War Baby (5 page)

‘What are you thinking about?’ Mickey asked him.

‘Nothing,’ Webb said, forcing Private Judge from his mind.

‘We have an agreement, remember?’

He did remember. He would not talk about his work, and she would not talk about hers. But it was an easy bargain to keep. Mickey finished her beer and Webb signaled the waiter for two more. They were in the Royale, a seedy, once glorious old hotel in a side street between the Tu Do and the Nguyen Hue, the Street of Flowers. Outside, the street boiled in the noonday sun.

‘My Mister Nice Guy,’ she said.

‘How do you mean?’

‘Last time you were up at Bien Hoa I was rolling drunk. You could have done what you wanted.’

‘How do you know I didn’t?’

‘No cold, sticky mess in the middle of the night. It’s where women first learn their job in life is to clean up after men.’

‘You were upset. It didn’t seem right.’

‘Please, don’t say stuff like that. Before I know it, I’ll end up liking you.’

‘I went to an English grammar school. We were taught chivalry and good manners.’

‘I saw a movie about an English grammar school. Didn’t you play cricket and rape little boys?’

‘No, that’s the public schools. They’re called public schools because they’re private. I went to a grammar school. You only get to rape the new kids on special occasions. Christmas, Easter.’

‘It sounds quaint.’

‘I suppose it was. I didn’t like cricket though. The sodomy was the best part.’

She laughed. ‘I never met an Englishman before. I watched a lot of movies back home with Englishmen in them and I always loved the accent. Where you grew up, did it have thatched cottages and a haunted church and a duke and everything?’

‘Of course. I went fox hunting every week in the summer.’

Their lunch arrived. A sallow-faced Vietnamese in a white jacket brought a tray with two plates under silver covers. He removed the covers with a flourish; two small water buffalo steaks and two spherical mounds of mashed potato.

‘Jesus I need a hamburger,’ she said. ‘Eighty-three days and a wake-up to go. What about you? How long do you intend to stick this out?’

‘I don’t know, Mickey. No time frame for me.’

‘Wouldn’t you rather be taking photographs of skinny models in bikinis or sunsets on a Pacific island?’

He jabbed at the mashed potato with his fork. It was rare. The steak was overcooked. At least the beer was cold. ‘I was eighteen years old when I realized I really didn’t have any talent,’ he said.

She stopped eating and stared at him. ‘What?’

‘It’s why I’m here. Back home I’m just another hack.’

‘You have a talent,’ she said. ‘You take photographs. Damned good ones.’

‘No, I have a good camera, that doesn’t make me a good photographer. But I don’t need talent when I have Vietnam. I just have to stay alive to be good at what I do.’

She shook her head. ‘Sorry, but it’s hard to think of the things I see every day as stepping stones to a career. Was going back for the wounded lieutenant part of the game plan?’

‘Like I said, you shamed me into it. Anyway, I thought we agreed we weren’t going to talk shop.’

‘One last question. Do you enjoy it?’

‘Not really. They said I would but, no, I just got used to it.’

‘I guess that’s a good thing.’

‘Is it? I have no idea.’ He finished playing with his steak and pushed the plate away. ‘Do you think I’m a ghoul?’

‘I don’t know you well enough.’

‘Sometimes I think so. When you’re taking photographs of … well, I know some of the grunts think that. There was this time, I was on a medevac and this Marine lieutenant was lying there, holding a compress on some other guy’s chest wound, and there was blood in his hair, it was caked in his ears, he had one eye bandaged up, and he leaned forward and tapped me on the shoulder. Know what he said? Could I take a photograph of him so he could send it to his wife.’ He fidgeted with his glass. ‘We weren’t going to talk about this.’

‘My fault, I guess.’ She gave up on her lunch as well. She stared at him, her head cocked to one side. ‘So look, you say you have no talent, but I figure everyone’s good at something. Is there
anything
you think you can surprise me with?’

* * *

The room was steamy hot, a slow fan on the ceiling hardly stirred the air. A pale gekko darted along the wall. Mickey pushed back the tangled sheet, raised her arms above her head, let the sweat cool on her body, her heart hammering in her chest. After a while she sat up and knelt astride his thighs. She leaned forward so that her hair grazed his face. His eyes blinked open and he smiled at her.

‘You see. Youo were wrong.’

‘About what?’

‘You have an enormous talent,’ she said. ‘Absolutely enormous.’

* * *

‘I want to see
Soeur Odile
,’ Ryan said.

‘
C'est impossible
,’ the old nun said. ‘
Au revoir, monsieur.
’ She shook her head and tried to close the heavy wooden door, but Ryan kept his foot there.

‘Please.’

‘Allez-y!’ Soeur Marie said, peering through the crack.

Ryan put his weight against the door and gently forced it open.
Soeur Marie
squealed in alarm. Ryan squeezed inside.

