Uncle's Story

Chapter Eight

The photograph fell out of Uncle Sam’s diary:

SAM WITH CLIFF HARPER, VIETNAM, 1969.

In it, Uncle Sam and Cliff Harper look as if they’ve just come up from the beach after a swim. It must have been taken when they were on leave in Vung Tau, some time after Operation Bucephalus.

Harper is sitting on the sand. Uncle Sam, in the middle of the photo, is resting in the harbour of his arms. Uncle Sam’s upper body is strongly developed. Around his neck is a greenstone hei tiki. His right arm is up in protest, as if he doesn’t want the photograph to be taken. He is laughing and his lips are curved in a resisting, ‘No.’ But the one who really draws the attention is Harper, who looks directly into the camera. With his boyish grin and half smile he traps you in his gaze. He seems to absorb the light. Wherever there are shadows — on his shoulders, in the definition of his back muscles as he encloses Uncle Sam in his arms — they serve only to highlight his skin’s extraordinary translucence.

Some men are lookers, but Cliff Harper is something else. His looks transcend time. Blond, clean cut and devastatingly handsome, he is breathtaking — yet, in his unswerving gaze is a mixture of innocence and knowing. He seems to come wrapped in a shyness and modesty that makes him the boy next door or the brother you wish you had. Or the boyfriend you dream about.

‘Michael? I know you’re there.’ My sister Amiria’s voice. ‘Pick up the phone, pick it up right now.’

I put Uncle Sam’s diary, and the photograph, aside.

‘Hello, Amiria, How was the honeymoon?’

’I knew you were there, I’m your twin, you can’t hide from me. The honeymoon was great but —’ Amiria wailed, ‘I’m pregnant.’

‘Already? Nobody gets pregnant on their honeymoon.’

‘You know what they say about the Mahana family.’ Amiria didn’t sound too happy about it. ‘The women are always so fertile. A man only has to look at one of us and she gets pregnant — though I guess a woman wouldn’t have to worry in your case! But that’s not the reason why I’m ringing. Tyrone and I are leaving from Auckland by United Airlines for Texas this weekend. His Dad wants him to start work at the casino immediately, and I’m starting to get cold feet. I may be leaving New Zealand for good.’

Amiria was sounding tearful. At that moment I felt the same sadness. My twin was going to the other side of the world.

‘Will you come up and say goodbye to me?’

‘I don’t know whether that’s wise. Mum and Dad will be there. I don’t want to start World War Three.’

‘Please, Michael. We might never see each other again.’

I caught the afternoon flight from Wellington to Auckland where the international terminal was crowded with Cook Islanders returning to Raratonga. Bedecked with flowers, they looked so festive and relaxed. Across the sea of flowers I saw Mum and Dad with Auntie Pat. For a moment I considered backing away. Perhaps I could pretend I hadn’t come, ring Amiria in Texas and give some excuse about work or fully booked flights. But Auntie Pat saw me and pulled me towards Mum and Dad.

‘Now, Monty,’ Auntie Pat said to Dad, ‘we’re all adults —’

Dad’s face went red with anger and Auntie Pat had to intercede again.

‘You’ve already spoilt Amiria’s wedding. Let’s try not to spoil her going away, shall we?’

Dad glared and said nothing. Mum looked awkward, as if she wanted to hug me but was being restrained by her loyalty to Dad. For a while we just stood there, a silent knot in that singing crowd. What can you say to a father who has made it quite clear that you don’t belong in his life any longer?

Amiria and Tyrone joined us. They had been doing some last-minute duty-free shopping. As soon as she saw me, Amiria began to cry. When we had been small children we were always trying to push each other out of the pram. As teenagers, there had been times when we wanted to throttle each other. The gap in her teeth was bigger than mine. How would we get on at opposite ends of the world?

Auntie Pat started the conversation.

‘I suppose your sister’s told you that she’s pregnant?’

Amiria sniffled and glared at Tyrone.

‘I told you to keep on using your condoms.’

Mum gave a nervous laugh, and Dad tried a different track. ‘Better start thinking about buying that double pram for the twins,’ he said.

Tyrone blanched, Amiria started to wail, and you could count on Mum to make things worse.

‘What did you two get married for? To have children of course!’

Another family argument began. Dad apologised to Amiria that he had only been joking. Mum folded her arms and said she didn’t know what the fuss was all about. Tyrone tried to hug Amiria and reassure her that he didn’t mind that she was pregnant.

In the middle of all of it, Auntie Pat pulled me away. ‘They won’t miss us,’ she said.

But I saw the look Dad gave her, as if she was doing something he disapproved of. Despite the fact that she was older than Dad, he was head of the family. Auntie Pat had always been somebody who said yes to him, a sister he had sometimes gently ridiculed because of her submissive nature and her spinsterhood.

‘Am I causing trouble for you, Auntie Pat?’

She stared at Dad and then turned to me — and I sensed that the relationship between her and my father was changing.

‘Yes,’ she answered. ‘Your father doesn’t like me taking your side. He’s used to me being the kind of girl I was when Dad had us under his thumb, and the kind of sister I’ve been — up until now. He doesn’t like it when I argue with him or speak against him. He’s not used to it.’

We went to find some of the stuff that passes for coffee at an airport. Auntie Pat was tense — but for another reason. I guessed it was the diary.

‘I’ve begun reading Sam’s story,’ I said.

She sighed and took both my hands in hers and held them tight. I was surprised at the intensity of the gesture and the force she put into it. Any further pressure and her grip would have hurt.

‘I never realised how much of a relief it would be to share his story with someone else. To share it with you —’

I knew what she meant. Once, I had simply been her nephew and she had been my aunt. My coming out had led to a particular act of trust — the giving to me of the diary. And like Auntie Pat’s relationship with Dad, hers and mine was changing. I liked this new Auntie Pat, this spirited woman whom I was becoming close friends with. Our alliance was shifting the shapes of both our lives.

Then Auntie Pat said something strange, as if speaking to herself. ‘And now that the lid is off Pandora’s Box, I guess whatever is in there, for good or ill, will come flying out —’

She closed her eyes and sighed.

‘When you get back to Wellington I want you to go out and talk to George.’

For a moment I didn’t know who she was talking about. Then it clicked:

‘George? So he didn’t die in Vietnam?’

‘No. What makes you think that! I haven’t seen him in many years but I rang Emma —’

‘Turei’s sister?’

‘You know about her? She gave me George’s number in Porirua, just outside Wellington. I told him you might want to talk to him about Sam. He’s expecting you at the Porirua Tavern eight o’clock Friday night, next weekend.’

‘Can he tell me about Cliff Harper too?’

A look of fear crossed Auntie Pat’s face. ‘How much do you need to know about Cliff Harper?’ she asked. Her expression was angry, almost bitter.

We rejoined Mum and Dad just as Amiria and Tyrone’s final boarding call was made.

It was obvious that Mum would cry. But none of us was prepared for Dad’s sudden grief.

‘Amiria,’ he burst out. Tears were rushing down his cheeks like a river.

At the sight of Dad’s sorrow, tears sprang to my eyes too. Part of it was because of the emotion of the moment. Another part of it was because here was my father, weeping for Amiria who was only going to America; and here I was, his son whom he had thrown out of the family. Had there been any tears for me? No. None. Even so I tried to close the gap between us.

When Amiria and Tyrone went through Customs, Dad was still weeping. I went to offer support. He looked at me, dabbing at his tears with a handkerchief, and turned his back on me.

‘Your mother and I have decided,’ he said. ‘Don’t come home for Christmas.’

Auntie Pat began to argue with him: ‘Now, Monty, that’s a stupid thing to say.’ But he was already walking away with Mum through that roistering Polynesian crowd.

My anger made me walk after him and force him to turn and look me in the eyes.

‘Dad, why do you think I stayed away from home? Why do you think I live in Wellington? It makes no difference to me.’

Did I mean it? Yes. No. Yes —

‘Then don’t come back at all,’ Dad said. ‘Ever.’

It was raining when I returned to Wellington. I was depressed and angry with myself for having pushed Dad too far, for mishandling the situation. But there was no use crying over spilt milk.

What’s done was done. The gloves were back on.

The taxi queue was chaos, with men in business suits jumping the queue and grabbing taxis without apology. A guy carrying a large, bulky canvas bag over his shoulder bumped into me, and for a minute I was on the defensive. Bloody idiot. Why didn’t he look …

But I was drained by the altercation with Dad and by Amiria’s departure. So I let the moment go — until he bumped into me again.

‘Remember me?’ the culprit said, laughing.

Shaven head. Taller than I had expected. Lasers had limned his profile with green fire. ‘Carlos.’

‘Good boy! You’ve passed Go and been given a hotel on Mayfair. Why didn’t you tell me that the person you were with at the club was your Auntie! I met your girlfriend, and she told me. I thought you were with another guy. Are you available?’

His boldness took my breath away.

‘I’m in a relationship right now, but it’s rocky. I’m not right for anybody. I don’t want to get involved.’

‘Damn,’ Carlos answered, making a teasing gesture. ‘Here I was hoping we’d do the wild thing! Look, I’d give you a lift but I’ve got to get this gear back —’ Apart from his canvas bag, he had a pile of aqualung equipment on a trolley. ‘I’ve been doing some diving up around the Hen and Chickens.’ He took out a piece of paper, and scribbled his telephone number on it. With another grin he pretended to throw dice.

‘If you don’t call me soon you lose your hotels on Mayfair and go straight to jail, you hear?’

Back at the flat, I dumped my bags and opened a can of beer. Life was changing all around me and it was happening so fast. In less than a month I had come out to my parents, my boyfriend had walked out, and my sister was now on her way to live in America. My parents no longer talked to me, and my aunt had given me the diary of an uncle who I had never known existed. A history which once I had been part of and belonged to was disappearing as surely as if somebody had pressed the Delete button on a document named Michael Mahana. Correction. I, Michael, had pressed the button and consigned the file to the Recycle Bin. By my own act I had rendered myself a man without a history. And now a guy named Carlos had given me a hotel on Mayfair.

Later that night, however, my thoughts turned to Jason.

‘The thing is that I do think I love you,’ he’d said. ‘If I do come back to you it would be nice to know that you will be waiting.’

I truly believed Jason. I wanted to believe him. Love was always the problem. Before you knew it you could only think of one person to the exclusion of any others. I had to admit to myself that I loved Jason. Although I was now writing myself a new history, I wanted to include him in it. I wanted a partner to walk with me into that brave new world. Too much time had passed already. There was a shapeshifter at work in my life, shifting the shapes according to forces I had myself set in motion. The shapes were out of control now, and I was afraid if too much time went past they would move Jason and me further apart. And I needed him. Physically as well as emotionally.

The next morning I telephoned Jason at work. I was so confident. I felt that all I had to do was talk to him and he would melt. That all I had to do was to say ‘I miss you’, and he would come running back.

But Jason wasn’t in. ‘Sorry, Michael, nobody knows when he’ll be back. Do you want to leave a message? All right, I’ll tell Jason you called.’

I put the receiver down. I was frustrated. I replayed the conversation I’d just had back in my head. You know what it’s like. You start becoming suspicious. You begin to imagine a hidden, unspoken text:

Sorry, Michael, Jason isn’t in, not to you. No, nobody knows when he’ll be back, but even if he was he wouldn’t talk to you anyway. Do you want to leave a message? You can if you like, but it’ll end up in the trash can. All right, I’ll tell Jason you called, but quite frankly, Michael, can’t you take a hint and take a hike?

