Above the East China Sea: A Novel (37 page)

“No bother. Not every day your past comes to life in front of you. Seems like you’d want to know about me.”

“Maybe I could come back another time.”

“Naw, I don’t think it’s gonna work like that.”

The tiniest edge of a threat in Vaughn’s tone makes me realize that he’s a man who’s been waiting for decades to tell his story to someone who cared. And he’s decided that I’m that someone. Before he gives me what I want, he’s going to make sure that I hear his story. He hands me his phone. “Call your boyfriend. Tell him you’re fine and that you decided to stay awhile.”

Jake tells me to take all the time I need, he’ll sleep. “But call me the instant anything gets weird. Actually, call me the instant
before
anything gets weird.”

I promise I will, hang up, tell Vaughn, “I’ll try the shit tea.”

He cackles a pleased laugh. As he busies himself heating water in a dorm-size microwave, I notice a large black-and-white security monitor split into nine different screens that takes up most of a shelf on a wall facing the bed. The upper left of the patchwork of screens is focused on Mama-san downstairs at the reception desk, folding towels. Other screens show the street outside. Most stare into small, empty rooms covered in tile. The only furnishings are a handheld shower snaking from the wall, its chrome head resting next to a large plastic stool with a split down the middle; a white plastic bucket; an inflated air mattress; and a stack of towels. Another camera is zeroed in on an overly bright room where three no-longer-young women in string bikinis slump on white vinyl chairs. Two look Filipina. The third, a tall, sturdy girl with narrow, single-fold eyelids and high cheekbones, sits away from the others and concentrates on picking at a scab on her right elbow.

All three are bored. The Filipinas flip through limp magazines, exchange listless comments, check their makeup in hand mirrors, and rearrange individual strands of their bangs. The third girl just sits and picks. A flurry of motion in the upper screen resolves into the backs of the shaved heads of the two marines I saw earlier. They step in front of Mama-san and cash is exchanged for towels. Mama-san takes the money but keeps her hand out. The marines wave her off. She starts to
give the money back. The soldiers look at each other, shake their heads, pull out their wallets again, and both of them surrender their ID cards. Only then does Mama-san step out from behind the counter and lead them off camera.

In the same instant, both the Filipina girls come to life and assume rehearsed poses. One arches her back, sucks her middle finger; the second tips her head down and gazes up through a tangle of lashes at the marines. The third girl’s smile is a wince, as if she’s staring into the sun. The two petite Filipinas are chosen. They look like tiny Hindu elephant trainers as they lead the soldiers away.

Vaughn comes over with two mugs of hot liquid that looks like chicken broth. He notices me glancing quickly away from the monitor. “Sorry, wish I could turn that off, but Mama-san’s got it rigged so it’s on twenty-four-seven. Ignore it. It’s just business. You’ve probably seen a lot worse on the Internet anyways.”

Vaughn takes a seat on the edge of his bed across from me. “Want to see what killed your grand … what killed Gene?” He leans over, flips the pages of the album back almost to the beginning, stops at a faded color snapshot of two slender young airmen riding a motorcycle across the open swath of a runway. Vaughn is the passenger, sitting in back, arms held out wide. In front, leaning over the handlebars into the wind, is a thin, fit Gene, my grandmother’s husband. The reddish-blond hair he’d lost by the time I met him is a fringe flattened against his high forehead. His eyes are nearly lost behind the swell of his cheeks as he grins. He is so young.

Vaughn taps the photo, calling my attention to a row of fifty-five-gallon drums baking in the sun at the edge of the runway. Bands of different colors encircle each drum. “See those? Those are what killed Gene. What are killing me.”

I glance up. Listen to the ragged wheeze of his breath.

“Called ’em the rainbow herbicides. Agents Purple, Pink, and Orange. According to the Pentagon, none of them was ever on Okinawa. But there they are. Only time and place military had ’em all together like that. Either testing for Vietnam or dumping the dented drums straight into the Pacific Ocean. I researched this shit. You better believe I did. It’s all on the Internet now. Just look it up, you’ll see.

“Back then, though? They told us that shit was safe as water, and we were so ignorant we believed ’em. No gloves, no hazmat suit. We
humped those damn drums using our bare hands like the idiot kids we were.”

Vaughn shakes his head, mutters to himself, “Young, dumb, and full of cum. Excuse me. Don’t report me to your mother. Lucky for me, I was the biggest goldbrick you ever saw. Laid back much as I could. Gene, though, Gene liked running a front-end loader, liked watching those barrels with the colored stripes on them bumping down a long hill and splashing into the ocean. He was there every day handling that shit, breathing it.”

I recall Gene, old before his time, rooted to his recliner, oxygen tube running into his nose, the end table next to him covered with pill bottles, always more of a glowering presence than a person. Vaughn glances at the security monitor. Two of the screens now show the marines in separate rooms, naked, sitting on the divided stools, being washed by their chosen woman. The women slosh soapy water across the men with as little emotion as workers at a carwash sudsing up a big SUV. When one of the men is thoroughly soaped up, his attendant positions herself behind him. I look away, thoroughly creeped out. But the image of the girl using both hands to reach under him and rhythmically wash his genital area with long swipes from his ass to his erect dick is already burned into my brain. Only my intense desire to hear my grandmother’s story overcomes my nearly equally intense desire to leave.

Vaughn doesn’t seem to notice the screen or my embarrassed reaction as he mutters, “Thank God, I had the Bush.”

I wince.

