I've always loved the short story genre. I wanted to create short fiction like Poe, Maupassant, and McCullers. I became disillusioned when I received a rejection on a short story I'd written about the war in Vietnam. I'm paraphrasing the reply because I didn't keep the original rejection letter.
"Your story is good, though little different than the many short stories about Vietnam filling my IN basket."
Taking the editor's criticism to heart, I stopped writing war stories. I wrote one last story about Vietnam before moving on to other subjects. Tell Me a Story isn't about death and dying; it's about life and living and how humans of all sexes and nationalities manage to cope with the hands that fate deals them.
The cover for this story was created by artificial intelligence. I asked it to create an image of a Vietnam War-era Boom Boom girl in a Lambretta. The result isn't exactly what I had in mind, but it's so entertaining that I'm using it anyway.
“Hey, Mac. You've had enough already. Why don't you drag your ass outa here and go home?”
“Leave him alone, Clancy, why don't
you?”
Clancy, the big bartender, turned
to see his nephew Tim standing on one foot in the half-opened doorway, bracing
himself with an elbow against the wall.
“You want to close for me?” Clancy
said. Not waiting for an answer, he threw his bar towel across the counter,
removed his apron, and grabbed his coat from the rack in the corner. He dropped
the keys to the door into Tim's hand as he passed. “Lock up when you've had all
the fun you can take. I'm going home.”
Tim watched Clancy disappear down
the deserted sidewalk and then glanced at the drunk sitting alone at the bar.
Grabbing a bottle of Clancy's bourbon, he sat on the stool beside him.
The man seemed oblivious to his
stained shirt and day-old growth of beard. As Tim filled his empty glass, he
opened one eye and glanced up from the table.
“And to what do I owe this honor?”
he said, alcohol slurring his words.
“Clancy decided to let us borrow a
bottle of his best-sipping whiskey,” Tim said.
Raising himself into a slumped
sitting position, the unshaven drunk hiccupped, glanced at the bottle, and
grinned. “Well, I'd rather have a bottle before me than a frontal
lobotomy.”
Smiling at the tired old joke, Tim
raised his glass, and the drunk did likewise.
“Here's to you. What's your name?”
After draining half the liquor in a single swallow, the man said, “Harris. John Harris.”
“Pleased to meet you, Mr. Harris.
I'm Tim Sullivan.”
“And a fine Irish name it is,”
Harris replied.
After tapping Tim's barely touched
glass, he finished the remaining drops of his own whiskey.
“To what do I owe the honor, Tim
Sullivan?” Harris said again, refilling his glass from the bottle.
“Curiosity.”
“And what might ye be curious
about, lad?” he said in his drunken imitation of an Irish brogue.
Tim smiled. “I'm a reporter. I
haven't slept in thirty-six hours and can't remember the last time I ate. I
just covered a murder so grisly and sordid my editor's not gonna believe it
when I give it to him.”
“If I could make the past go away,
I would do it for both of us,” John Harris said.
Tim nodded, and his grin remained
acerbic when he said, “I guess you can't. But there is something you can do for
me.”
“Name it,” Harris said.
“A story,” Tim said, resting his
head in his hands. “Tell me a story.”
Staring with drunken, rheumy eyes,
Harris raked five bony fingers through his matted hair before pouring himself
another shot of whiskey.
“What story?”
Shrugging noncommittally and
glancing at his watch, Tim said, “You name it, John. Everyone has a story. I'm
too wired to sleep and too numb to talk. I gave you whiskey; now tell me a
story.”
Harris nodded and leaned back in
his chair, watching Tim Sullivan light his cigarette. He stared at a point above Tim's right shoulder for a long moment, making him wonder if he’d passed
out with his eyes open. He hadn't. He was trying to recall a past moment and
the exact nuance and inflection to convey that memory. The cogs in his drunken
brain were turning. Finally, he blew a wisp of smoke at the ceiling and began
in dreamy, broken sentences.
“Pale, washed-out sky. Butt on a
canvas seat and back against a metal vibrating wall. Half-dozen expressionless
Vietnamese Nationals across the aisle, staring at nothing with nervous eyes,
inside the droning monstrosity.”
Harris's words emanated from a different person. Before three sentences passed his lips, he had stopped
talking and held his own cigarette with a palsied grip. Slowly, he sucked at
it as if he might never taste another. Tim thought he was done. He wasn’t and
soon began again.
“Glanced out the porthole. Endless
connecting craters surround a forest of defoliated stumps, many still
burning. Wisps of yellow smoke curling up from decimated earth. Pale tropical
sky back-dropping freshly churned dirt—like a coffin's velvet lining around an
ashen corpse.”
Harris paused again as if
remembering the vision with vivid recall.
“Ruined jungle. Rice paddies. When
the Caribou banked its wing, I saw the South China Sea for the first time. It
looked like paradise.
“The plane began a downward spiral,
and I saw a short stretch of man-made gray surrounding an eternity of tropical
green. Heat devils danced on the concrete runway. Greenhouse heat and outhouse
stench hit me when they opened the door.