I was really spinning out of control. I needed somebody to talk my anxieties out with. Who better than Margo, Jason’s analyst? I decide to telephone her.

‘I’ll see if Margo can talk to you,’ her secretary said. ‘Yes, she’s just finished with a client. I’ll put you through.’

The phone clicked and buzzed, and Margo’s voice came down the line. ‘Hello, Michael, how lovely to hear from you.’ She sounded warm, reassuring, like a soft couch you could sink into.

‘Margo, I need your help. Jason’s left me and I haven’t heard from him since. Do you know where he is?’

‘You don’t know where he is?’

‘No, and I’m going out of my mind with worry. When he first started to go to you I thought it was for simple issues. Like why is he unhappy? Or what he wanted out of life.’

‘You thought those were simple issues?’

‘I never anticipated that they would escalate like this. Three months down the track and he’s questioning everything and everybody. What’s happening to him, Margo? How can I help him?’

‘You don’t know what’s happening to him? You want to help him?’

I began to feel my temperature rising. Sometimes, talking to Margo was like listening to an echo or having a talking parrot in the room.

‘Michael, there are two issues here. One of them is what Jason wants and the other is what you want. Are you sure you’re ringing because of your concern for Jason — or is it because you’re really concerned about yourself? Have you considered that the reason Jason hasn’t let you know his address is because he doesn’t want to be found? He needs time to think these things out. He’s given himself permission to explore who he is, what he wants and where he wants to be —’

I listened as Margo put it all on the line for me. She was right: I was concerned for myself. Secretly I had hoped to hear her say that Jason had spoken about me, that he had told her he loved me and that he wanted us to be back together. Instead:

‘I have had to guide him through some very serious matters. While this might mean that some of us might not be happy with the outcome, what is more important is that Jason defines the outcome for himself. So if he chooses not to be in touch with anyone, we have to respect that choice.’

It all sounded so reasonable. And, obviously, if Margo knew where he was staying, she wasn’t telling. I tried another tack:

‘In that case, Margo, can you give me Graham’s telephone number?’

A pause. ‘You know about Graham?’

‘Yes.’ Her intonation had risen a few decibels. Why?

‘Well, I suppose it will be all right.’

A few moments later, I was talking to Graham, the buddy who had become Jason’s closest friend.

‘You’ve got a nerve ringing me,’ he said. ‘But if you want to know, Jason’s moved in with me.’

Moved in?

Graham went for the jugular.

‘Why don’t you leave him alone, Michael. Why don’t you admit that all he ever was to you was another scalp you could hang on your belt.’

Later that day Roimata asked me to meet her for lunch to talk about the submission I had written for Toi Maori — her Board was delighted with it. As usual she had chosen a restaurant where we would stand out: the only brown people in the room. She liked to make visual her political position — that Maori were a minority but, dammit, we could still walk through the front door and play with the family silver.

‘So things look really bad for you and Jason, right?’

‘You don’t have to sound so pleased.’

‘Well, you know how I feel about Jason. We’ve never liked each other.’

‘Can you blame him?’ I reminded her. ‘Who was that certain Maori maiden who tried to break us up by introducing me to an alternative candidate!’

‘He wasn’t only an alternative,’ Roimata said. ‘Don was Maori, he had mana and, from what I’ve heard, he wasn’t called Long Dong Silver for nothing. He was totally suitable but what did you do? You rejected him and became a — a potato queen.’

‘Look,’ I answered. ‘I like white boys. When I put my brown hands on them it makes me feel so dirty.’

Roimata knew I was joking. Even so, she couldn’t resist pushing home her point.

‘I only wish, Michael, dear, that you would see that you’ve been colonised twice over. First, by the Pakeha. Second by the gay Pakeha. Even in the gay world the White majority holds the power, the money, the decision making power — and it is their images which tell you what is desirable, what you should be like and what you shouldn’t be like.’

Roimata always had a particular strength, a particular vision. It came from her university training in Maori studies, women’s studies and art history — a potent combination that had turned her into an outspoken Maori activist. Add to this her lesbian identity and world, watch out.

‘Take, for instance, the Pakeha gay attitude to family,’ Roimata continued, warming to her subject and talking academic-speak. ‘The Western model de-privileges any notions that gay men or women might have children. Therefore, the White gay species is the only one which doesn’t replicate itself. But our Maori model is a tribal one. It should therefore include the possibility of growing a tribe. Of having children.’

Roimata’s passion was overwhelming, pouring out of her, and her eyes were glowing and luminous.

‘Don’t you understand, Michael? The issues of identity and space — of sovereignty, of tino rangatiratanga — that our people have been fighting for within Pakeha society are the same issues for gay Maori within Pakeha gay society! That gay tribe that your Auntie Pat asked about won’t just happen — it will have to be created, God dammit —’

Sometimes Roimata’s words weren’t expressive enough for her and, before you knew it, you became the target of her spontaneous passions. This time, she reached over the table, grasped my head in both hands and kissed me. Roimata was always helping herself to my body, leaving lipstick all over my face, so I wasn’t surprised. However, this wasn’t just a kiss. It was strong. Deep. Long.

‘Why did you do that?’ I asked. I had the feeling another shape was shifting in my life.

Roimata tried to hide her emotions with flippancy.

‘Well it works in films and in television ads,’ she said.

She looked at me, as if trying to decide whether to push her point or not. Then decided that the meter had gone too far into the danger zone, so backed off — for now.

‘But that isn’t why I asked you for coffee. Are you able to come to Canada? Next month?’

‘Canada?’

‘There’s a big indigenous arts conference being held in Ottawa. The First Nations people of Canada are hosting it and they’ve invited indigenous representatives from all around the world — Black Africa, the Caribbean, Asia, Europe and, of course, Polynesia. The conference will consider the models available for indigenous cultures in terms of setting up our own network. I’ve already been asked to go but last week, you lucky boy, I emailed them a copy of the submission you wrote for me. They want you to come with me. They’re paying all travel and expenses. Will you?’

‘If the dates work out, yes.’

‘Great.’

‘Now,’ I said gently, ‘that kiss —’

Roimata was silent for a moment. She hated being cornered. She nodded to herself and there was both sadness and acceptance in her eyes.

‘I know you’re gay,’ she began, ‘and you know I’m lesbian. But I love you, Michael, and I wanted you to know it.’

I took Roimata’s hand and kissed it. I was surprised to see tears welling in her eyes. Our relationship had always been unspoken. Amiria was my twin but Roimata and I shared something else. Amiria was part of the old world; with Roimata there was a promise of the new.

The moment grew dangerous. Then:

‘What a pity you’re not a woman,’ Roimata smiled.

‘What a pity you’re not a man,’ I answered.

In every other respect we knew we were made for each other.

At that moment the waiter arrived. ‘More coffee?’ he asked.

‘Yes,’ Roimata said. Her voice was strong and thrilling. ‘He’ll have a tall basketball player —’

‘A long black.’

‘And I’ll have —’

‘A flat white?’ I laughed.

‘Yes,’ she nodded. ‘A dead Pakeha.’

In the evening there was a knock on the door. I went down the stairs to answer it.

‘Jason.’

My heart leapt in my chest at the sight of him. He was looking stunning, and absence only made him look more desirable. Without thinking I went to embrace him but he took a step back.

‘No.’

I stood there looking at him, panicking that I could not touch him. How can you turn something around when the other person won’t let it happen? Jason was trembling, but there was a firm look on his face. I didn’t realise how much courage it had taken him to park his car outside the house that he once lived in and to knock on the door as if he was a stranger.

‘I hear you’ve been looking for me,’ he said. ‘I don’t want you ringing Margo or Graham. The reason why I’ve come is to demand that you don’t do it again.’

Demand? I acknowledged what he was saying with a nod.

‘Won’t you come in?’

‘No,’ said Jason. ‘Now that I’ve said what I want to say, I’ll go.’

Jason started to walk away. Ultimatums have always been to me like a red rag to a bull. I remembered that Jason had always been good at making statements and walking away before I could reply. As if I had no right of reply or that my reply wasn’t of any relevance. There was only so much of that I had ever taken and, as for playing the forlorn lover, it wasn’t a look that I liked. Before I knew it, I was walking after him and getting between him and his car. I wasn’t about to be rejected without a fight.

‘I wish you had told me to stay out of your life before I went to Amiria’s wedding. It would have saved me the bother of coming out to my folks.’

Jason pushed past me. Whatever Margo’s therapy was doing for him, he was certainly not taking anything lying down.

‘I won’t take physical intimidation,’ he said, ‘and I won’t be made responsible for what you said to your parents.’

‘You were the one who wanted me to do it!’

Before either of us could prevent it, we were arguing again, our voices echoing along the street, going over all that stuff, raking it back up.

‘I may have suggested it,’ Jason said, ’but the decision was yours, not mine, and it was time you came out of the closet. Margo was always saying in our sessions you can’t live a life of freedom until you come out; by doing so, you also come out to yourself, not just to the world. As far as you’re concerned, I was only trying to provide you with an example of how you denied me. In all the time we were together you never put me first. Whenever we walked down the street and saw any of your family, your Maori relatives or friends, you always seemed embarrassed I was with you. I got sick and tired of answering the phone and pretending I was your — your room mate.’

‘That’s unfair,’ I answered. ‘I was never embarrassed. Don’t try to palm off your feelings of embarrassment on me. If you felt that way it wasn’t my fault.’

‘How was I expected to feel? Listen to your message on the answerphone. What does it say? Not “Jason and I are not in right now” but “We’re not in right now.” Your voice is giving the message. You never ever considered what this made me look like. Not a partner. Just an anonymous somebody else who lived in the flat.’

I thought about that and conceded. However:

‘You could have changed the message,’ I said. ‘Why didn’t you?’

‘The flat’s in your name and you never gave me permission.’

It was beginning again, the descent into accusations and recriminations where guilt was situational, something unthought of until pointed out. I tried again.

‘We’ve talked about all of this before, and it was the reason why I came out to Mum and Dad. To make legitimate what we were to each other. I know there were times when I didn’t realise how you felt —’

‘Whenever you had to meet clients, did you ever introduce me as your lover?’

‘Did you?’

‘I’m not the one answering the questions, Michael, so don’t try to change the subject. Well, I can tell you the answer. No, you never did. You preferred, in fact, to take your girlfriend, Roimata, rather than me.’

I felt helpless. I was always having to provide proof, proof and more proof, more and more signs that I loved him. When would I ever find the holy grail?

Jason stared at me. He wrenched away, opened the door of his car and stepped in.

‘You’ve never understood me, Michael. Never.’

The line between us snapped and I could see him spinning away, spinning, spinning, and I reached out to grab him before it was too late —

‘I don’t want to lose you,’ I said.

Tears began to stream down Jason’s eyes. ‘When I’m with you, all my old feelings for you come back. But I have to figure out whether that’s because I really want to come back or if I’m doing it only because it’s what you want. I’m all mixed up, Michael, and talking to you only confuses me more. Did I get into my relationship with you because I needed to be loved? I’ve never really known what my needs are. As I said before, this has got nothing to do with you. It’s about who I am and what I want. Margo says I have to find the child in me. I have to touch him. Nurture him. Once I have found him, then I can begin to heal myself. I asked you to wait for me. Please be here when I come back.’

