On The Yankee Station_ Stories Part 6

Mme. D'Amico comes in. Her hair is pinned up carelessly and her old face is s.h.i.+ny with tears. She sits down on the bed and immediately begins to sob quietly, her thin shoulders shaking beneath her black cardigan.

"Oh, Madame," I say, alarmed. "What is it?" I find it distressing to see Mme. D'Amico, normally so correct and so formal, displaying such unabashed human weakness. I am also-inappropriately-very aware of my nakedness beneath the sheets.

"C'est mon mari," she cries. " she cries. "Il est mort."

Gradually the story comes out. Apparently Monsieur D'Amico, sufferer from Parkinson's disease, was having a final cigarette in his room in the sanatorium before the nurse came to put him to bed. He lit his cigarette and then tried to shake the match out. But his affliction instead made the match spin from his trembling fingers and fall down the side of the plastic armchair upon which he was sitting. The chair was blazing within seconds, Monsieur D'Amico's pyjamas and dressing-gown caught fire, and although he managed to wriggle himself onto the floor, his screams were not sufficiently loud to attract the attention of the nurses immediately. He was severely burned. The shock was too much for his frail body and he died in the early hours of the morning.

I try to arrange my sleepy, unresponsive senses into some sort of order, try to summon the full extent of my French vocabulary.

Mme. D'Amico looks at me pitifully. "Oh, Monsieur Edward," she whimpers, her lips quivering.

"Madame," I reply helplessly. "C'est une vraie tragedie." "C'est une vraie tragedie." It seems grossly inept, under the circ.u.mstances, almost flippant, my thick early-morning tongue removing any vestige of sincerity from the words. But it seems to mean something to Mme. D'Amico, who bows her head and starts to cry with light, high-pitched sobs. I reach out an arm from beneath the sheets and gently pat her shoulder. It seems grossly inept, under the circ.u.mstances, almost flippant, my thick early-morning tongue removing any vestige of sincerity from the words. But it seems to mean something to Mme. D'Amico, who bows her head and starts to cry with light, high-pitched sobs. I reach out an arm from beneath the sheets and gently pat her shoulder.

"There, there, Madame," I say. "It will be all right."

As I lean forward I notice that in her hands there is a crumpled letter. Peering closer I still can't make out the name but I do see that the stamp is British. It is surely for me. The postal strike, I realise with a start, must now be over. Suddenly I know that I can stay. I think at once about Jackie and our bizarre and unsatisfactory evening. But I don't really care any more. My spirits begin to stir and lift. I get a brief mental flash of Monsieur D'Amico in his blazing armchair and I hear the quiet sobs of his wife beside me. But it doesn't really impede the revelation that slowly overtakes me. People, it seems, want to give me things-for some reason known only to them. No matter what I do or how I behave, unprompted and unsought the gifts come. And they will keep on coming. Naked photos, cold pizza, their girls, their wives, their b.r.e.a.s.t.s to see, even their grief. I feel a growing confidence about my stay in Nice. It will be all right now, I feel sure. It will work out. I think about all the gifts that lie waiting for me. I think about the Swedish girls at the Centre. I think about spring and the days when the sun will be out....

The bed continues to shudder gently from Mme. D'Amico's sobbing. I smile benignly at her bowed head.

"There, there, Madame," I say again. "Don't worry. Everything will be okay. You'll see. Everything will be fine, I promise you."

On the Yankee Station

When Lieutenant Larry Pfitz lost his Phantom on his first mission, he decided, quite spontaneously and irrationally, to blame the Vietnamese people and Arthur Lydecker, a member of his ground crew.

Pfitz was a new pilot and his face was taut as he ran through the c.o.c.kpit checks before being catapulted off the heaving deck of the U.S.S. Chester B. Halsey Chester B. Halsey. The Phantom was heavy with four cl.u.s.ters of 500-pound bombs, and extra poundage of pressure was demanded from the old steam catapults. Pfitz was third in line and as the Chester B Chester B. heeled around into the wind, the deck crew noticed the way his eyes continuously flicked from left to right at the rescue helicopters hovering alongside.

