Gods Go Begging (45 page)

After she left the shower stall, her song would change.

“I’m putting foundation on my face because my pores need to be clogged up, and this red stuff on my cheeks and lips is a clear but subtle echo of my perfect genitalia. But never mind those crimson-faced and purple-assed baboons and all of those silly social anthropologists, I’m still not a mammal! What mammal pours hot wax on its own crotch, then rips it off? Now I am curling my eyelashes, God knows what that means.

“I am surely one confused female nonanimal, put on this earth to please the male of the species during those interludes between tours of duty. They say that the male of the species always has the brighter feathers. Is that what all those flashy ribbons and medals are about? If so, why do women even bother with makeup?”

Sergeant Flyer laughed out loud, but the movement sent stabs of pain up his side. He glanced at a smudged meter and saw that the orientation of the antenna was completely wrong. Above his head, a mortar round had shattered the dish. He pushed a toggle switch and heard nothing. The antenna did not budge. The pneumatics were dead. He would be limited to line-of-sight radio. He groaned to his troops as he keyed the radio and began mumbling unintelligible jargon to someone far away, someone in an air-conditioned radio installation in a secured area.

“Strongarm, strongarm, this is Dodge City, over.”

He then smirked unconsciously as he waited for a response. The call signs always seemed so fucking stupid, in Korea and now in the Nam.

“Strongarm, strongarm,” he repeated with angry, self-conscious desperation.

There was a hash of garble and a flurry of hard syllables that caused the sergeant to slump even lower. They would be sending movers but no troops. They needed the troops just across the border in Laos. All that would be forthcoming today would be a couple of flybys, a couple of Phantoms armed with sidewinder missiles and napalm. The only rides coming down from the sky were dustoff rides for the wounded and the dead.

“You’d think the bastards could spare an Apache gunship.”

He glanced down toward the base of the hill and saw the enemy coming even closer. Their fire teams had linked up: now there were two platoons in advance-and-cover formation—a frontal assault. There was little to stop them now. Without help the boys could only slow them down. Suddenly the Southern white voice of a forward air controller came on the smaller radio. That would be him circling overhead in a small Cessna. His job was to direct artillery and air-strikes, to report on the location of smoke rounds, and to adjust fire. The sergeant spoke to him briefly, then dropped the handset.

In the last minutes of his life he was able to scribble the name of his wife and her latest address on the slip of paper. He kissed the paper then folded it carefully and shoved it into the pocket of his shirt. Maybe someday someone would tell her what really happened up here. The Department of the Army would surely send her some bullshit form letter.

Down the hill the whistles of the enemy were growing even louder. Now they were shouting out that crazy battle cry of theirs. Amos Flyer knew what it meant—he had heard it once before. It meant that on this day they would all rather die than suffer defeat. The sergeant looked around for a weapon and found nothing. He slumped back and began, once again, to remember his beautiful wife. He remembered her past. In his last seconds on earth, he remembered her future. He recalled with an infallible memory that she would surely be a widow.

Down below the Salon, one of the NVA soldiers, a young man named Trin Adrong, had grabbed an armed satchel charge from a younger soldier. He had stripped himself of his pack and his shirt. His narrow, hairless chest was gleaming with sweat. He had removed his hat, then strapped the satchel charge to his chest, the detonator string held tautly in his right hand.

He had placed a copy of Mao’s poems in the front of his pants. In truth, it was a Catholic Bible, hidden between crimson bindings. He had dashed ahead of the two platoons that were now positioned to give him cover fire. His Russian-made wire-rimmed glasses bobbed on his wide nose as he ran. He went at full speed toward the Salon des Refuses, his sandaled feet unmindful of the ravaged, uneven terrain that cut his ankles and shins with each step. The Chinese-made watch on his wrist had stopped working months ago. The concussion from an air strike had disabled it. Even as he ran toward his own death, Trin hated the Chinese and their cheap watches.

Twenty meters up the hill a bullet smashed his right ankle, the same one that he had broken as a boy while playing in a soccer tournament in Nha Trang. His speed dropped down to a hobble, but still he moved forward, focusing his entire being on the net and the goalie up ahead. Another bullet blew a kidney into his stomach sack before exiting just above the pelvis.