He started the car. Burnt rubber as he put his foot on the accelerator.

‘Jason? Jason —’

I was still depressed by my argument with Jason when Friday come around. That evening I was to drive out to Porirua to meet a man named George. Of course Auntie Pat had assumed that I knew George’s surname, which I didn’t, and when I’d rung her to ask her, she was either out or watching one of her beloved old movies on Sky’s Turner Classic Movies network. She’d had a satellite dish put on her roof just so she could tune in. Not even the telephone could take her away from all those melodramatic scenes with their sweeping violins when the hero kissed the heroine. Her favourite star was an actor called Guy Madison, who appeared in Till the End of Time. She had a whole scrapbook of photographs and clippings about him.

On a wing and a prayer I arrived at the Porirua Tavern. The bar was big and brash, dating back to the days when drinking yourself stupid was the name of the game — and bar owners provided carparks that took up to a thousand cars to enable you to do it. Carpet deodorant could not mask the overriding smell of cigarette smoke and spilt beer. One look at the roistering, carousing crowd in the public bar — wall to wall Maori and Pacific Islanders — and I knew there was only one hope of finding a man named George, one of the most common names of Maori men, and that was no hope. To make matters worse, I arrived right on show time. The lights went down just as I had paid for my beer at the bar.

Great. Now I’d be stumbling around looking for somebody I didn’t know in the dark.

A spotlight came up on a small stage at floor level. A fifty-ish singer came forward. A good-humoured cheer went up.

‘Hey,’ the singer grinned, ‘you can do better than that!’

This time he was rewarded with a bigger roar of welcome, and this seemed to please him. He was wearing a very bad wig, sunglasses, a dreadful white retro suit with bell bottoms, and a wide-collar half-unbuttoned disco shirt. With a gold chain around his neck, he was a throwback to the disco dinosaur days of the 1970s.

‘Thank you, folks, and thank you all my loyal fans —’ The crowd started to laugh. ‘— for coming along for this little stroll down Memory Lane.’

The band started to play, the singer took the microphone in his hands and began to sing that great Maori anthem to Mum, Dad, the Maori flag and puha pie, ‘Ten Guitars’. Once upon a very long time ago, the singer must have had a pretty good voice. All the bass notes were there. Trouble was, whenever he tried to reach for the high ones his voice wobbled like a train going off the rails and his suit split open, exposing a startlingly white and gruesome beer gut. But he was obviously a local favourite, and the punters sang along in the chorus — and they sang the high notes for him.

The song concluded with whistles, applause and stamping feet. The singer bowed, wiped the sweat off his brow and, to much laughter, took off his toupee and began to fan himself with it.

‘Thanks, folks,’ he said, ‘but now we’ll leave the singing to the younger fellas, eh? Put your hands together, because here they are, the ones you’ve really been waiting for, the Porirua Punishers!’

The atmosphere immediately changed. Black and Polynesian rhythms crisscrossed the bar room. From out of nowhere dry ice started to drift across the stage. Laser beams started to strike through the blackness. Two hip men and two girl singers strode out into the light.

‘Oh, wahine, haere mai ki au,’ the boys sang.

‘Oh, taku tane, let the good lovin’ flow,’ sang the girls.

‘Let’s do it! Get down to it! Arohaina mai —’

The audience roared. There was nothing like being in a bar filled with Maori and Pacific Islanders on a night when the music was cool, sweet and moaning with love, sex and wild dreams. A few minutes into their bracket, though, I checked my watch. I was supposed to meet George at eight and it was already half past. I walked through the crowd, targeting every fifty-ish man who looked like he could have been a Vietnam Vet. The only Vietnam soldier I had ever seen was Sylvester Stallone in the Rambo movies, so I looked for an older version of Sly. Somebody who once could have worn a red bandanna and, bare-chested, operated a machine gun with one hand and shot down a helicopter with it.

No such luck.

I decided to call it a night. I walked to the bar, intending to put my glass down and leave. The singer had divested himself of his white suit and was pulling handles. The lights blazed on his bald head. One of the patrons called to him:

‘Pae kare, George, you can still show those young fellas a thing or two.’

George grinned. Our eyes connected. For a second I saw surprise in his eyes. He nodded and reached across the bar to shake my hand.

‘You must be Michael. Patty told me you’d be coming tonight.’

George led me into another bar, empty because it was being renovated. ‘It’ll be quieter in here,’ he said. Gib board was stacked against the walls. Bags of cement, flooring materials and timber was strewn around the room. Muttering to himself, George kicked away some planks, found a couple of chairs, motioned me to take a seat and cracked open two beers. We sat drinking, the thump thump thump of the band coming through the walls. Neither of us said anything for a while and, as a way of beginning, I showed him the photograph of Uncle Sam with Cliff Harper. His hands trembled as he looked at it. He must have registered Harper but, if so, he pretended not to notice him. Instead, he pointed at Sam:

‘Yeah, that’s my mate. That’s the bastard. You want to know about him, right?’

‘As much as you can tell me,’ I answered.

He nodded. He went quiet for a moment. He looked at me, as if wondering how much he should say.

‘We must have been a bit younger than you — Sam, Turei and me — when we joined up to fight in Vietnam. God we were young. We were two years out of school and the war had been going on for about four years. Sam was our leader and we were his followers. Sam grew up hearing about his Dad’s exploits in war. You know about Arapeta, don’t you.’

‘He died before I was nine,’ I answered, ‘but I’ve heard the stories.’

‘Arapeta was the man,’ George said. ‘Some people thought he was more formidable than his older brother, Bulibasha. Strong as an ox. Never gave up. Stubborn as. Fast with his fists. I’ve heard he was a hard husband and a hard father. He wasn’t a person to cross but you have to hand it to him. He knew what was right and what was wrong, and very few people challenged him. He had guts. Anyway, Arapeta was about 24 when he married Auntie Florence. Sam was born two years later, and me and him are cousins on Auntie Florence’s side. We’re the same age, so that must mean Sam was born in 1948. Turei was a year younger.’

George chuckled to himself.

‘You know, they tell a story about Sam when he was born. When he came out of Auntie Florence’s womb, his hands were bunched up into tiny fists and the first thing he did was to poke Arapeta in the eye. Apparently, Arapeta poked him back: ‘You want to fight me, eh?’ The hospital had never seen such a sight as that — a proud father, skipping and boxing with his newborn son in his arms. From that time onwards, Arapeta was inseparable from Sam. When Sam was two, Arapeta bought him some boxing gloves. Sam liked nothing better than to box with his Dad. The trouble was that Arapeta always won. You’d think a father might pretend to lose some fights to his son, but Arapeta never did. Ever. By the time we were all at high school, it was still the same. Sam was a high flier. In the fifth form he was a prefect. He was Most Popular Boy and vice captain of the First Fifteen. But you know what his Dad used to say to him? “Only a prefect? I was head prefect! Only vice captain? I was captain!” Arapeta loved raising the bar to another rung, and that used to make Sam mad.’

George paused. Leaned forward. Took a sip of his beer.

‘I think, in the end, that’s why Sam joined up. I think he realised if he didn’t get away from his dad and make his own way in life, Arapeta would break him as surely as if he was one of his horses. Arapeta would have a stallion on the end of a rope and in his other hand he held the bullwhip. Every now and then he cracked the whip over the stallion’s head. It was his way of showing who was the master. Well, you can do that to horses, but it shouldn’t be done to a man.

‘Throughout Sam’s teens, his father was always cracking the whip at him. Letting it sing just above his head, when Sam was least expecting it. Just to make him remember who was boss.

‘Well, we were all in the Upper Sixth at high school when Sam started to talk about joining the Army. The next year we went out shearing in the Mahana Number Two gang. The following May, 1967, the news came that a rifle company of 121 from the First Battalion in Malaysia was going to Vietnam. Sam was sick of shearing, and he told us he was going into Gisborne to sign up. I decided to join him, and so did Turei. Our mothers, especially Turei’s Mum, Lilly, hated the idea but by that time it was too late. We went to Burnham Camp for basic all arms training, then we were shipped off to Malaysia for further training. From there we went with Victor Company to Nui Dat.’

George’s voice drifted into silence. He looked at me to provide another cue. I confronted him with Harper.

‘Can you tell me anything about the guy who’s with Uncle Sam?’

George lifted the photograph to the light. I watched his eyes crinkle and clear with recognition. His gaze went right through me.

‘What do you want to know?’

‘His name. Anything.’

George didn’t even blink.

‘Are you playing with me, son?’ he asked gently. ‘You know who he is — Woody Woodpecker, the American chopper pilot at Nui Dat.’

It was obvious George didn’t want to say more, but I pressed on.

‘I’m not playing with you. I’m just trying to understand their story. How they became —’

George’s eyes narrowed. The question hung in the air and I thought I had blown it.

‘Well, I guess it must have happened straight after Operation Bucephalus while we were on our second leave in Vung Tau —’

And suddenly the blades of a gunship were slapping the air hard, pop, pop, pop. It was late evening. Three young men were watching a helicopter making its way northwards across the town towards the dark Vietnam horizon.

Chapter Nine

‘Go, cowboys, go!’

The chopper convoy was wheeling through the air. In the street below, soldiers and civilians were cheering and waving. The noise was shattering as the convoy lifted up and over and away into the night. Sam was aware of the heat again. Yes, it had kept its promise:

‘I’m in every breath you take. You’ll never escape me. Never.’

Sam looked across at George and Turei, and grinned. They’d started at a popular Steam and Clean massage parlour where the girls had been playful and sexy — and when Sam had climaxed, his laughter following the release of tension had ricocheted through the walls setting everybody else off. From there they’d gone on to the LOVE FOR YOU HERE BAR where George had avoided the steak but had shouted Sam and Turei another round of sex; hey, that was the great thing about Vietnam. Sex was easy. All you had to do was pass over your money and you got laid. Now they were on their way to another bar where Turei had been told the action was supposed to be hot and the beer the coldest in Vung Tau. After half an hour’s searching, however, they still hadn’t found it.

‘Are you sure you got the name right?’ Sam asked.

‘I tell you,’ Turei insisted, ‘the bar’s called The Cock Door. We’re supposed to look for a sign of a naked woman. It must be around here somewhere.’

When at last they found the place, Sam let out a sigh of amused exasperation.

‘God, you’re dumb,’ he said to Turei. ’Not only did you get the sign wrong. You got the language wrong too.’

The bar was called Le Coq D’or and the sign was a golden rooster.

‘C’mon,’ George said. ‘We’ve already wasted good boozing time.’

Inside, the bar looked like a packing crate. The walls were framed with whatever wood the proprietor had been able to scrounge, and covered with large sheets of the thin metal that beer cans were stamped from. Thousands of Carling and Falstaff labels on top of the sheets gave the place a certain atmosphere.

‘Hey, Kiwis!’ The patrons were full of drunken exhilaration, shooting the bull, excited and happy to be alive and having a good time. The Vietnamese scrambled to service the orders of beer. The barmaids and whores cracked the air with shrill laughter.

‘There’s sure a lot of Aussies here,’ Sam said.

