Читать книгу The Big Buddha Bicycle Race - Terence A. Harkin - Страница 16

14 May 1971 (later)

“Mai Pen Rai,” OR: The Show Must Go On

At quarter of nine down at the Soul Sister, the band had almost finished setting up. I had already put my cases backstage and checked that the stands and other hardware on my kit were ready to take a pounding. I gave the bass drum, tom-toms and snare drum one last thunk, decided the tuning sounded good, and made my way over to the bar to relax a few minutes before the show began. Ackerman, the sax man from New Orleans, was warming up, running through some staccato arpeggios and scales. Angel, the Thai-Filipino trumpet player on loan from Jay and the Ugly Americans, had been smoking grass with Ackerman all afternoon, looking for inspiration. He was still looking, unable to play more than a series of soft, long tones on his horn while he stared blankly at the wall, the faint smile on his face alternating between perplexed and mellow.

Sugie Bear, the birthday boy, was sitting in a corner booth with Oi, who had just moved in with him and officially become his tii-rahk. It had taken me two months in-country to learn that tii-rahk literally meant “loved one.” I had been surprised because I had heard it used so much in other contexts that it never occurred to me that it meant anything other than “shack up” as either a verb or noun. Sugie Bear was a gangly, homely eighteen-going-on-nineteen-year-old from the streets of Brooklyn. Oi, a frequently zonked twenty-seven-year-old, sported a bright orange Afro that was hard to miss even when the lights were dim and the place was crowded. They were deeply in love, Sugie because he didn’t know any better and Oi because she was close to retirement and realized that Sugar Bear might be her last chance to find a Sugar Daddy who could whisk her off to America and a life of ease. He was especially looking forward to tonight’s performance because her name meant Sugar Cane in English and he’d be singing lead on a soul version of “Sugar, Sugar” that the band had worked up as a little surprise serenade. While Sugie Bear and Oi waited for the show to begin, they slid a little closer together and continued sweet-talking.

Harley banged through the door, nearly dropping his guitar case, and lumbered in. Everyone stopped what they were doing and stared, the room growing almost silent. I could make out a couple of the bartenders and waitresses in the distance saying, “Farang khii mao mahk mahk” (“foreigner very, very shit-faced”). Brian Golson, “the Reverend,” our leader who never worried about anything, looked worried. “Where you been?” he asked.

“Nowhere. Just a little Spectre farewell party.”

“Where’s Mali?” I asked.

“Sent her home,” Harley replied.

“You look like hell,” I said, giving up my comfy bar stool and walking over. “What’s wrong?”

“Mai pen rai,” answered Harley, plugging in his Les Paul but having a hard time tuning it. “There’s nothing wrong with me that a large bottle of Singha won’t cure.” He grabbed a beer off the tray of a passing waitress and took a swig, setting it down precariously on his amplifier. “Mai pen fuckin’ rai,” said Harley a little too loudly. “The show’s gotta go on.”

I would have liked to take him off stage, but he was right—it was show time. Despite being the first time the band had played in public in over a week and despite having only had an hour of rehearsal in between, we sounded pretty good—except for Harley, who missed a couple of cues and was still out of tune. “Sugar, Sugar” was an in-joke for the Thai waitresses and bartenders who knew Oi and got us a round of laughter and applause that went over the heads of the GIs in the audience. We were in the middle of the Otis Redding version of “Satisfaction” when Tom Wheeler and Lek came in with Larry Zelinsky and Pueng. Dave Murray trailed behind them, accompanied by a girl I didn’t recognize in the smoky haze. When they danced up close to the bandstand, though, Murray’s mystery girl looked vaguely familiar in the swaths of reflected spotlight that occasionally hit the dance floor. She reminded me of the girl I took pictures of my first weekend in Ubon, but she kept disappearing into the crowd of dancers before I could be sure. It didn’t help that the night was extremely hot and this girl was wearing a vermilion tank top instead of a navy work shirt and her hair was pulled up in a twist.

I gave my full attention to the cymbal crashes that I matched to the three loud opening chords on “That’s How Strong My Love Is,” but once we settled in for a fairly conventional ballad, my mind started drifting, wondering at first whether I liked the Otis Redding or Mick Jagger version better and then smiling to myself, realizing that I liked our version best of all. Nobody sang soul better than the Reverend, his North Carolina voice both clear and resonant as it wrapped itself around notes in a way that nobody with a recording contract back in the World was doing any better, a quality equal to Joe Tex at his best on a song like “Hold On to What You’ve Got.” Even though the drumming demands on “That’s How Strong My Love Is” were simple, I tried to make every beat count, timing my fills on the tom-toms to dig deep into a listener’s heart. As if by mental telepathy, Brian called for the Joe Tex song next. It had a similar gospel-ballad feel and it sounded so good that I wasn’t surprised at all when I caught Dave Murray’s mystery lady staring up at me and smiling a couple of times, even while she was dancing with her body pressed close to his. I tried to smile back but she kept disappearing into the darkness. Now that I had gotten a couple of good looks at her, though, I had no doubt that she was the girl I had seen that first weekend in Ubon at the market down by the River Mun.

