looking at the twinkling fire lights among the peasant huts in the distance. “Aqua vitae, the French call it by one name, which translated means the water of life. They also call it eau de vie, or burning water. I think from the way it goes down the hatch. But a buddy of mine had another name for it that I think you’d appreciate.”
Hembee laughed and said, “You sound as full of shit as a Christmas turkey, but go ahead. We’ve got all night.”
“My dad, back in Philly, has a buddy in New York who was in the Marine Corps with him, out in the Pacific in World War II,” O’Connor began. “Ben Finney is the guy’s name. He was a major and worked with the war correspondents and stuff. Now he writes a column in the
New York Daily News
.
“A few years back, Major Finney introduced me to a young fellow from Germany, going to Columbia, same as me. This guy’s dad was German ambassador to the United Nations, and supposedly he descended from Frederick the Great. He’s got all kinds of Bavarian nobility in his family legacy. At any rate, his grandfather was an artillery captain for the kaiser in World War I, and fought the Marines at the Battle of Belleau Wood. During World War II, the same officer is now a German general, and oversees the occupation of France.
“According to my friend, and I have nothing to back me up on this except his word, his grandfather, because of his enduring respect for U.S. Marines from World War I, had German soldiers raise and lower the U.S. flag each day at the American national cemetery at Belleau, France. The site where they buried most of the Marines who died at the Battle of Belleau Wood, right by the battleground.