Beast Of The Heartland And Other Stories Part 25

In the days following the war, Vung Thao had served as a resort for Russian bureaucrats and their wives. They had stayed at a hotel constructed for their exclusive use, a pink stucco cake of a building that would not have been out of place in 1930s California, three stories of white balconies and French doors and a red tile roof, set on the beach among landscaped palms and hibiscus, fronted by an outdoor cafe lit by necklaces of colored light bulbs strung on bamboo poles, at whose tables, each sprouting a pink and white umbrella from a hole at its center, pale men in ill-fitting suits had sweated and sipped vodka in the company of diminutive cadres with red stars on their caps, plotting the course of the new Marxist Wonderland.

Mizell wished he had lived in that Vietnam; in the rawness of victory, he believed, there might have been a spirit that would have nourished him. Not of hope, certainly. The Vietnamese were too unsentimental to buy into hope. Perhaps an elated defiance that counterfeited hope, or made hope unnecessary. A feeling that would provide momentum. Which was exactly what Mizell needed. His life had evolved into a series of lazy orbits, like that of a fly circling some sweet spoilage, landing now and again to take sustenance, rising up to mate and buzz, eventually confronted by menace, swatted at, and darting away to the next treat. Ten years of this. From Goa to Indonesia to Vietnam. Growing expert in the hierarchies of minor officials and lesser criminals, trading in the currency of information, of knowing who to bribe in whatever contingency, who had the best drugs, the most beautiful girls, their weaknesses, the extent of their power. It was something he'd fallen into, something he'd learned he had a talent for.

Doing a favor for a friend in Goa had turned a college graduation trip into a decade of wasted activity.

And though he took a certain pride in his ability to negotiate, to manipulate, it dismayed him to realize that he had become a creature appropriate to the current incarnation of the hotel, its balconies chipped and crumbling; umbrellas faded; catering to young travelers such as filled the cafe that night: overweight British girls with f.a.n.n.y packs, sober Swedish youths, French guys with wispy beards and wire-rimmed gla.s.ses, insufferably cheerful, beer-swilling Aussies, American dopers, post-teen Greenpeaceniks out to earn a merit badge in reality by hiking the Ho Chi Minh Trail. Like them, Mizell was part of the new invasion flowing into Vietnam, wielding the ultimate weapon of a bland, brightly colored, alluring culture to smash all resistance, winning the final battle of the war with scarcely a casualty. Unlike the rest, he had no plans for withdrawal, no degree program to which he might return, no job prospects or career track, no plans at all, except for a few vague designs concerning the immediate future -- a new apartment, detox for Anna -- and the recognition that a plan might be necessary.

It was full dark by the time they reached the hotel. They grabbed a table at the cafe, the only one available, on the edge of the beach, where flagstones gave out into mucky yellow sand. A poor location if you were thirsty or hungry: The Vietnamese waiters were not highly motivated, spending most of their time smoking beneath the paper lanterns that overhung the entrance to the hotel, and rarely did they respond to signals from patrons sitting far from their station. At the adjoining table -- two tables, actually, that had been pulled together -- were a dozen or so twentysomethings, clean-cut boys and girls who were given to hugging one another and jabbered away madly, eagerly, leaning forward and gesturing with bottles, cigarettes. Happy animals at play. Given their uniform age and appearance, Mizell thought that they must be members of a group, some church- or university-sponsored excursion. The journalist cast a disconsolate eye on them, and with a gesture that included the entire cafe, all the motley a.s.semblage, said, "Everywhere I go I wind up falling in with these people. I guess I don't spend enough money on hotels."

"You could do a lot worse," Anna said; she looked annoyed, and Mizell could relate -- the journalist's habit of editorializing his negativity had become grating, and as a result, the drive had not been much fun.

"h.e.l.l, yes," said the journalist. "This place is so sad and f.u.c.ked up, you can always do worse. It's different up north, but once you drop below the Seventeenth Parallel, it's a theme park of defeat.

