That evening Lydecker applied for some long-overdue shore leave. The bizarre feeling of kinship had unsettled him. It appeared that Pfitz’s plane would be out of action for a week, and now — more than ever — Lydecker didn’t want to be around.
Lydecker was granted five days and opted for Saigon. He passed nearly all of his time in a Tu-Do bar brothel, methodically working his way through the nine girls who serviced the clients. Out at the back of the bar there were three lean-to-cabins with rickety iron beds. Lydecker spent the day drinking beer and every now and then would stagger up to one of the girls — comicbook whores with thickly mascara-ed eyes, miniskirts and padded bras — and lurch outside to a cabin.
It was only on the third day that he noticed the young, thin-shouldered girl who wiped and cleared the tables and periodically swept out the cabins. She was quiet and withdrawn and had slightly buck teeth. Unlike the others, she wore an ao-dai and a thigh-length chemise. Her status in the bar was indeterminate. He never saw her with G.I.’s and she never used the cabins. Sometimes she would go out to the back or into the toilets, but only with civilians or the occasional Vietnamese soldier, only spending the briefest time — about two minutes — away from her chores. She did not pout, flirt or posture like the other girls and never wore their cheap Western clothes. Yet for all her quiet dignity and restraint, she was the lowest creature in the bar. A quick-time girl — lower than the pimps and shoeshine boys, lower even than the many cats and stray dogs that nosed around and were temporarily adopted and spoiled by the American servicemen. Why is she doing this? Lydecker found himself asking. What was it about her that kept her in this whores’ city, so calmly accepting the shitty jobs and compliantly carrying out the spurious sex acts demanded of her? The paradox enraged and excited him and the girl gradually took a hold on his mind. Not having noticed her at first, he now seemed to see her everywhere. She hovered around the perimeter of his vision: taking the empty bottles from his table, slipping from a cabin as he entered, mopping up pools of vomit in the men’s room. He discovered a disproportionate irritation in this, and despite himself swore and shouted at her if she approached. Strengthened by his uniform in this city of obsequious servants, he befriended other servicemen who used the bar and in his noontide drunkenness wove obscene stories around the thin girl, flashing his eyes in her direction as he joined in the raucous guffaws.
She paid no attention to him, her frail body moving among the tables, her straight, shiny hair framing her face.
At night, Lydecker tossed in his bed and found his thoughts turning again and again to the thin girl. He stayed away from the bar a whole day before crashing in late at night in a beer haze to seek her out. He found her in the corridor that led out to the cabins at the back, her arms full of dirty sheets. Lydecker bore down on her, maddened by her inscrutability and at the same time potently aroused. He wrenched the sheets from her hands and forced her against the wall, drunkenly nuzzling her neck.
She made no move to resist him. He gazed into her eyes.
“Whassa fuckin’ matter with you? Damn you,” he implored slurringly, “whyncha like the others? No-good chicken-shit …” His voice tailed off into a wet, whispering pant. He looked at her and saw why she wasn’t like the others. Beneath the stretched oblique lids her brown eyes stared out defiantly in candid, unalloyed hate.
Lydecker stepped back, suddenly dismayed and shocked. “Ach, no-good fuckin’ …” he grunted to himself and staggered off down the passage. The girl stood there, a grubby snowdrift of soiled sheets around her ankles, and watched him go.
During his last day of leave Lydecker took three cheery whores to bed. They giggled when he stared into their eyes.
“You like G.I.?” he would ask uncertainly.
“Sure, you number one,” they would smile. “U.S. number one.”
So, no hooker fell in love with her John, Lydecker reasoned, but where did that little bit of skinny ass get the right to condemn him like that, to look at him in that way? It troubled and nagged at him, her contempt. It marred his swaggering progress through downtown Saigon; it sapped his confidence and aloof reserve as he pushed his way through the pimps and beggars; it made his hurried sex with the other prostitutes more grimy and unsatisfactory. Nobody, he declared, knew more about hate than he did; surely no one had hated so intensely; but this chick … He was prepared, even willing, to accept the scorn and spite of the peasant for the armed invader, but the look in that girl’s eyes had seemed to mark him out personally for her wrath.
So on the last afternoon of his last day, Lydecker sat in the bar and studied her, his mind a jostling crowd of vague tensions, obscure guilts and unresolved lusts. He was due to pick up a helicopter in a few hours that would ferry him back to the fleet on the Yankee Station. He felt disturbed, hung over, sullen. Saigon had proved no release, no real solace. He felt immensely fatigued at the thought of returning to the catapult maintenance crew.
The bar was quiet in the afternoon’s torpor. The whores lounged in groups around the wall; some ARVN soldiers played cards in a corner. Lydecker stared at the girl as she swept the floor. Her hair was tied up with a scrap of pink ribbon; her chemise shone crisply white. Once her gaze passed over him as he sat there but there was no flicker of recognition, no revulsion or even acknowledgment in her motionless face.
As the time drew nearer for his departure, Lydecker was seized with a restless panic at the thought of leaving with so much uncertain and unfinished. He felt the sweat pool against his body, and his uniform chafed. He drank beer after beer in an attempt to keep cool.
With an hour to go, he beckoned one of the whores over. She had become something of a favorite with him and she now slid easily onto his knee. Her smile was wide and at once she started to whisper endearments and run her sharp fingers through his hair. Lydecker shrugged her hands away. For some reason the artifice and dishonesty repulsed him. He pointed to the thin girl.
“What about her?” he demanded hoarsely. “How much?”
The whore looked archly offended, hurt. “She no good. Not for G.I. She number ten, Johnny, she quick-time girl. No ficky-fick.” She made a contemptuous jerking with her hand.
With a sudden movement Lydecker brutally tipped her from his lap and strode across the room toward the girl. He dropped a handful of notes on the bar in front of the startled patron and, seizing the girl’s hand, dragged her out to the cabins at the back.
He pushed her into the first room. Solid slabs of sunlight beaming through the shutters sectioned the floor and the grubby coverlet on the bed. It was stiflingly hot. With a finger Lydecker sluiced perspiration from his forehead and upper lip. He stuffed the rest of his notes into the girl’s unresponsive hand.
“Okay,” he croaked. “Christ damn you. Let’s really give you something to get riled over. Take ’em off.” He pulled off his own clothes in a hasty flurry of movement, leaving only his shorts. The rough concrete of the floor cooled the soles of his feet. Sweat dampened the sparse black hairs on his pale chest. There was the distant sound of a Honda revving.