There had been a ragged jeer as Pfitz's plane dipped alarmingly on being hurled off the deck, before the straining engines thrust him up in a steep climb to join the other two members of his flight. The fourth jet was ready on the second catapult when one of the fire guards shouted and pointed up. There, in the pale-gray sky, Pfitz hung beneath his orange parachute. His plane flew on straight for a few brief seconds before tilting on one wing and curving elegantly down into the sea.

It was as well for Pfitz that, just before it smashed into the water, there was a m.u.f.fled crack of explosion and a puff of smoke from the jets; otherwise the court of inquiry might have peremptorily dismissed his claim of a serious engine malfunction. Still, it left an uneasy aroma of doubt in the air. The Phantom had been new, flown over from Guam three days prior to Pfitz's arrival, and the loss of several million dollars' worth of expensive equipment for no real and pressing reason was regarded-even in this most extravagantly wasteful of wars-as a fairly serious matter. Pfitz was reprimanded for overhasty reactions, and as a measure of the captain's disapproval was a.s.signed to fly an old Ling-Temco-Vought F-8 Crusader that was stored in the back of the below-deck hangar until a replacement Phantom arrived.

Pfitz's considerable self-esteem never recovered from this blow and his fellow pilots ribbed him unmercifully. He came to the conclusion that the loss of his Phantom was somehow symbolic of the animosity of the Vietnamese people to the American presence, and more particularly, the direct result of some gross act of carelessness on the part of his ground crew. And it was Lydecker on whom his venom alighted.

Pfitz's maintenance crew consisted of five people. There was Dawson, a huge, taciturn black; two Puerto Ricans called Pascual and Huq; Lee Otis Cooper, who came, like Pfitz, from Fayette County, Alabama; and there was Lydecker. There were good and sensible reasons for selecting Lydecker as scapegoat; Dawson was too big, Pascual and Huq too united, and Cooper-well, he was a white man. So was Lydecker, for that matter, but of a particularly inferior, Yankee city-sc.u.m sort. Lydecker came from Sturgis, New Jersey; a mean smog-mantled town that seemed to have stamped its own harsh landscape on Lydecker's body and visage. He was small, dark and thin, with pale skin and permanently red-rimmed eyes. His face looked as if it had been compressed vertically in a vise, pursing his mouth and forcing his eyes close together.

Pfitz's resolute persecution came as no surprise to Lydecker: persecution of one form or another, whether from drunken father, bored teachers or cruel playmates, was the abiding feature of his memories. Questions of justice or injustice, of blame rightly apportioned, had never carried much weight in his world. He never really stopped to consider how unfair it was, even though he had a good idea of who in fact was responsible. Lee Otis had been checking the engine casings of the Phantom's port jet the morning before Pfitz's doomed flight, and had borrowed Lydecker's own small monkey wrench to adjust what he thought was a loose bearing deep in the complex mechanism. A fire drill had interrupted work on that s.h.i.+ft, Lydecker remembered, and he recalled Lee Otis bolting down the inspection hatch immediately after work was resumed. He never returned the monkey wrench either, and, when asked for it a few days after the accident, Lee Otis flushed momentarily before informing Lydecker that he "f.u.c.kin gave it back to you, t.u.r.dbird, so beat it, heah?"

Lydecker shrugged. Maybe he was wrong, so who gave a s.h.i.+t anyway? He merely tried to keep out of Pfitz's way as much as possible, and on occasions when he was chewed out or put on report, accepted the screaming flow of abuse with the practiced, hangdog, foot-shuffling resentment that he knew Pfitz's injured pride demanded. Lydecker never thought about trying to change things; experience had taught him to adapt to the world's crazy logic. It was a hostile alien terrain of unrelieved frustration and disappointment out there, and this was the only method of survival he had found. But at those times when its harsh realities inescapably obtruded into his consciousness, he responded with a sullen, silent hatred. It was a comfort to him, his hatred; comforting because he came to realize that no matter what the world or people did to him, they couldn't regulate his emotions, couldn't stop him hating, however they tried. After particularly bad days he would exult in his hatred at night, allowing the waves of his disdain and contempt to wash through his body with the potency of some magic serum, numbing and restoring, and letting him, when the sun rose, face once again whatever the world had to offer. Recipients of his hatred had in the past included his father, and Werbel, the manager of the gas station where he had worked before he was drafted. And now there was Pfitz.

