Turn of the cards

Chapter Seventeen

The young woman slowed way down on her 50cc Suzi scooter, scoping Mark over the tops of the white heart-shaped shades she was wearing despite the fact that night had settled in to stay on Ho Chi Minh City’s main drag. She wore a sleeveless denim vest patterned in swirls of studs, blue denim gloves clear to the elbow, and white capri pants. She caught Mark’s eye, bobbing around up there in the ozone, gave him a phosphorescent smile, and putted away.

He watched her rump recede, caught himself, and felt like a male chauvinist. But it had been a long time for him. He thought of Tachyon’s sister, Roxalana. She was back on Takis. One more reason to question his decision to leave.

Naturally Jumpin’ Jack Flash had gotten to her first. It didn’t seem fair somehow.

Hey, can I help it if I’m the one with dangerous charisma? came the sardonic voice from the back of his mind.

“Hey, man, You like?”

“Huh?” Mark said intelligently. He blinked his way back to reality, such as it was.

A pair of Vietnamese dudes in shades sat fore-and-aft on a 100cc Honda scooter. The pillion rider nodded after the woman on the Suzuki. “You like her, man? She number one.”

Mark blushed. He was completely unprepared for this kind of situation. Either they were trying to engage him in some sort of thigh-slapping male-chauvinist ritual, hooting after the hapless woman like New York construction workers, or they were her brothers, bent upon cadging an admission from him that he liked their sister so that they could set upon him and stomp him silly. Only Mark, at least a foot taller than either of them and carrying some of the most powerful aces the world had ever known in a back pocket of his faded Levi’s, would worry about that.

So he smiled like a goon, bobbed his head and kind of waved, and walked on. Behind him the dudes on the bike shrugged and zoomed past him into the people flow.

Dong Khoi Street ran wide and only slightly seedy from the city center to the Saigon River. Mark had found the Wild Cards office closed when he straggled back from Cholon. It had been a relief; he still couldn’t see himself turning the men with their pith helmets and Kalashnikovs on the wretched family of squatters huddled in “his” apartment. Even if young Ali thought he was a wimp.

That left him loose, to say the least, and what motion there was in Ho Chi Minh City after dark tended to flow down Dong Khoi and back up the parallel Nguyen Hue Street, so he let his boot-heels wander down that way too.

This wasn’t the loud, bustling, boisterous, decadent, and dangerous Saigon of the movies. But then, those movies were filmed in Bangkok these days, or Manila.

…Another young woman was giving him the eye, this one with her long hair piled and pinned atop her head. As Mark noticed her, she flashed him a good many white teeth and accelerated.

“Hey, man! Yo, My, that girl fine, yes?” Mark looked around. Two more guys on a motor bike – and he found something else to feel a guilt twinge at, that the only reason he could tell these two from the last was that their scooter was different. He grinned and shook his head – no comprendo Inglйs – and moved on.

There were people enough, kids cruising past on those farty little scooters like the ones who kept accosting him for whatever unknowable purpose, pedestrians, tourists looking big and ungainly. A cafй or two were still open, a few shops selling curios, cigarettes, lottery tickets, and maps to the famous former Viet Cong tunnel complex of Cu Chi in what was now the northern suburbs, which the government was touting big-time as a tourist attraction.

There was even a nightclub or restaurant called Maxim’s, with bright lights and swing music pouring out the front. Mark took a peek inside, but all he saw were suits and evening gowns. It jarred his image of life in a communist country almost as much as the lottery tickets had.

But the whole scene was, like, subdued. Ho Chi Minh City seemed to be holding its collective breath, waiting, for what he couldn’t tell.

Maybe it was the rain.

As he was walking away from Maxim’s, a kid came up to him. Mark glanced at him with unafraid eyes – maybe Takis was starting to wear off some, after all. At least this one wasn’t riding a scooter.

The boy was tall for a Vietnamese, and then Mark realized with a shock his skin was the color of chocolate. Much darker than any Vietnamese he’d seen.

“Give me some money,” the boy said. “I’m hungry.”

Stunned, Mark reached reflexively into his pocket and pulled out a couple of wadded dong notes. The kid accepted them, grunted at them, made them vanish, and shuffled away.

They were all over him then, big-boned kids, round-eyed kids, kids with dark skin and frizzy hair, adolescents and young adults, saying, “Take me to America,” and “Give me money,” and “My father was American.”

It didn’t take long for him to realize that if he tried to help them all, he’d soon be flat himself, and him without a roof to sleep under tonight. Hands on his pockets, feeling selfish and horrible, he lurched away as fast as his long legs would carry him.

After a few paces the youths gave up the listless chase and began to drift back up the street in search of better-heeled Americans to guilt-trip. The experience left him feeling eerie and disconnected, left his head ringing. He was suddenly very, very homesick for Sprout.

In that frame of mind he heard a familiar voice singing – chanting, really – to a dry and sinister backbeat.

“I’m a joker, I’m insane

“And you can not say my name -”

He gravitated toward the saloon-style doors through which the sound slithered, snakelike. As he reached them, the voice rose to a screaming crescendo: “I am the serpent who gnaws ‘The roots of the world!’”

Familiar, but dead. The voice belonged to Thomas Marion Douglas, lead singer for Destiny. He had been one of Doctor Tachyon’s successes with his early trump vaccine. More or less. The return to nat status had finished Douglas off twenty years ago.

Mark had briefly known him. Or maybe he hadn’t.

He peered inside. The bar was poorly lit – but then, the next well-lit bar you go into will be the first, now, won’t it? It did not take his eyes any time to adjust, but it took his mind a while.

