The Working Girls Go By Part 1

The Working Girls Go By.

by I. Van Laningham.

"...brother Billy's got both guns drawn, He ain't been right since Vietnam."

--Play it All Night Long, Warren Zevon

Her name was Tuyen, which means angel.

She was a working girl at the Sunset Grill, a run-down bar in a run-down country in a run-down war, but it was a bar that gave us the illusion of love and the hope of home. She was breathtakingly lovely, and she lived in a country that smelled like burning s.h.i.+t.

If you stood in just the right place on top of Nui Lon, Big Mountain, where 369th Signal Battalion HQ was, you could look down on the South China Sea and on Bi Sau, Back Beach. You could see the long row of bars on Back Beach run by Vietnamese civilians. At the South end of that row, with a porch extending from the front and around the side, was the bar that we called the Sunset Grill. I don't think any of us ever knew what the Vietnamese called it, and we didn't much care. All we knew was that it promised escape from the heat that covered the country like a thick flannel blanket, relief from the Army bulls.h.i.+t and a place away from the war that we could call our own. We went to drink and get drunk and watch the working girls go by. In the afternoons, you could see the girls, walking or riding bikes; in their ao-da's they looked like flocks of birds making their way through the tree-lined streets of French Colonial Cape St. Jacques. You could have mistaken them for schoolgirls, except that schoolgirls only wore white, and the working girls wore every color there was. Everywhere you looked in Vung Tau you saw the ghosts and shadows of an imperial architecture, except on Back Beach where the buildings were made of stucco and tin and salvaged wood, furnished in mismatched castoff, with walls papered in centerfolds..

I'm Andi--Andrea--Holmes; in 1970, I was the battalion clerk for the 369th, on top of Big Mountain, and I was a WAC Spec 4. I wasn't interested in the working girls, or so I told myself. I told myself a lot, in those days. I was 23, the daughter of missionaries, patriotic and embara.s.singly close to being a virgin. I grew up in Indonesia, the Philippines and Ecuador before my parents returned to Chicago, where my brothers enlisted. Where I enlisted after Dana died.

Two months incountry had ruined my mouth; after a year and a couple of months in the Army, I swore and drank as well as all the other GIs. My mother would have been appalled to hear me; she would have washed out my mouth with soap, just the way she had when I was little and told her what I really thought of the dolls she kept trying to make me play with.

In some sense, I was always on duty; like all the women serving in Vietnam; it was our unspoken, but mandatory, duty to keep up the troops'

morale. The troops being defined as only men, of course. Our morale was irrelevant. We were support personnel, modern-day camp followers who weren't supposed to know that s.e.x existed; we were there to remind the men of what they were fighting for. Once in a while, guys would make pa.s.ses at me, and I would put them on s.h.i.+t-burning duty. So you see, it wasn't Vietnam's fault that it smelled that way, but the US Government regulations which mandated waste disposal by cremation.

During the day, I would tell myself oh, yeah, I really wanted a husband, once I got out of the Army. Someday I would get to go back to a country where I wasn't surrounded by 10,000 unwashed GIs stepping on their tongues every time they saw a round-eye like me. Those days were hard; I worked 0600 to 1800 Monday through Sat.u.r.day, and I was expected to be Little Miss Perky every minute of those twelve-hour days.

Every night, I went down to the Sunset Grill to drink myself stupid, and, when I was being honest with myself, watch the working girls. They weren't called working girls in those days, but bar girls, hookers and wh.o.r.es.

The nights were easier, down at the Sunset Grill. Sometimes, when the Hueys went whupping by and the sound competed with Inna-gadda-da-vida playing on the finest stereo equipment ever liberated from Uncle Sam's Quartermaster Corps, you could hear the flat, thick whoomph! of artillery going out. Incoming was usually rocket fire and mortars.

What you never really heard was the sound of the South China Sea on the beach, the sounds of gulls squabbling over things you didn't want to look at closely, or the sounds of the constant wind and constant surf.

Mostly what you did hear was the music that pulled in the GIs, giving the bar girls in their ao-das a target and covering up the sounds that shouldn't have been heard, like the girls s.c.r.e.w.i.n.g in the tin-walled back rooms. Sometimes they put on an act to convince the guys they were earning their money. And the music covered up the sounds of GIs throwing up off the side porch while girls the size of twelve-year-olds went through their wallets.