Lydecker had expected the insults, the dirty jobs and the regular appearance on report to die down after Pfitz had flown a few more missions, but if anything they intensified. Soon Lydecker came to see that the old Crusader was acting as a catalyst, a regular reminder of Pfitz's shame. Every time the Crusader was towed out amongst the Phantoms and the Skyhawks, Pfitz remembered all the details of that day: watching his new plane scythe cleanly into the waves, the hours of subjective time as he gently floated down into the sea, the rows of incredulous, grinning faces as the rescue helicopter deposited him back on board, the sly gibes and quips of his fellow officers in the messroom. And each time he climbed into the c.o.c.kpit, saw the unfamiliar instrument layout and the dated mechanisms, the shame returned. And as he pulled away from the s.h.i.+p on a mission he imagined it brazenly echoing to the crew's gleeful laughter. And every time he took the Crusader up and landed, Lydecker was there, the man who'd caused the foul-up, weaselly s.h.i.+tface Lydecker, draining the fuel tanks or fitting the chocks to the wheels. And then Pfitz would claim his cannon had misfired or the fuel-flow was unbalanced and he'd put him on report for slipshod work, or kick his narrow b.u.t.t the length of the repair bay, or a.s.sign him to de-scale the afterburner all night.

For Lydecker the one benefit of the whole thing was the Crusader. His first posting had been to a Sixth Fleet carrier in the Mediterranean that still had a squadron of Crusaders in operation. He had grown familiar with the planes and had an affection for them that he did not bestow on the lean Phantoms or the dainty Sky-hawks. The Crusader was a hefty rectangular machine, large for a single-seater, with the crude geometry of a bus. Its single intake was set in the nose, like a gaping mouth beneath the matte-black cone that housed the radar. It was like greeting an old friend when Pfitz's was wheeled out from storage and hoisted up to the deck. Its strong, unambiguous profile seemed to render the other planes less significant and somehow pretentious. Pfitz was loudly derogatory, complaining that she was a pig to fly and sluggish to maneuver. But then he soon discovered in it other qualities that he employed in wreaking his revenge on the population of Vietnam.

The payload of the Crusader was prodigious; its st.u.r.dy frame could carry an anthology of destructive weaponry beneath its wings. Pfitz was highly satisfied with this aspect, soon indifferent to the absence of computer technology that precluded his carrying laser or guided bombs like the Phantoms. And he was never happier than when he supervised his crew as they bolted the finless, cigar-shaped canisters of napalm to the underwing pylons. Pascual overheard him talking about a request he'd made to be excused from carrying all other bomb loads and how he'd voluntarily restricted himself to napalm. He started to refer to his aircraft as the Rose Train and had Huq, who was something of an artist, paint this below his c.o.c.kpit.

"It's like roses in the jungle, man," he would crow on returning from a mission. "You see them cans tumblin' and whoomph whoomph-it's like a f.u.c.kin' great flower bloomin' in the trees. Wham, pink an' orange roses. Beautiful, man, just beautiful." He made Huq keep a tally of missions by painting a red rose beneath the c.o.c.kpit sill.

Lydecker thought Pfitz had gone mad, and so did many of the other pilots. Napalm had to be delivered from low level, making the plane vulnerable to ground fire. With half a dozen canisters wobbling like overripe fruit beneath your wings, you could be transformed into a comet of blazing petroleum jelly with one lucky shot. Lydecker sometimes thought about this as he patched bullet holes in the wings and tail.

