Jungle Rules (4 page)

Although he could have easily done it, Brian Pitts never ran the table, but barely won each folding-cash game. Just by a hair. Close enough to keep the sucker wanting to get back on his winning streak, and confident that he could play to even money with his next rack. Losers love to bet big, and ironically the more most of the marks lost, the greater each one bet, doubling his stakes as the hole got deeper from ten to twenty dollars, and sometimes even fifty.

With often a hundred dollars or more wadded in his jeans pockets, while letting the mark rack one more last game, Pitts would finally excuse himself to the can, and then duck out the backdoor. He would never let the sucker see him leave. It took only one ass whipping to teach him that rule of pool hustle life.

He learned the hard lesson after a sore loser had followed him out of Robbie’s front door and caught him as he stepped around the corner to where he had parked Aunt Winnie’s car. It took six stitches across his right eyebrow to close the gash after the angry mark had slammed the boy’s head against the front bumper of the 1958 Ford Fairlane coupe.

If Brian ever saw a hustled player again, he would lie a tale of getting sick with the squirts, and heading out the backdoor, embarrassed, because he had accidently crapped his pants. Then with his clean-faced innocent smile, the boyish shark would offer the guy a fresh chance to play him and get even. This time Brian would win a few and lose a few, and leave his victim only a little short, but never quite even, certainly never on the plus side. The youngster the old Kansas City pool hall pros called Small Change always finished out ahead with at least a few newly won bills folded in his front pocket.

In the summer of 1963, Brian Pitts turned eighteen years old, and dutifully registered for the draft with the Johnson County, Kansas, U.S. Selective Service Board. A few weeks later he got his official Selective Service registration card in the mail that had the letters 1-A typed next to classification, just below his name. Three months later, he got a letter from the Johnson County draft board that began “Greetings,” and ordered him to the U.S. Armed Forces Induction Center in Kansas City to take a physical examination to determine his fitness for service in the armed forces of the United States.

Since he didn’t have flat feet or wear a dress, he knew that his life of nights at Robbie’s Pool Hall and days relaxing in his room above Aunt Winnie’s garage had ended. Considering that he had always liked the look of the Marine uniform over any of the other services’ outfits, and that he had also heard that the Corps would get a guy in good shape and teach him some useful hand-to-hand combat skills, too, rather than punching a two-year draft ticket in the army, Brian joined the Marines for double the time.

Standing six feet tall and a trim 175 pounds, the Kansas cowboy had little trouble adapting to the physical stress that the Marines demanded of him. His sandy hair cut in a flattop flattered his golden face. Ruggedly attractive, he looked like a poster model in his uniform.

Aunt Winnie kept his dress-blues photograph in a large frame on the mantel, next to the portrait of her late husband, Joe, who in 1956 had driven his pipe truck off a cliff on Raton Pass rather than crash head-on into a carload of Trinidad, Colorado, teens, boozed out of their brains after a Friday night football game. With no children of her own, Winnie Russell regarded Brian as more her son than a nephew. He had her sister’s pale blue eyes and dimpled smile, and his father’s easy-to-like personality. She boasted about her Marine often, and kept her friends thoroughly briefed on his weekly letters.

When Brian came home on leave, several of the old widow’s church friends brought their daughters to meet the handsome young man. The girls and their mothers all swooned at the sight of him looking so tall, fit, and dashing in his well-tailored green serge uniform. He fully enjoyed and took every advantage of the attention and fringe benefits that his good looks now bought.

Back at Marine Corps Air Station, El Toro, California, the young Marine could always count on two or three letters from admiring Olathe debutantes in each day’s mail call. He laughed with his buddies, letting them sniff the perfume on many of the envelopes. Dutifully, he replied to each letter, too, and kept the mail flowing his way. Brian felt good about himself and liked his job. He even finished high school, taking off-duty courses, and planned next to enroll in a nearby Orange County community college.

Then in March 1965, President Johnson announced that he was sending in the Marines to end the Viet Cong rebellion in South Vietnam. Corporal Brian Pitts, assigned as an aviation ordnance technician to the First Marine Aircraft Wing, soon joined that first bunch of Vietnam veterans in country, racking bombs under the wings of F-4 Phantom jets at Da Nang.

