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