Often at night Lydecker would leave the brightly lit crew quarters, where the air was thick with smoke, and bored sailors played cards or told obscene stories, and wander up to the dark cavern of the main hangar below the deck where the atmosphere had a tranquil metallic chill and the smell of oil and engine coolant clung to the air. He would go over to the Crusader, ponderously low-slung on its curious trolley undercarriage which jutted like spavined legs from the fuselage belly, and run his hands over the scarred and chipped aluminum, his fingers tracing and caressing the lines of rivet heads. Like the halted, bullied schoolchild who tinkers with his bike all day, Lydecker enjoyed the mute presence of his plane. It was like some gigantic familiar toy, stored in a cupboard with its wings folded and canopy up. He knew every square inch of the plane, from its gaping intake to the scorched jet at the rear. He had clambered all over its body, fueling and rearming it, riveting patches of aluminum alloy over the puckered ulcers caused by random bullets. He had climbed into the dark ventral recesses of the undercarriage bay, checking the hydraulic system, and had inched along its ribbed length replacing frayed control wires and realigning the armor plate. And he found himself, like an anxious mother, fretting for its return after long missions to Laos or Haiphong.

The war was a distant affair to the men on the "Yankee Station" in the South China Sea. Just a green haze on the horizon sometimes. Even for the pilots who flew above it, dumping tons of high explosive on the jungle, the war and the enemy remained abstract and remote. To them it was a dangerous, demanding job and only Pfitz openly expressed the requisite warlike antagonism; only he seemed to be exulted by the regular missions and the crop of red roses that grew on the side of the plane.

Then one late afternoon a seabird was sucked into the intake as the Crusader came in to land. The thump made Pfitz veer up and away to make his approach again. This caused a lot of hilarity among the deck crew and when Pfitz had landed safely someone shouted, "Hey! Why din't ya eject, Pfitz?" There was no real danger, as, set about five feet down the intake vent, there was a fine wire mesh that protected the delicate compressor fans of the engine from such incidents.

Lydecker wheeled the light ladder against the fuselage as soon as the plane was towed to its bay on the deck. Pfitz took off his helmet, sweat s.h.i.+ning in his crew-cut hair, his beefy face red with anger. As he climbed down, Lydecker stepped back from the ladder and looked away, but Pfitz grabbed him by the arm, fingers biting cruelly into his bicep.

"f.u.c.kin' b.u.mpy landing again, you f.u.c.kin' s.h.i.+thead creep. How many times I told you to get those tire pressures reduced? You're on f.u.c.kin' report."

That night Lydecker abandoned the letter he was trying to write to a movie usherette he had known in Sturgis and made his way up to the hangar. He roved around the familiar contours of the plane, noting with a surge of anger the bulge of the fat soft tires on the steel floor. His brain hummed with an almost palpable hatred for Pfitz. His hands were raw and astringent from an evening spent cleaning latrines with coa.r.s.e scouring powder as a result of his having been placed on report. He leaned up against the side of the Crusader and rested his hot cheek on the cool metal, his eyes blank and tearless, yet his mouth uncontrollably twisted in a rictus of sadness and utter frustration with his life. He forced himself to think of something else. He thought of the plane and the bird it had engulfed, how his heart had leaped in panic as the plane had jerked from its approach run. Without thinking he peered into the maw of the intake. In the gloom he could make out the detritus of feathers and expressed flesh stuck to the fine grille. He climbed into the intake, easily adapting the posture of his body to the narrowing curves of the interior, and began to pick the feathers and bones away from the wire mesh. He felt his spine molded against the curve of polished metal and sensed all about him the complex terminals of controls and cables running from the c.o.c.kpit above his head. The only sound was the noise of his breathing and the quiet pinging of his nails on the wires as he plucked the trapped feathers away.

When he heard the voices he suddenly realized he did not know how long he'd been hunched in the throat of the plane. With a chill of alarm he recognized Pfitz's oddly high laugh among them and hastily clambered out of the intake. He saw three officers sauntering toward the Crusader down the aisle of parked aircraft. Momentarily distracted, he tried to slip around the plane out of sight but Pfitz had seen him and ran forward.

"Hey! You there, sailor, stop!"