He jerked his head at a tableful of Australian soldiers. One of them was the red-haired bastard from the base and, as usual, he was eyeballing Turei.

‘Good,’ Turei said, staring back. ‘I feel like getting physical. I’ve had some sex, some drink, and now all that’s left to do is take out a certain red-headed cunt.’

He called for some beer. He paid the barman 50 piastres extra to spin the bottles on ice to get them really cold. Then, wiping the top of the bottle — not to mention the rust on the bottle rim — Turei offered a toast in the direction of the soldier.

‘Fuck all Aussies.’

To be fair, the baiting between the sides had started long before Sam, George and Turei arrived. There’d been some pushing and jostling, beer guzzling contests, and lots of macho crushing of empty beer cans. An Aussie and Kiwi soldier had done the Dance of the Flaming Arseholes standing butt-arse naked on a table, with two-metre lengths of toilet paper trailing from their bums. Bets had been taken as to who would do the dance first, someone had tossed a coin and, to much groaning from the Aussie side, the Kiwi soldier won first opportunity to set his competitor’s toilet roll on fire. But you can never trust the Aussies to play by the rules — when nobody was looking, someone in the crowd lit the toilet roll of the Kiwi soldier halfway along the roll.

Now there was no doubting the mood among the Kiwis — ‘Let’s get the bastards’. So that when the red-haired Aussie started to hassle Turei, everybody was primed.

There was deadly quiet as the bar patrons collected into three groups. The Aussies. The Kiwis. Everybody Else.

‘No, no!’ the bar owner remonstrated. ‘No fighting! No fighting!’

Turei patted him on the head and smiled benignly.

‘Okay, chief,’ he said. ‘How’s about another bet instead?’

‘What the bet? No more fire in arsehole. Something else.’

Turei turned to the red-haired Aussie.

‘Feel like taking me on, cobber? The guy who pisses the farthest wins.’

‘Not in bar! Not in bar!’ the bar owner yelled frantically.

But it was too late. The Aussie had jumped on the table, chugged as many jugs as he could, burped and pulled down his trou. Around him odds were being laid and bets exchanged. The bar girls giggled as they caught sight of the Aussie’s red bush and bloated pink dick.

‘Oh, he win for sure!’ they laughed. ‘And after you win, cobber boy, you spend money on us, we show you good time-ah?’

The Aussie soldier burped again, winked and nodded. He pointed himself towards the open door.

‘Clear the way,’ he called.

Everyone scattered.

‘On the count of five! One! Two! Three! Four —’

‘Five!’ the patrons in the bar roared.

For a moment nothing happened. Then something began to dribble from the end of the Aussie’s dick. Gradually the stream thickened and arched upward. Very soon it was fountaining higher, flowing and splashing across the floor. As it did so, everyone began to cheer. Onward and upward went the stream of piss — right to the threshold of the door.

‘You pay! You pay for pissing on floor of bar!’ the bar owner cried.

Shaking himself dry, the red-haired Aussie jumped down from the table.

‘All yours, Hori,’ he said to Turei.

Bad move that, calling Turei a Hori. Turei masked his anger and stepped nonchalantly on the table. He was always a showman and he knew how to play the crowd. He knelt down, as if making mental calculations: if x equals urine and y equals volume and you added z to represent distance then —

‘Come on, Kiwi,’ the red-haired soldier called. ‘You’re wasting time.’

‘Patience!’ Turei smiled as he wet a finger and put it in the air as if to test which way the wind was blowing. He shook his head sadly at the audience, and winked at Sam.

‘I’m going to have to up the stakes to make this all worth while,’ he said. ‘See that door? And the road outside? And the other side of the road? It’s double or nothing that I can piss that far.’

The audience cheered wildly. The Kiwis looked at each other nervously. There was no way Turei could do it.

‘You’re on!’ the red-haired Aussie called.

‘Okay,’ Turei answered. ‘In that case, you and your mates can go out there to make sure I reach the kerb and, by the time you’re there, I’ll be ready.’

With that, Turei asked Sam and George to get him some jugs. He downed the lot. Then, he pretended to do a strip on the table and dropped his jungle utilities.

‘Holy Hone Hika,’ Sam thought as Turei mooned everybody with a very dark and pimply set of buns.

The bar girls shrieked with laughter.

‘It’s not what you see that counts,’ Turei said, offended. ‘It’s what you do with it.’

He turned toward the door. Far beyond it was the red-haired Aussie and his mates. Then Turei showed everybody his cannon — and the Kiwis in the crowd groaned because, compared to the Aussie’s dick, Turei’s was short, stubby and uncircumcised. What they didn’t know, however, was that Turei’s was a grower not a shower.

Turei applied himself to a quiet and fierce concentration. He chug-a-lugged several more beers as he scoped out the problem, finalising his mathematical assumptions about the arc of fire and the velocity needed to piss across the road.

‘You really think you can do it, bro?’ Sam asked.

Turei nodded. He had finally concluded he was ready. ‘Stay right where you are, cobbers,’ he yelled to the Australians. Then he turned to Sam: ‘When you’re ready, my good man.’

Sam waved for silence:

‘Ready!’ he called.

Turei massaged his dick a few times, and it began to grow. He pinched his uncircumcised foreskin closed with his fingers. He began to piss and piss and piss. A gasp went up in the room as Turei’s foreskin ballooned outward.

‘Aim!’

With a loud grunt and strain, Turei sighted through the doorway of the bar. He put all the force of muscle into his thighs, elevated onto his toes, brought his balls and dick into a 90-degree position, let go his foreskin, flexed —

‘Fire!’

With a huge monstrous fart, which sent everyone coughing for fresh air, Turei sent a big yellow water ball of piss sailing through the bar. It was an astonishing and beautiful sight as it rose to the ceiling and over the heads of the patrons. On it went, reaching its zenith — and then it began its downward trajectory. Everybody — except the red-haired Aussie and his mates — fled for shelter.

This couldn’t be happening! This wasn’t possible!

Oh yes it was. Splash. The ball of piss hit the target.

The whole bar erupted into whoops of astonishment and laughter. Turei rolled his eyes as if there’d been nothing to it. George began to collect on the bet.

‘How he do that?’ the bar owner asked.

‘Mormon elders taught us applied science,’ Sam said.

A beer bottle came flying through the air. With a roar, the red-haired Aussie launched himself at Turei.

‘You black bastard —’ If there was another word that Turei disliked it was bastard.

‘Didn’t your mother ever tell you not to swear?’

With the sound like a crack of a bat hitting home, Turei let fly with his fists. Next minute the fight was on. Beer cans, Ba Muoi Ba bottles and other assorted articles rained across the room.

‘No fight! No fight!’ the bar owner cried.

But this was what life was all about, wasn’t it? Kiwis against the Aussies. The sheer exhilaration of physical contact. Even the bar girls got into the act, head butting and groin kicking for all they were worth. And right in the middle of it were Sam and George, laughing their heads off and drinking a toast to Turei.

‘Oh, you are one truly foul dude,’ Sam called.

The riot rolled into the alley, attracting more and more people.

‘Hey, boys! Fight! Fight!’

Within minutes, soldiers were leaping into the battle and it didn’t matter which side you were on. Then there were whistles as the Military Police arrived to break everything up, but they only made matters worse because they were White Mice — South Vietnamese police in white helmets, gloves and shirts — and, man, they were so clean.

Not for long. ‘Enjoying yourself?’ George asked Sam.

‘Yup,’ Sam laughed. ‘It’s just like Saturday night at home.’

More whistles sounded, and this time American Military Police arrived in jeeps from all directions.

‘Time to bail out,’ Sam yelled.

‘Damn,’ Turei said, and he smiled at the red-haired Aussie. ‘I’m going to have to make this short.’ With that, he let fly with an upper cut, and the Aussie was down for the count.

Sam grabbed George and Turei and they were out the door and running together with the rest of the crowd down the street. Next moment Sam tripped and took a dive. When he picked himself up, his mates were gone, not realising he was not following them. Panting, he saw blood on his hand and gingerly inspected his forehead: ouch. He must have been grazed during the fight. He pushed through the crowd and, as he passed an alley, he saw the sea, just on the other side of a strand of beach. He headed for the waves, where at least he could wash off the blood. He took off his boots and socks, and started to laugh when he thought of Turei’s pissing act.

By chance, Sam looked up and saw three other soldiers staggering about further along the beach. Two of them were trying to get the third to stand. Sam was about to leave but blood was still dripping from his forehead. He was splashing his face with sea water, the salt stinging the wound. He looked again at the three soldiers and he took in the situation for what it really was.

Only one of the three men was a soldier. The other two were local Vietnamese, probably friendly to the enemy, and they were beating the soldier up.

‘Hey —’

Immediately Sam was up and running, running along the beach to the rescue. One of the attackers turned. A knife flashed in his hand. Sam kicked, the knife went spinning, and the attacker went down. The other attacker whirled into the fight, leaping at Sam neck. Sam blocked, stepped to one side, brought his elbow up into the attacker’s face, and kicked again. Next moment, the two assailants were fleeing the beach.

Sam knelt beside the soldier, who was spitting and coughing and nursing his jaw. ‘Are you all right?’

The soldier looked up. He was paralytically drunk and his attackers had found it easy to lure him to the beach. His eyes were unfocussed.

It was Cliff Harper.

Harper gave Sam a shove that sent him sprawling.

‘Leave me alone, willya, just leave me alone.’

Next minute, disorientated, he was up and stumbling into the sea, wading, falling, advancing further and further in. Sam waded in after him, tackled and brought him down. They were chest deep in the water and, immediately, they were fighting.

‘I told you, leave me alone —’

Harper was swinging, ineffectually, his movements uncoordinated. He was half whimpering, half crying. He gave a mighty left hook which didn’t connect and, spun around by his own momentum, fell again into the water.

Sam waited for Harper to re-surface, but he only flailed wretchedly before going down again. Sam stroked out to where Harper had disappeared, took a breath, and dived. A few seconds later he felt something in his hand, pulled, and dragged Harper back up into the air. Together, the two splashed into shallow water.

‘How come you can’t swim!’ Sam asked. ‘Everybody can swim.’

‘Not if you come from Illinois you don’t. All we’ve got there are the great lakes and you have to crack the ice to get in. No way.’

Harper floundered up to the beach and fell down.

‘Oh Christ —’

He sat there, his elbows on his knees, cradling his face. He was panting with exhaustion. Sam sat beside him. Harper’s mind had flipped completely away from the attack. It was somewhere else. Somewhere darker.

‘What’s up with you?’ Sam asked.

Cliff Harper was up again, trying to find something, anything, to hurl at the sea. A rock. Another rock. And another.

‘This fucken war, that’s what’s up with me. I’ve lost some good pals to this war. Fox is gone now, God dammit, Why didn’t he bail out, man? And I keep taking soldiers to the front and they count on me to get them there alive and get them back alive. I’ve seen their eyes, how they trust me. They see me as some kind of god. When they’re stuck in some shithole of a situation they’re saying to each other, “Good old Cliff, he’ll get through. He’ll get us out of here to safety.” But there are times when I can’t deliver.’

