Wag the Dog (40 page)

I
don't have to describe her in detail. You've seen her onscreen. If you haven't, go rent a cassette. The vibrancy, they say, comes across on film—the curve of her back, how long her legs are—remember that long pan up her legs, seemed to take forever, when she played a call girl in that Burt Reynolds film—the shape of her breasts, even the texture of her nipples when they're erect—the full-screen CU of one of them, and it really is her, she didn't use a tit double, in
White Lady
—that is what it is I'm looking at. She's got her shorts on. But she's topless. She stands still long enough for me to look at her, then she turns her back, slips into her running bra and puts a shirt over it.

When we go out, I'm sullen and silent. We start. I have no intention of cutting her any slack. She's quick. I can't outsprint her. She's light and lithe and I'm a truck. But I figure, over distance, I can grind her down some and keep going when she tires. I break a sweat after a mile. After two it starts to feel real good. I even zone Maggie out. The pictures begin to come. You have to remember that Vietnam wasn't just war. It was Asia. Like in the movies I saw when I was a kid. Exotic. Especially for a kid from the Ohio Valley, didn't know much but Slavs and Hunkies and Polacks, working the coal mines, working the mill, sooty and black and drinking a lot of cheap beer. Coming home drunk, whacking their families around. Waking up hurting. Them and their families both. Hungover. Joints all achin'—from lifting, loading, turning, shoveling, shoving, humping, grinding, holding, carrying, pouring, chipping, digging—from being a man. Wood-frame houses, tar-paper shingles, built on the hill.

There were some pretty girls. But not like the girls we saw in the movies. If we had the money to take them somewhere, where the hell would we take them? For a beer at the VFW hall or the corner bar. No. Backseat of a car, trying to get past girdles and the fear of getting pregnant. Belches tasting of beer and cheap whisky. My father takes me to a whore when I'm thirteen. Maybe twelve. Old enough to do it. Young enough I thought she was ugly. She's upstairs from a bar called Swat Sullivan's. My father's downstairs drinking while I'm up there. He's in a good mood. Buys a round for his buddies, to drink to his son, fucking his first whore upstairs. But he can't afford both the whore and the round. So when she comes down with me to collect her pay, it's gone to the bartender. They have a big fight.

Marines were a relief. The Marines were optimists compared to home. At least in Vietnam, we figured, you could go to glory.

Running with a full pack. Fifty-six pounds. With combat boots. With an M-16. Run past the hurt. Run till you're numb. The blisters break. Heat rash in your pits. Pack scrapes your shoulders and your back. Rifle makes your arms ache, like to fall off. And it all felt so goddamn good. We were studs. Young studs. Harder than hard. Tougher than leather. Running, running, running.

Vietnam was beautiful. Exotic. Beautiful women. As beautiful as the women we saw on-screen back in the Ohio Valley. We called them slopes, zippers, gooks, and slants, bought 'em, whored 'em, raped 'em, killed 'em. They killed us. But if you stopped, stopped being part of that thing and just looked—there were beautiful women. Preston Griffith, he helped me stop being as dumb as a dumb jarhead is dumb. Through the smoke and lessons in war and night killing, he said, “They're people, Joe. You think some blond round-eye is going to be better than the woman you got now? You're a stupid fuck, Joe. Wake up and see what you got.” He loved the food, Griff did. Lemon grass. That's the flavor of Vietnam. He smoked reefer to eat. Opium to sleep and to live. Street filled with soldiers and cripples and whores. “Can you imagine,” Preston says, sitting in the Café Gascon, a mural of D'Artagnan on the wall inside, painted by a Vietnamese, probably from a picture in a storybook, drinking
café filtre,
“can you imagine this without a war to fuck it up. Let's go to Bangkok, or Rangoon. They'll never find us.” Of course they would.

“War don't fuck things up, Griff,” I say like the stud Marine I'm trained to be. “War is what makes it fun. Dying puts living in perspective.”

“Have you ever been in love?” Maggie asks, her voice cutting from somewhere else. From the present. The beach.

I don't answer. I pick it up a notch. She stays with me.

“Have you?” About as much of a sentence as she can get out, breathing hard.

“'Sides you?”

“Do you love me?”

I run. What am I going to say to that? Of course. It's obvious. No question. She owns me. “Fuck you, bitch.”

“I'm sorry,” she says. She falters a little. Slows down. I don't. I keep on pushing. If she can't keep up, she can't keep up. I go back. Me and Griff, sitting in the café, like a couple of Frenchmen, watching
la vie de la ville.
Armed, of course.
Café filtre, baguettes.

“What about Joey?” he says.

Joe and Joey. We joined the Marines together. I was sixteen. Joey was seventeen. Almost eighteen. We lied. They didn't check. He died. I lived. “Fuck you, Griff.”

“What's the problem, war lover?”

“You're out of line.”

“No, I'm not I didn't kill him.”

“I'm outta here,” I say.

“Don't go, Joe.”

“Don't talk about Joey.”

“Why not?”

“He's family.”

“Bullshit. I've seen your record. You have no family, Joseph Broz. That's part of why we like you. So very much.”

“You're becoming a dope fiend, Griff. A dope fiend.”

“Let's go to Madame Thieu's. She has some new girls. Sweet and happy girls all the way from Cambodia.”

“Why the hell would anyone run from Cambodia to Vietnam?”