Until the day that Corporal Pitts arrived in South Vietnam, he had kept his nose clean, except for a minor skirmish in the barracks at El Toro, where he paid penance by washing windows on Saturdays, but got no page 11 entry in his Service Record Book. His pro-con marks, with a possible top rating of 5.0, ran from a 4.9 high in proficiency to a 4.3 low in conduct. Overall, a good Marine. Yet three months into his combat tour, something finally snapped.

Gunnery Sergeant Clifford Goss headed the aviation ordnance section where Pitts now worked, arming the growing number of Marine attack planes based at Da Nang Air Base. Built like a bullet with legs, Goss had the mentality of a rock. By what measure he failed to know about his job or leadership he made up with loud profanity, doing his best to intimidate his Marines into conforming to his warped ideas of discipline and submissive respect. Like oil and water, Cliff Goss and Brian Pitts did not mix at all.

“That concrete-for-brains son of a bitch finally sent me over the edge,” the deserter turned crime lord said to James Harris as he gnawed the last bit of meat off a barbecued pork rib and tossed the bone into a growing pile in a big bowl set between the two fugitives, who now feasted on what remained of a roast pig from a whorehouse luau Pitts had hosted for his best customers two nights ago. “The cocksucker would not let up, ever. No matter what I did, he fucked with me. Even in my hooch, on my own time.

I finally reached the point that I would have killed the motherfucker. Not a doubt in my mind. So I just grabbed a few duds, threw some shit in a pack that I needed for survival, along with my personal mementos, and I left.”

“I should have done that,” Harris said, wiping his mouth with a paper napkin. “Lifers down on my shit all the time, day in and day out. You were smart ducking out like you done, before they push you into something bad, so they can throw you in the slammer.”

“Sometimes, I wonder if I could have hung on for seven more months and rotated home,” Pitts said, setting the bowl of bones on the floor, by the table, and snapping his fingers for the skinny dog to come help himself to them. “Then I think about that bullethead son of a bitch Gunny Goss, and I know better. He did his best to push me into doing something stupid, to give him an excuse to bust my ass and shit-can me.

“First day I see the guy, he told me he didn’t like my candy ass. He hated me because I knew my job, and all the guys came to me to figure shit out, instead of him. He fucked everything up that he touched. Seriously. Shit, he even had live ordnance hung on the pylons and wired ass-backward to the planes half the time. It’s a wonder he didn’t blow something up and kill a bunch of people.”

“How did he get to be a gunny then?” Harris asked, watching the mangy dog that wouldn’t leave his side chomp on the pork bones.

“Fucking lateral move, that’s how,” Pitts said. “Reenlisted to get an option out of the grunts, because he knew he would die in the bush, sure as shit. Dumbest fucking son of a bitch that ever walked, and they let him reup for aviation ordnance because they needed staff NCOs. I’ll never understand Marine Corps thinking. Why didn’t they just promote some of the sergeants who had their shit together?”

“Fucking crotch, that’s why,” Harris said. “There’s the right way, the wrong way, and the Marine Corps way.”

“So, did you think about what I said?” Pitts asked.

“Fuck, like I have any choice?” Harris answered.

“My man, there’s always a choice. You can join my crew here, or take a shot at life on your own dime, like I did,” Pitts said. “Benny Lam and his cowboys might let you live, but I doubt it. Then I know Major Tran Van Toan, one seriously bad motherfucker with the biggest operation in the northern provinces, would drop you on the spot, and not even say please. However, I managed to get past those two, and survived.”

“You’re a white man, though, and you got lucky,” Harris said, “falling into all this good shit.”

“Lucky my ass!” Pitts said and laughed. “I earned every bit of all this good shit. You’ve got a point about the advantage of my being white, because these guys don’t cotton to any soul brother. Even you staying here, you still have to watch your back. But all this good shit, I didn’t just fall into it. Every damned dope connection I got supplying all you assholes here in Da Nang and down at Chu Lai, I set up myself. The stupid motherfucker I killed to get this house, he didn’t have a clue of what he had at his fingertips, until I appeared on his doorstep, damned near like you showed up on mine, Huong holding his .45 in my ear. Only I wasn’t in cuffs.