I didn’t know much about Murray’s personal life other than that he shared a place off base with a strange dude named Mole and that they were serious potheads. If she was Murray’s tii-rahk, he was a lucky guy. If he was only with her for the night, I figured he was still a lucky guy. It was right about then that I was snapped out of my reverie by the neck of Baker’s guitar crashing into my big ride cymbal.

Golson quickly wrapped up the song and stepped up to the mike. “It’s break time, folks. Don’t forget to tip your waitress.” Baker had already picked up his beer and was about to head for the bar when Golson caught his arm and guided him backstage. The Reverend was calm, but he wasn’t happy. “What’s with you tonight?”

“I’ll be fine,” said Harley. “I just need a little fresh air.” He lurched toward the stage door and put his shoulder to it, forcing it open with an ugly thud. He stepped outside, not having spilled a drop from his bottle of Singha.

The Reverend looked at me regretfully. “We gotta send him home.”

“I’ll take care of it,” I said, packing up the Les Paul.

“You might need some help,” said Sugie Bear as he and Ackerman followed me outside. We surrounded Baker, grabbed him by the elbows, and guided him around the corner to a waiting three-wheeled, bicycle-powered rickshaw called a sahmlaw. I overpaid the driver and asked him to take Harley back to his bungalow, but Baker wasn’t in a cooperative mood and broke away from us. “Fuck you, Leary. Fuck all of you.”

He was too wobbly to walk, however. We took hold of him again, forcefully this time, and maneuvered him into the back seat, where I handed him his guitar case. “Go,” I told the driver.

“I oughta come back and shoot you bastards!” Harley screamed as they drove away. “Watch your back, Leary—you’re gonna be first!”

By the time we got onstage for our next set, Wheeler’s group was gone. The mystery girl would remain a mystery. A bigger concern was how capable Harley was of actually carrying out his threat. Pissed-off troops over in Nam were fragging second lieutenants, but this would have been ridiculous. We slogged on through the night’s performance, grinding it out. Harley didn’t need to kill anybody for his tirade to have put a damper on Sugie Bear’s birthday celebration. When the last set was finished, everybody threw their equipment into their cases and skedaddled, leaving me to pack up the drums alone. By the time I was finished, the manager had emptied out the cash registers and turned out all the lights except one. It was creepy stepping outside and finding the streets deserted, not a cab in sight. Turning my bass drum case on its side, I sat down and waited. A trash can fell over in the alley behind me, making a sharp crack that I mistook for a gunshot. I dived behind my drum cases, my heart racing, and I hoped like hell it had been a hungry cat raising the ruckus and not Harley with his Ruger Blackhawk.

When I got back to the hootch, my bunkmates were already sound asleep. Leaving the lights off and walking on tip toes, I wearily peeled off my clothes. Reaching into the shadows to pull back my covers, I put my hand on a body! “Jesus Christ!” I shouted, instinctively jumping back from the bed.

“Shaddup, Leary!” one of my unsympathetic hootchmates grumbled.

I flipped on the light and what did I see but Harley Baker passed out on my bunk holding his guitar case in his arms like a long-lost teddy bear. “Baker,” I said warily, trying to shake him awake, “I thought you wanted to kill me.”

“I love you, man.” Opening his eyes, he rolled out of the bed unsteadily and put his arm on my shoulder. “Let’sh go to th’NCO Club. We need a drink.”

“Sure that’s a good idea? You’re a scarier drunk than my kid brother.”

“I’m shupposed to be scarier, ashshole.” He started pushing me toward the door. “We Scotch Irish’re way scarier’n you Irish Irish. Le’sh go—or I really will have to kill you.” Harley could be a hard guy to say no to.

“Would you bastards turn out the light and let us get some sleep!” came another groan.

We slowly made our way over to the NCO Club, which was kept open twenty-four hours a day on account of the several secret and not-so-secret wars and non-wars in the area that were flaring up twenty-four hours a day. “You sure it’s okay bringing a two-stripe airman in here?” I asked.