Everybody tells the same G.o.dd.a.m.n story. Reeducation camp. Lost their wife or their brother, and now they're living in a dormitory. One of their kids blown up by an old land mine. And then you've got all the bonehead ex-pats and their business. The Vietnamese form of hideous business. Even the ex-pats youmeet who're not total boneheads... like this couple I met in Hue. This twenty-seven-year-old Yalie and his perfect girlfriend. Getting rich and tootling around all day on their motorbikes. I mean there was nothing wrong with them, they were nice people. They were just somehow horrifying. The war wasn't even on their radar screen."

Anna sniffed, disgusted. "We must be horrifying, then. The war's not on our radar screen, either."

"All that perspective you've got happening must be a pain in the a.s.s," said Mizell. "Maybe you should try to relax. Go with the moment."

The journalist said, "That's your secret, is it?"

Mizell thought it best not to respond.

Out over the water, a bloated, bone-china moon was sailing among low clouds, and there was a heavy brine smell. From behind the hotel came a blast of techno that veered into distortion, this followed by an amplified voice giving instructions: a sound check in progress. The clicks and pops from the PA seemed connected to slight fluctuations in the heat. Sweat trickled down Mizell's neck, soaked through the back of his shirt.

Anna touched his arm, pointed to a slender middle-aged man in a tailored beige suit standing off among the tables, his receding hair trimmed to stubble, sharp-featured, a prissy set to his mouth. "David!"

she called. The man spotted her, hurried toward them.

"Don't get pushy with him. All right?" Mizell said to her. "Just let it happen."

"I'll be fine." She said this airily, and that worried Mizell. Though she seemed to be on top of things, he thought he detected a looseness in her, evidence of some new unraveling.

"Remember what we know about this guy," he said.

"I'll be fine!" She poisoned him with a stare, then smiled at the man as he came up, stood and embraced him.

"Mistuh Mizell!" said the man; he draped an arm about Anna's shoulder and beamed. "I 'preciate you givin' Anna a ride. I would have sent my car, but I jus' had so much to deal with heah."

Mizell told him it wasn't a problem.

The man gave the journalist a cursory glance, then favored Mizell with an oily, good-buddy smile.

"Well, I 'preciate it anyway. I hope we'll get a chance to chat later. In fact, let's make a point of it." He looked to Anna. "Shall we?"

The journalist watched them walk away. "That's a seriously attractive woman." Then, after a pause: "What's the deal with you two? I started out thinking she's your girlfriend, but now I don't get it."

"She works for me. Guys like to tell her things. Sometimes they tell her things I can use."

"But she sleeps with you, too."

"When she feels like it. When we both feel like it."

"She works for you, sleeps with you. And" -- the journalist held up three fingers -- "you keep her high."

"She keeps herself high," Mizell said testily. "I know her head's not right. I can't do much except try to protect her."

The journalist gave a rueful shake of his head. "The amount of brain damage in this country is f.u.c.king unbelievable," he said.

Mizell tended to agree but doubted they were thinking about the same thing. He tapped a pa.s.sing waiter on the arm, asked for a beer. The waiter -- a man with a face so crumpled by age, it was impossible to discern his expression -- recoiled. As he scuttled away, Mizell realized that he had touched an old napalm scar on the man's arm, the skin bubbled, mottled, like pink plastic and crispy bacon melted together.

"Where'd you meet her?" asked the journalist. "Saigon?"

"Djakarta. She had some trouble with the police. I put the police captain together with a couple of Malaysian businessmen who helped him with a project. Afterward, Anna and I hooked up and came here."

"So what you do now, your business, you were doing it back then, huh? Why'd you leaveDjakarta?"

"The more you learn about a place, the deeper the s.h.i.t you're stepping in. Things get too heavy, it's best to move on. Find some place less complicated."

"Like Vietnam?"

"Like Vietnam used to be five, six years ago."

"That's when you came here?"

"I got in on the ground floor." Mizell said this with relish, knowing it would irritate the journalist.

The group at the adjoining table began to sing an old Tom Petty song, "Free Falling," linking their arms and swaying to the tune. The journalist slouched in his chair, hunched his shoulders, as if preparing to absorb a blow. "How's Vietnam different now?" he asked.