The walls were plastered with posters, giant icon heads, Elvis and the Beatles and Janis and Jimi, Peter Fonda on his bike with his Captain America colors, Buddy Holly before the wild card. Tom Douglas as the Lizard King, going down beneath a wave of cops in New Haven. Richard Nixon flashing V-for-victory, Martin Luther King having a dream. The Grateful Dead. A single-sheet for Peter Sellers in The Party. There was a pool table and a lighted Budweiser sign behind the bar and a TV up on the wall playing SportsCenter to no one in particular.

Dominating the scene was a truly humongous poster behind the door; Humphrey Bogart in regulation fedora and cigarette, eyes crinkly and wise. And the voices from the gang at the bar were American.

Mark had felt more than a few flashes of dislocation of late, mainly because no other earthling in history, except for Jay Ackroyd and Kelly Jenkins, had ever been as dislocated as he had. But that old devil culture shock had been creeping along behind him on muffled hooves, lo these many months, and at the sound and smell and sight of so much that was so American, he stepped right up and sandbagged Mark behind the ear.

He staggered. He almost went down. He had to take a step back, take a deep breath, reassure himself that this was real, or that he was.

He glanced up. Visible over the door in spillover light from within were the painted words RICK’S CAFE AMERICAIN.

What else could it be? he told himself, and walked on in.

He bellied up to the bar, and the words “Hi, guys!” burst out through his shyness, propelled by loneliness and the longing for homelike things.

Conversation died. Faces turned to him. He realized then that many of those faces diverged pretty widely from the human norm. It made no particular impression on him. He had no problem with jokers, and besides, these were Americans.

He looked at the bartender. He was a joker, too, a squatty little guy with warty slate-gray skin, stone bald, with a line of fleshy spines running from the top of his head down his back to the tip of a short, heavy tail. He didn’t seem to be wearing anything but a grimy barkeep’s apron.

“I’d like a Pepsi,” Mark said.

“‘He’d like a Pepsi,’” a voice echoed. Mark had done enough time in the schoolyards of his childhood to be all too familiar with that mocking tone. He blinked around, wondering what he’d done.

He was beginning to register a few details his initial rush of homesickness had obscured. Like the poster of Bloat on one wall, like an obscene parody of Buddha. The stern visage of General Francis Zappa affixed to the dartboard with a fistful of darts through his prominent nose. Most alarmingly, the poster of the Turtle floating above the battle lines in Czechago with a peace sign painted on his shell had been crossed out with emphatic slashes of red paint.

A pair of left hands gripped Mark’s biceps and spun him around. He found himself looking into a round, malevolent Charlie Brown kind of face, with neutral-colored hair roached up in a butch cut and round wire-rimmed glasses of the kind the kids all called Lennons – what Mark himself was wearing. The overhead light pooled in the lenses and hid the eyes behind.

“You stink like a nat,” the round-faced man said, “and you look like some kind of hippie.”

Mark had been letting his hair grow. He took a breath that was like dry-swallowing aspirin.

The man confronting him folded two sets of arms across his chest. Muscles rolled like billiard balls in the biceps. Below the lower set of arms were two sets of bulges that suggested more pairs of arms concealed under the tan T-shirt.

The sound system was cranking “Sympathy for the Devil,” which Mark didn’t think was propitious. “You don’t belong here,” the round-faced man said.

“Yeah,” said a man with a fierce bird’s head, white-crested and short-beaked. “This is our bar, nat.”

“Cut him some slack, Luce,” said a man who stood behind the man in the Lennon glasses. He loomed above the rest, at least Mark’s height, six-four. He had square-cut brown bangs and dark-prince good looks, though his height and the length of his face and lantern jaw gave him the appearance of Lurch’s ingйnue brother. He wore a tweed jacket buttoned over a black T-shirt.

He reached over the caterpillar man’s top shoulder with a huge, horrible green-on-green-mottled spiky lobster claw, placed the tip under Mark’s chin, and tipped Mark’s head up. Porcelain-hard spines dug into Mark’s flesh.

“W-why did you do that to Turtle’s picture?” asked Mark, partially emboldened by the intercession.

Luce’s four free hands shoved him in the chest. Hard. He stumbled back away from the claw.

“Are you stoned or just stupid?” Luce demanded. “He sold us out, man!”

“What are you talking about? What did he do?”

Luce looked around at his buddies with an exaggerated expression of disbelief. “‘What did he do?’” he mimicked. “What did he do? He only wiped out the fucking Rox. He’s only the biggest joker-killer in all history, you nat piece of shit! Where have you been, some other fucking planet?”

Well, yes, Mark thought. His lips began to spill denial: “Turtle would never do anything like that, there’s got to be some mistake”

A chuckle fell across anger and exculpation alike. “He doesn’t really get it,” the tall man said with a lazy smile. “He burned his brain out on drugs a long time back. Just look at him.”

His friend’s calm voice seemed to drain Luce of rage. He blew out a disgusted breath. “He doesn’t look like an objective socialist,” he said cryptically, and turned his back, “He’s bogus. Get him out of here.”

More hands were laid on Mark – purple hands, feathered claw hands, a pair of hands shiny with what looked like mineral oil. He expected the bum’s rush back to the street, but instead they propelled him away from the bar, in the general direction of the saloon-style doors.

He figured he had received a pretty clear message, though, so he kept walking that way. He was almost out when a boozy voice hailed him from the dim depths of the bar.

“Where’s your hurry, mate? Come along on back. I’ll set you straight right quick.”