“Mai pen fuckin’ rai!” Harley answered. “We’re in shivvies an’ I’m acshully fighting in thish goddamn war. Any Rear Echelon Motherfucker who wansh to complain can try takin’ it up wi’ my commander. ‘Grouchy Bear’ Della Rippa’sh been hating REMFs for three wars now.”

The place was crowded and smoky but eerily silent. Nothing on the jukebox. Just a low hum of men’s voices and the occasional whirring of a blender, a somber bartender making a pitcher of margaritas. We found Pigpen Sachs, one of Harley’s fellow gunners, sitting alone nursing a beer in a quiet corner booth and plopped our tired bodies down next to him. Their faces were gaunt and their eyes dull, but their expressions were different. Sach’s jaw was slack and his thick lips slobbery under his overgrown mustache. Harley’s jaw was clinched tight, the muscles occasionally twitching. Wordlessly, they exchanged soul-brother handshakes. The lovely Thai waitress didn’t smile when she took our order. “What’s going on?” I asked. “It’s like a wake in here.”

“Something big went down tonight before I got to the Soul Sister.”

“Didn’t Harley tell you?” Sachs asked.

“He said something about a Spectre farewell—” Suddenly I got it. Part of growing up as an airline pilot’s son was the shock, rare but devastating, when another pilot—a fellow god, really—went down in flames.

“When I shtopped by the chapel annex to pick up my guitar thish evening, Kirkgartner, that young assistant chaplain pulled me ashide and tol’ me tha’ one of our gunships wush coming in wi’ battle damage.”

“A bunch of us had already gathered around the radio at Spectre operations,” said Sachs.

“When I got there,” Harley continued, “we could hear Major Brishtow, the pilot, requeshting an emergency landing.”

“The flight engineer wuzh reporting more’n a foota JP-4 fuel sloshing around the cabin, down with all those NiCad batteries an’ all that other electronic shit,” Sachs added.

Harley finished the story. “We could hear other voices screaming in the background. I wushn’t positive, but I thought I heard Booty Simms, the gunner who had taken my place. They were all lined up for an emergency landing on Runway 2-3, jush eighteen minutes out. And then poof. Nada. Vaporized.”

We sat quietly for a moment, our eyes lowered, staring into our beers. The ten-month lucky streak was over. My chest had seized up, and it was a long time before I could let out a breath. “Here’s to Booty Simms,” I said, clinking bottles with my melancholy bandmate and his friend.

“An’ here’s to the rest o’ the crew,” added Sachs. We clinked again.

Harley kept his bottle raised. His face looked bloodless and waxy, like it had been embalmed. “But here’s eshpecially to Booty. I’ve seen some bad shit over in Nam. Some very bad shit. But thish is the firsht time somebody’s died when it shoulda been me.” We sat there in silence for a while, and then out of nowhere Harley said in a quiet monotone, “Le’sh go down to the Ubon Hotel.”

“Isn’t Mali going to be waiting up for you?”

“I just can’t go home right now. I need to go somewhere bright.”

“I need to stay somewhere dark,” said Sachs. And with that he curled up in his corner of the booth and went to sleep.

I often saw a procession of sahmlaws and taxis heading for the Ubon Hotel when I packed up after our gigs at the Soul Sister. The GI and bar girl passengers could be boisterous or they could be deep in thought, but they were all headed for the same destination—the after-hours restaurant perched on the ninth floor of the tallest building in Ubon. Sugie Bear and Ackerman sometimes asked me to join them there for a nightcap, but I had never felt a desire to do anything more than get home to my bunk and write my nightly letter to Danielle. Tonight was different, though. Tonight I could cut my grieving bandmate some slack.

Long before we arrived, the night’s losers had started gathering around the rooftop bar and out on a gigantic revolving dance floor. The tired-out bar girls and besotted GIs were going through the motions of dancing to a live band when Harley and I made our entrance, but nobody seemed to be having much fun. Cramming ourselves into a couple of seats at an undersized cocktail table and looking around for a waitress, we wouldn’t have admitted it, but we fit right in. “How the hell do they get enough electricity up here to budge that thing?” I asked Harley as I gawked at the dance floor for the first time. There hadn’t been a night when this backwater boomtown had not endured a brownout or blackout shortly after dark when thousands of GIs returned to their off-base bungalows and fired up their stereos.

“They wait till everyone else in Ubon has turned off their lights. An’ then they put some food in that spirit house back by the kitchen and pray like hell the friggin’ cosmos is in alignment. What are you drinking?”

We polished off a big platter of paht thai while we drank a couple more Singhas and nibbled on some chicken saté in peanut sauce. “What are they going to do with that oversized Lazy Susan after the war?” I asked, still fixated on the revolving circle of parquet. It would have been impressive in a rooftop restaurant in L.A. or Boston, but I was mostly fixating on it because I was too numb to think of anything meaningful to say to Harley.

