Jungle Rules (30 page)

“We get tired of Saigon, we can go where we want. New identities. Everything. Rich as a motherfucker.”

Turd, with his belly almost ready to burst, walked to James Harris and laid his head across the knees of the young man, who sat cross-legged on the floor. Mau Mau looked at Brian and Huong and smiled happily at the two men.

“That be real cool, man,” Harris said, leaning over to the tub of water and fishing out another 33 Beer, knocking off its top on the rim of the tub. “Maybe I go back to Chicago in a while, too. Rich as a motherfucker. Got me a nice suit. Nice car. Have me a nice house. All that shit.”

While the world grew dark outside the Vietnamese peasant farmhouse and the surrounding village that lay quiet in the night, the light from small fires flickered from the windows as noisy insects and frogs chirped beneath a drizzle that began to fall. Inside, warmed by the glow of the cooking stove and a kerosene lamp, the two Americans with six Vietnamese cowboys made their beds. While they casually dreamed of the wonders that their fortunes might soon buy them, they considered with reverence the hard tasks that lay ahead of them in the coming few days.

Chapter 8

DESPITE THE GROWING shadows and deepening orange light cast from the setting sun, marking the end to another blistering day, sweltering heat still boiled off the pavement and concrete sidewalks that ran next to the wide river that slashes through the heart of Da Nang, forcing three Marines strolling there, stifling in the humidity, to look for shade and cold beer. The short cyclo-taxi ride they had taken from outside the air base gates had left sweat dripping from their faces. At the first sight of pleasurable refuge, the trio of fun-seeking lads ducked inside an open-fronted bar that blared from cathedral-sized loudspeakers Tommy James singing, “My Baby Does the Hanky-Panky.” Deep inside the saloon’s dark and smoky cavern, the evening’s feature entertainment sported a lineup of mostly naked dancing girls go-going on a red-lit stage.

Perching their butts on three open bar stools and drying out under the cool breezes stirred by a quartet of ceiling fans spinning above their heads, the Leatherneck trio ordered a round of 33s from a well filled with water, chipped ice, and submerged brown bottles with the infamous Vietnamese beer’s red and yellow paper labels soaking off their sides. Two swigs of the dirty-sock-tasting brew and the boys had their heads turning like swivels as their eyes searched the joint for what quality snatch might troll there.

“Buy me drink, GI?” came the familiar mating call from one hungry old shark that swam by them, smelling the fresh blood and hoping for a bite.

“Take a hike,
mama-san
,” the first Marine growled, a corporal who wore sunglasses and a dark mustache above his lip. He had gotten a good look at the hooker when the outside sunlight had caught her hard face that sprouted makeup-filled deep lines around her eyes and mouth. She wore a bad-fitting wig, phony lashes, and dark red lipstick.

“She’d make a freight train take a dirt road,” the second Marine scowled as she passed the trio.

“What you name, GI?” came a soft voice from the other side of the third Marine, a blond-haired lad with a baby face and swimmer’s build tied to a six-foot tall, 180-pound frame.

“Mike,” the young man said, and smiled at the pretty face that had asked him. “What’s yours?”

“Wild Thing,” the girl said, shaking her long, black hair over her front, bending forward so it touched the floor, and then in a furious cloud tossing it back again, behind her shoulders. “My friend, they call me Wild Thing ’cause I so wild.”

“Wild Thing!” the American with the dark glasses and mustache then bellowed, and clapped his hands as he began to sing the 1966 rock and roll hit. The second Marine clapped his hands, too, and rumbled out the bass side of the song, mimicking the hard-edged guitar riff between lyric phrases.

“You make my heart sing!” the first man wailed as his partner kept pace with the bottom side of the music. “You make everything groovy. Wild Thing.”

The girl snapped her fingers to their impromptu song and began dancing and gyrating, tossing her hair to the rhythm as she moved.

“Wild Thing! I think I love you! But I want to know for sure,” the blond Marine then howled, joining the little barroom choir. “Come on and hold me tight. I love you.”