Ky Thi Tuyen was one of those twelve-year-old-size girls. Everyone called her Kitty. She said she was eighteen, but she just said that to make the guys less nervous. If she had been seventeen, I would have been surprised, although she seemed more mature than many of the men.

You grow up fast in a war zone. We used to talk when she had a few minutes at night between customers, more on slow nights. You have to understand, my Vietnamese at the time was horrible. I'd just begun to learn, and I was as likely to ask someone if they'd had s.e.x with a water buffalo as had a nice day. Kitty's English wasn't any better than my Vietnamese, but we made ourselves understood. And I guess that's what counted.

When I went through Basic Training, enlisted women got lectures on snakes and what to do about bites; the men got training films about s.e.x.

Keep it in your pants was the message. But if you couldn't, go see the medics and get your condom ration. Prevent deadly disease, of which, they were told, there was no shortage. Some of the guys pa.s.sed on what they were told to some of us girls.

I remembered the disease part. It kept me pure. It was easy for me to not sleep with men. I wasn't interested, for one thing. For another, I'm six-foot-one and carry a switchblade. I scared most guys. I liked that, although once in a while, I worried about being too tough. But what it came down to was protecting myself; I'd heard too many stories from the Donut Dollies and the nurses and the women running the service clubs to think it was a simple matter of calling for help or just saying no.

Sure, I got called a lesbian by the guys, but never to my face. They would, and did, say the same about any woman who didn't sleep with guys.

Naturally, any woman who did was called a wh.o.r.e.

I didn't sleep with the girls, but I knew I wanted to. Kitty knew it too. She'd come into the bar, dressed in that electric blue ao-da, and see me standing at the bar chasing cheap whiskey with cheaper Vietnamese beer, cigarette dangling from the side of my mouth. She'd sit on the stool next to me, and say in that rich voice of hers that always made me think of Bacall, "You wanna f.u.c.k, GI?"

No, I'd say in my lousy Vietnamese. Shouldn't she be at home asleep?

Taking care of her husband? Not if she wanted to live, not if she ever wanted to see the end of the war, she'd say. And she had no use for a husband. "Boring!" she'd say, and I'd sneak peeks at her figure.

She'd pretend not to notice, but, like a cat, she'd arrange herself for better viewing. I thought then, and still think now, Vietnamese women were the most beautiful on earth. Kitty the prettiest of all.

I remember that hot March night; Tuesday, St. Patrick's day, 1970. Like scalding wax from a candle, it left permanent scars. I was early at the bar, like I always was; I hardly ever bothered with the mess hall.

There was an air base in Vung Tau, and air bases were where the food came incountry. The Army got supplies after the Air Force, but between the cargo planes and our mess hall kilotonnes of supplies slipped into the black market like horse through the needle in a junkie's arm. I got better food eating at the bar. It was cheaper and tasted fine, as long as you never asked what the meat was. Early on, I found out that I'd been eating pig-ears, so I quit asking. You could see the weevils in the bread, too, but as long as they didn't wiggle you ate them anyway.

It was good bread, though, a direct descendent of the French baguette.

I kept on eating pig-ear sandwiches.

That night, I stopped at the bar first thing, of course. I said "Chao anh"--h.e.l.lo, older brother--to Tan, the bartender.

"Chao em," he said. h.e.l.lo, little sister. "How are you tonight?"

Sometimes I thought his English was better than mine. Tan was always dressed flawlessly, shaved and manicured impeccably. I envied him.

White s.h.i.+rts and pressed grey slacks in 100 heat? And there I was, by contrast, the tall skinny blonde girl in rumpled jungle fatigues and messy jungle boots. I ordered food and asked him to send it out on the porch with Kitty when she was free. He poured my shot of cheap whiskey, handed me my Bau Muoi Ba, and gave me that small opaque smile. He knew what I liked to drink. I think he knew, too, what I thought about doing, in my heart of hearts. But I never felt judged by him, and I certainly did by most of the GIs.