“Why the hell would anyone sell Cambodian girls when there's so many Vietnamese girls for sale? It's not like they're noticeably different. It's not like she's got some blond round-eyes. But there is a difference, Joe. Takes a connoisseur to tell, of course.”

“I thought you had a girlfriend. That reporter woman.”

“You know, I don't think I can ever, ever go back to Western women. They're all take. All fight. Eastern women, it's Confucian, places a man above them. Now a Western woman would say that's wrong. But a man, if he's got a choice, between a woman who looks up to him as her lord and master or a woman who's always trying to climb up just so she can look down on him, he's crazy if he takes the woman always trying to look down on him. Mind you, I'm glad my sister was born in Boston and went to Radcliffe instead of being born in Danang and going to Madame Thieu's. And if her husband doesn't mind that she leaps up to take a shower immediately after having sex, like it should be washed away, that's his affair, none of mine. May God bless and keep them.”

“We're losing, aren't we?”

“Shit, yeah. We're motherfucking losing. You mother-fucking know that, don't you. You motherfucking knew that when you were an FNG.
⁸⁸
So what you wanna do about it, you wanna go out and kill some more people anyway?”

“That's my job,” I say. “You got another job, maybe I'll take that instead.”

“War a good job, Joe?”

“Yeah, the best, Griff.”

He throws some scrip on the table. The waiter's been hoping for real money. Any kind, except scrip and Vietnamese. But he doesn't say anything. “Come on, Madame Thieu's. New Cambodian girls. Got no place to live anymore. Their home's a bomb crater. They're happy for the work. We'll take two at a time. We'll take four on the floor and swap 'em around. Come on, buddy.”

I think about it. But I say, “No.”

“Gonna go see Dao?”

“Yeah,” I say.

“You're missing your opportunities, Joe. You go back to the States, and you're gonna go back to the States if you live, ‘cause we're losing and they're gonna kick our asses out of here, our motherfucking sorry white asses, you go out see some whore, your lady wife will take out a knife or call her attorney. Not Vietnamese women. They understand, a man's a man, and a' that.”

“I don't know, Griff. I think Dao would hurt if I went to Madame Thieu's instead of home.”

“Home, Joe, home? You're starting to call something in Nam home? You're going native, Joe? White man has to watch out for that, going native.”

For me, after about three miles, the machine kicks in. Now I'm below the bluff that marks six miles. I turn around to head back. About a half mile later I see Maggie, still running. Good for her. When we meet, I gesture for her to turn around, stay with me. She thinks about being stubborn, but it's still going to be about five miles longer than she's used to. She turns. I slow down a little bit, enough that she can run beside me. I'm not angry anymore. Sweated it out. We run in silence. No more questions. The place where we exist—where the lust and desire and whatever else is happening—is contained—rebuilds inside the steady rhythm.

Maggie begins to hurt. I don't speak, I just try to hold her up with my running. Like we're in the same platoon. It works. She goes away from the pain into the zone. Maybe she's learning something. Maybe she already knows.

Maggie is a mystery to me. I don't ask her many questions because there are no facts. I know nothing about her except her existence.

The house comes into view. With the goal in sight she comes out of the zone. Ideas about stopping, rest, tiredness, pain all enter her and it affects her running. “There is no end,” I tell her. “We won't stop at the house.”

“OK,” she says and steadies.

As we get closer and closer, she begins to hope that I'm lying. That we will stop. She goes back and forth. When she thinks it's the end, her running is ragged, when she thinks there is no end, it's steady. When we do stop, right at the house, she's exhilarated. She takes me by the arm and leans on me like she can't walk. And by tomorrow she probably won't be able to.

“Tell me,” she says. “I want you to tell me.”

“Yes.”

“Who was she?”

“Dao Thi Thai was her name.”

“Was?”

“Was.”

“I'm sorry, Joe.”

I shrug.

“What happened, Joe? What happened to her?”

“Friendly fire.”

“Friendly fire?”

“Enemy fire.”

“Enemy? What enemy?”

“Exactly. What enemy?”

“Don't be cryptic.”

“Cryptic?”

“Don't . . . just tell me so I can understand. Tell me once. I won't ask again.”

“She got shot. In Hue. In our apartment. Where we lived together.”

“Who? Who shot her?”

“Friend or foe, I don't know. It didn't matter, did it? Friendly fire, enemy fire. It got to be all the same. Her people were my enemy. My people were her enemy. Is the enemy of my friend my enemy? Maybe it wasn't even meant for her. We were there to kill. They were there to kill.”

“Did you love her very much, Joe?”

I go through the gate and head up the stairs into the house. To a shower. We have to get ready for this party. “Oh, Maggie,” I say, I guess because it has to be said to complete the story, “oh, Maggie—she was pregnant.”

The party is a Hollywood party. A lot of money is spent on the booze and the catering. There's valet parking outside, five bartenders, and five circulating waitpersons inside. The valets, bartenders, and waitpersons are all better-looking than me, better-looking than 99.9 percent of the people that exist in real life. They all have perfect teeth. They look better than most of the guests, but are not in the same league as the best-looking of the guests. Like Maggie, Julia Roberts, and Michelle Pfeiffer.

Jean-Claude Van Damme is there. He ripples and poses for Maggie—I think it's for Maggie, not for me—when we're introduced. She treats Van Damme like he looks like Tip O'Neill. Like I said, there is something very thoughtful and courteous about Maggie, even with the feeling that all life is a movie.