“Mali says the mayor of Ubon wants to move it into his auto showroom, but Pigpen figures they’ll turn it into a new-fangled way to grind rice—and turn the whole damned hotel into a grain elevator when there are no American contractors or GIs left to fill it up.” He tried to smile and gave up.

The music was making it hard to converse. Glancing out over the dance floor, I pitied the washed-up whores who were still trying to sell themselves to the bottom of the GI barrel. I wondered why they didn’t return home to the simple dignity of their childhood villages or their family rice farms. Hadn’t they already done their share for the war effort? I asked myself. When did they finally know they had enough?

BOOM! Harley’s head hit the table with a jolt. He sat up in slow motion and checked that his jaw still worked.

“You okay?” It was Woody Shahbazian stepping out of the crowd. He’d brought his drink and an older, but still attractive bar girl along with him. She looked familiar, one of the regulars who hung out at Mama-sahn’s café at Ruam Chon Sawng. “This is Bun-lii everybody. I’ve hired her to be my ‘Thai teacher.’”

“An’ Khun Woody teach me how to drive race car!” added Bun-lii happily.

“I can’t remember if I’ve ever told you,” I said to Woody, “but Harley here’s from Spectre—”

“And I shoulda been on the bird that went down tonight. ’Cept I traded trips so me an’ Leary could play downtown at the Soul Sister.”

“Wow, man, I’m so fuckin’ sorry,” Shahbazian muttered. “Sorrier’n you could imagine. I knew Major Bristow, the pilot in command. His son and I went to school together when our fathers were both instructing down at Randolph.”

“Small fuckin’ Air Force,” said Harley. He checked out his jaw again and then something caught his eye. “What’s that wrishband for? You some kinda hippie or what?”

“It’s for some friends. On my first tour over at Danang a lucky VC rocket hit our hootch while they were sleeping. Here,” he said, starting to unlace it. “You just lost an AC-130 with a crew of fifteen on board.”

“No, no, no, no,” Harley responded, fumbling to fasten it back on Woody’s wrist.

They were both tired and inebriated and depressed and made a half-hearted attempt to wrestle the wristband onto each other’s arm. Finally, Woody gave up, lacing it back up. “Okay! Uncle! But I’m gonna make one for you over at the base hobby shop.”

“Leary here won’ be needin’ one.” Harley turned to me with jaundiced eyes. “I don’ think you have a clue how lucky you are to be a shupport troop here in Thailand.”

“I have a clue, Baker. I wouldn’t want to be your shoes for a minute flying combat.”

“Only shometimes Fate does the deshiding for you. When I firs’ got to Nam we were flying night opsh with AC-47s—friggin’ Puffs. Flyin’ at much lower altitudes wi’ nowhere near the kind of instruments we have on AC-130s. And one night it wush really bad—real rainy, cloudy—but we were TIC—Troops in Contact. A company of Marines wush surrounded and gettin’ itsh ass kicked, so we hadda go out. And damn if we didn’ get hit by the Puff that wush comin’ in to relieve us. I woke up lyin’ in the mud with a massive headache and looked up and what little ish lef’ of the plane ish on fire. Gasholine an’ ammo burnin’ ash far ash you could see acrosh the rice paddies. Everybody dead excep’ me. That wush fuckin’ Fate,” said Harley, slowly standing.

“I’m makin’ you two wristbands,” Woody called as Harley and I made our way to the elevator.

Ubon may have been the capital of the largest province in Thailand, but the first thing we heard when Harley and I stepped outside was the crowing of a neighborhood rooster. We found a sleepy cabby willing to take one more fare and headed home. Along the way I wondered if a ComDoc cameraman had been on board the flight with Booty Simms. “What’ll happen now?” I asked.

Harley was staring at the back of the cab driver’s head. “There will be payback. You can count of that.”

Back at my hootch I undressed in the dark and climbed wearily into my bunk—not surprised this time when I bumped into the Harley’s vintage Les Paul. I slid the case under the bunk and settled in, but I couldn’t sleep, lying there instead with my eyes wide open, staring at the sagging springs above me. I started thinking about the uncomfortable intensity of life at Ubon Royal Thai Air Force Base that Zelinsky and Wheeler had warned me about and how simple things had been in my mountain cabin with Danielle. It seemed as if ten years were being pressed into one. The war wasn’t turning out at all like I expected. It was worse. On one hand, it seemed like an absolute massacre. Indochina was being laid waste while North Vietnamese and Viet Cong units were taking staggering losses. But when fifteen American airmen go down at once, the enemy’s ability to inflict random, instant death hit close to home. I began to toss and turn and was surprised to find myself pitying the next North Vietnamese convoys that tried to make it down the Trail—tonight and tomorrow night and the night after that. Spectre would be shooting to kill. The North Vietnamese would be shooting back. My mind was racing. I shivered at the thought of the next Spectre bird shot out of the sky by North Vietnamese triple-A. I didn’t see it ever ending, and I wanted out. I tossed and turned some more and wondered why my case was taking so damned long. At last, trying to figure out how much of this to tell Danielle, I drifted off to sleep.

