Smoky Joe's Cafe (3 page)

‘Jesus, Thommo,' he grins, ‘you're big and ugly enough to be a dead ringer for Lee Marvin.'

‘Counting Spags and Lawsy from down the road that's only eleven of us,' I say. ‘You can't have The Dirty Eleven, it don't work.'

‘Yeah, well, you know what I mean, I couldn't locate the four others who were with us in the battle,' he says, impatient to continue. Fifteen of our platoon were Long Tan survivors so he's done pretty good.

‘Fair enough,' I say.

Shorty's anxious to go on, jerking his thumb in the direction of the pub, ‘Pub's practically next door where we can all stay the night, Spags and Lawsy, me too.
We'll be too pissed to drive home and the Sydney blokes will need late night and early mornin' drinking partners anyway. Can the pub take twelve?'

I don't remind him it's eleven. ‘He can put us in army cots, keeps them out the back in the shed, three to a room, I'll book for ten, I can stay home.'

‘Nah, twelve, you stay with us, we may end up with a stripper.'

I laugh, ‘Not in this town, mate. The last stripper who come here turned out to be a poofter in drag.'

‘Righto, but book for twelve anyway,' Shorty says, ‘Never know your luck in the big city.'

I think about the glasses they gunna break and the mess I'm gunna have to clean up before Wendy gets home, but it's only a passing thought. I'm real pleased at the notion of the piss-up. It'll be good to see some of me Vietnam mates again, blokes who understand, who've been there.

‘Besides, Thommo, you might as well make a buck out of the catering,' Shorty says. ‘I'll bring the wine, it's me old man's own. We'll all throw in two bucks each for the food, another ten each for the other grog and a few bags of ice. The wine is irrigation plonk, but not too bad. We'll only have to drink it if we run out of beer after the pub's closed, bloody sight better than
most of the piss the local wogs make, even if I say so myself.'

I don't point out to him that he qualifies as a local wog as well. Shorty is built like a brick shithouse and is your born natural leader, and wog is not a term of endearment that suits him like it might most Eyetalians, Greeks or Lebbos. He used to say he joined the army to get away from his old man, who was trying to turn him back into an Eyetalian. He once told me, ‘Me old man's a Sicilian and they only ever have one nationality and one home, some mud-cracked, crow-infested village up in the hills back of Bisacquino where they all end up killing each other and calling it tradition.' Besides, Shorty must be a throwback or something, because he's not your usual wog, he's got fair hair and blue eyes. He says it must have come about when the Greeks invaded Sicily about a thousand or so years ago. It seems that in those days the Greeks were blond with blue eyes like him.

I persuade Wendy to take Anna and spend the night with a girlfriend. I order in the grog, get in extra tucker, buns and mince for hamburgers and I bum a dozen wine glasses from Willy McGregor. He's dead chuffed at the overnight and agrees to leave a couple of cases of Flag Ale upstairs after the pub closes in case the boys get thirsty during the night.

Well, the night at Smoky Joe's is a big success or failure depending on how you look at it. It turns out most of us are in much the same boat since we got back. Can't settle down, hold a job, several of the guys are divorced. We're like a farmyard full of old chooks comparing our various ailments at the Country Hens Association Dinner.

Suddenly I realise I'm not alone, that my mates are going through the same hell as me. It's not just my imagination. Same headaches, rashes, panic attacks, nightmares, shit fights with wives, girlfriends or bosses, skin complaints, irrational behaviour, feeling half crook all the time. Some of my mates have been through the same tests and been told the usual bullshit about their psychological problems being their mothers' fault and that Agent Orange is harmless.

We're halfway pissed when Shorty calls us to attention by standing on his chair. ‘Righto, lemme speak!' he shouts, tinging the lip of his wine glass with the blade of a knife. It's the same old Shorty di Maggio, platoon sergeant, always organising the mob. Reminding us, just by the way he stands, that he's permanent army and we're nashos. Though there was no difference in Vietnam, some of the nashos scrubbed up a damn sight better than the regulars and Shorty knows it.

Once when he was briefing us before going out on patrol he said, ‘It's your flamin' duty to die for yer country and it's mine to see you don't.'

In Vietnam they said it was a corporal's war because in the jungle the corporal was the section leader, but I gotta tell ya, Shorty near ran the battalion and here he's at it again. Of all of us he seems the least affected or perhaps is best able to cope with civilian life. If he's had the rashes or acted irrational or suffers insomnia like the rest of us he don't say. Shorty always had his shit tightly packed together in an airtight plastic container, nothing seems to have changed. F'instance, we've all took to wearing our hair a bit long with sideburns down our cheeks and he's still got an army brushcut, short back ‘n' sides, with his sideburns in line with the top of his ears.