‘Quel scandale!
Vous êtes fou!
’

‘Calm down. I don’t want to hurt anyone. I just need to speak Odile.’

A man’s voice had never before disturbed the crystal sanctity of the chapel. Every face turned to stare at the intruder. Ryan strode in,
Soeur Marie
at his heels like a fussing hen. He stopped just inside the door and looked straight at her.

There was no need for words. It seemed to Odile in that moment that the decision had been taken from her. He raised his hands in a helpless gesture as if to say: I can’t help this and neither can you.

The
canonesse
rose from her knees to confront him. Ryan backed slowly out of the chapel. Odile felt her cheeks burning with shame. But there was something else, too, something she had not felt since she was a child.

Joy.

Mickey heard doors banging in the hooch. In the distance, through the receding mist of her dreams, she heard the distant
whump-whump-whump
of the medevac rotors. She tried to focus on the green dial of her watch.

Someone hammered a fist on her door and threw it open. ‘‘Come on, kiddo, mas-cal!’ The light hurt her eyes. She rolled out of her cot and fumbled for her fatigues.

She stumbled out of the hooch, her boot laces dragging on the ground. The first Hueys were settling on the landing pads. The roar was deafening; dirt and grit picked up by the downdraught of the rotors stung her face and eyes.

I can’t do this anymore, I can’t face another boy with no legs.

‘Mickey, c’mon!’

A doctor and two nurses ran towards one of the Hueys with a gurney. She started running with them. Please God, get me through another night.

* * *

The
canonesse
looked out of the window to the courtyard below. The big Australian towered over the orphanage children, as happy and exuberant as a large dog, shouting and laughing with them as they kicked a plastic football around the quadrangle. He was like a big child himself, and like a child he could cause a lot of damage without intention.

She turned away.
Soeur Odile
sat with her head bowed.

‘You intend to marry him?’ the canonesse asked her.

‘Yes, Mother.’

‘When?’

Soeur Odile did not answer.

‘I hope you have thought this through.’

‘I trust him, Mother.’

‘He has been one of our greatest benefactors. But charity and responsibility are not always found in the same person.’

‘I have made up my mind.’

‘Yes, I was afraid of that.’

She sat down at her desk. A rosary clicked softly between her fingers. She wondered if Ryan really understood young Odile at all. The girl was sincere, and she too had a good heart, and she was beautiful, certainly. But she was not bright, and she was naïve, she had no knowledge of the world outside of her cloistered upbringing here and in Dalat. Perhaps Ryan had mistaken vacuity for mystery. She really was no match for such a man.

‘When you leave us, you can never return. You understand this?’

‘I understand.’

‘Do you really understand what you are doing, Odile? Do you really know this man?’

‘I love him.’

Love! The young fell in love so easily, and placed such store by it, yet they knew least about it. The
canonesse
had come late to her vocation and knew just how painful an emotion it could be. Ryan’s voice around the courtyard below, over the shouts of the children.

‘Would you like to pray with me, Odile?’

‘Yes, Mother.’

And so they knelt together under the wooden crucifix on the wall, but all the while she knew Odile was longing to flee to the door, like a schoolgirl detained to finish her homework. Only the
canonesse
truly prayed that some good would come from this liaison, but she had known the world too long to believed that such stories ever ended well.

* * *

Webb spent two weeks up-country, living out of the Press Centre at Danang. When he got back to Saigon the Hashish Hilton had undergone a radical change. Nixon had gone. Crosby told him that Cochrane’s Vietnamese girlfriend had been sitting in the room alone one night when the monkey began masturbating on the bookshelf behind her. At the inevitable conclusion of Nixon’s performance the girl had felt something wet and warm on the back of her neck. She had screamed, grabbed the animal by the tail and tossed it out of the window.

He came, she got sore, he was conquered, as Crosby put it.

Crosby had moved into Ryan’s top-floor room. Ryan’s paraphernalia had all gone: the ashtray made from a shell casing; the NVA pith helmet with the red star; the Leica with the grenade fragment lodged in the lens; the meat safe where he kept his stock of marijuana. Crosby was sprawled on a hard divan chair, a can of Koors in one hand and a large joint in the other. He was stoned as well as drunk, red-eyed and remorselessly solemn.

He looked up as Webb walked in. ‘The wanderer returns,’ he said.

‘Where’s Sean?’ Webb asked, experiencing a cold chill of alarm. ‘He’s okay?’

‘Yeah, he’s fine,’ Crosby said. ‘Moved out. Got himself a live-in girlfriend.’

‘Sean?’

‘Yep. I know it’s hard to believe, but they do say fact is stranger than fiction. We’ve had some changes here while you’ve been gone. Cochrane got his ass transferred back to Washington DC. Hell, he was only here because he wanted it on his CV. Prescott moved on also.’