“I was soon in a green army bus
winding down a seaside road surrounded by endless vegetation. They let me out
at an Army base by the sea.
“I hit the base on Friday for a
three-day stand-down, and the place was jumping. Stowing my duffel in one of
the tents, I followed the noise to the beach. I thought I had died and gone to
heaven, standing on the whitest sand, beneath the bluest sky, beside the
most transparent water I’d ever imagined.
“Half-naked Vietnamese girls with
seamless copper skin and flowing black hair were everywhere, and they all had
sensual lips and dark eyes that could burn a hole through your heart like a
cutting torch.
“G.I.'s were also everywhere.
Young, drunk, and laughing. Grunts, straight from the jungle, wearing cut-off
fatigue pants. Bodies the sun hadn't touched in months—bleached by sunless,
triple-canopy darkness. Martha and the Vandellas blasted from a quad-speaker
radio in the background.
“I pulled off my boots and shirt
and tossed them behind a concrete wall. A squeal behind me. A beautiful
Vietnamese girl walked by, and I watched her tanned legs and bikinied ass. She
left the beach with a lifeguard and my heart.
“Drunken, dancing Aussies. More
girls. Tropical colors, loud music, and alcohol. I should have felt happiness,
but the throes of melancholia entangled my neck with icy fingers. Still, after
an hour in paradise, I had yet to speak. Feeling strangely invisible and
ignored, I changed clothes and took a Lambretta to Vung Tau, the village beside
the sea the French called the Vietnamese Riviera. Tall palms, tranquil breezes, and long stretches of white beach were everywhere. I met a grunt on a back street that swarmed with bicycles, buffalo, and little yellow people. No more than nineteen, the man had the hard edge of someone who had already
experienced more life and death than most ninety-year-olds. With him, I went to
a whore house in an old French villa with a red tiled roof, surrounded by
creeping greenery. A mama-san, her tongue and lips black from chewing betel
nuts smiled.
“Got two baby-san,” she said.
“Number one. You like?”
She wasn't lying. Neither of the
girls looked older than thirteen. When I shook my head and backed out of the
room, the young G.I. grinned and took both girls. I never caught his name.
After returning to the base, I
slept till late the following day on a cot in a muggy tent, returning to the
village that afternoon. I visited a bar and met Hoa. G.I.'s and boom-boom girls
crowded the bar. A smiling Vietnamese waitress approached me through the throng
when I sat down.
“You buy me tea?”
Dark hair. Tight yellow sarong slit
almost to her waist. Ruby lips and amethyst mascara surrounded dark eyes that
glowed in the dim room like coal in a hot furnace. She was beautiful, and I was
in love, at least in lust. I nodded and patted the empty chair beside me,
waiting as she signaled someone across the noisy bar before putting her arms
around my neck.
“G.I. alone?”
“Not now,” I said.
A little man brought her a glass
decorated with a single cherry. ‘Saigon tea’ was just that—tea. Holding the
cherry by the stem, she touched it suggestively to her tongue and closed her
red-painted lips around it.
“What name?”
“Harris,” I said.
“Glad to meet you, Harris. My name is Hoa,” she said in broken English.
Between patron noise and jukebox blare, I drank a half-dozen gin slings while she consumed several Saigon teas.
“You spend the night with me, Harris?”
she said.
“How much?” I asked, not naïve
enough to believe she was offering charity.
“Ten dollars, MPC.”
I'd already paid twice that much
for drinks, and ten dollars in military payment certificates were about all I
had left. “Five dollars,” I countered.
Folding her arms tightly, she
crossed her legs and shook her head. “No way, G.I.”
“All right,” I conceded. “Ten
dollars.”
When I gave her the money, her
oriental smile returned. “How many rubbers do you need?”
“Ten.”
“G.I. number one bullshit. Give me a dollar,” she said, holding out her hand.
I dug a dollar out of my shirt
pocket, handed it to her, and watched her disappear through the crowded bar
wearing a mile-wide grin. Checking my wallet, I found I had less than twenty
dollars left. Five minutes had elapsed when I spotted Hoa standing by the door.
She motioned me, and I followed her outside to the dark street.
“Give me a dollar,” she said. “Taxi
man charge you five dollars. I talk.”
I fished in my pocket for another
dollar.
We weaved a circuitous course
through the ville to a three-story apartment complex and then walked to the
second floor. Holding my hand, she led me to her one-room apartment. Inside,
sweating plaster was peeling off the walls from the humidity. There wasn't a
single couch or chair in the room, only a large bed.
“You hungry, Harris? Give me a dollar.
I get food.”
She took the money and disappeared
for ten minutes, directing me when she returned to the bathroom. “Brush teeth,”
she said, handing me a well-used toothbrush and tube of toothpaste. I wondered
how many G.I.s had used the same brush.
Tim Sullivan waited for Harris to
continue. Instead, he slumped in his chair. Thinking him too dry to talk, Tim
refilled his glass. Harris didn't seem to notice. Producing a crumpled pack of
cigarettes from his shirt pocket, he fished one out. It was only slightly bent.