Harper looked across at Sam. ‘Have you ever had a man die in your arms? Have you ever seen his eyes roll up and into white and felt the warmth draining away from his body? Have you? Every time I go out, every time I take grunts to the front, I know some of them won’t come back. When they come piling back into the chopper, you know what I see? I see the gaps where somebody’s supposed to be. During the medevacs after Bucephalus, for instance, there was this cute kid, couldn’t have been more than twenty for God’s sake. He kept saying, “Please don’t leave me. If you stay with me I know I’ll be okay. Please.” So I rode with him to the base hospital.’

Harper looked at his hands. ‘When we got to the hospital, the kid begged me to stay with him. He held my hands and he pleaded with me as if I was his saviour. But I didn’t listen to him. I said, “You’ll be okay, kid.” I was tired, I was exhausted, I just didn’t have anything left over to give to him. When I left him he was okay. But he up and died on me. I feel angry at myself for not being there for him. This war’s getting to me. I can’t keep on doing this. I can’t.’

Harper began to shiver. Next minute he was puking his guts out.

‘I’d better take you home,’ Sam said. ‘Get you out of those clothes. Get you to bed. Where are you staying?’

‘The Flags.’

Sam hoisted Harper to his feet. Together, with Sam shouldering Harper, they made their way to the soldiers’ club. Harper threw up a couple more times and, when they arrived, the sergeant on the desk didn’t want to know. He backed away from the wet, blood-spattered pair and threw the keys of Harper’s room to Sam.

‘If you’re planning to get back to your own quarters before curfew,’ he said to Sam, ‘you’re out of luck.’

‘Looks like you’re staying the night with me then,’ Harper said.

Once they were in the room, Sam propped Harper against the wall. Harper was still drunk and kept on sliding down. Sam lifted him up again and, to keep him upright, put a knee between his thighs. He started to take off Harper’s shirt and Harper came over all coy, buttoning up all the buttons Sam had unbuttoned.

‘For Christ’s sake, stop that willya?’ Sam said, slapping Harper’s hands away from the shirt.

‘Don’t get any ideas,’ Harper answered, wagging a finger, and giving Sam a blast of his acrid breath. ‘I’m heterosexual and I never kiss on a first date.’

Harper gave a drunken giggle, yawned and, next minute, his head came forward onto Sam’s shoulder as he fainted. Out like a light. Just like that.

‘Great,’ Sam said to himself.

It took Sam quite a while to wrestle Harper’s shirt off. He finally got it unbuttoned and pulled the tails out of the pants. He opened one flap and then the other. The wet shirt clung to Harper’s ratty T-shirt and skin, so that unclothing him was like ripping off a band aid. Harper’s dead weight didn’t help matters either. Sam placed his head in the middle of Harper’s chest and wrestled Harper’s arms out of the sleeves.

The T-shirt came next. Harper was struggling so much there was nothing else to do except take it in two hands and rip. The pressure of Harper’s chest did the rest, causing the T-shirt to break across his nipples. Sam reached behind Harper and ripped the back of the shirt. Harper made a murmur of complaint — and then surrendered. Exposed, his upper body was an artist’s dream. He was like a nude model in a drawing class, breaking out of the shreds and tatters of the shirt. His shoulders were wide and his chest was smooth and hard. His pectorals were well defined and his abs rippled in the light. Harper’s chest hair sprang in tight curls against Sam’s skin. His dogtags clinked within the clavicle of his breast. The scent of Harper’s armpits was like sea water.

Hard against Harper, Sam moved his hands down past Harper’s navel and started to undo Cliff Harper’s belt. Harper began to rotate his pelvis and murmur to himself.

‘Oh, baby, yeah baby —’

Harper’s penis pulsed against Sam’s thighs, and he began to butt against Sam’s pelvis.

‘Oh, boy,’ Sam said to himself between clenched teeth.

The pants dropped to the floor. Underneath, Harper was wearing Army regulation boxer shorts.

‘Okay, chopper boy,’ Sam said. ‘Let’s be having you.’

Sam bent, let Harper fall over him, flexed, and took him in a fireman’s lift. He kicked the door open. The dogtags waggled in his face as he carried Harper to the showers. He sat Harper in one of the stalls and turned on the taps.

‘Daddy, Daddy, the water’s too cold,’ Harper complained in a small boy’s voice.

Sam adjusted the temperature and Harper began to sigh. He curled himself up within the water, lifted his head to the flow, and started to snore. Leaving Harper there, Sam went back to the room and collected Harper’s puke-stained clothes. He returned to the showers and threw the clothes in the next-door stall. He stripped off and stepped into it himself.

Five minutes later, Sam switched Harper’s shower off. Harper protested as Sam pulled him out.

‘You’re not making this easy for me, are you!’ Sam said as he tried to get Harper dry with a towel.

Harper opened his glazed eyes and tried to focus them. He looked at Sam closely, gave up, and snuggled into Sam’s arms.

‘Tickles,’ Harper giggled as Sam dried his hair and under his armpits.

‘Okay,’ Sam said to himself, ‘here comes the moment of truth.’

With a quick motion Sam gathered Harper’s shorts in his hands and gave another rip. Harper sucked in his stomach in a deep indrawn gasp, clenched his buttocks, and the fly buttons went popping across the shower room floor. Unleashed, his penis stirred strong, and wedge-shaped, thick-rooted, in a grove of golden pubic hair. Cliff Harper was a big boy.

Sam towelled Harper briskly. For the sake of modesty he knotted the towel at Harper’s waist.

‘Alley-oop!’

Lifting Harper in his arms, Sam took him back to his room, put him to bed and pulled the sheet over him.

‘Night Mommy, night Daddy, night John-Boy,’ Harper whispered.

He turned into the sheets and began to hump them in a movement that Sam didn’t even want to think about.

Sam turned out the light and went back to the shower room, washed his and Harper’s clothes and strung them out to dry. When he returned to the room the moonlight was flooding in the window. Harper had turned onto his front, pushed the sheets down and released the towel. His right arm was flung across the bed and his head nestled on his left arm. One leg was pulled up, the towel tangled around it. As Sam watched, Harper moved, and the towel slid away. He began to breathe deeply. Sam grabbed a blanket and wrapped it around himself. He arranged himself as comfortably as he could in a chair at the foot of the bed.

‘Oh, what a night,’ Sam said to himself.

But it was not over. No sooner had Sam drifted off to sleep than Harper began to toss and turn in a terrible dream. Harper dreamt he was flying in a gunship convoy through a red sky filled with flames and showering sparks. All of a sudden, to his left, his friend Fox’s chopper was hit. Harper screamed. He followed Fox down through the fiery sky and saw Fox’s gunship explode on the ground. He managed to touch down and saw that the land had been napalmed to death and was writhing with agony. But Fox was walking out of the explosion. Only, something was wrong with Fox and he was not alone. Walking with him was a whole battalion of soldiers and, silently, they all began to pile into Harper’s chopper. But each soldier was Fox and he kept saying Don’t leave me, his fingers like talons on Harper’s arm. The chopper became filled with soldiers, and still they kept coming and wanting to board. I can’t take any more of you, Harper said. Before his eyes, all the men metamorphosed into masses of seething maggots — and Harper woke up screaming.

Dazed, Sam heard Harper’s scream and saw Harper was standing on the bed, backing away, making wiping motions, as if he was trying to brush something off his body. The entire gunship was filled with rotting corpses crawling with maggots, and each liquifying corpse was shouting Please don’t leave me. Then the nightmare changed, and the corpses transformed themselves into Vietcong soldiers, jabbing at Harper with bayonets and —

‘Harper —’

He saw Sam and gave an unearthly yell:

‘Keep away from me.’

He was going up the wall and straight over the cliff into hysteria. As Sam approached he lashed out and reached for Sam’s throat, as if he wanted to rip his windpipe out.

‘I’m not the enemy,’ Sam cried.

Harper whimpered and scrambled out of the bed, onto the floor and towards the wardrobe. He reached for something inside and then leapt back on the bed. Sam froze as Harper levelled a Colt .45 at his head.

‘Then who the hell are you?’ Harper hissed.

He pulled the trigger. The chamber revolved. Sam’s heart stopped. Click. The chamber was empty.

Harper pulled again. Click.

‘Bang. You’re supposed to be dead,’ Harper said.

His gun arm wavered. His sanity returned as he pushed against the nightmare and started to lift his gunship out of it. He cleared the battle zone, blinked, and saw Sam — and he looked down and saw the gun he held in his hand.

‘I could have killed you —’

The Colt fell to the floor with a thud. Sam was just in time to catch Harper as he collapsed, limp, into his arms.

‘Oh God … Fox, Fox, where are you, man … How long will my own luck hold, how long can I stay up there … How long before I go down …’

Harper began to shiver uncontrollably. He pulled Sam’s arms around him and whispered, horrified, into Sam’s face.

‘I can’t keep doing this … Flying backwards and forwards every day … Taking guys to the front and bringing them back dead … Day after day …’

Sam held Harper tight. He began to stroke him, and he thought of the golden palomino and a mackerel sky.

‘Harper, you have to find a place where you can put all this stuff you’re talking about, all these fears and nightmares. A place where you can throw it all. Then you have to lock it up there, and walk away from it without looking back.’

‘Without looking back? But they follow me —’

Sam waited a few moments for Harper to calm down. Then gently, he tried to free himself from Harper’s arms.

‘You should try to get some sleep now,’ Sam said.

Harper held on tight.

‘Please don’t leave me. If you stay with me I know I’ll be okay.’

For a moment, Sam hesitated. Then he nodded and lay down. Harper turned on his side away from Sam.

Sam didn’t know how long they stayed like that. But, just before sleep sneaked up, Harper’s voice curled across to him.

‘Was that you down there at the beach?’

‘Yes.’

Harper was silent. Then:

‘So you came for me when I went down?’

‘It was a small thing.’

Harper reached back for Sam’s right arm, pulled it underneath his armpit and across his heart.

‘Don’t let go,’ Harper said. ‘Please —’

And it was still not over. When the dawn came Sam was aware of a sudden stillness. His left arm was numb and he could feel Harper’s head nestling in the harbour of his upper arm and neck. He realised that at some time during the night Harper had turned in his arms and was now facing him. Something about the moment made Sam realise that Harper was awake.

Sam opened his eyes. As soon as he saw Harper’s dark green eyes staring at him and the double rows of blond eyelashes that framed them, he knew he was gone, gone, gone forever. His mouth was dry and his heart began to pound. Even so, he tried to escape.

‘I hate people watching me when I’m asleep,’ Sam said.

He pushed Harper roughly in the chest and tried to get up. As he moved he realised that Harper had an erection, his penis rock hard against his stomach. He heard Harper’s groan — or was it his own — and he gasped as he became drenched with sexual arousal, his own cock pulsating and lengthening.

‘No, this mustn’t happen,’ he said to himself.

He looked into Harper’s eyes and saw what must have been in his own eyes — the sheer incomprehension and horror that this could be happening with another man.

‘No,’ Harper said. ‘Don’t move —’

It was a plea for help. I’m heterosexual, Harper had said, and I never kiss on a first date. Harper was almost there, almost ready to climax. Sam saw he was fighting the moment, hoping that his insane desire would disappear. But Sam could feel Harper’s heart fluttering against his chest and the way in which Harper’s penis was pulsing. He was gasping, out of control, past the point of no return. And Sam found that the force of Harper’s lust was taking him with it.

‘No —’ Sam said.