The undigested rice in his gut swelled with blood. Despite this foul recipe filling his throat, he limped onward, a trail of red rice marking his path. The sliver of jade that he had placed on his tongue earlier was cutting into his cheeks and lips. He had always carried the stone for luck and nothing more. Only women knew how to use them.

As he ran, he looked to his right to see a young, brown-skinned enemy soldier—a sergeant—taking careful aim at the satchel charge. Trin turned his body to protect the explosives. Immediately after the muzzle flash, he felt the contents of one lung filling the space in the other as black blood sprayed from his left nostril. He felt the cold wind of another exit wound. He felt himself inside out, the secret self exposed to the air and the insects.

Trin Adrong dreamed of his beautiful, barren wife as he staggered on. He dreamed of her past. He had promised her three children. He dreamed of a small restaurant on Tu Do Street in Saigon, a tiny ten-table bastion of decadent capitalism that had supported four extended families and had once filled his heart with joy. In his last instant on earth, he dreamed of her future. She would be a widow. Then, somehow, he saw her in Hong Kong, opening her heart and legs to another man. Though his escaping blood boiled with envy, he wished her love and forgetfulness, then spat out the jade stone.

Down the hill from the Salon, the sapper was crossing what was once the outer perimeter. The weeping Creole sergeant at the top of the hill threw open his arms to embrace his naked wife, her stomach heaving as if in birth. For the first time ever, her soft brown skin wasn’t just a bit too dark. For the first time ever, the soft rolls of flesh beneath her breasts were acceptable, perhaps even beautiful. Her careful, complicated makeup was beautiful. Her feminist, biological protest songs were suddenly lovely beyond belief.

Even her three overbearing sisters—women that only an ancient Greek playwright could love—were beautiful. The sergeant suddenly burst out laughing. Wasn’t this a strange place to realize his love?

“Supposing,” he said aloud to no one, “supposing there had never been slaves in America. Supposing we all spoke French. Would I have died anyway, maybe on the Maginot Line or at Dien Bien Phu? My family would have moved to Toulouse. Like all of the other African boys I would have been drafted into the army.

“Or just maybe I would have lived out my life loving Persephone on a saxophonist’s pay, playing Madagascar jazz in some dingy bistro in Tripoli. We would have had children who would never have heard an English word. They could live out their lives without once saying Vietnam. God bless Le Duc Ellington et Le Comte Basie! God Bless Monsieur Jacques DeJohnette!”

He began to laugh out loud.

“Everything turns on jazz!
Toutes les choses.
Everything.”

A hundred meters from the metal container box, eyes that had been frantically searching the wreckage and rubble for a target of opportunity suddenly settled on black arms upraised to caress. The stumbling sapper with his satchel charge had made the inner perimeter and had to be protected at all costs.

The eyes, peering over gun sights and down a long barrel, saw the breasts that were lifted up by the dark palms of the enemy sergeant, and for a moment thought of his own young wife in Hanoi. Her breasts were smaller than the ones that the American black man was caressing, but they were more firm and absolutely hairless and as smooth as wet stones. He smiled as he pulled the trigger. Wasn’t this a strange place to think of breasts?

The AK-47 bullet that he fired was made in China and left a ring of machine grease at the point of entry: on the left heel of the Creole staff sergeant. The thin trail of Chinese grease veered sharply upward at the kneecap and followed the busy projectile to the hip bone, where it changed course again.

The woman from Louisiana smiled softly and with deep satisfaction as her husband jerked and shivered in passion, the heat in his thighs searing his eyesight. She felt his fluid love as it gushed into his pants, and she kissed him tenderly as the exiting bullet deflated his right lung and shattered his sweating, stubbled chin. She kissed the new wound as if it were a set of alluring lips.

She smiled with a woman’s satisfaction as he collapsed, fully sated. As usual, the man always fell asleep right after an orgasm. Never had no staying power. Perhaps, after all these years, he has come to accept me as I am, she thought. I should have withheld sex, she mused. You might have stayed home. You might have longed for me. She reached over to gently touch his shoulder. His weight shifted under her touch. He was still awake… still alive, and still far away.

