Dog Soldiers (4 page)

On the far side of the street, a cyclo driver and an Army Spec One were engaged in some dispute. The Spec One was rubbing his thumb and forefinger together under the cyclo driver
’
s nose and cursing in Italian. The driver, eyes rolling, was demonstrating
t
’
ai chi
strokes, weaving and dancing on the pavement. He was a great success with the crowd. People laughed and applauded. The exercise he was performing in pantomime was the one called Repelling the Monkey.

The Hotel Coligny, where Converse lived, was just off the flower market, which enabled the more life-affirming of its guests to rush downstairs each morning and buy poinciana boughs and fresh roses to adorn their rooms. A Dutch correspondent in the room adjoining Converse
’
s did so regularly. The Dutchman was a stoned head, and so fond of flowers that he had once taken to wearing marigold chains in his long golden hair. One day some street cowboys threw an uncharged hand grenade at him for a joke. The flowers had made him look unlucky.

As Converse entered the small dark lobby, Madame Colletti, the
patronesse
, who was a young and exquisitely beautiful Vietnamese lady, regarded him with suspicion and loathing. She regarded everyone that way.

Converse naturally preferred to deal with Monsieur, but he did not take Madame
’
s attitude personally. Sauntering past the desk, he threw her a snappy
“
Bon soir
.
”
The Sisters had taught Madame Colletti to abhor those who abused the language of clarity. She stared at him with an in comprehension that bordered on horror.

“
Bon soir
,
”
she said, as though his mouthings were human speech.

Converse rented a tin safe from the Collettis in which he kept his checks, notes, and such things as Zap comics and the works of Saint-Exupery. Acutely aware of the pa tronesses close attention, he stuffed the briefcase inside. There were merchant adventurers in Saigon who paid the Indian currency sharks to hold their contraband in strong boxes that were as secure as anything there could be. But Converse was frightened of Indian currency sharks; he had decided to risk the tin safe. The briefcase was an awkward fit, but it went in.

When he turned round, Madame was staring at the closed door of the safe. He went past her into the small bar that adjoined the lobby; she followed to sell him a bottle of pilfered PX Sprite from the pilfered PX cooler.

“
Beaucoup de travail demain
,
”
Converse said, attempting to convey zestful satisfaction in his profession.

Madame Colletti grimaced.

She never used the same expression twice, Converse thought. Conversation wi
th her was a series of small un
pleasant surprises.

Early in the spring, Converse had been away in the Delta, and Madame had rente
d Room Number Sixteen in his ab
sence. The man who had taken it apparently had a thing about squashing lizards. Converse returned to find nearly a dozen of them mashed into the walls and the tiles of the floor. He had found it disturbing. Like most people he was rather fond of house lizards. They ate insects and were fun to watch when one was high.

The management had m
ade a few gestures toward effac
ing the traces of carnage but
there were still stains and rem
nants of tiny dinosaur skeleton. Murder haunted the room.

Whoever he was, he had spent hours stomping around his soiled gray hotel room wasting lizards with the framed tintype of Our Lady of Lourdes that stood on the night table.

Converse sat at his writing desk, drinking Sprite, looking at the lizard smears. It was just as well not to wonder why. There was never any satisfaction in that. Perhaps the man had thought they would bite him. Or perhaps they had kept him awake nights, whispering together. The man had also diligently crushed all his used batteries so that the hotel flunkies couldn
’
t recycle them through Thieves
’
Market.

An extrovert.

On the desk beside him was a thermos bottle filled with cold water. It was supposed to be bottled water, but Con verse knew for a fact that the porter filled it from the tap. Every day he poured it into the shower drain. Every day the porter refilled it. From the tap. Every day Converse felt guiltier about not drinking it.

That was the liberal sensibility for you, he thought. It began to give in the face of such persistence. One day, perhaps, he would feel thoroughly obliged to drink it.

The thermos was somewhat or
iginal, an actual Vietnam
ese artifact, and Converse planned to take it with him when he left. Printed across it in bright colors was the picture of a wide-winged bat; on the bat
’
s breast was the brand name—lucky.

He stood up and went across the cement air shaft to the bathroom, carrying the thermos with him. When he had locked the door, he turned on the cold shower and poured the contents of the thermos into the drain.

Fuck it, he thought, why me?

There were plenty of other Americans around.

C
onverse was, by profession, an author. Ten years
before he had written a play about the Marine Corps which had been perfo
rmed and admired. Since the pro
duction of his play, the only professional good fortune attending him had been the result of his marriage to the daughter of an editor and publisher.

Elmer Bender, Converse
’
s father-in-law, edited and published imitations of other magazines. The name of each Bender publication was designed to give its preoccupied and overstimulated purchasers the impression that they were buying the more popular magazine it imitated. If there were, for example, a magazine called
Collier
’
s
, Elmer would edit and publish a magazine called
Shmollier
’
s
.