It happened so quickly. Everything in him told him this was wrong. Maybe he’d been made vulnerable by Hempel’s death. Maybe it was living all this time taking orders. Then Sam looked into Harper’s eyes again and realised no, it was the reality of Harper himself. It was all mixed up with sympathy and passion and physical yearning — and he felt himself yielding.

Harper’s arms tightened around Sam. Propelled by desire, Harper began to turn Sam onto his back. He was whimpering, his penis trying to find a sheath. As he turned, Sam saw Harper’s eyes, clouded with a terrible look of fear and lust, and gladness too that Sam was capitulating. When the kiss came, Sam felt the electric shock of it go right through his body and somebody said Yes inside him, somebody who had been locked up all his life in a room with a closed door.

The touch of Harper’s lips was dry, firm, taking full possession of Sam’s mouth. The pressure increased, and Sam felt the full erotic force of the kiss begin to flood through him.

Suddenly Sam heard laughter. It was only soldiers going down the corridor but it was enough for him to wrench away from the kiss.

‘No,’ Sam said again.

Sam leapt up from the bed. His heart was pounding. He wanted to stay. He wanted to go. He didn’t know what he wanted. He pulled on his clothes. Quickly. Desperately. He turned to Harper. The blond American was sitting up in bed, a horrified look on his face. He looked at Sam and there was fear written in his glance.

Sam went to the door. He managed a smile.

‘You were drunk. All the bars were closed. We were both feeling horny. I was there. You were there. That’s all it was, right?’

Cliff Harper’s lips quivered. ‘Right.’

But that wasn’t all it was. When Sam got back to the Peter Badcoe Club, no amount of ribbing from George and Turei — ‘Where were you last night?’ ‘Was she hot?’ — could dispel his sense of regret about what had happened, or what had not happened, between him and Cliff Harper. Throughout the day, the touch of Harper’s lips, the smell of him, the feel of him, remained. He excused himself from his mates, needing time to himself, and made his way to Roches Noires Beach. When he was a teenager and wanted to be alone he would go down to the Waipaoa River. There, beside the deepest waterhole, he would take a heavy boulder, dive, and let the stone pull him down to the bottom. Anchored there, amid the swirling mud and sunken logs, the eels nipping at his body, he would sit looking up at the surface of the water. What bliss it had been to be alone in that glowing green world. To watch the bubbles streaming up from his lips — until, inevitably, the pressure to breathe would build, and he would kick himself from the bottom and soar towards the light. His first gasp of breath was both a victory and a defeat.

Sam swam as far out as he could, and lay on his back, looking up at the sky. He thought about Harper and searched his past to see if there was anything there which predisposed him towards men. Nothing. But, somehow or other, Harper had got through to him.

‘So why didn’t you let it happen, Sam?’ he asked himself.

This was why. The mana of a man, his value in Maori culture, was in his fighting power and his warrior tradition. It was all symbolised in a man’s cock. It, as much as the fighting club, personified all that a man was. With both, man was made sacred and women profane. This had been the way since the beginning of Time when Ranginui, the Sky Father above, was set apart from Papatuanuku, the Earth Mother below. Ever since, the roles of men and women had been preordained. Indeed, all the Gods were male until Tane decided to make a woman out of the red dust and mated with her. Male to female union was therefore sanctified by the gods. Any other kind of union could never be countenanced; it transgressed the order of the Maori world, it transgressed the tapu nature of man. The consequences were too fearful to contemplate. You relinquished the mana, the tapu, the ihi or life force and the wehi or dread that the dynamic of being a man depended on, to maintain your power relationships with the world. You brought noa upon yourself, the loss of sacredness, and, without sacredness, you were prone to punishment, dishonour, banishment and death. You also brought this on your partner.

In the evening, trying to drink himself out of his sadness, Sam sat in yet another Vung Tau bar with George and Turei. He called for another round and, from the corner of his eye, saw Cliff Harper. Immediately Sam’s heart lifted. He grinned, and Harper grinned back. His smile lit up the whole room. But Sam suddenly felt slashed by lightning, and he turned away.

‘I can take my punishment, Harper,’ he thought to himself, ‘but I won’t allow you to be punished.’

When he looked back, he saw that Harper was still looking, and his fingers were moving.

Hi, Sam.

The message was filled with loneliness and need, as if Harper was the only one left in the world. Across the crowded bar it came: ‘Is anybody there? Can anybody hear me?’ Sam put up his hands and deflected it.

Sam, I know you can hear me. Please talk to me.

Harper was standing, working his fingers with furious speed. All around, people were looking at him, curious. The words started to come out too fast, losing all sense, desperate.

Talk to me talktome pleasetalk …

Sam turned to George and Turei. ‘Let’s get out of here,’ he said.

The next day, George and Turei were sleeping off a hangover. Sam had been told about a Buddhist temple on the outskirts of Vung Tau. For some reason he felt he should go there. He borrowed a bike from the Club and negotiated his way out. For a while, Sam was escorted by a pack of laughing young boys. They zoomed around him like butterflies, shouting out: ‘Hey! Kiwi! Can you fly?’

At the outskirts the boys dropped behind, shimmering, settling in the dust. Sam found himself biking through another country. This was a country that breathed. At every inhalation the trees, grasses and rice shoots bent down as if bowing to the wind. At every breathing out, the soft warm breeze brought with it the tintinnabulation and tinkling of a thousand temple bells.

‘One small piece of land,’ Sam thought, ‘and so much blood spilled for it.’

The sun was at its apex in the blue-hot sky, and very soon Sam found himself sweating. But he didn’t care. The oxygen breathed through him, making him at one with the breath of the land, and he began to smile at his sense of unity with God’s creation. The sun was shimmering. The paddy fields stretched away into the haze. Raised dykes criss-crossed them like a chequer board. Family tombs popped up here and there. In some of the fields women were cutting the rice with sickles, feeding the stalks into threshers worked by fast pedals, stacking up the straw like conical hats. In other fields the women bent over, uprooting seedlings, gathering them into bundles and carefully placing them into sacks. Some walked along the dykes with heavily laden shoulder poles. In adjoining fields, men guided harrows yoked to plodding water buffalo. In the calm, almost soporific surroundings, Sam was reminded of his own people of Waituhi, his aunts, his uncles, his kaumatua and kuia. They lived like this too. Substitute maize and kumara for rice and they could be bending in these fields.

An hour later Sam, perspiring heavily, stopped to rest. Opposite him workers were shifting water from an irrigation channel to a field, using a conical basket sealed with lacquer and attached to a double rope. Standing either side of the channel, they dropped the basket into the water, then stepped back and tightened the ropes, swinging the brimming basket up into the air and dumping the water into the field. Nearby, an old man was sitting beside the road. He was dipping a ladle into an urn and drinking from it. When he saw Sam he gestured to him.

Water? The drink to give you life?

Sam nodded.

‘Yes. Wai ora. Yes.’

The man watched with approval as Sam drank. When Sam was finished he made questioning motions.

Are you going far?

Sam nodded and put his hands together, signifying prayer.

The old man nodded, frowned and then pointed to the sky. Sam was surprised to see that clouds had begun to gather. Even as he stood a gust of wind swirled through the green rice shoots.

Go fast! the old man motioned.

He made a rising and dipping motion with his hands.

Get to temple just before the rain, just over the next hill.

Sam smiled as the old man hastened him to his bike and, with a strong push, sent him on his way. At the top of the rise, Sam could see the rain falling across the landscape, like cobwebs from the sky. The wind was rippling the water in the irrigation channels. Workers were moving quickly along the banks of the rice paddies, heading for shelter.

Ahead was the Buddhist temple. Sam let the bike freewheel down the slope. The exhilaration bubbled within him and he began to laugh. Then the rainstorm was all around him, pelting him. Staining the red dust and turning it into mud. Quickly, he dismounted and ran towards the temple. As soon as he reached the threshold, he felt a sudden fear:

‘No, I can’t go in.’

All around him were carved figures, forbidding in their strangeness. He stepped back and turned to leave. Better to face the rain than to continue inside. There, he would have to confront the temple’s holiness. There, he would be unmasked, unclothed in the sight of God. He took one step away from the temple and then another. And at that point, Buddha exhaled and breathed upon the rain. And every raindrop from Heaven held within it a tinkling bell, so that the entire landscape resounded with the harmonics of life.

Sam felt awe overwhelm him, as if the pavilion were calling to him. He knew it was only the austere voices of chanting monks but it sounded like a karanga, reaching out and around him, calling:

Haramai, Sam.

So it was that Sam turned and confronted his fears. He saw before him a pavilion gate, blue, the colour of Heaven. Stretching ahead was a courtyard of tiles, green, the colour of humanity. He sensed the imminence of a kind of peace that was also a mystery. He took a step over the threshold — the paepae — and the pavilion opened like a meeting house and welcomed him in.

Before him was a large inner courtyard, open to the elements. Around the pavilion was a portico coloured with a pale green wash. Ornately carved wooden pillars marked the perimeter, and at the foot of each pillar were pots of flowers. Two dragons, yellow and red, stood on a pair of tigers. The dragons faced each other with snarls and curling tails. Sam remembered that the Vietnamese believed they were descended from a dragon king who mated with the queen of the fairies to produce a hundred sons, one of whom became the first leader of Vietnam. Dragons were lucky and protective.

But what drew Sam’s attention was a pagoda at the far end. Within was a huge altar dominated by a golden Buddha.

Come to me, Sam.

Sam walked across the courtyard. He was drawn along a centre line of white marble, the path of Immortals. As he entered the depths of the temple he noticed little details. Elaborate ceramic friezes; wood, metal and ceramic sculptures; numerous drums, gongs, urns and other Buddhist relics. Diagonally across from him he saw saffron-robed monks in processional along one side of the pavilion. They were walking, shaven heads bowed, through a gateway to some outer temple garden. One of the monks looked up, saw Sam, and paused.

Sam approached the pagoda. The roof was sustained on thick hardwood columns carved with ancient inscriptions. The gilded Buddha was sitting within on an inverted gold lotus throne. Buddha’s hands, with their stylised fingers, were resting on his knees. His eyes were open, and his face had an expression of total peace, of extraordinary serenity. Its majesty and permanence transcended all.

Scattered on the altar were offerings of food and flowers. Incense spirals, each more than two metres long, hung from the gilded ceiling. Below them were large brass urns filled with sand and bristling with incense sticks. Sam stood there for a moment, looking up into the face of the Buddha. He saw that a monk had come to his side. He lit a candle and took a package of lit incense sticks and held them over his head. The monk closed his eyes and said a long mantra. Then he knelt, continuing to intone the mantra. The incense wafted around him as he held the incense sticks above his head.

Sam knelt to pray.

I need your help.

He closed his eyes, and a feeling of vertigo overwhelmed him, sweeping him off his feet and, before he knew it, he was tumbling through Te Po, the Night. Down, down, down he plummeted. Was this his punishment? He felt Harper’s kiss, and his heart was pounding with fear. He saw Harper’s face above him, heard himself whimpering, caught between desire and self loathing. He saw that they were both tumbling through the darkness, sending ripples that disturbed the entire universe.

Time stretched and expanded, and Sam knew that they had fallen through thousands of years. Sam cried out to Harper:

Go back, damn you, let go.

