“Career soldier?”
“No, he was drafted, too. He hates this war.”
“You, too?”
“I don’t know. I just want to go home soon.”
“All right, we’ll talk more later. Enjoy yourself.”
Yong Kyu signaled with his eye and the girls pulled the curtains together.
From the other side of the partition came the sound of Leon and the other girl laughing, then the sound of bare flesh slapping. Caressing Yong Kyu with her fingertips, the girl with him asked, “What do you want me to do?”
“What do you recommend?”
“Hands, body, special. . prices are different.”
“How different?”
“Five-dollar difference.”
“I’ll give you thirty. Do them all to that guy.”
“He already has a girl.”
“Do a double for him.”
With a look of disdain, the girl stared down at Yong Kyu with narrowed eyes and the corners of her mouth twitching upward, then she moved over into the next compartment. The whispering and giggling of the two girls could be heard together with eruptions of convulsive laughter from Leon.
“Hey, Sarge, you’re crazy! This is too much!”
Without responding, Yong Kyu put his clothes back on. He smoked a cigarette absentmindedly and listened to the gradual changes in the sound of their heavy breathing, the moving flesh and the laughs. He was detached. Thirty dollars for a girl, sixty for two, plus ten dollars for the bath — for a grand total of seventy dollars he’d bought hell’s pleasures. The girls would suck the marrow out of the bastard and leave him a drained pulp. . just as the goods heaped up in Leon’s warehouse had made the larger and more grandiose hell prosper.
Yong Kyu thought of the porn films he used to watch with the administrative agents back at the Grand Hotel. The constant hunger, the lack, the incessant material quest. The next day Yong Kyu had found his way into this bathhouse during duty hours. And he had come back once more with the team leader. He pictured sperm crawling on the screens like worms. His body was mindlessly hung between his legs.
He saw the countless limbs and blobs of flesh swept up into vinyl bags for disposal, the stench of the blood, the rotting wounds, the flesh swollen with an amber brown tinge, the sticky pus oozing around, the swarming maggots, the hordes of lizards ceaselessly slipping in and out of the hellish holes in torn and severed parts of corpses, . our machines, our poisons, our weapons, our own despair, hell is a frenzied festival of all the things we’ve produced, ourselves included.
Drink, drink, you’ll feel great at heart, peel and eat while it’s still soft and tender, chew it, relish it, suck it, suck it, stick it in deep and suck it, see you in a clean bedroom with graceful designs and tasteful decor, soft touch, for diminishing stamina, for indigestion, it’ll make you younger, it’ll make you sleep, stocks and savings and investments will make a deluge of money, of rifles machine guns rockets grenades cannon napalm helicopters tanks kill me take the GI money and run for the room down the hall, hey, whore here’s your customer, take him to your room sit down lie down undress go ahead spread insert suck pay soldiers of the Cross rise up for the Lord go away brimstone is burning God bless Americans God bless America.
When the smokescreen of this horrible blood-drenched war is gone, we shall see our finance still standing firm. And we shall also find money to drop on the next place, and money to rebuild the razed and ruined world. And we also shall find dollars that will illuminate the earth with a victorious peace by burning the lights in the factories once again.
Standing amidst the lower-class pleasure spots and GI bars, the Saigon branches of the Bank of America and the Chase Manhattan Bank resemble a modern granite forest sunk deep into the psammitic soil. These edifices were built especially to withstand the condition you know by the name of “war.” That is, the windows of the banks are bulletproof, and the walls are of reinforced materials designed to hold up against bombings and mortar attacks. If there had been no American power in Vietnam, then no American banks ever would have been built there. The economy of any nation that depends on American money will in time become America-oriented.
Yong Kyu took out his wallet and removed a red ten-dollar military certificate. Then he folded up sixty dollars more and placed it on the table where the girls would easily find and take it.
“I’ll be waiting for you in the car.”
Yong Kyu spat out those words above the blended noise of moaning, sniffling, and panting, then walked out into the corridor.
The old man at the ticket booth looked up at him with a vacant stare. Outside, the heat was still burning, reflected from the cement sidewalks. Hot air enveloped his eyes. Suddenly, Yong Kyu felt heavy at heart. Sure, treat him to a fine meal, maybe at the French restaurant down by the White Elephant. What the hell, it would all work out somehow. Garçon, a bottle of champagne, if you please.
Wait, a diplomatic mission this is not. Business ought to be a bit more barbaric. Right, a secret room would be perfect. There must be strong whiskey and the exquisite skills of naked women. Let’s call Toi. He should know all about it. The familiar sound of a grenade exploding could be heard only a block away. Instinctively, Yong Kyu pressed himself against the wall. A moment later, a roll of machine gun fire was audible. ARVN guards patrolling the street could be heard barking signals to each other. Across the street, people were cowering on the ground or else had dashed into nearby buildings. A terrorist attack by urban guerrillas, apparently. A little while later, armored personnel carriers and Jeeps were speeding by and the streets once more became animated with life. Slowly Yong Kyu crawled into the Jeep and fell asleep with the front door open.
18
The telephone was ringing loudly.
Yong Kyu managed to open his eyes, but getting out of bed would take too much effort. He fumbled around the table beside the bed for his watch, then picked it up to check the time. Two in the afternoon. The ache at the back of his skull was terrible and his mouth felt like it was full of sand. He staggered to his feet. By the time he picked up the receiver, the caller had hung up. For a long while he sat there on the edge of the bed, his mind completely blank. The buzzing white noise from the air conditioner made his head even fuzzier. He took a carton of milk from the refrigerator and downed a couple of gulps. The cold milk flowing down his throat put his senses on edge.
He had returned around six in the morning. He remembered Toi dropping him off. They had been drinking all night at some bar with a strip show. Toi had probably driven on with Leon slouched unconscious beside him, passing through the checkpoints on the outskirts of the city where ambush alerts remained in force, then slipped out of Da Nang.
Yong Kyu had seen floorshows a few times before, but this one was something else entirely. There were mulatto dancers and Vietnamese girls who could pass for white — half-French, must have been. He checked his jacket. A single ten-dollar note was left. He had had a hundred and fifty on him and Pointer had given him another three hundred, so he must have spent about four hundred fifty dollars. Peanuts, he thought to himself. He was confident that that and much and more would be easily recovered with a single deal.
After peering over the cliff of sudden death dozens of times and at long last emerging from the jungle swamps, a fighter about to embark for Korea would be unlikely to have saved from his combat pay more than three hundred dollars, a paltry sum of money stuck in a savings account somewhere back home. Korean crawlers often said their lives were worth forty dollars — their monthly salary. Sure, they got the economic, military and financial support America gave to its allies, and the privileges normally reserved to businessmen in Seoul. And army privates would sail back home along with their plywood crates holding a couple of Japanese appliances or electronics items they had conjured up on the sly.