Lydecker stood at attention, his face red with embarra.s.sment, as if his mother had discovered him having s.e.x or masturbating. As Pfitz approached, the shame dissipated and fear suddenly gripped like a hand at his heart.

"Lydecker! This is off limits to you, man." Pfitz was enraged; he clutched a beer can in his fist. "What're you f.u.c.kin' doing here, jerk-off?"

The other two officers stood back grinning. Pfitz was aware of their amused observation.

Lydecker held out his hand, showing the ball of fluff and feathers by way of explanation.

"Uh, I was just clearing the intake, sir. The bird? You know, when you landed this afternoon ...?"

The two officers snorted with laughter. Pfitz's eyes widened in fury. He cuffed at the feathers, and the bundle exploded into a cloud of swooping fluff.

"Hey, Larry," one of the officers guffawed, "it's a f.u.c.kin' souvenir, man."

Pfitz struck out blindly at Lydecker, punching him in the chest. Lydecker staggered backward. Pfitz's voice rose to a shriek.

"You're f.u.c.kin' finished, you f.u.c.kin' dips.h.i.+t a.s.shole! Get outa here an' don't come back or I'm gonna dump a giant s.h.i.+t on you, boy!"

Pfitz held the beer can up threateningly. Lydecker backed down the row of planes. Helpless with laughter, the two officers tried to restrain Pfitz.

"You're getting transferred off of my crew. You ain't gonna mess around with me anymore, you b.a.s.t.a.r.d. Now git out!" His face rigid with fury, Pfitz hurled the half-full beer can at the retreating Lydecker. It glanced off his forehead and went ringing along the steel deck. Lydecker turned and fled, only to slip on a patch of oil. He skidded to the ground, careening into the nose wheel of a Skyhawk. The beer can rested against the tire. All Lydecker could hear was laughter-Pfitz's harsh, triumphant laughter. He picked up the beer can, paused for an instant, then got to his feet and limped off, the can clutched to his chest with both hands.

Pfitz had Lydecker transferred from aircraft crew to catapult maintenance, one of the worst details on the s.h.i.+p. It meant hours on the exposed bow of the carrier as it steamed full speed into the wind for a mission launch. Lydecker's new job was to shackle the planes on to the towing block that protruded from the indented track of the catapult. He wore a huge goggled helmet with bulging ear protectors that made him look like some insect-headed alien or demented astronaut. It was a cheerless, companionless job. The rush of wind made his bright nylon coveralls crack like a pennant in a hurricane, and conversation of any kind was impossible due to the shattering roar of jet engines driven at full thrust As the plane was moved into take-off position, Lydecker would run forward with the c.u.mbersome steel-cable towing strop. He would secure each end of the strop to pinions in the undercarriage bay or just below the leading edge of the wings, and slip the middle over the angled blade of the towing block. He then darted out from beneath the plane, giving a thumbs-up to the catapult officer. If everything was in order the officer held five fingers up to the pilot of the plane, who saluted his acknowledgment Then, like some ardent coach cheering on his team, the catapult officer dropped to one knee, swept his arm forward, and a seaman on a catwalk across the deck pressed the launch b.u.t.ton. The catapult would be released, hurling the plane, on full afterburn, along the narrow expanse of deck and into the air. The cable, too, would be flung out ahead of the carrier, dropping away from the climbing plane to splash forlornly into the sea in a tiny flurry of spray. The next plane was then towed into the take-off position, ghostly wreaths of steam hissing from the length of the catapult track.

Some strange impulse made Lydecker keep the beer can Pfitz had thrown at him. It stood on a small shelf above his bunk beside his electric razor and a creased Polaroid snapshot of the movie usherette. For a week after the incident he had worn adhesive tape on his forehead; then the scab had sloughed off, leaving a paler stripe on his already pale skin. Lydecker found that he unconsciously kept touching the thin scar, repeatedly running his forefinger over it, as if he had to keep reminding himself of its presence, like a teenager with his first moustache.