But Harper looked at Sam and shook his head. They kept falling, like two astronauts whose lifelines had snapped, their oxygen leaking away from the trailing cord.

Oh, God, then breathe, Harper, breathe in deep.

A black hole was opening below them and stars were cascading into it: the entrance to Te Kore, The Void. Once through its gateway there would be no return. And Harper thought Sam had accepted him but with one quick surge of strength Sam kicked at Harper and sent him spinning away.

No, Harper cried.

Alone, Sam fell through the black hole. Punishment was for him alone to take. Sacrifice was for him alone to make. The sin was his and his alone. His lungs began to burn and he fought against opening his mouth, because he knew that there was no air to breathe and that he would surely die. He felt his heart beating in his brain, and, all of a sudden, four words formed on his lips.

Please, not eternal darkness.

With a start, Sam opened his eyes. His heart was thundering, almost breaking out of his chest. He grasped the altar, steadying his terror. How long he knelt there, he never knew. Perhaps it was another thousand years. He looked up again at the face of the Buddha and made an obeisance to the figure. All the world seemed to recede around him and away from him. More years passed by, the rain tinkling down like a gentle benediction. Mist surrounded the head of the Buddha, refracting the light. A patch of light, a golden glow, opened above him and Buddha’s aura came streaming down. It was like an absolution.

Suddenly Sam saw that something was moving in the stillness. From the corner of his eye he saw it. Something dislodged by the torrent of rain coursing down the pitched roof, sliding down the pillars of the temple, coiling wet and glistening, slipping downward through the rich red and gold figurines. A cobra, dusky and dark in colour, almost two metres long, with a diamond-shaped head. Ferocious. Deadly. One bite and you were gone in a few minutes, foaming at the mouth and screaming in hideous death.

Mesmerised, Sam watched as the cobra slithered to the floor. There it paused, saw the patch of sunlight glowing where Sam was sitting. It began to slide towards the sunlight, scraping the cobbles like dry leaves falling. At the last moment it sniffed Sam and reared, its hood flaring, ready to strike, its black tongue a piece of lethal licorice, feathering in and out. It stood over Sam, crowding him, and when it hissed, its hood flared again.

Without realising what he was doing, Sam also began to feather his tongue in and out in the action that Maori call the pukana. The cobra reared even higher, and so did Sam. For a moment both Sam and cobra eyed each other.

Then Sam stopped. Relaxed. The cobra imitated his movements. Lowered its head from the strike position. Feathered water from a small puddle among the cobbles and without a look at Sam, coiled itself in the sun, resting itself like he was, waiting for the rain to stop.

‘You and me, snake,’ Sam thought. ‘You are hated and reviled, and men would wish only to stamp on your head and crush you beneath them. If they knew about me they would do the same. Our paths have crossed. Let us enjoy our brief friendship in the sun.’

Sam closed his eyes. He wasn’t sure for how long; perhaps he dozed. One minute. Ten minutes. The sun was so warm on his face. A shadow awakened him. The saffron-robed monk was kneeling beside him. The cobra had gone. But the monk was looking at Sam in a quizzical manner. He cocked his head to one side. His tongue began to feather in and out.

It was so comical that Sam felt the urge to laugh. Soon his laughter was uncontrollable — and the monk joined him, laughing and laughing. Then, in a quick movement, the monk pressed his hands together and bowed. He motioned with his hands, and Sam saw that the world had changed. Although drops were still falling like a beaded curtain from the perimeter of the temple, the storm itself was over. When Sam stepped into the sunlight, it was as if the whole landscape was holding its breath. The world seemed to stop, to glow, to find serenity. With a sigh, a deep exhalation, the world began to renew itself. The sky was a sumptuous blue, unrolling clear to the other end of the universe. The rich rays of the sun were transforming the landscape into a place of glowing beauty. Wild swans flew overhead like a glissando, their wings describing arabesques in the light. Where the rain continued to fall was a soft shimmering curtain. More birds flew homeward, this time starlings and swallows, swooping and circling towards far distant trees. They piped the world with glorious song, and some spun songs of delight above Sam as they found roost in the temple’s eaves.

Sam mounted his bike. He ascended the rise. When he looked back at the temple it had been spun into gold by the sun. All around it, the paddy fields had turned into emeralds. The dykes were silvered filigree. Arching above was the rainbow.

And Sam was laughing and crying at the same time. His life had reached a point of perfection. A kind of understanding. A moment of revelation. He felt more open to life than he ever had before. He closed his eyes and breathed deep. It was as if he had disappeared into the landscape, become transparent, and was watching all the molecules that made up man, leaf, snake, bird of sky, river, mountain, sun stream through himself like glowing lights.

It was going to be okay. When he next saw Harper he would explain and maybe Harper would understand and, if there was a God of second chances —

The wind breathed through Sam, in, out, in, out.

He heard the universe singing.

Chapter Ten

If there was a God of second chances …

No sooner had Victor Company returned to Nui Dat than they were called to a briefing. Sam had no time to talk to Cliff Harper, to move his fingers: Hi Cliff. Yes, let’s talk please, let’s talk in that secret language that had become their own.

‘The American’s have called us in to help them,’ Major Worsnop reported. ‘We took out the enemy base, but there’s still a large battalion out there. They were found yesterday and now the Americans have begun Operation Roundup. They’ve already begun to drive the enemy towards the corral here —’

Major Worsnop pointed to a semi-circular valley with an opening, the gate, at one end.

‘Once they’re in, our job is to close the gate.’

At 1400 hours, the choppers began to ferry Victor Company to the operational zone. An hour later, they were on the ground and had dispersed into their assigned formation. But Intelligence had underestimated the enemy strength, and the gate was exposed to open ground.

‘This smells bad,’ Lieutenant Haapu said.

The platoon entered a deep ravine. There was no cover and nowhere to go except forward or back. The only concealment was in the creek bed, and there the vegetation was sparse.

This was Vietcong terrain. Like a trapped scorpion the enemy would already be waiting, sting curved and ready to strike.

Sam signed to his section to spread out:

Open formation, one up.

He was working on instinct, just in case they were hit.

Suddenly, something flowered and fizzed from the right.

‘Hit the ground!’

Sam rolled to his left — and the hillside opened up with enemy firepower. The first rocket hit. An orange ball of flame erupted. A second enemy rocket exploded in the creek bed, sending up mud and water like a fountain. Then came the automatic heavy machine-gun fire.

‘Fall back. Fall back!’ Lieutenant Haapu called. ‘Everybody get the Hell out —’

There was a hail of bullets, like a swarm of angry bees, and Lieutenant Haapu was down with a round through his chest.

Sam waited for a lull as the enemy finished their first magazines, then he was up and over to the lieutenant, repeating his order:

‘Fall back, you bastards! Turei, get a line on that rocket launcher.’

Lieutenant Haapu was sitting now, looking at his wounds.

‘Fuck, fucken bast-ard.’

Sam grabbed an arm and hoisted Lieutenant Haapu up. Turei had managed a lucky shot and had taken the rocket launcher out.

‘Medic!’ Sam called.

Vickers arrived and started to work on Lieutenant Haapu. His left lung had collapsed and he was having trouble breathing. Vickers tore open a compress bandage, split the plastic in half, and began a patch up job on him.

Sam turned to George. ‘Go to Turei. Both of you give us cover while I get the lieutenant out of here.’

George nodded and began wriggling quickly through the elephant grass to Turei.

‘Sir,’ Sam said to Lieutenant Haapu. ‘We’ve got to go.’

Lieutenant Haapu nodded. He took a quick look at the situation. The men were moving fluidly in retreat but the enemy was picking them off.

‘You’ve got to make smoke,’ he said. ‘Put up a screen to hide everyone.’

Sam understood. But the wind was capricious, opening up holes in the smoke. All of a sudden there was a yell as Flanagan, the radio operator, took two rounds in the back and two rounds in his right leg.

‘Get the radio! Get the radio!’ Sam called to Red Fleming.

Over to the side, there was another cry as Manderson was hit.

‘Goody goody,’ Johanssen said to his stricken colleague. ‘Now I get the chance to fire the big gun.’

He began to lay down fire as fast as he could.

Trying to gain an edge, Sam speed-crawled after Red Fleming to the radio operator. Flanagan was drooling, spitting blood, but trying to keep breathing. His eyes were wide, staring up at the blue sky with terror. As soon as Sam reached the radio he grabbed the handset and gave the platoon’s coordinates:

‘We’re pinned down. We have dead and wounded. Request gunships, reaction force and extraction.’

The enemy started up again. Sam watched as a grenade came sailing into the area. He scrambled on top of Flanagan and rolled with him away from the grenade. Whaaam. The concussion slammed him and he felt a hot stinging in his crotch and legs.

‘I can’t get hurt,’ he thought. ‘I’ve got to get the men out.’

Sam pulled out one of his own grenades, popped the handle off, counted a couple of seconds and threw it in the direction of the hillside. With relief he saw that his men were halfway out of the enemy’s killing zone, firing and moving as they retreated, pulling their wounded comrades with them. Red Fleming was lobbing grenades and firing his M-79, trying to get air bursts on the trees. Johanssen managed to find good cover and was hitting the enemy with all he could give. Machine-gun chatter filled the ravine. With every burst the belt lashed like an angry snake. Johanssen grabbed and hooked a second belt. The spent cartridge cases spilled out of the weapon as if they were the shells of peas. Raising his head, Sam saw that his men were in the clear. But George and Turei were still out there.

Sam tapped Lieutenant Haapu on the shoulder. ‘Sir, I have to leave you a moment.’ Sam made his way over to Johanssen: ‘Can you keep the enemy’s heads down? I’m going to get those two dumb Horis out.’

Sam crawled over to the dry creek bed and rolled into it. Enemy bullets whizzed over his head and kicked up small puffs of dust. Five minutes later he hauled himself up beside George and Turei. The two were talking dirty.

‘Did I ever tell you that your sister was a great lay?’ George asked Turei. Squeeze the trigger. Bang.

‘Not as good as your mama, you bastard,’ Turei answered. Line up the sights. Squeeze.

‘I heard about that. Mum told me you got a tiny one.’

Enemy fire. Duck your head.

‘Is that so? Well, my sister said that you were all blow and no go.’

Turei saw Sam and, at the same time, heard the thunder of gunships approaching from the north.

‘Oh, hi Sarge,’ Turei smiled. ‘Hey! Isn’t that the cavalry?’

Sam grinned and remembered all those bad B-grade Westerns Mum had taken him to at the Majestic in Gisborne. Sometimes Turei or George would come too. The wagon train was surrounded. Those Redskin Injuns were riding their horses around and around it, picking off the poor defenceless settlers. You could never trust them, those mean snakes-in-the-grass varmints. The settlers were down to their last bullets and were getting ready to go to Heaven. The heroine, either Rhonda Fleming or Joanne Dru, was trying to look brave and resolute. Whaddyknow, on the soundtrack came the strains of ‘Oh! Susannah’ and, yippee, the cavalry arrived, their horses high-stepping onto the battle scene. Then, it was Guy Madison, Ronald Reagan, John Wayne, Randolph Scott, Joel McCrae or Errol Flynn crying, ‘Lower sabers!’, ‘Charge!’

The reaction force was landing, giving cover fire.

‘Time to go, my beauties,’ Sam said.

‘You said it, Sarge.’

Turei stood up. He walked a few steps.