Smoke wafted slowly from his nostrils. Although he stared at the ceiling, his
green eyes glazed as if he envisioned something far away. After a
long, unbroken silence, he stubbed out the cigarette and stared at Sullivan.
“Have you ever gone five months
without seeing a woman?”
Tim Sullivan shook his head.
“I had thought about having sex so
long when it finally came to pass; the act paled beside the dream.”
“No problem, G.I. Happen always,”
she assured me.
“Someone knocked on the door, and I
almost came unglued. Hoa patted my shoulder and got out of bed, not bothering
to dress. An old man, unmindful of her nudity, handed her a steaming
bowl of fishy soup through the door. We shared the spicy soup and rice with a
single spoon.
“You married, Harris?”
“Yes,” I said.
“Wife very pretty?”
“We were only married five months
when I got here. I can barely remember what she looks like.”
“You love her?”
“Don't know,” I said. “Are you
married?” I said, changing the subject.
Shaking her head sadly, she said,
“I have a lover. He beaucoup love me.”
Hoa pointed to a glossy 8 by 10 on
the stand beside the bed—she and a young American airman holding a tiny baby.
“Is he stationed at the air base?”
Again, she shook her head. “He went home six months ago. He send for me soon.”
“And the baby?”
“He our baby-san,” she said,
smiling. “Leonard, take us to America. Baby-san grows up to become rich, very
smart like a father.”
My heart skipped a beat and almost
seized up. While I longed for a woman far away whose face I could barely
remember, Hoa longed for a man who’d fucked her, taken her love, and gone away,
never to return.
“The war will end soon, Hoa. All
the G.I.'s will go home. What will you do then?”
Even as I mouthed the words, I knew
they sounded cruel, though I couldn't stop saying them.
She stared back at me with sad eyes darker than ten years of war.
“I check on baby-san,” she said.
“You stay. We make boom-boom again when I come back. Better this time.”
After ten long minutes of waiting naked and alone in the dark, paranoid thoughts overloaded my brain. What
was I doing in a Vietnamese village swarming with Viet Cong, with no weapon,
alone in the middle of the night? What if Hoa returned with a little
black-garbed man armed with a demon-spitting AK-47? I got dressed and peered
out the door, seeing nothing but darkness.
“Fear is strange,” Harris
said, smiling at Tim Sullivan.
When Tim topped up his drink,
Harris continued his story. “I abandoned the apartment and hurried down the
stairs to the deserted street, finally hailing a surprised Lambretta
driver passing in the night. When I reached the base beside the sea, I fell
into a fitful sleep in the airless tent.
Lingering guilt overcame me the
following morning. After checking my wallet and finding it nearly bare, I took
the army bus back to town and waited in the hotel lobby that housed the bar
where I’d met Hoa. Although the place seemed deserted, she soon appeared
through a door from the bar. She was wearing a lime green sarong and looked
exotic and beautiful.
Glaring at me with accusing eyes,
she said, “You leave the door unlocked. Why not tell me you go? I very much worry for
you.”
When I reached for her, she pulled
away, shaking her head.
“I'm sorry, Hoa. When you left, I
got frightened. I didn't mean to leave the door unlocked.”
Hoa's features softened, and she
touched my hand. “You miss wife very much?”
Cradling my face in her hands when I nodded, she stood on her tiptoes and kissed me.
“You remember me always, Harris?”
“Always,” I said.
Though she turned away, attempting
to hide the tears streaking her amethyst mascara, I saw her
sorrowful smile.
I never saw her again.
I found it nearly deserted upon returning to the base, with all the Aussies and Line Company grunts gone. Despondent,
I took a walk on the beach, alone with only an old papa-san picking up
yesterday's litter using a nail protruding from a broom handle. I sat on the
concrete wall, feeling like the last man on earth.
All alone, listening to a whistling
ocean breeze and watching distant gulls, I sat there. A G.I. dressed in camouflage fatigues,
walking along the beach alone, smiled when he saw me, joining me on the cement
wall. He was a sniper, trained to lie in wait for the enemy and kill him with a
single shot from his specially modified M-14.
He asked, “How far away do you
think you can kill a man?”
Shaking my head, I answered, “I
don't know.”
“I killed one once from
nine hundred meters. Believe me?”
I shrugged.
“I was on a hill overlooking a rice
paddy when I saw a papa-san plowing behind a water buffalo. He was so far away
he looked like an ant. I raised my sights and squeezed off a round.” Raising
his arms to show me, he added, “A second later, papa-san dropped and never got
back up. I killed him from nine hundred meters.”
When I nodded appreciation for his
feat, the camouflaged man acknowledged my silent praise with a smile and walked
away down the beach without speaking, relieved for the moment of
more guilt than one person should ever have to bear alone.
“People do things, you know.
Sometimes, terrible things. They may live long enough to regret it. They never
live long enough to forget about it.
***
Tim Sullivan waited as Harris
became silent. When he reached for his glass, he found no single sip missing
from the last pouring. Returning to the bar, he watched John Harris drag himself sullenly off his stool.