"Things are starting to get deep. Like the guy Anna's checking out. The guy she left with. David Moskowitz. He's the new breed of hustler. We used to just get the con artists and drug dealers. But Moskowitz, back in the States, Atlanta, he was under suspicion for a couple of murders. Now he's into concert promotion over here."

The singers brayed out the line about vampires on Ventura Boulevard, and two of the women hugged one another, as if enlivened by the notion of vampires. A gust of wind blew in off the water, setting the colored light bulbs to bobbing. Gla.s.s broke close by, a girl shrieked, and Mizell caught a sweet scent on the wind, like incense, curling in from blackness that reached to China. He tipped back his head, closed his eyes, and tried to find its end.

"You went to college, right?" said the journalist. "What'd you major in?"

"Jesus!" said Mizell. "You writing my biography? Okay... how's this? I was raised in Denver by a single-parent mom. Turn-offs? Prison rape and yappy little dogs. When I'm feeling blue, I jerk off and read Flaubert. I don't have a favorite color."

"Hey, it's how I get to know people! I ask questions, all right?"

Mizell decided that he really wanted a beer. He waved at the idling waiters, but they made no response. "I majored in theatrical arts. Film," he said, turning back to the journalist. "I was planning to direct."

The journalist regarded him with undisguised distaste. "Who can guess the purposes of fate, huh?"

"Exactly!" said Mizell.

"So when you got into all this, the business stuff, it's like you asked yourself, What's better than making movies?"

"I did? And what was my answer?"

"Being in the movies."

Mizell did not embrace the idea that he was a roleplayer but could not entirely reject it. "I don't know... maybe."

"Maybe, my a.s.s. It's the height of slacker romance. Playing games on the dark side, lost in the mystic Orient."

"Oh, I see. Now I'm a slacker."

"Beats me," said the journalist, and for the first time in a long while, he smiled. "Could be you're just faking."

A stage had been erected in the jungle behind the hotel, supporting a battery of speakers that in the confusion of strobes and colored spotlights resembled black doorways leading off into the dense vegetation at their back. The DJ was a shadowy figure at his boards, and the crowd -- several hundred strong -- danced, staggered, hopped, crawled, and perpetrated s.e.xual a.s.sault beneath a canopy ofpalms, amid scents of opium, ganja, perfume, and delirium. Early in the proceedings, Mizell caught sight of Anna. Watching her charm Moskowitz, he remembered when things had been different, not just business and the occasional f.u.c.k. They'd never had many problems. Their addictions, her dope, and his extralegal games -- that was what they were, no point in denying it -- had served both as defenses against real intimacy and a reason to stay together. The relationship had never taken much effort; in fact, it had always been the easiest thing to do, a loose, undemanding partnership, and without ever crossing each other's borders, traveling on needles and adrenaline, they had co-depended their way across Asia.

Yet he believed there had once been a feeling of bright quiet involved in their closeness that might have transformed them. He doubted it was accessible any longer; if it was, something drastic would be needed in order to salvage it.

About an hour into the set, Lonesome Heartbreak walked on stage and plugged in his Telecaster. He was short and muscular; his black hair was trimmed into bangs, and this, along with his air of defiance and disdain, lent his broad face a trollish aspect. He wore a white silk cowboy shirt with red fringe along the sleeves, red slacks, and white cowboy boots, and was outfitted with a headset mike. He strummed a chord pulsing with reverb and began to sing a Buddy Holly song, "Heartbeat," in an easy tenor without a trace of accent. He sang each successive verse with increased fervor, rolling his eyes up to the palm crowns, moving with crabby quickness about the stage, a clownish figure, yet touching for his intensity, his emotional commitment to the song. Then as he laid into the final chorus, his performance came unraveled. Discords shattered the progressions, his voice rasped, cracked, rose into a scream, and he hunched over the guitar, his face contorted with effort. The crowd pressed close to the stage, pumping their fists and shouting as Lonesome Heartbreak screamed the word "heartbeat" over and over.

Throat-tearing screams so genuine in their rage and grief, they generated in Mizell the desire to join in, to vent some blood emotion that had been hibernating inside him and now, though there was no article of despair to which it attached -- no obvious one, at any rate -- had been stimulated to waking by this powerful influence.