Denied the satisfaction of working on a plane, Lydecker's life became one of routine mindless boredom. There were long periods of inactivity or futile ch.o.r.es. There was the deadening monotony of the catapult maintenance crew; the endless scurrying beneath screaming jets with the heavy cable, the grease thick on his gloves as he fought with recalcitrant pinions. Sometimes the frequent malfunctioning of the Chester B Chester B.'s old steam catapult brought tedious afternoons of stripping the mechanism down, searching for faults and elusive defects. The pressure that was required to fling tons of lethal weaponry into the air caused valves to blow back, bearings to jam and gauges to crack and leak. There were many accidents. Planes, given insufficient lift from the catapult, belly-landing in the sea; a tardily raised blast deflector had caused a parked helicopter to be flipped overboard; combat-dazed pilots had misjudged their landings and ploughed off the end of the carrier. Once a deck-tractor had momentarily stuck in reverse and backed a Skyhawk into the ocean-just like kicking a pebble off a dock.

Throughout this time Lydecker appeased his tired and numb body by hating Pfitz. The man came to obsess him. His throat would be thick with emotion and fury as he forced the launching cable onto the Crusader's grips. Sometimes he would wander over to the plane when the crew were working on it, but he was invariably met with insults and told to stay away. Slowly he came to feel that Pfitz had deliberately set out to deprive his life of the little meaning and satisfaction it had, and for some reason the only solace he found, the only way he knew of combating this emptiness, was to replace it with his hatred. The emotion gave his life a structure of sorts; it became something he could rely on, constant and unwavering, like a picture he had once seen of Saint Paul's cathedral in the London blitz. Lydecker's hatred was a familiar comfort; it had done able service from his earliest days. It had sustained him as he had lain in bed and listened to his father batter his frail mother in a frenzy of c.r.a.pulous rage. It had provided support when Werbel took him off cars and put him on the pumps and had then restricted him to cleaning the rest rooms and sweeping the concrete ap.r.o.n. As he had freed plugged drains or picked sodden cigar b.u.t.ts from chill pools of oil, listening to the laughter and banter of the mechanics in the warm garage, all that had kept his mind from tilting over into twitching insanity was his pa.s.sionate hatred. It was this and the knowledge that no matter what Werbel made him do, no matter how he was debased by him, the hate lived on-secretly firing and fueling his spirit. He was grateful to the Navy for allowing the hate to subside for a while. He still had no friends, was still one of the few despised and ignored that figure in any large company, but his ability with machinery was recognized and his self-esteem inched up from ground zero. He found his reward in the perfect roar of an engine, the smooth retraction of an undercarriage, or the clean function of an aileron. Never having asked for much, he needed nothing more, and his life reached a plateau of tolerance which was as close as he'd come to happiness. Until Pfitz had lost his Phantom.

Working away from Pfitz's immediate sphere of influence, Lydecker became more aware of the man's other obsession. Pfitz's fascination with napalm was the subject of bemused reflection among the members of the catapult maintenance crew. "h.e.l.l, there goes Fireball Pfitz," one of them would remark, and there would ensue some discussion about the "poor f.u.c.kin' gooks." Lydecker didn't pay much attention at first. He had never been to Vietnam, even though he'd been on the Yankee Station for four months. The fleet made an endless patrol, usually just over the horizon from the coast, rarely steaming into sight unless cruisers or destroyers were called to bring their large guns into play. But gradually Lydecker came to see that Pfitz hated Vietnam as much as he loathed Lydecker himself; and he felt an involuntary sympathy start up in his body as Pfitz lovingly recounted, to the wide-mouthed audience of his ground crew, the devastation eight canisters of napalm had wrought in a straw village. The Rose Train climbed the gradients into the sky weighted with seething latent fire like some modern archangelic predator. Lydecker would watch it go, his head a confused muddle of thoughts and sensations.

And each night, exhausted, he would gaze at the slightly buckled beer can as if it were some icon or idol of his hate. In the distorted planes of its surface he seemed to see a vague metallic template of Pfitz's bullish features. He would stroke the scar on his forehead and think about Pfitz and the men he had known like him-his father and Werbel-and the intensity of his hatred brought his flesh up in goose pimples. He would clutch the sides of his bunk and screw his eyes tight shut as if in the grip of an acute migraine attack. Men like that shouldn't be allowed to go about unhindered, he would think distractedly; something should be done to them.