‘Thommo's in trouble!' he begins right off. ‘No, not Thommo,' he corrects, ‘Thommo's five-year-old kid, Thommo's little girl, Anna. She's got leukaemia and now has to have a bone-marrow transplant. First we've got to find a donor who's suitable and then we've got to find the bread for the operation!'

‘Hey! Wait a minute,' I protest, ‘I ain't said nothing to nobody about Anna, about our little girl!'

‘Don't have to, mate!' Shorty says, his eyes sharp.
‘We're not going to let your little girlie go down the gurgler because the gold braid in the Pentagon and all the President's men and their Canberra toadies won't take no responsibility! You know and they know it's AO what's done this to your little girl. Screw the FBI!'

‘CIA,' I correct.

‘Both,' he shoots back, ‘we've got brothers in the States.'

‘Yeah, well,' I mumble, feeling foolish, ‘it's not your responsibility.'

‘That's where you're dead wrong, mate,' Flow Murray chips in. ‘Could've happened to any of us the same as it done to your kid! My little girlie was born with this nasty rash all over her body that won't go away.' He turns to the others, ‘Yeah, man, let's do it for Thommo!'

Jesus, he's barely heard this weird proposal from Shorty and already he's all piss and wind. Flow gets his nickname because his surname is the same as the Murray River, the area where he comes from. That's in the first place, in the second he gets it because he'll always go with the flow. He doesn't have an opinion of his own. Someone says, ‘Let's dip our heads in a bucket of piss so Charlie can't smell us?' and Flow goes looking for a bucket to piss in. He's what you'd call easily
led, or maybe easygoing is a kinder way of putting it. But now he goes off like a string of crackers on Chinese New Year, what are we going to do? Sit back and cop the shit the Penta-fuckin'-gon's throwing at us or what?' he yells, fist in the air.

‘Jesus, Flow, put a sock in it, will ya?' I say.

‘Flow's right,' Shorty says, though he knows Flow's little ways as well as I do. Then several others also mumble their agreement. ‘And what's more,' Shorty announces, ‘I've got the plan of action!'

‘Here we go,' Gazza says, rolling his eyes to the ceiling, ‘Bloody sergeant's got a plan. Gawd help us!'

We all laugh.

‘Whoa,' I say, ‘not so bloody fast! Do you blokes know what kind of money it takes for a bone-marrow transplant?'

Shorty looks at me. ‘Yeah, mate, I do. But it's not just you, Thommo. We're not just doing this for you and your kid.' He looks around, his gaze resting in turn on each of us. It's like the old days before the platoon went on patrol. He's getting us ready, leaching the fear out of us. ‘We're gunna have to fight these miserable bastards, we'll start with Canberra and then we'll take on the Yanks if we have to!' He pauses, ‘It's about justice, about givin' us a fair go.'

‘Who, us? Fight them?' Macca protests, ‘Come off it, mate, we're a bunch of no-hopers, the brain dead, Vietnam vets, the forgotten legion! Who are you kidding?'

Shorty turns around sharply. ‘No one, mate, I'm not kidding. Matter of fact, I've never been more serious. There are blokes in America same as us, their vets are copping the same shit from the top brass in the Pentagon. We'll get in touch. Thommo's kid's going to die!'

‘Hey, steady on, mate,' I say.

‘Sorry, Thommo, but let's face the facts, mate. If she don't get a marrow transplant . . .' He doesn't finish and looks about the room. ‘It won't just be her!' he says angrily, ‘There are other kids too and some of us as well!' He shrugs his shoulders. ‘Someone's got to do it, take responsibility, and we know it ain't gunna be those ingrates in Canberra or Washington!'

‘Fight Canberra! Washington? It will take millions!' Ocker Barrett exclaims.

‘So?'

‘So where's the money going to come from?' Lawsy, who's a lawyer in Griffith, asks, ‘You won the Opera House lottery or something?'

‘We can get it, the money,' Shorty persists.

‘How? Where?' several of us shout at the same time, my voice the loudest, I'm still annoyed at what he's said about my little girl.

Shorty puts up his hand to silence us, then waits ‘til we're all concentrating on him. ‘Dope. Marijuana!' he says, calm as all get-out.

We're all, you know, stunned. Dope, weed, selling it? Us? Shorty must ‘ave gone troppo.