In a moment, seeing the action, the bartender slipped the original recording by the Troggs on the turntable, and then let the full rock and roll blast of “Wild Thing” jam the club. With the booming bass and amplified stereophonic sound shaking the walls and floor, the girl stepped away from the bar and let go with her show.

While she moved, and mesmerized the trio of Marines with her storm of tossed black hair, two of her friends, wearing g-strings and nothing else, dashed from the stage and joined her. The girls flung their waist-length manes fore and aft, and shook their bodies to the hard rock beat, capturing the full attention of the three young Americans.

When the song finally ended, the hookers then moved close to set their barbs in the three GIs while music of The Lovin’ Spoonful seguéd into the sound system, “What a day for a daydream, what a day for a daydreamin’ boy. And I’m lost in a daydream; dreamin’ ‘bout my bundle of joy.”

“You buy me drink?” the girl then asked the blond Marine as the pair of nearly naked dancers hustled glasses of watered-down fake champagne from his two friends.

Seeing the stemware sliding down the bar, the young blond fellow shrugged his shoulders and said, “Okay, why not?”

“Come, we go sit over there,” the young hooker said, pointing to a shadowy table that sat well outside the light that streamed in from the saloon’s open front. She took the young man by the hand and discreetly led him from the bar and away from the close attention of his two friends, who now busily ran their hands over the bare skin of the dancers, trying to fast-talk the youthful but experienced bordello veterans.

Seating the young American at the dark table with his back turned to his friends, the young hooker wearing the high, tight, black miniskirt, her nickname, Wild Thing, written in silver sequins on the sleeveless blue knit top that covered her perky, braless, hard-nipple breasts, pulled her chair by his and angled it facing toward him.

“Hey, boy, you like make boom-boom? Me show you plenty good time. All night fuckie-suckie, twenty-dollar,” she then blurted to the Marine lance corporal whose look reminded the girl of her former boss, Brian Pitts, especially from behind.

Hunched in a dark corner booth in the bar that opened onto the street that ran along the Han River, in the heart of Da Nang, near the American consulate and the press center, Huong Van Nguyen, his youngest brother, Bao, and James Mau Mau Harris sat quietly and watched their one-night-stand employee work her craft on the unsuspecting young Leatherneck. They had targeted the blond lad the moment they had spotted the trio of GIs as they strolled on the boulevard. With Wild Thing in tow, Harris, Huong, and Bao had followed the three Marines inside the bar.

They could not believe their luck when they first saw the lad. They had hoped at best to find a medium-built American who had a body that when disfigured enough could pass for the Snowman. Such a close match, however, seemed too good to be true. No matter what, they could not afford to let this fellow who could pass for Brian Pitts’s brother slip away.

Although Pitts had personally broken in the whore he nicknamed Wild Thing two years ago at his ranch, when her uncle sold the teenage waif to him for a hundred dollars cash American, she fell under the employ of Benny Lam as of a day and a half ago, when the Snowman’s empire fell. That night, rather than trying to fly on her own wings, the Snowman’s lead whore, Madam Nanna, had gone straight to Lam and pledged him her and the girls’ allegiances. She had wisely calculated that the maneuver would avoid his deadly wrath against her independent competition, or a worse yet fate, her and the girls working for the fat, heavily perfumed, and often sexually cruel Major Toan.

Thus, this afternoon, when Huong found Wild Thing lurking on the street, he had to bribe Benny Lam’s watchdog two hundred dollars to let her go with them, and then had to pay the whore fifty more for the one evening’s work.

Now seventeen years old, Wild Thing still kept a childish, innocent look about her that attracted men who liked sex with prepubescent girls. When Brian Pitts first saw her, just shy of her fifteenth birthday, he considered the child well worth the five Andrew Jackson bills he paid her uncle when he brought her to Dogpatch. Homesick at first, she quickly forgot about life on the farm after enjoying the luxury that her new profession rewarded her. Nanna had seen great potential in the pretty girl with the raven hair that hung a full twelve inches past her waist when unfurled. For nearly any skirt-sniffing GI or horn dog American contractor, she proved impossible to resist.