“
Mine are better,
”
Elmer would say. He was a veteran of
New Masses
and the Abraham Lincoln Brigade.

For seven years of his marriage to Marge, Elmer had employed Converse as principal writer on
Nightbeat
, which his lawyers described as A Weekly Tabloid With a Heavy Emphasis on Sex. He supervised a staff of two — Douglas Dalton, who was an elderly newspaper alcoholic with beautiful manners, and a Chinese Communist named Mike Woo, who had once attempted an explication of the theory of surplus value in the weekly horoscope.
“
Don
’
t be afraid to ask for a raise, Sagittarius. Your boss always pays you less than your work is
actually worth
!
”

Five days each week, Converse peopled the nation with spanking judges and Lesbian motorcyclists.

At the turning of the seventh year, he had written a memory lane story about the late Por
fi
rio Rubirosa entitled
“
Rubirosa Was a Fizzle in My Bed,
”
under the byline of Carmen Guittarez. In it, he had assumed the identity of a Sexy Latin Showgirl disappointed in the climax of her assig nation with the World Famed Playboy and Bon Vivant. The story had led Converse to a Schizophrenic Episode.

For several days he had gone about imagining that a band of Bored and Corrupt Socialites might descend on his home in Berkeley, and in the name of their beloved Rubi, Wreak a Bizarre Revenge.

His difficulties with reality increased.

After a night of sinister racked sleep, he had gone to Elmer and enlisted his cooperation in securing press accreditation as a marginal correspondent in Saigon.

Bender had reluctantly agreed. It seemed to him that if Marge and Converse endured a period of separation, their union might regain some of its edge. Marge
’
s mother had been a left-wing Irish vegetarian, a suicide with her lover during the McCarthy days. It was often observed that Marge was very like her.

Converse suggested that something worthwhile might emerge from such an expedition, that there might be a book or a play. The argument particularly moved Elmer, who was an author in his own right — one of his early stories had earned him a passionate letter of appreciation from Whittaker Chambers. Marge, who loved all that was fateful, had sullenly agreed.

He flew out of Oakland on the morning after their daughter
’
s second birthday. In Saigon, Converse was able to extend his employment by taking over the positions of departing stringers and hustling a few of his own. And surely enough, the difficulties he had been experiencing with reality were in time obviated. One bright afternoon, near a place called Krek, Converse had watched with astonishment as the world of things transformed itself into a single overwhelming act of murder. In a manner of speaking, he had discovered himself. Himself was a soft shell-less quivering thing encased in a hundred and sixty pounds of pink sweating meat. It was real enough. It tried to burrow into the earth. It wept.

After his exercise in reality, Converse had fallen in with Charmian and the dope people; he became one of the Constantly Stoned. Charmian was utterly without affect, cool and full of plans. She had taken leave of life in a way which he found irresistible.

When, after a little fencing, she had put the plan to him, he had found that between his own desperate emptiness and her fascination for him, he was unable to refuse. She had contacts in the States, a few thousand to invest, and access to Colonel Tho, whose heroin refinery was the fourth largest building in Saigon. He had fifteen thousand dollars in a Berkeley bank, the remnants of a sum he had received for an unproduced film version of his play. Ten thousand dollars, it developed, would buy him a three-quarters share on three kilos of the Colonel
’
s Own Mixture and his share of the stateside sale would be forty thousand. There would be no risk of misunderstanding because everybody was friends. Marge, as he foresaw, had gone along. The thing had come together.

His own reasons changed, it seemed, by the hour. Money in large amounts had never been particularly important to him. But he had been in the country for eighteen months and for all the discoveries it had become apparent that there would be no book, no play. It seemed necessary that there be something.

Showered, under the ceiling fan in his room at the Coligny, Converse woke to the telephone. Jill Percy was on the line to say that she and her husband would meet him in the Crazy Hor
se, a girlie bar off
Tu Do Street.

Jill was becoming an international social worker and she had conceived a professional interest in girlie bars. She was always trying to get people to take her to them.

Converse dressed, pulled on his plastic anorak and went down to the street. It had started to rain again. As he walked toward Tu Do, he sifted through his pockets to find twenty piasters.

Halfway up the street, midway between the market and Tu Do, there was always a legless man squatting in a door way. Each time Converse passed, he would drop twenty piasters in the man
’
s upturned pith helmet. He had been doing so for more than a year, so that whenever the man saw Converse approach he would smile. It was as though they were friends. Often, Converse was tormented by an impulse to
withhold
the twenty piasters to see what sort of a reaction there would be, but he had never had the courage.