I took my drinks and went outside; it was early enough in the evening that I was the only one on the porch. I grabbed the table furthest toward the back; later on, of course, the whole porch would be crammed with smelly GIs. By that time, I'd either be parked on the beach or out behind the building with a bottle or part of one. I put my beer on the table, but leaned up against the railing so I could watch the ocean. I wished for palm trees, but those were over on BiTruoc, Front Beach.

Back Beach had no trees at all. They would have blocked the view anyway.

When Kitty came out with my food, she brought me another double and a Saigon Tea for herself. She put the plate down and leaned beside me on the railing. We didn't say anything for a while. I was conscious of her body, close, and her scent, fresh and clean. I was nervous. All the guys were scared of me, but stand me next to a woman a foot shorter than I was and I started melting like b.u.t.ter in a frying pan.

Most nights, she teased me. Not that night. I guessed she didn't have a customer, but maybe that was too harsh. When you're the only one bringing any money home to your family, you do what you have to do. A few times before, Kitty had snuggled up to me without teasing. Never when anyone else was looking. And those other times, she had invited me home with her.

"You come home with me GI," she would say. "I show you good time."

And I'd shake my head, deeply afraid.

She'd say, "For you free, GI."

I couldn't tell if she was serious and I was so scared I could hardly move. That night, it was different. She said the same things, yeah, but when she asked me to come home with her, she had her arm around my waist. And when she told me it was free for me, her lips were a millimetre from mine and I could feel her breath, sweet and soft and fragrant, like cinnamon. No one was watching us, so I moved that last millimetre and kissed her. I closed my eyes and tasted her lipstick and felt her tongue exploring my mouth; her small hand found its way around my neck, tangled in my hair. I was breathing hard and so was she. I put my hand on her back and pulled her to me; I could feel the texture of her ao-da under my hand.

I was as aroused as I was afraid; I don't think she was afraid at all.

I felt her hand slip under my fatigue s.h.i.+rt and I didn't stop her. I felt her hand on my skin and I didn't stop her; I pushed into her hand and didn't stop myself. Nothing existed for me except her hand and her mouth and the delicate touch of her fingers. The sound of the music inside faded away in the pounding of blood in my ears. She stopped kissing me, moved her lips close to my ear, whispered, "You come home with me now. I take off work. You share betel nut with me, Andi."

I wanted to. Oh, I wanted to. Every time I saw her in the bar, or on the porch, she gave me that smile full of promise, full of hot sweaty nights and twisted covers, of hours spent touching each other in secret moist ways that I could only imagine. I wanted the real thing. But.

"I'm not ready yet, Kitty."

She stopped touching me. "It's OK, GI," she said. "Some other time."

She kissed me on the cheek. "We got beaucoup time."

She went back inside; I was trembling. I wanted to call to her but my mouth wouldn't open. Kitty came out again a minute later, with another shot for me. "You want bottle?" She asked, smiling when she saw I was busy licking her lipstick off my lips.

I shook my head. "Maybe some other time," I said.

She grinned. "You save plenty time for me, GI." She patted my hand.

"When you ready." She went back to the bar.

I sat at the table, ate my sandwich and smelled the ocean. I thought about Tuyen and the feel of her hands on my skin. I'd never done anything like that before, never confronted the need inside me quite so openly. I thought, if she had pushed me a little more, I'd have gone with her. And I found that knowledge discomforting; to know that I would have risked getting caught outside the compound after curfew, or being found with a woman when it meant, at the least, an undesirable discharge, told me something about myself I hadn't known before.

And here I thought I was so practiced at being such a good little girl.

No, I didn't do perky very well, but by golly my mom taught me how to behave, how to be charming and polite even when you hated someone's guts. She also taught me that serving others' needs came before anything I wanted. I leaned back in my chair, put my feet up on the table and watched moonrise across the South China Sea. Back home in Chicago, all the beers would have been green. All I had inside me was sadness, loneliness and homesickness. I felt ten thousand miles from home for the first time since arriving in Vietnam.

Someone had put on a tape of Simon & Garfunkel alb.u.ms and cranked the volume. Guys were filtering out onto the porch. I sighed. I drank my shot, gathered up the plate and beer and went inside, leaving the ocean to watch itself. I was able to squeeze through the crowd and shove up against the bar. All I wanted was my booze and to see Kitty, but she was busy in the back, f.u.c.king for money so she could keep her family alive. Every time I thought about what she was doing, it hurt. I had another drink.