“Things with old Tommy Nguyen might have worked out fine, too, if he hadn’t gotten so fucking greedy. I had to kill him. No choice. The whole operation would have collapsed otherwise. All these cowboys knew it, too, and stuck with me. If he’d been straight with the gang, as soon as I drew down on him, right here in the patio, they would have capped my young ass and fed me to the hogs. But he fucked them, too, just like me, and they were glad to see him gone.

“Old Nguyen, the sorry bastard, didn’t have a clue that his cowboys and I had finally turned on his ass. Not until none of the house girls would suck his dick anymore. The fat sack of shit couldn’t get it up, so the girls had to blow him to get him off. Shit, they finally just told him no. Then, when none of the cowboys would enforce his law, he knew it was up. That’s the day I shot him.”

Refilling the two Marines’ glasses with iced tea, playing the polite host, Pitts smiled casually at Harris, who sat staring blankly at his new boss, marveling at the coolness of this young man, so casually describing his bloody ascent to power.

“He had good ties with both the Viet Cong and the Da Nang police, due to our dope business and hookers,” Pitts said, sipping tea and looking at the dog now flopped behind Harris’s chair. “I knew that once he had figured out that he had lost the boys’ and my loyalty, he would have had either the Cong or the cops take us down. They would have shot my ass in either case. So I popped the motherfucker first.”

“Why wouldn’t you think I might take over like that?” Harris asked, and smiled as he said it.

“Because Huong and his two brothers, along with about a dozen other cowboys that they supervise, adore my young ass,” Pitts said. “I gave them the same deal I offered to you. Work for me, and I pay you a share of the profits at year’s end, above all salaries and other benefits. I run it just like a business back in the States, and give the workers a respectable taste of the pie along with damned fine wages. These guys never had it so good, and they damned sure wouldn’t get it this good from anyone else around here in this business, especially not from the likes of Benny Lam and Major Toan. These cowboys know it, too. They would drop you in your tracks the second they smelled any crossways shit coming from you. I’m their golden goose.”

“So what I gotta do?” Harris said.

“First thing, you and that filthy mutt gotta go take a run through the rain closet,” Pitts said. “You’re pretty foul, and that dog, maybe a quart of motor oil after a lye-soap bath would kill that creeping crud on his back.

“Next, you will get a haircut. High and tight, just like mine. I want you looking squared away, like a 5.0 jarhead. That’s a rule. No compromise. We go out in the ville. We’re in uniform. Nobody questions a squared-away Marine who looks like he’s taking care of official business. Come on and I’ll show you something.”

The two men left the table in the villa’s shaded, courtyard patio, and walked back inside the house and into a large master bedroom. Pitts slid open a closet door to reveal a rack of starched and perfectly ironed Marine Corps utility uniforms. Silver first lieutenant bars gleamed on the collars. Then he slid a wallet from his back pocket and pulled out a green, Marine Corps identification card with his picture in the center of it and the name First Lieutenant Joseph A. Russell typed on it, along with Pitts’s appropriate physical description, blood type, and a phony service number.

“Take a look here,” Pitts said, and pulled out a set of dog tags hanging on a chain around his neck. “As far as anyone who checks me is concerned, I am First Lieutenant Joe Russell. That’s really my Uncle Joe. He got the Silver Star on Iwo Jima.”

Then Pitts looked at James Harris and said, “No offense, but we will have to make you a corporal or something. If I put lieutenant bars on your collar, people would notice. Dark green Marine officers are rare. Our objective is to go out in the ville, do our business, and not draw attention. We can maybe let you be a sergeant, but that is pushing it. If you’re with me, it’ll look righteous to anyone.”

Harris smiled. “I wouldn’t even want to fucking pretend to be any candy-ass officer anyway. I got my pride. I like sergeant, though. Where you get all this shit, anyway?”

“Fuck, man,” Pitts said, “this is Vietnam! Shit, they print ID cards easy here. Once laminated, you can’t tell them from the real thing, unless you run the number, and that takes a week at least. These gooners can make uniforms that look way better than any you can buy at cash sales Stateside.

We even have jump boots, traded to us by the doggies with the Americal division down at Chu Lai.”