Lonesome Heartbeat unstrapped his guitar and tossed it into a speaker, producing a squall of feedback. He fell to his knees, fists clenched on his thighs. Sweat trickled down his face, pasting his bangs to his forehead, and he continued to scream. Such vicious insults to the larynx, Mizell half-expected to see blood jet from his mouth. At length the screams grew weak; the DJ brought up his own music up under them, making them danceable, and the journalist pulled Mizell away from the stage to a spot where speech was possible. "I gotta talk to this guy," he said. "How about introducing me?"

"Yeah," said Mizell, thinking it might be interesting to see how the journalist would handle this a.s.signment. "Yeah, I guess I can. But I might leave you alone with him. I want to check on Anna."

They made their way through the fringes of the crowd, clumps of giggling stoners, couples dry-humping against palm trunks, and walked along the beach toward the spot where Lonesome Heartbreak had parked his van, slogging through sand still wet from the day's rain. The journalist, as he did whenever there was a void to fill, went back to talking in disparaging terms about Vietnam, recounting a conversation with the owner of a ceramic tile company he'd met in the pool at the Hotel Rex, more tales of graft and corruption.

"What did you expect to find here?" Mizell asked. "A happy marriage between Walt Disney and the Workers' Paradise?"

"I expected something vital. But this place... it's the sort of karmically endangered place where bad things are supposed to happen. Terrible things. And they did. But that's over now. The moving finger has moved on. All that's left is... leftovers. Another broken anthill where nothing important will ever happen again."

They walked a minute in silence.

"Know the worst thing I've heard since I've been here?" said the journalist. "I mean it's not actually the worst, but it's a h.e.l.l of a symptom of the end times. Don Johnson... you know Don Johnson? The guy from Miami Vice? He bought an island off the coast. Just off Saigon. He's building his f.u.c.king dream house." The moon had risen higher, clearing the clouds, and in its light, the van, an ancient VW showing pale gray, standing at the base of a dune topped by tall gra.s.ses and a single palm, looked as individual as its owner. Polka-dotted with decals from dozens of countries, dinged, battered, windows blacked out, the words LONESOME HEARTBREAK'S WORLD TOUR painted in fat, cartoonish letters on the side.

As they waited, the journalist broke out a joint and offered a hit to Mizell, who said No thanks and gazed up at the palm crown, black fronds stirring feebly against the blue-dark sky like the legs of an exotic spider impaled on a pin.

Ten minutes pa.s.sed before Lonesome Heartbreak came trudging along the beach with his head down.

His shirt was flung over one shoulder, guitar in hand. When he noticed them he hesitated, then started forward again. He pa.s.sed them without a word, unlocked the van, and slid back the side door. He was more heavily muscled than Mizell had thought, his upper body developed like a weightlifter's. After watching him on stage, it was strange to be so close to him. Mizell thought he could feel all that suppressed emotion, a vibration, an almost impalpable radiation.

"Remember me?" Mizell said. "I'm the guy helped you out with that visa problem."

"I remember." The words were gruffly spoken, half-grunted, the tone used by movie samurai when rebuking subordinates or confessing an egregious sin.

"I've got this guy here wants to write something about you for a magazine."

Lonesome Heartbreak struggled into a T-shirt, one imprinted with his image and an announcement of the World Tour, and stared gravely at the journalist. "American magazine?"

"Yeah, The New Yorker."

Lonesome Heartbreak pursed his lips and nodded slowly, affirmatively, suggesting that he was impressed. "Sure, you go ahead. Write what you want."

"I need to ask you some questions, then." The journalist moved a step closer. "From what I gather, your trip, your performances... they're a kind of penance. Or maybe 'tribute' would be closer to the truth. A tribute to your fiancee. She died in an accident, I believe?"

Lonesome Heartbreak made a guttural noise, a noise of animal perturbation. "You the a.s.shole break into my van?"

"No!" The journalist cast an anxious look at Mizell. "That's just what I heard. Some guy told me I met in a bar."