Just down the hill the sapper was running straight for the Salon des Refuses. He was going at full speed now, and his wounded ankle was little more than a flapping stump. His mouth was open wide and he was screaming a single stirring phrase over and over again. The phrase could barely be heard above the support fire and the volleys of return fire from the hill. His comrades heard him and his words inspired them. They would speak of his words for years to come. Then the single voice was lost in the roaring din of jet engines.

“Carolina, think about the stratifications of an open hillside, a place where earth has given way and time itself is left exposed, layer upon layer—silica, clay, diatoms, and ash. Down here at this level is the time of the swelling sea; here, the time of the desert when hot, rising air would have haunted our eyes; here is a jagged karst, a time when the world shook an abrasion into its own skin; and here are the fossil dead, here you will find love and war in the same shamble of strewn bone. Here and there, where the world has shifted and cracked open, one era will touch another. And once upon the rarest time, human hands and eyes from the distant past can seek out and find… search for and contact… hands and eyes of the present time… our time.”

Jesse stood up from his seat next to Carolina, his eyes fixed and burning into hers.

“I know that you might be skeptical. You don’t believe that such things can take place.”

Carolina began to protest, but Jesse continued on. The profound fatigue that had descended upon him when he had finished his formal summation had vanished completely.

“Believe me, it happened. I am a living witness. It happened here in this city, on Potrero Hill, and on a hill near the eastern edge of Laos. I was there, at both places. Carolina, almost three decades after that enemy sapper ran up that hill in Vietnam, at the very same instant in time that his body flew toward its own doom, Persephone Flyer looked up to see two boys standing in front of the glass door of the Amazon Luncheonette.

“Persephone knew one of the boys. In fact she had just met him the week before. Somehow she had been drawn toward this frightening boy. Mai knew one of the boys, too—the one she had chris tened the Biscuit Boy. It was the sight of the second boy that sent a cold chill down her spine. There had always been rumors on the hill that he was insane. There were those who spoke of demonism and incest. Others told of a bad seed.

“Mai looked deeply into Reggie’s face, while he stood there leering back. He had a handsome, almost pretty face, but his eyes were inhuman. A shudder ran down her back as she realized that she had seen those eyes before: in her own husband’s altered face when he went off to fight a war, eyes that looked down on her love as an expendable, bourgeois luxury. Mai saw death in Reggie’s eyes and knew that her husband’s war had reached across time to claim her.”

“Oh no, it’s that fool Little Reggie and one of his little lackey friends. I’ll take care of it,” she said wearily as she walked to the door. Persephone opened the door and the young man with Little Reggie held up an empty pot and smiled sheepishly. The lid was in his other hand. Behind her, Mai spoke the young man’s name in a strange mixture of tenderness and worry.

“Duá bé giao bánhbich quy.
Biscuit Boy.”

“I’m so sorry, boys,” said Persephone, opening the door just wide enough to speak face to face, “but we’re all sold out. There’s not a drop of spaghetti sauce left. Come back on Saturday and we’ll have seafood gumbo and salmon croquettes, too. I’ll save some especially for the both of you.”

As she attempted to close the door the one named Little Reggie suddenly pushed violently at the glass, shoving a stunned and frightened Persephone backward into the kitchen.

“Get out of here, boy!” she shouted. “Go on, now, get out of here before I call the cops!”

Little Reggie reached inside his jacket and pulled out his nine-millimeter pistol. Grinning weirdly, his head cocked to one side, he pointed the gun directly at Persephone’s face.

“You already forgot about your future lover man, old woman?” sneered Little Reggie. “I treated you right the other night, now didn’t I? I give you a little sniff of cocaine and a little roll on the kitchen floor, and I didn’t charge you shit for the coke, neither. I knows about womens. I knows about bitches. For a minute back then you forgot you was a fuckin’ widow, didn’t you? You felt like a real woman. I figure you owe me somethin’ more than a few wet kisses and a hug. I could see it in your eyes, bitch. You wanted more. You want some of what Little Reggie’s got. You see, I likes older women. Never had nothin’ but older women. Shit, I been gettin’ laid since I was five years old. I gots experience.”