Then one day Pfitz had an engine cut out as Lydecker was shackling the expendable wire bridle to the nose wheel of the Crusader. The air vibrated with the idling jets of planes waiting in line and the hot gases of the exhausts made the crowded deck of the carrier s.h.i.+mmer and dance in the haze. Pfitz had to be towed off line and there was some delay as Lydecker fought to free the cable from the stiff nose-wheel clamps. Pfitz had raised his c.o.c.kpit canopy and as Lydecker stood up, the cable finally released, he saw Pfitz's purple enraged face screaming inaudible obscenities at him through arcs of spittle. It was as if Lydecker had been responsible for the cutout, as if his particular touch on the nose wheel had mysteriously spooked the functioning of the jet. And in the waves of Pfitz's anger, Lydecker was disturbed by the sudden realization that Pfitz was a hater, too; that, like him, he needed his hate, needed his malice to beat the world.

That evening Lydecker applied for some long-overdue sh.o.r.e leave. The bizarre feeling of kins.h.i.+p 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 pa.s.sed 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 wh.o.r.es 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 ch.o.r.es. 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 shoes.h.i.+ne 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 wh.o.r.es' city, so calmly accepting the s.h.i.+tty jobs and compliantly carrying out the spurious s.e.x 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, flas.h.i.+ng 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, s.h.i.+ny 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 cras.h.i.+ng 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.

"Wha.s.sa f.u.c.kin' matter with you? d.a.m.n you," he implored slurringly, "whyncha like the others? No-good chicken-s.h.i.+t..." 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 f.u.c.kin' ..." he grunted to himself and staggered off down the pa.s.sage. 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 wh.o.r.es 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 a.s.s 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 s.e.x with the other prost.i.tutes more grimy and unsatisfactory. n.o.body, 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 l.u.s.ts. 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 wh.o.r.es 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 sc.r.a.p of pink ribbon; her chemise shone crisply white. Once her gaze pa.s.sed 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 wh.o.r.es 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 hoa.r.s.ely. "How much?"

The wh.o.r.e 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 patron and, seizing the girl's hand, dragged her out to the cabins at the back. 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 d.a.m.n 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 spa.r.s.e black hairs on his pale chest. There was the distant sound of a Honda revving.

Very slowly the girl pocketed the money and tugged her hair free from the ribbon. She slipped the sandals from her feet and gently unwound the cloth from around her waist. The swish of material sent dust motes spiraling among the sun bars.

Without removing her chemise she went and lay on the bed. Lydecker stood, his chest heaving, his erection straining against his cotton undershorts.

"I said take it all all off." He spoke quietly, a tremble in his voice. off." He spoke quietly, a tremble in his voice.

The girl did nothing, her hands clenched by her slim brown thighs.

"All of it, baby. That means the f.u.c.kin' s.h.i.+rt." Lydecker awkwardly slipped down his shorts and moved over to stand by the bed. The girl didn't look at him.

"I'm waiting," Lydecker said harshly.

In response the girl raised the hem of her chemise to her waist and spread her legs. Lydecker gulped. A blob of sweat fell from the tip of his nose.

Suddenly he grabbed the girl's hand and jerked her roughly to her feet.

"Take it off!" he shouted. "I f.u.c.kin' paid paid you." you."

"No," the girl said evenly. "No good."

Lydecker seized her and crushed his mouth on hers, clas.h.i.+ng their teeth together. Then Lydecker drew back. He had seen her eyes. On fire with disgust. Ashamed and angry, he wrenched at the chemise. It tore slightly at the shoulder. At the sound of the ripping cotton the girl's eyes registered alarm.

"No, Johnny," she said as though only half-remembering the unfamiliar wh.o.r.e's argot. "No good." She made vague pa.s.sing movements with her hands in front of her face and soft explosion noises in the back of her throat. "Number ten. No lie G.I. Not good for you, Johnny."