“Naw, naw, not like that. The Bush is what we, me and the other brothers, called the five, six blocks of Koza that we owned.
Owned
 …” He goes off into a reverie. When he speaks again, it’s more for himself than me. “I’m telling you, this should be in the history books. The Bush was my kingdom. My domain. Me and the Soul Tronics. We were like the house band for the whole scene back then. It was ours, we owned it. Me and every other brother on the Rock. The Man did not dare set foot into the Bush. We set up the official Far East branch of the Black Panthers. Only we were more radical and better armed. You think getting pulled out the projects, then sent to Vietnam to get your ass shot up for some bullshit cracker war ain’t gonna radicalize a brother?”

There it is, the anger always ready to flare, exactly like my mom’s. With her gentle mother and silent father, I always wondered where it
came from. Vaughn relaxes. When he speaks, he’s once again one of the brothers who owned the Bush.

“Brothers going to or just coming out of ’Nam on R and R with their KA-BARS, their sidearms. Lot of green beanies too. Them Green Beret sonsabitches could kill a man with a ballpoint pen. Yeah, we had some desperate motherfuckers holed up in there. You hear lot of talk about, ‘I was the only white dude ever go into the Bush.’ Bullshit!
MPs
wouldn’t go up in there. White man’s military mighta ruled our lives on base, but not in the Bush. That was ours. And the Okis backed us up. Least the ones with any balls did. You want tough? Those were the motherfuckers invented karate. Japs took away their weapons, they turned their hands into weapons. Never needed a gun, a knife. They want you dead, didn’t need no ballpoint pen, kill you with their bare hands. You think I didn’t see them do it? Hell I didn’t!”

Vaughn looks off, nodding to himself as if he’d just gotten the last word in. Then he remembers that I’m there and says, “Your grandmother, fine woman. Just wanted what she couldn’t have.”

“What was that?”

“Delmar Roquel Vaughn. You really want to hear all this old-timey shit?” he asks, now that he has my attention riveted.

Codie could nail down attention the same way. When she was around, you couldn’t put your eyes anywhere but on her. Charisma. It astonishes me to witness its source. I nod.

“Okay, here’s how it was back in the day. The girls who worked the Bush were there because they liked a brother, you know what I’m sayin’? I was fronting
the
hot band in the Bush. I could have had any female I wanted. Never a question of me paying. Hell, girls bought
me
presents. Beautiful Akai reel-to-reel, Seiko watch, Pentax camera, Denon hi-fi. Made me loans they never expected to see come back. Oriental women know how to treat a man. At least, they did back then. Not like the trash you got now.” He waves vaguely toward the security monitor. “Damn Flips and Bucketheads. Sukie, though, Setsuko, now, she was a whole ’nother level. She was obsessed. I mean cuckoo stalker insane for me.”

I almost stop him. Almost say, “That’s my grandmother you’re talking about,” but I have made a decision: It’s not. He’s just telling me an old-time story from his life, and it can’t touch or change who my grandmother was to me. I won’t let it. I knew who she really was. I’m only listening to the story for the information I have to get.

“That’s not just me talkin’,” he continues. “Anybody’d tell you the same. End of a show, she was always right there with a nice, cool, moist towel outta the fridge, bowl of
sōki
soba with all that good pork in it, bottle of cold Orion.” He grunts at the memory. “Even though she knew I was with a different lady every night, she’d lose control, try to scratch the new one’s eyes out. Got to where I knew I had to cut her loose. I couldn’t have that kind of discourse going on.”

I like it that he uses the wrong word for “discord.” Listening to him brag about what a stud he was makes me even more certain that he is my mother’s father. I feel it in my blood, the cheater and the cheated. The left and the always leaving. The one who thinks connection equals entanglement. Whose idea of free is alone.

“I was just about ready to tell her not to come ’round no more when I got my orders. For ’Nam. All of us bloods making the scene down the Bush, we all got them the same day. Military knew the Bush was more powerful than they were, so they ganged up, air force, army, marines, navy. If you were black and not eatin’ a yard of the Man’s shit, you got orders that day. And there weren’t any assignments sortin’ mail at Hickam either. Naw, it was all front line. You got papers that day, you
were
gonna end up in the Central Highlands or the Mekong Delta. And you
were
gonna end up dead. Those orders were death sentences.”

Vaughn looks out the window. The sun has come out and slants a harsh stripe of light across his face. His eyes glitter the way old people’s do. He sounds even older when he says, “I wasn’t gonna let the air force kill me. Took me a while to figure out they already had.”

THIRTY-SEVEN

Vaughn stares out the window. It’s a long time before he finally picks up his story again. “The Bush was wild that night. Never been wilder. Girls were crying, making a fuss. Brothers all frontin’ about how they ain’t goin’. No way. No how. Then guess what happens?”

I shake my head, intent on what he is saying; I know the story is coming to the part where my existence begins.

“Typhoon! You believe that shit? Elsie, Typhoon Elsie, supposed to hit Guam; it veers off, heads right for the Rock. It was an official TC-1 alert. Base closed up, locked down. No one even supposed to be outside the fence. But after we got orders? We figured,
shee
-it, what they gonna do to us? Send us to Vee
Et
Nam? So we take it to the street. Ready to riot.
Hoping
they’d send some MPs after us, because we didn’t care anymore. Whatever stockade they threw us in be better than dying in the Central Highlands next to some Montagnard fighting for a country he actually gave a shit about.

“So it’s straight-up chaos in Koza, know what I’m sayin’? It’s pouring rain, the wind is howlin’ like standing in the prop wash of a B-52. All the club owners are freaking out, boarding up windows, pulling down the metal shutters, shoving sandbags under the doors. The mama-sans are filling up bathtubs, buckets, douche bags, anything they got for drinking water. Coupla shops still open are packed with people buying batteries, cans of Spam, jugs of water.