Then he continues, ‘The nice clean little part-time hippies who marched in protest against us can't get enough of the stuff. It's the fashionable drug among the brave and the beautiful, the little boys and girls who think their protest marches won the war.'

‘What about the dock workers who went on strike, useless bastards wouldn't load supplies to Vietnam?' Lawsy adds.

‘Yeah, them too,' Shorty says impatiently, though I sense he's not too interested in including the dock workers, who've been screwing the nation around for generations anyway.

‘There are two little valleys on the farm that's never been cultivated,' he continues. ‘Mostly scrub and not too rocky, the soil's good, needs a bit of work and a drop of nitrate, that's all. It's hard to see from the air, nobody ever goes there, about seventy acres in all.'
Shorty looks around, ‘Do you have any idea how much dope you can harvest on seventy acres irrigated?' he asks.

‘Shit a brick!' says Spags Belgiovani, who's from another local Italian farming family just outside Griffith.

Shorty, it turns out, has taken over the family farm and his old man has gone back to Sicily to retire and be a proper Mafioso again. He's got enough dosh stashed away to last the distance and to make him the Con-suleri or mayor of his mountain village and die properly from a blast of buckshot while he's eating pasta with chilli and cabanossi.

Basically, with the irrigation, the farm he's left his only son is rice, but the old man added a few vines and a couple of citrus orchards. What Shorty's inherited is a pretty good proposition, he sells his crop to the Rice Board at a guaranteed price, he's his own boss and he doesn't have to worry about a quid. What he's proposing, from his point of view, is pretty amazing. I mean, from where I sit, he's got everything to lose and I can't see he's got anything to gain.

‘I've got someone I want you blokes to meet,' Shorty suddenly announces, ‘Be back in a mo.'

Shorty hops down from his chair and leaves the cafe and we start to get into the piss and argue about the
merits of his surprising proposition. After a few minutes I stand up and bring the room to silence by shouting louder than the rest of the mob. I'm a bit pissed but I know what I'm saying. ‘Look, it's not on, fellas. What Shorty's proposed is serious.' I stop and look about me. ‘We're not the men we used to be and we're not up against the provosts, the real cops will be onto us faster than you can wipe your arse one up, one down and one to polish. We have trouble enough keeping our own shit together, I for one, if the truth be known, couldn't get a fuck in a brothel. I don't want you blokes risking your freedom for me.' I pause, ‘Wendy and me will manage somehow, but what Shorty's proposing, well, it's just not on, no way, Jose.'

‘Bullshit!' Killer Kowolski shouts. He's ridden all the way from Sydney on his Harley and belongs to a bikie gang called ‘Vets from Hell', which is painted on the back of his leather jacket. The gang is made up mostly of blokes who fought in Vietnam. ‘We gunna do it, Thommo, bugger yiz!'

‘Yeah, shit yes!' everyone shouts and then Bong-face jumps on the table. He's a skinny little runt but you wouldn't want to pick him or have a blue with him. Before he joined the regular army he fought in Jimmy Sharman's boxing troupe as a bantamweight,
doing all the country shows. He's accustomed to going into the ring with big bastards off the land who are being egged on by their mates to have a go at the little Abo. He don't take no crap, no matter how big ‘n' ugly his opponent is. Most Aborigines are more white-coloured than black these days, but Bongface looks like he's almost a pure blood and, I know, he's dead proud of the fact. When he smiles, his big white teeth take over his entire face and it makes you want to laugh, even if you're on patrol in the jungle quietly shitting yourself.

Most of his tribe are supposed to be able to track real good but Bongface grew up in Redfern and couldn't find an elephant's track in the snow. Maybe that's exaggerating a bit ‘cause he's a bloody good scout, but he ain't exactly your didgeridoo-totin' tribesman. Abos weren't conscripted for Vietnam in the beginning, but like I said he'd volunteered and was a regular like Shorty. He has this sort of peripheral vision, something his kind is supposed to have and we don't. Like almost being able to see out the back of your head. He was the scout in our platoon and more than once he got us out of serious trouble, seen some movement in his flank we wouldn't have picked up, hit the deck and started firing. Being a scout is the shit job, you're the first to die if anything goes
wrong. A mine, a booby trap, sniper, ambush, he is the first to cop the lot. Bongface would smile, ‘I reckon the thing I'm most scared of is some dopey grunt from another battalion comin' across me in the jungle, blasting me off the flamin' planet thinking I'm a Nog.'