Sometimes, she got lucky and the jerk she was with would pa.s.s out, leaving her to take money out of his wallet. She'd tuck it in her pocket and come out to stand next to me at the bar, flas.h.i.+ng that grin at me and telling me where she kept it. "Hey, GI, you want take away?"

That night, I thought she might get lucky like that, and I would maybe get to spend some more time with her. But when she came back to the bar, our latest FNG came sidling up to her right away, like a garden slug oozing up to a crocus. I knew who he was; I was the battalion clerk, after all, and I hadn't liked him any better when he'd reported to the CO last week. He'd found out where the action was quick enough.

You could tell he hadn't taken a shower. I could see Kitty's eyes cross and the expression of revulsion on that perfect face, framed in that s.h.i.+ny black hair that went down to her waist, whenever he turned away.

She was mugging for me, and it made me laugh. But he had the money and the time and no inhibitions, so when he said, "Let's go" to her, she did.

That left me there at the bar next to Phil Cherry, who suited his last name well. A medic, he was a little guy, not much taller than the bar girls. He was blonde, wore thick-lensed gla.s.ses, and might have been the most innocent boy I had ever known. I'd seen him turn amazing shades of red when Kitty had suggested a little boom-boom to him.

"Hey, Cherry," I said. "I need a ride tonight."

"Don't you always? And don't I always give you one?"

"Yah, but I like to ask. You might have a hot date."

He snorted.

Phil was about the only Army I talked to. He'd never had a hot date.

Sometimes, I think he suspected. I guessed that was OK, because I kind of suspected him, too. He never said, and neither did I. Since we didn't talk about it, you couldn't say we were close. Probably, his mother, like mine, told him when he was growing up, "Go out there and make friends!" Easy for a mother to say. Not so easy for those of us on the fringe to do.

After an hour I got worried. Kitty was too efficient to take that long.

Usually, she came back to the bar within less than a half hour, snuggled up to me to get my juices, and my jealousy, going. Jealousy that I couldn't admit. To silence that voice inside, I had another drink, and another, and another. That night, after too many another drinks, I wondered where she was. I tried ignoring my anxiety, but when the jerk she'd taken to her room turned up at the bar again, I slipped into the rear where the tiny little rooms were and knocked on her door.

No answer, and she wasn't inside, but I saw the side door standing open, the breeze off the ocean making it sway on its hinges. There's always a breeze in Vung Tau.

During the day, it was often over a hundred Fahrenheit. Places like Cu Chi, it got to 110 every day, monsoon or not. In beautiful downtown Vung Tau, 120 klicks from Saigon, we enjoyed a moderate climate.

Sometimes it only reached the high nineties. At night, always, the temperature dropped into the seventies. For the Vietnamese, and for people like me whose thermostat had been permanently reset by days that debilitate most foreigners, the nights were cold. I was s.h.i.+vering just a few minutes after I slipped out the door and started following her tracks. I could tell which ones were Kitty's; besides being on top of everyone else's, I could see the little sweeps made by the trousers of her ao-da in the sand. So I knew two things; one, she hadn't been naked, and two, she hadn't been dragged. I worried anyway.

I was almost a klick down the beach where it turned rocky, close to VC Hill and away from any buildings, when I saw the lump on the sand. The moon was a little past first quarter, swelling toward fullness, giving me enough light to see. Seaweed had washed up on the sand near Kitty's body. I could smell the rank odor of the weed.as I chased the crabs away. My knees gave out and I knelt beside her. She lay on her back, her arms away from her body, eyes wide, fear on her face, and a clean red slice right across her neck. The blood on the blue ao-da had only just started to dry. I felt nearly sober, despite the number of drinks I'd had.

All I could think was, why hadn't I gone home with her? If I had, she would have been alive and in my arms, not lifeless on the beach. We would both have been happy, at least for a while, if I hadn't been so scared. I was crying: "Oh, Kitty, I'm so sorry." When Dana had been killed during Tet, two years before, I hadn't been nearly as devastated.