‘Where did he go?’

‘Everywhere.’

‘What?’

‘He was with an ARVN company in the Delta. The guy in front of him stepped on a three-hundred-pound mine, man. They say there wasn’t enough left of him to fit into a helmet.’

‘Oh, Christ.’

‘He didn’t have to be here. None of us has to be here.’ He blew smoke at the ceiling. ‘Oh, man, I am going to miss him, though.’

Webb threw his duffel bag and cameras on the bed. He sat down, took the joint from Crosby and drew on it.

‘We moved your gear into Cochrane’s pad. If I rotate or step on a mine, the AC is yours.’

‘I can live without air conditioning.’

‘Easy to say this time of year.’ He leaned forward. Webb could make out the thready streaks of the capillaries in his eyes. ‘Ryan sure was pissed about Prescott. Said he owed him three hundred bucks and now he’ll never collect.’

‘Three hundred bucks? What for?’

‘The nun, man. That bastard, he really made it with the nun!’

* * *

Webb hitched a ride out to Bien Hoa, got there just before sunset. He walked across the compound to the hospital. The tech from Georgia was busy changing wound dressings. Webb asked him where he could find Mickey, was told she was still over at the ER.

There was an orderly row of body bags outside the Emergency Room, laid out under a scraggly banana palm. Webb felt sullied just walking past them as if they were just so much cordwood. He felt an insane impulse to salute, to bow his head, anything but just ignore them. They should get some respect, he thought, whatever good it would do them now.

It was quiet inside; the afternoon’s casualties had been processed, two nurses were monitoring the last of the post-ops. Webb found Mickey in another room with the expectants - those too badly wounded to save. There was just one soldier left in there; he still had his fatigues and jungle boots on, his head was swathed in so many blood-soaked bandages that it appeared to be almost twice its normal size. Mickey stood next to the gurney, holding his hand.

She saw Webb in the doorway. ‘Another day in paradise,’ she said. She looked down at the boy on the litter. ‘We gave him one hundred and twenty units of blood. In the end he had so much new blood in him it just wouldn’t clot. Now his whole head is leaking.’

She doesn’t have to do this, Webb thought. The kid would be snowed with so much morphine he wouldn’t even know she was there.

‘It’s not long now.’

‘I’ll wait outside,’ he said.

* * *

When she came out, the quick tropical dark had fallen. There were flashes on the horizon, and Webb could feel the shaking underfoot as the B-52s carpet-bombed the jungle near the Cambodian border. Lights blazed on the apron as a Chinook dropped down from the night.

‘Well. Long time no see.’

‘Been up at Pleiku and the Highlands.’

‘Get around, huh?’

‘You know how it is. You have to hustle or you can miss some of the war.’ He had meant it as a joke and it came out sounding hollow. ‘You okay?’

‘Sure. Walk me to the mess hall?’ She reached for his hand, gripped it. ‘So. How have you been?’

‘Cold and wet and muddy. How about you?’

‘Hot and dry and clean. Want to change places?’

He thought about the young soldier in the expectants’ room. ‘Not really.’

‘I got thirty-three days and a wake-up to go.’

He felt relieved for her, disappointed for himself. He couldn’t see her face in the darkness and he wished he could. She stopped walking. ‘Hugh, this isn’t a good idea.’

‘What isn’t?’

‘You and me.’

He felt sick. He knew whatever she wanted to say he didn’t want to hear. ‘I thought... I thought we were kind of good for each other.’

‘Yeah, I feel that way too. But you know what’s going to happen next. I’m going to get feelings for you, not just when I’m horny, the other stuff, the stuff guys like you hate. Then before you know it, I’m back in the world, and you’re still here. And I spend the next God knows how long waiting to find out if you’re going to end up like one of these sorry bastards I see in here every day. And you aren’t here just for a tour. Are you?’

She was right. He had no plans to leave.

‘This hasn’t got a future so let’s stop it now before it starts.’

‘Mickey . .

‘You want to come back with me to the world, I’ll think about it again. But you don’t want to do that, do you?’

There was nothing he could think of to say.

‘A month from now I’m getting out of here and I don’t want to remember a thing about this place. Not one damned thing.’

‘So that’s it?’

‘Yeah, I guess so.’

She let go of his hand and walked away towards the mess hall. But then she stopped and turned around. ‘Don’t let anyone ever tell you that you don’t have talent. Okay?’

‘Will you send me a reference?’

‘You don’t need a reference, scout. It’s written all over you.’

She walked back to him and for one insane moment he thought she had changed her mind. Instead she stood on her toes and kissed him on the lips. ‘Take care,’ she said.

And then she was gone.

What was it the grunts said when one of their platoon died?
It don’t mean nothin’ to me.
Just forget it. That was just the way it was.