If you want company, he told himself, scoot back over to Eglin and look up some of your old Air Force buddy-buddies.
Of course that was not possible. Nobody he knew from the days before Hugo’s death lived in base housing anymore. Military families were professional refugees. They came and went like gypsies. Last October he had hitched a ride onto base with a young airman and then strolled past the old Capehart unit in which the Monegals had lived for nearly three years. Out front, one of those headache-green plastic tricycles for preschoolers. You can’t go home again, particularly if you never had one.
The number on the jukebox ended, not by resolving itself but by fading away into wounded silence. The next tune was a ballad with a lovely flute solo lifting above the repetitive thud of the bass. Sunburned bodies clutched each other and swayed together like amorous drunks. Refusing to acknowledge his disfranchisement, Joshua continued to watch.
Then a small miracle occurred.
A frail, brown-skinned girl with hair like liquid graphite was staring at him from the other side of the pavilion. Dragon Lady’s kid sister, he thought; an Oriental innocent. When she saw that he had seen her watching him, she closed her eyes and let her hair gust from side to side with the melancholy piping of the flute.
Alas, she was not alone. Beside her, gazing glassily at the dancers, slumped a skinheaded young man in a pair of polyester slacks and a pale yellow T-shirt commemorating the Freedom Flotilla of 1980. A trainee from one of the bases in the area, he had probably overdosed on potato chips and light beer, sunshine and Seconal. His date wanted to dance, but he was doing well to stay upright. Finally, his scalp shining obscenely pink, his chin fell to his breast and he began sliding slowly toward the floor. The girl tried to rescue him, but he was clearly too heavy for her to support alone. Struggling with his weight, she appealed to Joshua with her eyes, and the unequivocal message in that look was, “You see the trouble I’m having. Come on, turkey, give me a hand.” Joshua circled the crowd at the rail to do just that.
After some initial fumbling for handholds, Joshua and the girl walked her dehydrated beau back up the beach to the Miracle Strip, where they thrust his head beneath a shower spray and tried to revive him to at least zombie status. No go. The trainee regarded them with the bulging, transparent eyes of a whitefish.
Dragon Lady’s kid sister wiped his face with a silk scarf and signaled her helplessness to Joshua by shrugging. They had exchanged no more than ten words since leaving the pavilion.
“Where’s he from?”
“Hurlbutt Field,” said the girl with no trace of accent, in spite of which Joshua had decided that she was of Thai or Vietnamese extraction. “He tells me he’s going to be a Ranger.”
“Hockey, baseball, or forest?”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“Never mind. We’d better put him someplace where he can sleep off his zonk. If he goes back to Hurlbutt like this, he’ll spend the next few days bayonetting potatoes instead of make-believe Iranians.”
“He rented a car. It’s over there.”
They laid the would-be Ranger in the back seat of the rental car, a blue Plymouth Fury, rolled up his pants legs, and placed the girl’s dampened scarf on his head for a compress.
The girl drove west along the highway to a deserted section of the dunes. Joshua followed on his Kawasaki. In the lee of a mimosa tree they discussed what else they should do for the fellow. By now, stars were guttering in a fabric of blowing clouds.
“He doesn’t have to be back until five o’clock Sunday evening. His pass is for the entire weekend.”
“Let’s crack a couple of windows, lock the keys up in the car with him, and let him sleep. He’s not going to convulse or suffocate, and nobody’ll bother him out here.”
In khaki-colored shorts and a T-shirt like her companion’s, the girl resembled a rather coltish Brownie Scout. She was almost exactly Joshua’s height, but slender, ethereal-looking. She was noticeably hesitant about accepting his suggestions, not so much out of loyalty to her date, Joshua thought, as from a cagey distrust of his own motives. No dummy, this one.
“I’ll let you drive,” he said, pointing at his motorbike. “If I misbehave, you can steer us into oncoming traffic and put the fear of God back into me.”
“If you drive, maybe you’ll be too busy to misbehave.”
“But you’d have no control over where I was taking you.”
“Would you go someplace besides where I asked you to?” She cocked her head and studied him critically. “If it comes to it, I can hitchhike home.” She set off through the dunes toward the highway.
Flustered, Joshua walked along beside her. How was he supposed to address this sensuous Asian waif with magical hair and eyes like a pair of melting chocolate kisses? Not even his residence in New York—his exile, as he sometimes thought of it—had taught him how to proceed. He was a novice in these matters, an aspirant.
“How old are you?” he blurted.
“Seventeen.”
“I’m nineteen this November.” Even though November seemed at least as far away as Ho Chi Minh City, that put him back up. “I meant it when I said you could drive. I’ve just been paid. Take me back to the Strip and I’ll buy you something to eat.”
The girl halted. “A foot-long and a Coke?”
“Anything you want. I’ve just been paid.”
“Yeah, you told me.” She glanced back at the rental car beneath the mimosa tree. “All Rudy wanted was uppers, downers, and onion rings. He washed ’em down with white wine and Pabst Blue Ribbon, back and forth—just like this.” Rustling her hair like a veil of chain, she demonstrated Rudy’s unmannerly technique.
“Jesus.”
The girl smiled. Her smile was the fulcrum upon which his hopes precariously teetered. “I’ve never ridden a motorcycle,” she said. “I think I’d like to try.”
Her name, once upon a time, had been Tru Tran Quan, but now she was known as Jacqueline Tru. Her father, who had emigrated to the United States long before anyone had ever heard of Boat People or suspected that Saigon was ripe for the picking, ran a small ethnic restaurant where foot-longs and onion rings were not even on the menu. Although Joshua and Jackie did not eat in the old man’s establishment that first night, before the summer was over they had devoured rice, diced chicken, and fried vegetable sprouts in so many different combinations that Joshua began to regard mayonnaise as an exotic condiment and hamburger soup as a consommé devoutly to be wished.
Kha, the old man, had been a colonel in the Army of the Republic of Vietnam until early in the first administration of Richard Nixon, at which time he had come to Lackland Air Force Base in Texas with his wife and three children on a mission of mercy approved by the U.S. State Department. Madame Tru was suffering from a rare blood disorder for which she had been promised treatment at either the base hospital or the facility in Houston where Dr. Denton Cooley had made heart transplants as commonplace as tonsillectomies. A wealthy man, Kha had reputedly reimbursed the American government for the privilege of bringing his entire family into the country during a time of private as well as public anguish.
Unfortunately, Madame Tru collapsed and died upon first setting foot in an examination room at Lackland, a victim of the combined effects of her disease, her wearisome trip, and her own apprehensions. Reacting swiftly, Kha told the authorities that he was resigning his commission in the ARVN and requesting political asylum in the United States. He did not want to go back to the institutionalized chaos of a disintegrating war effort and a corrupt South Vietnamese regime. Besides, his only son was thirteen, fast approaching draft age.
“But you can’t seek political asylum in the country of your government’s foremost ally,” a bespectacled official from the State Department told Tru. “It doesn’t make sense.”