“So what’s your real name?” the Marine asked the girl as she slid her hand across his lap. “I know your mama didn’t name you Wild Thing.”

“That my working-girl name, Wild Thing,” the childlike whore said, and then lied, “my real name Song, like water that flow from mountain.”

“Song. That’s a real pretty name,” the American said, feeling himself grow hard at the touch of her hand massaging his groin. “Wild Thing. That’s not a good name for a pretty girl like you. But Song, I like that a lot. Anyway, your mama know you’re working in a dive like this?”

“My mama know, she no care. My daddy, he dead. VC kill him when I maybe ten year old. American GI kill VC, so I like see American GI. You be my boyfriend, maybe you take me Stateside?” she said, unbuttoning his pants with quick, nimble fingers and sliding her hand inside.

“Oh, wait!” the young Marine said, rocking back in his chair. “You can’t do that in here!”

“They no care,” the girl said, urging him to slide the chair close to her again. Then she slipped her hand back inside his fly. “Nobody see. No sweat, GI. I make you feel too good.”

As she began to massage him, she put her left leg across his lap and slipped out his stiff penis so that it rubbed against the hot, bare flesh along the inside of her thigh. Then she took his hand and put it where his fingers rested across the heart of her silk panties, pulled tight into the slit of her hairless mound, soaked wet. As he touched her there, the girl gasped and shuddered.

“You make me oh, so horny, baby,” she moaned in his ear, pulling herself tight to him, pressing her small, firm breasts against his bare arm. “Me get beaucoup hot for you. Come. Go my room. Stay all night. Twenty-dollar. Five dollar go one hour. We fuck all way you like. Okay?”

Just as the hooker felt the young Marine nearly succumb to an orgasm, she quickly took her hand from his groin, slid it under his T-shirt, and began massaging his stomach.

“What you say you name? Mike?” she whispered.

“Yeah, Mike Scott,” he panted, and took a hard pull on the bottle of beer he had setting on the table. Then he glanced at the bar to make sure that his two buddies from the air wing still sat there, looking out for him. Both of them had six months in country, while he had just checked in a few days ago, and today enjoyed his first excursion off the base.

Taking a pledge not to abandon him for any reason, they had taken the cyclo-taxi to the wide boulevard that ran along the river because this part of town had a low-risk reputation. The new guy felt safe here. Many Americans on the streets. Never any trouble. And the hookers all clean. Nothing worse than a rare case of plain old clap.

Barracks tales of the black syphilis, an incurable, deadly strain of venereal disease, had made all three of them fearful. The saltiest of the trio, the man with dark glasses and mustache, who had the most time on the shitter in Vietnam, reassured his two cohorts, though, that black syph did not occur among the girls who worked the boulevard along the Han River.

“The government has these whores checked,” he told the other two while the cyclo driver peddled. Now, while he and his one bud kept busy with the two nearly naked dancers at the bar, the blond Marine drifted toward oblivion with the baby-faced whore, relaxing his caution while her seasoned, professional seduction took hold of his mind.

“You so good-looking man,” she breathed, putting the tip of her tongue inside his ear. Then she felt a slight ooze of seminal fluid bead onto her hand from his penis, and with the tip of her index digit she smeared it around the head. Then she took that finger and put it on her tongue.

“Mmmmm, you taste so good,” she sighed. “I want taste more.”

Suddenly she ducked her head under the table and took him into her mouth. Then she quickly rose up again, and kissed him, darting her tongue between his lips.

“We go now,” she breathed and then swirled the tip of her tongue in his ear.

For twenty-one-year-old Mike Scott from Orchard Park, New York, a village just south of Buffalo, this girl named Song who hustled on the streets of Da Nang and stripped in the bars as Wild Thing burst open a whole new vista of life for him that he had never before encountered. His first afternoon off the air base, and he was suddenly in love.