What the f.u.c.k was she talking about? Lydecker wondered in desperation, as her thin hands still swooped to and fro.

"Strip, d.a.m.n you. Off. All of it," he gasped.

She saw she could do nothing more. His purple swollen s.e.x stood out from his belly like a clenched fist salute, an absurd symbol of his domination. Crossing her arms in front of her, she swiftly pulled off the chemise.

Lydecker looked at the firm, p.u.b.escent girl's body. "That's more like it, baby," he said, trying to sound kind. "I ain't gonna hurt you." His gaze cautiously returned once again to her eyes, hoping to find some more amicable response. "What's all the trouble been about, eh? C'mon, honey." But then he was perturbed to see a look of almost contemptuous triumph cross her face. She turned abruptly to reveal her back. And as she turned, Lydecker's beer-numbed mind grasped feebly at the reasons for her evasiveness. "It's all right, baby," he said reflexively, but it was too late by then.

When he saw her back, Lydecker's brain screamed in silent horror. His hands rose involuntarily to his mouth. The girl looked at him over her shoulder.

"Nay-pom," she said quietly in explanation. "Nay-pom, G.I."

Lydecker wrenched his bulging eyes away. Her back was a broad stripe, a swath of purpled s.h.i.+ny skin where static waves of silvery scar tissue and blistered burn weals tossed in a horrifying flesh-sea.

Lydecker emptied his stomach into his cupped hands, and his vomit splashed over his naked body.

On the Sea King taking him back to the Chester B. Chester B., Lydecker sat slumped in white-faced, silent depression. The throb of the rotor's beat sounded remorselessly in his head. He considered his hatred and the girl's. Now he knew why he had been so fascinated by her. They were the same. Siblings. He looked into her eyes to find himself staring back. They were both burning up inside with their hate and it was wrong. Their hate had no consequences outside of themselves. It made them sick, ate them up. It accrued only inside of them, like a miser's h.o.a.rd, poisoning everything. Their bodies couldn't nourish such a parasite for long. Lydecker saw that. He didn't want to end up like that girl. Infernal decades of grief and agony beamed out from those eyes. Perhaps what he needed was to cast it out into the world and let it flourish there. Like Pfitz did.

As the Sea King approached the carrier, a great steel playing field plowing through the choppy waters of the South China Sea, Lydecker was aware of a palpable change going through his body. He felt his breathing become shallower and perspiration break out on his forehead. It seemed as if his chest were hollow and filled with throbbing, pulsating air.

Lydecker reported sick on landing and was found to be running a high temperature. The s.h.i.+pboard medics shot him full of penicillin and told him not to report for duty for two days. During that time Lydecker uneasily roved the corridors of the s.h.i.+p, a thinner and more consumptive figure than before, his mind obsessed with the violent images of his sh.o.r.e leave; of his casual unsatisfactory s.e.x, fragments of obscene anecdotes he had heard, murmured accounts of battle-zone atrocities, and above them all, endlessly repeating itself like a video film loop, the vision of the young girl's ghastly pirouette to expose her ravaged back.

Even Lydecker's normally uninterested crew-mates commented on his yellowish pallor, the sheen of sweat forever on his forehead and upper lip, his staring red-rimmed eyes. They jokingly accused him of contracting some recondite strain of venereal disease and roared with laughter when he tried haltingly to tell them about the wh.o.r.e and her loathsome scars.

Gradually the nomadic circuit of Lydecker's thoughts began to focus once again on Pfitz and his Crusader. Covertly, he haunted the below-deck hangar, distantly supervised the fueling and rearming of the plane, observed Pascual and Huq trundle the fat napalm canisters from the magazine elevators. He even took to following Pfitz discreetly whenever he moved from the officers' quarters, studying the man's corridor-filling bulk, the contours of his large skull revealed by his razored crew-cut, the pink fles.h.i.+ness of his neck above the stiff collar of his flying suit. The glimmerings of an idea began to form in Lydecker's mind. He started to plot his revenge.

His nervous debility persisted, his temperature was regularly above normal and he collected sickness chits without problem.