"Same motherf.u.c.ker break into my van, I bet." Lonesome Heartbreak rested his guitar in the sand, the neck leaning against the front door; he let out a long breath. "My fiancee name Mayumi Ishida. We go drinking in London. Get very drunk. Too drunk. On the way home..." He performed a quick movement of his right hand, lifting it above his head with a flourish, the gesture an actor might choose to signal finality or dramatic impatience. "I was a fool. I know love. Not death. Not grief. Only love. Now...

now I understand these things. Too late. But I understand." He sat in the open door of the van and rested his hands on his knees, elbows akimbo, and looked down at the sand. "I understand," he repeated in a dull voice. "So I must change my life. I travel, I play. I think of her. Sometime" -- he glanced not at the journalist, but at Mizell, and spoke more a.s.sertively -- "sometime she is there. Not far. I can touch her. I know her better than she is alive." His voice lost energy again. "But she is not there. Only when I drive, when I sing."

Mizell was embarra.s.sed to see him so exposed; it was even more complete an exposure, he thought, than he had managed on stage. But the journalist seemed unaffected. "When you say you've changed your life," he said, "do you mean when you return home, you're going to take up some new occupation?"

Lonesome Heartbreak stared up at him balefully through his bangs, but said nothing.

"Okay. All right. How about this. Going by the decals on your van, I figure you're on the last leg of your trip. When you get home, what are you planning to do?"

Lonesome Heartbreak got to his feet and addressed him with a curt bow. "I have to p.i.s.s," he said and stalked off behind the van.

Once he had pa.s.sed out of sight, the journalist said excitedly, "It's like grief is a choice for him. Areyou getting that, man? It's the old bushido deal. Yukio Mishima. The son of a b.i.t.c.h is on a death trip. He gets duded up like Hank Williams and goes around doing this self-abnegation s.h.i.t. Then when he's had enough, he does the deed."

"Why don't you ask him about it?" said Mizell.

"I'm not sure that would be cool," said the journalist. "And f.u.c.k, I'm not that much of an a.s.shole. I don't want to torture the guy." He paced off a couple of steps. "h.e.l.l, I don't need to ask. It's all pretty clear."

"I don't think anything's clear," said Mizell. "His English sucks. You don't know what he's trying to say."

The moon brightened, as if a film had been washed from its surface, and Mizell spotted several figures, tiny as yet, walking toward them from the candy-pink hotel, its top floor visible above the palms.

A succession of wavelets, little black surges edged with foam and furtive light, slopped against the sh.o.r.e, thinned, and melted away.

Lonesome Heartbreak came out from behind the van and sat back down. Mizell, stirred by impulse, a boost of curiosity similar to the one that encouraged him to break into the van, hunkered down beside him. "My friend has a theory about you," he said. "He thinks when you get home you're going to commit suicide. He thinks your trip is a prelude to that."

Stiffly, like an idol coming to life, Lonesome Heartbreak turned his scowling face to Mizell, and Mizell had a sense that he was being less examined than felt, apprehended. He thought of a Dian Fossey doc.u.mentary he'd seen, Dian sitting cross-legged beside the alpha male, displaying submissive behavior, while the gorilla studied her, trying to puzzle out their differences.

"I want to know, too," said Mizell. "It's not casual. I really want to know."

He imagined that he detected a charred residue in the darks of the man's eyes, the old shocks of disaster, and he imagined, too, the thought of death, almost a shadow, standing in a secret place among ebony pillars, waiting to step forward into conscious light, real yet not real, like smoke or a half-heard whisper.

"I can't say these things," said Lonesome Heartbreak, the words faltering, as if he were operating the mechanisms of the flesh from a remove. "I don't know you."

"Hey!" said the journalist. "There's Anna."

David Moskowitz, his suit jacket flapping in the breeze, was hurrying toward them along the beach; he was hauling Anna along by the wrist. Bringing up the rear was a lanky, long-haired Vietnamese kid wearing an orange T-shirt beneath a pale linen suit. As they came up, Moskowitz gave Anna's arm a vicious tug and sent her sprawling into the sand. He stepped close to Mizell, so close that only his small pale eyes were in focus.