He walked wearily, shifting the briefcase from hand to hand. After a few minutes a jeep with two Marine MPs pulled up beside him.
“Come along, cousin.”
Converse placed his bag inside the runner and climbed aboard. The driver asked him where he was from in the world. Converse said California and that made them laugh.
He asked them about the sappers.
“Oh wow,” one of the marines said. “Fantastic. Unbelievable.”
The other marine agreed. “They got skin-divin’ girl sappers, you know that? They swim over from the beach with charges in their teeth. They put adhesive mines on the hulls of those big AKs and blam!”
He opened his hands to signify an explosion.
The marines were deeply suntanned and under their green camouflage helmets they looked very much alike. They smiled constantly and had crazy doper’s eyes.
“What I think about,” one of them said, “is catchin’ a sapper girl and fuckin’ her to death. I’m a vicious freak.”
“You know what else they got? They got porpoises out there. They got porpoises trained to kill gooks. Don’t you wish you could get a picture of that action?”
Converse nodded. He was picturing the silent depths of the Bay, Navy-gray porpoises with spiked collars locked in combat with knife-wielding sloe-eyed sapper girls. The Battle of My Lat Bay, illustrated by Arthur Rackham.
“This is a very strange war,” he told the marines.
“Yeah, it’s weird, man. We’re not supposed to talk about it.
Beyond the main gate was an open space from which the town of My Lat had been removed to a discreet distance from the wire. The base end of town had been mortared out of existence during Tet, 1968. What remained of it began with a fleet street of open-fronted stalls furnished with stolen Navy chairs and iceboxes full of “33” beer. The fleet street led to a larger artery, which in turn led to a square before the double-spired church. It was a pleasant square with tamarind trees, an ice cream parlor and a cafe framed with fancy ironwork. Long ago My Lat had been a resort.
Converse crossed the square and found a street market in the shade of the church. Across from the market was the bus depot and behind that a narrow street of Chinese noodle restaurants. Among them, a square cement building, was the Oscar Hotel.
The Oscar was a hotel in the neo-oriental manner—
there were cubicles separated by bamboo partitions, mats on the floor, an iron teapot in one corner. Converse carried his own bag upstairs. In the next cubicle a card game was in progress; Converse could smell the players’ cologne and the raw alcohol aroma of the local whiskey they were drinking.
He squatted down on a mat, the briefcase supporting his back, and found himself eye to eye with one of the sports next door. The man was a dark-skinned Asian of indeterminate nationality, perhaps, Converse thought, a Malayan seaman. He had come down on all fours to check Converse out, and they exchanged hostile stares until the man snorted with disgust and withdrew. It was said that Asians detected the presence of Westerners through the latter’s exuding a scent like rancid butter; Converse wondered if the man had been able to smell him. He stood up and opened the shutters. As he did, the rain came down like a shell on the street below.
He had nearly dozed off when he looked up and saw a young girl standing in the doorway holding a cluster of cushions in her arms like an oversized bouquet. He stood up and watched her come in.
The girl dropped the cushions on the floor and looked at Converse as though he were in some way desirable. She was wearing Western clothes which she had probably made for herself and she looked perfectly marvelous. It was extraordinary how commonly one saw beautiful girls there.
“You know Ray?” Converse asked. It occurred to him that she might connect with Hicks in some way. She shook her head blankly, and advanced on him, cushions foremost.
The girl would not have been out of place around the Caravalle in Saigon; she wore the same eye makeup the Caravalle girls used to make their eyes rounder. Parisian chick was out at the Caravalle — in response to customer demand the Saigon girls had taken to imitating the style, and even the accents, of Delta Airline stewardesses.
“Fuck,” the girl said.
Converse tried to appear amused. She came closer.
“Number one fuck.”
He reached out and leaned a hand on her buttocks. It was always a kick; their faces made them look so ethereal and then you found that their asses were disproportionately full. She leaned a tit into the crook of his elbow. That was as high as her tits went. Looking past her, Converse found that he could see the upturned crepe sole of one of the card players squatting in the next apartment. The sole was new; it had a price tag pasted to it.
“Later,” he told the girl.
She reached down and touched his belt.
“No,” he said. “Not now. Later.”
The expression on the girl’s face looked like a smile, but wasn’t. “No fuck?”
“No fuck,” Converse said. She raised a finger to her nose and blew air through the
free nostril. For a moment Converse thought that she would blow her nose on him. It was one of their gestures, he supposed. He had never seen it before. She bent down, picked up most of the cushions, and looked him in the eye. He took out his wallet and gave her two hundred piasters.
“More green,” she said.
“No,” Converse told her.
“Yes!” With the shrill Vietnamese inflection. Some people said it was a pretty language. Converse had never thought so. He jerked his head toward the open door. She stooped for the rest of the cushions, fixing him with her non-smile. It was not pleasant to look at.
“You fuck little boy?”
Converse picked up the last cushion and handed it to her.
“Diddy mao,” he told her. “Fuck off.” He had never said diddy mao to a Vietnamese person before.
He stayed in the room for as long as he could bear it, waiting to see if Ray would come round. But after five-thirty, he had had enough. He picked up his bag and went downstairs to find the proprietor eating soup under a photograph of Chiang Kai-shek. The girl he had met earlier was standing by with a worried expression. As Converse came down the stairs she began to speak rapidly, pointing at him. The proprietor raised a hand to quiet her and continued eating.
“You get fucked?” he asked between mouthfuls.
“No,” Converse said.
“You sure?”
“I’m sure,” Converse said. “I always know.”
“You know Ray?” the Chinese asked.
Converse nodded.
“Ray at seaman service geedunk. You know seaman ser vice geedunk?”
“I’ll find it.”
He retraced his course through the wet streets; the base sentries passed him back inside on his press credentials. He set out wearily for the harbor area. The rain had stopped but the mosquitoes were out in alarming numbers and there was no jeep to ride in. At the perimeter of the base they were testing their searchlights for the oncoming night. Small patrol helicopters hovered over the treetops beyond the barbed wire.
The section of the base around the old fort was more agreeable than the rest. There were royal palms and banyan trees and shell and gravel paths across the shaded lawns. There was an enlisted men’s club, where marines and Seabees sat in the fading twilight drinking beer from pitchers and the jukebox inside played Johnny Cash at full volume. There was a movie theater playing True Grit and a plywood chapel with lawn sprinklers around it. The sprinklers had signs on them in English and Vietnamese that said do not drink the water.