Which made me feel even worse. She was just a little hooker, out for money and the presents she could sweet-talk the GIs out of, and Dana was my brother. But it didn't make any difference. Kitty had cla.s.s and style and to me, at least, was a lot more than just anything. I felt it was as much my blood on the sand as Kitty's.

I bent over and sank my head on my knees and sobbed until I was exhausted, until there was nothing left inside me but ice-cold rage.

Whoever killed her left two corpses on the beach that night; Ky Thi Tuyen and the little girl who had been Andrea Holmes. And I'd helped him do it.

When I was empty, I sat up and examined her body. Whoever cut her knew what he was doing. He was right-handed; the right side of the wound on her neck was a tiny bit more ragged than on the left, so it had to be the exit side. And whatever he'd used was deadly sharp. I kept my switchblade as sharp as I could; I never knew when I'd need it. But I could tell that the edge that had cut Kitty's throat made mine look like knapped flint. He'd done her from the front and she fell back on the sand, dead in seconds, blood spurting out to splash on the blue cloth and drain out on the beach. It could have been a straight razor. Or it could have been a scalpel, but I wasn't sure that would have had the depth of cut for that kind of work.

I knelt there in the sand, watching the sea creep up the beach, smelling the dead fish on the breeze. I kept brus.h.i.+ng the crabs away. What the h.e.l.l could I do? Calling the MPs was out. Why should they have cared?

What was another dead bar girl to them? Not their jurisdiction. I didn't want to spend hours in a jeep or a scruffy guard shack, being interviewed and ha.s.sled for making trouble.

I couldn't call the White Mice. The ARVN MPs with their s.h.i.+ny white helmets would look at me and take my switchblade and call me a murderer.

Even if they didn't arrest me themselves, they'd tell the MPs up the hill I'd killed her, and that would almost certainly get all the beaches, not just Back and Front, shut down for several days. All that would accomplish would be to p.i.s.s off everyone I knew and a lot of people I didn't. There was enough of that going around already; I didn't need to add to it, especially if it became known I'd found the body and couldn't keep my mouth shut.

I planted my b.u.t.t on the sand and crossed my arms on my knees. With the moon the way it was, I could see there was n.o.body out but me. I lit a cigarette and pulled the smoke into my lungs. I wished for a hip flask.

I sat there on the sand, still warm from the heat soaked up during the day, next to the body of a woman I had loved, and I watched the ocean move.

When I finished the cigarette, I field-stripped it and shoved the filter in my pocket. Only then did I realize I was crying again, had been crying for a while. I looked down at Kitty's body, dug in my boot and pulled out my switchblade. I used it to slice off a short length of her hair which I put in my wallet, tucked behind my ID card. I looked down at her one more time.

Some people think the body is a coc.o.o.n for the soul; despite my parents'

best efforts, I couldn't believe that. Still, I couldn't stop myself from bending over and kissing those cold red lips, my tears dripping on her face. I smoothed her hair and started to stand up. That was when I noticed that the little ivory and gold Buddha was gone from around her neck. I spent too much time looking for it. I found instead another set of footsteps in the sand. They weren't jungle boots, but civilian shoes, boy shoes. Not like the sandals Kitty wore. A Vietnamese had cut her throat.

I'd get nowhere following the tracks, more than likely, but I had to try. I refused to look back.

They led me almost to the bars, then angled to hit the street before I could tell which one the killer had been heading for. About what I'd expected. I went back to the Sunset and ordered another shot and a Bau Muoi Ba from Tan.

"Where you been, Andi?"

"Out."

He stood there looking at me, his neat little mustache twitching.

Finally, he shrugged and poured me the shot of rye whiskey, let me alone.

I turned my back to the bar so I could look out at the little tables; the men with drinks of various kinds and the girls with their Saigon Tea. I looked at the working girls, trying to remember which one Kitty had been closest to. It was hard to concentrate: adrenaline and rage.

One of the men got up and left, leaving his drink on the table, heading out the front door. Hue, left sitting at the table, looked sad. Yeah, she was the one I'd seen walking arm-in-arm with Kitty. I looked around for Phil. He was at another table, alone. I knew him well enough to know that he had already turned down several girls who had tried to get him to buy them drinks.