Monday at lunch in the chow hall Tom Wheeler asked me if I had heard what had been coming down in Washington the last few weeks.

“Nixon and Kissinger have decided to suit up and come fight the war?”

“Not quite. But they might have to the way things are going in the Senate. Stennis and the Armed Services Committee will always say the military’s doing a great job, but people like Fulbright and Church are pushing to investigate Laos and Cambodia. They want to know why we’ve got spooks operating there and how the CIA got involved in drug-running. They’re cutting night ops over the Ho Chi Minh Trail a little slack—probably because there’s so much intelligence verifying North Vietnamese truck kills. As far as Cambodia, though, we were supposed to go a few miles in last year, kick some butt, and get out. The word around Saigon is that there is still a lot of Air Force activity there, what Nixon is calling ‘armed reconnaissance’ and ‘protective reaction strikes’—firing only when fired upon. That might apply to F-4 and Spectre sorties. But what do you call fuckin’ B-52s out of Guam and U-Tapao, Thailand, saturation-bombing the jungle? A group of senators want to cut off the funding altogether, but Nixon’s stonewalling them and keeping a tight leash on the Pentagon and the State Department. Commanders may be filing false reports—saying they’re operating in Vietnam when in reality they’re going anywhere in Southeast Asia that they’re sent.”

“Jesus, Mary and Joseph…. What’s to keep a president who goes off the deep end from bombing anywhere he pleases—anywhere in the world?”

“Eventually we’d run out of money, I suppose. Or have the whole damn world turn against us.”

“Holy shit.”

“There’s another inquiry you’d be especially interested in, Leary—about why the Pentagon is foot-dragging on CO applications. Turns out they’re swamped with new requests and too understaffed to catch up. So you’re not alone. Which ties into the latest really big development: a bunch of combat veterans threw away their medals on the Capitol steps. There were so many it took ’em a whole day.”

“I wouldn’t mention that to Harley any time soon. That coulda shoulda been him that bought the farm Friday night.”

“But it’s connected in a weird sort of way,” Tom said. “Some of the guys in D.C. had been up at the DMZ within a few miles of North Vietnam and Laos—take your pick—during a secret invasion of Laos early in ’69 called Dewey Canyon. A few of them have just left units that were involved with something recent called Dewey Canyon II—the operation the South Vietnamese called Lam Son 719. This time no GIs went in, they just babysat the South Vietnamese Army right up to the border and then let them get slaughtered on the Ho Chi Minh Trail. Trouble is, they took a bunch of our choppers down with them.”

He had caught my interest. “And that fiasco is what Larry Burrows was photographing when Spinelli and Nevers went down for the count.”

“You’re a smart boy.”

“And that’s probably where the Spectre bird got hit before it vaporized on Friday. You gotta figure that by the time the NVA got done wiping the ARVN’s ass, that part of the Trail was more heavily defended than ever.”

“Pretty good chance,” said Tom.

“This is reminding me of a term paper I did in high school for Modern History. Seems the Air Force did a big study after World War II and found that short of nuking Hiroshima and Nagasaki, bombing seemed to increase a people’s will to resist—be it England, Germany or even Madrid during the Spanish Civil War. Bombing a ball-bearing factory might hurt an enemy’s capacity to hurt us—”

“’Cept there ain’t no ball bearing factories in Laos,” said Tom, taking a pregnant pause.

“Yes?” I asked.

“Remember your old buddy, Lieutenant Barry Romo, the dude just back from the Ashau Valley who spoke at our Fourth of July rally in San Bernardino? He was the leader of the California medal-tossing contingent.”

“What a mess,” I replied. “Combat veterans throwing away medals. Barry Romo’s supposed to be going to law school on the GI Bill. You sure Lewis Carroll didn’t write this?”

“Not even Lewis Carroll could think this shit up. And Washington’s not the only capital under siege—a Buddhist monk and nun just set themselves on fire over in Saigon, and that’s got students taking to the streets in Bangkok protesting American troops in Thailand! Compared to the Vietnam War, I’m afraid Alice in Wonderland makes way too much sense.”