Having dropped the twenty P and exchanged smiles with his friend, Converse sauntered down Tu Do to the Crazy Horse. The Crazy Horse was one of the Tu Do bars in which, according to rumor, the knowledgeable patron might be served a bracing measure of heroin with — some even said in — his beer. As a result it was usually off limits, and on this evening Converse was the only customer. Facing him across the bar were fifteen uniformly beautiful Vietnamese girls in heavy makeup. He took a stool, smiled pleasantly, and ordered a Schlitz. The girl opposite him began to deal out a hand of cards.

Beer in the Crazy Horse cost 250 piasters without heroin, and Converse was not in the mood for cards. He glanced down at the poker hand on the chrome before him as though it were a small, conventionally amusing animal, and affected to look over the girls with a worldly expression. In spite of the glacial air conditioning and his recent bath, his face was covered with sweat. The fifteen girls across the bar turned their eyes on him with identical expressions of bland, fathomless contempt.

Converse drank his beer, his sinuses aching. He felt no resentment; he was a humanist and it was their country. They were war widows or refugee country girls or serving officers of the Viet Cong. And there he was, an American with a stupid expression and pockets stuffed with green money, and there was no way they could get it off him short of turning him upside down and shaking him. It must make them want to cry, he thought. He was sympathetic.

He was searching his
Vietnamese repertory for an ex
pression of sympathy when Jill and Ian Percy arrived. Jill looked at the girls behind the bar with a wide white smile and sat down beside Converse. Ian came behind her, stooped and weary.

“
Well,
”
Jill Percy said.
“
This looks like fun.
”

A girl down the bar blew her nose and looked into her handkerchief.
“
That
’
s what we
’
re here for,
”
Converse said. The Percys order bottles of
“
33
”
beer; it was pronounced
“
bami-bam
”
and supposedly made with formaldehyde. Ian went over to the jukebox and played
“
Let It Be.
”

“
Staying through the summer?
”
Jill asked Converse.

“
I guess so. Till the elections. Maybe longer. You?
”

“
We
’
ll be around forever. Right, Ian?
”

“
We
’
ll be around all right,
”
Ian said. Some
“
33
”
beer trickled from his mouth and into his sparse sandy beard. He wiped his chin with the back of his hand.
“
We
’
re waiting around until we get an explanation.
”

Ian Percy was an Australian agronomist. He was also an
engag
é
, one of the few — other than Quakers — one saw around. He had been in the country for fifteen years — with UNRRA, with WHO, with everyone who would hire him, ending with the Vietnamese government, which had him on loan from the Australian Ministry of Agriculture. A province chief up north had gotten him fired, and he had taken accreditation with an Australian daily which was actually more of a racing form than a newspaper. As an engage
”
he hated the Viet Cong. He also hated the South Vietnamese government and its armed forces, Americans and particularly the civilians, Buddhist monks, Catholics, the Cao Dai, the French and particularly Corsicans, the foreign press corps, the Australian government, and his employers past — and, most especially — present. He was said to be fond of children, but the Percys had none of their own. They had met in Vietnam and it was not a place in which people felt encouraged to bear children.

“
Bloody lot of people leaving,
”
Jill said.
“
We
’
re getting possessive about our friends.
”

“
Nobody wants to be the last rat,
”
Converse said.

Ian ordered another
“
33
”
beer. He drank
“
33
”
unceasingly from about four in the afternoon until after midnight.

“
Poor old last rat,
”
Ian said.
“
God help him.
”

Jill took her beer along the bar and started a conversation in Vietnamese with a bar girl opposite her. The other girls, softened by curiosity, leaned together to listen.

“
What
’
s she saying?
”
Converse asked.

“
She
’
s telling them her troubles.
”
The girls across from Jill had turned toward Ian and Converse and were nodding sympathetically.
“
Later she
’
ll come back and want them to tell her their troubles. She
’
s writing a report on Saigon bar girls.
”

“
What for?
”

“
Oh, for the information of the civilized world,
”
Ian said.
“
Not that the civilized world gives fuck all.
”
They drank in silence for a while as Jill told her troubles to the bar girls.

“
One thing,
”
Converse said,
“
this war is going to be well-documented. There
’
s more information available than there is shit loose to know about.
”

An image came to Converse
’
s mind of the sheets of paper onto which the computers clacked out useful information for the conduct of the war. The prettiest were the ones which analyzed the loyalties and affiliations of country villages — these were known, with curious Shakespearean undertones, as Hamlet Evaluation Reports. The thought of Hamlet Evaluation Reports made Converse hungry. Each Friday the Vietnamese used them to wrap food in.

“
Let
’
s eat,
”
he said.
“
Before it rains again.
”

They went outside and walked down Tu Do toward the river. On the first corner they came to, the MPs had a soldier in fatigues up against the wall and were searching his many khaki pockets while a crowd of silent Saigonnais looked on. Converse bought Jill a marigold necklace from a sleepy child flower-seller on the edge of the crowd. The marigolds when they were fresh smelled wonderfully on hot nights; they reminded Converse of Charmian.