All of a sudden there was a shift in the air, as if something was approaching. A sense of whirring wings as something which had called out a name on a long-forgotten evening came flying into the valley.

The owl, uttering a harsh hunting cry.

George looked up, his face blanched, and he put up his arms to protect himself.

‘No—’ Sam roared.

Turei looked back. He began to run towards George. But the owl beat past George, so close — and that’s when Sam realised:

‘Turei.’

Somewhere on the hillside, an enemy machine gunner zeroed in on a standing soldier. He sighted. Tracer began to flow, so beautiful, so mesmeric, floating like wings down and around its target.

And Turei fell.

‘Hey, you bastard,’ George yelled at the owl. His eyes were raging and the hupe was flowing. ‘You were supposed to come for me. It’s me you want. Me.’

He stumbled to where Sam was already crouched beside their wounded companion. The blood was spilling out, everywhere. Every time Turei moved it spurted like a fountain.

‘Jeez,’ Turei said.

His eyes rolled up, he began to shudder, his mouth pouring blood. Then he was gone. And, as he held his friend, Sam began to break apart with the horror of it all. Even though there had been no physical transgression, it was already happening.

‘This is all my fault,’ he thought. ‘I caused this. Everyone around me will be punished.’

The company was in shock when it returned to Nui Dat. Sam made his report to Major Worsnop, and Captain Fellowes telephoned Army Headquarters in New Zealand to tell them about Turei’s death. The news would be delivered to Lilly, through official channels but:

‘I’ll do it,’ Sam said. ‘Turei was my responsibility. It will be better for Auntie Lilly to hear the news from me.’

When the connection was made Sam, devastated, was already weeping, and Lilly knew straight away what had happened.

‘I blame your father for this,’ Lilly said.

She was already screaming with grief and, in the background, Sam could hear others of Turei’s family yelling and screaming with her.

‘I want Turei returned to me immediately, do you hear? I don’t want my son to stay a minute longer among the people who killed him.’

Lieutenant Haapu was the one who should have accompanied Turei’s body back to New Zealand, but he was still in a critical condition. Sam pleaded with Captain Fellowes on his and George’s behalf.

‘Sir,’ he said firmly. ‘It’s our job. We came together. Turei was George’s best mate. As for me, I failed to look after him. I have to front up to the iwi — and to my father.’

‘Okay, Sergeant,’ Captain Fellowes said. ‘I understand. I’ll do my best.’

Spent and exhausted with grief, Sam was walking back to his tent when Cliff Harper stopped him.

‘Hey! Sam —’

Harper looked so wonderful, his blond hair glowing in the moon’s light. He was the only person that Sam would have wanted to see at that moment. But then Sam thought of Turei’s death — and he knew what he had to do.

‘Harper, I know what you’ve come about, but I don’t want to hear it. I want you to turn around and walk away.’

Harper’s face was set with determination.

‘You’re not getting away as easy as that. I’m a stubborn Illinois boy and I confront everything that happens to me. I don’t walk away from anything.’

‘In that case,’ Sam said, ‘I’ll do the walking.’

He went to pass by, but Harper pulled him back.

All Sam wanted to do was to take a stone, dive into the river and stay down there forever.

‘No you don’t,’ Harper said. ‘I want to have it out with you. I thought I could get over what happened the other night, but I can’t. So I’m going to put it on the line for you, Sam. Something happened to me—’

‘Put it out of your mind, chopper boy,’ Sam answered, brutally. ‘Whatever you thought happened, didn’t happen. Okay? Now let me pass.’

He pushed past Harper. He was three steps away, his heart thudding, when Harper’s voice stopped him in his tracks.

‘Listen,’ Harper shouted. ‘All I want to know is: did it happen to you? If it didn’t, fine, you go your way and I’ll go mine. But if it did —’

Sam turned. Harper was standing in the moonlight, his fists clenched, his arms outstretched in a gesture of helplessness.

‘Sam, do you think I want to admit to myself something that would disgust me?’ Harper was flailing to explain himself. ‘But what do you do when something big hits you between the eyes? I’m in big trouble and I’m burning up inside. You know what I did last night? Me and Seymour went into Vung Tau and had us three women apiece, but something’s happened to me in here.’ Harper jabbed at his heart. ‘I keep thinking of you.’

With a cry of anger, Sam launched himself at Harper and they were sparring with each other.

‘Listen, you bastard,’ Sam said, ‘you’re a handsome heterosexual son of a bitch and you like to fuck girls. Stay that way. End of story. It was just a kiss, damn you, just a kiss —’

With that, Sam let Harper have it between the eyes, and Harper fell to the ground. But Harper grabbed him and, rapidly began to sign:

Was that all it was? Just a goddam kiss?

Harper held on to Sam and looked into his eyes and made Sam confront himself. When Sam’s eyes flickered with evasion, Harper knew without needing to be told.

‘So I was right.’

‘Even if you were, I can close the door —’

‘I knew something was happening between us,’ Harper said, running his fingers through his hair. His voice lightened up with incredulity and relief. ‘From the first time I saw you I knew. Jumping Jehosophat, Sam —’

‘Stay away from me,’ Sam warned. His voice was rising with fear. ‘I told you I can close the door and I can keep it shut. It’s Pandora’s Box. Who knows what might be in it?’

The two men were panting as they faced each other. Then, slowly, Harper began to spell out his feelings again in sign:

So, you’re scared, right?

‘Yes, aren’t you?’

Harper nodded. He lifted his face to the light and his voice cut through the darkness.

‘You gotta talk to me, Sam —’

‘Talk?’ Sam asked.

He was fearful. This thing Harper was wanting had to be stopped before it got out of hand.

‘Talk about what? There’s nothing to talk about! Hey, I can be your friend, your brother, your father if you like. Let’s keep it like that, eh? Buddies? Good friends?’

For a moment, Sam thought he had won and that Harper would agree: Yes, good friends. But he should have known better, and when Harper answered him, the words leaned so hard on the walls of Sam’s world that he could feel them collapsing around him.

‘Sam, the box is already open. You know what was in it? A grenade. It has already exploded in my face.’

Harper turned on his heel. He walked away into the darkness.

‘Haramai ki o tatou mate e, haramai, haramai, haramai.’

The sound of the karanga came across Poho o Rawiri marae like a spear. Sam and George and other Army pallbearers waited at the gateway. In front of him, Sam felt the rage of the iwi that one of their sons was being returned not in glory but in death. The old women of the village had now begun to cry out their distress.

‘What is the sign in our hands? They are the kawakawa leaves of mourning. You ask again what is the sign in our hands? I tell you, kawakawa leaves! Alas, lower them to the waist and let them fall! Death alights —’

Beside him, Sam heard George in agony. George had sobbed all the way from Vietnam. All through the night flight to Singapore, then all day down from Singapore on an RNZAF Hercules, George had not left the side of Turei’s coffin. The sound of George crying among the Army equipment and supplies struck Sam as the loneliest he had ever heard. And he was still crying as they waited for the karanga to end.

‘Turei! Turei, you got in the way of the owl,’ George cried. ‘It was coming for me. Why did you do it, you bastard?’

Sam saw his father leading the men in a haka powhiri. ‘Toia mai, te waka! Ki te urunga, te waka —’

Old men with Maori Battalion medals and ribbons, stamping their feet and slamming their chests with their fists.

‘Bring our son back to us! Bring him among us —’

Sam signalled the pallbearers to lift — and they had Turei’s casket on their shoulders. Boy, was Turei heavy? Was he what.

The pallbearers slow stepped their way through the gate and onto the marae. Behind them General Collinson, other Army brass and supporters followed, heads bowed.

‘Return in spirit, son, return to your birthplace —’

The old women completed their welcome to Turei. Their calling drifted into silence. Sam signalled to the pallbearers to lower the casket onto the marae. He saw Lilly on the porch of the meeting house, being comforted by her daughter Emma and other female relatives and friends. Among them was his mother, Florence — and was that Patty? Yes, it was. She smiled across the marae at Sam and waved to him.

Arapeta stood to speak. He strode purposefully backwards and forwards across the marae. His glance flicked across General Collinson — and then across Sam. There was no sign of recognition.

Arapeta pointed his walking stick at the casket.

‘He was not supposed to come back like this,’ Arapeta thundered. ‘Why has he come back before his time? Why has he not come walking back so that we may greet him with our pride and in joy? Why has he come back, sealed away so that we are not able to cry over him as is our custom? Why?’

Arapeta’s walking stick slashed its anger and accusations across the marae. At every outburst the grief of the mourners escalated. Lilly was screaming for her son, and the women surrounding her were having trouble restraining her. With a sudden determined movement she pushed them away and, crying, went stumbling through the crowd.

General Collinson spoke nervously to his Maori adjutant.

‘I hope Arapeta is not blaming the Army for this.’

‘No,’ the adjutant said. ‘The protocol of the tangihanga demands such rhetoric. It is our way of appeasing all the conflicting thoughts of the mourners.’

Sam knew otherwise. He knew that his father’s words were obliquely referring to him: Why, son, did you not save your mate?

‘There is not one old man here,’ Arapeta continued, ‘who would gladly give up his life if he could so that this young son of ours could walk again among us. We have had our lives, we have had our battles —’

‘Ah, ka tika,’ the old men murmured, ‘that is true, indeed you speak truly.’

‘But we cannot, for he has already been taken by the man-eating insect. Yet —’

Oh, Arapeta was so good at korero. With skill he modulated his voice and turned the thoughts of the mourners to the ideals of heroism and personal sacrifice.

‘By being taken unto death, Turei has brought honour to his iwi. There was no greater accolade for a warrior consecrated to Tumatauenga, the God of War, than to die in battle. For all of us who are here today, that was not our honour or privilege. And so we are belittled, made lesser men in the face of this young son of ours who did what we didn’t do — gave up his life in the service of his people and his country.’

The mourners began to sigh at Arapeta’s words. A hush came over the marae.

Suddenly, screams started to come from the crowd.

‘No, Lilly, don’t.’

Lilly reappeared. Her eyes were streaming with tears. In her hands was an axe. Before anybody could stop her, she strode across the marae to the coffin and struck it with the axe.

‘Turei! My son!’

The whole assembly began to moan and weep as the sounds of the axe reverberated across the marae. General Collinson blanched. Sam felt a tremendous pain in his heart and turned to George.

‘Come on,’ he said. ‘We have to finish the job.’

Sam walked over to Lilly. When she saw him, she swayed and collapsed in his arms.

‘I can’t let Turei go,’ Lilly said, ‘without seeing his beloved face —’

Sam nodded. ‘Give me the axe, Auntie.’

Sam struck at the lid. At every blow the wailing escalated, a wild, demonic sound that could have split the sky apart. But when it was done, and Turei’s face appeared, the keening subsided into a soft sighing sound. Lilly leaned and stroked Turei’s face and she nodded at Sam and George.

‘Thank you, boys,’ she said. ‘Once there were three of you. Now there are only two —’

She motioned for them to take the coffin onto the porch and lay it to rest among the women.

‘Savages,’ General Collinson muttered.

Angrily, Arapeta pointed his walking stick at him.

‘Ka mate, ka mate! It is life, it is life, it is death, it is death! You must understand, Sir, that our people have never been afraid to look upon the face of Death. Our boy once belonged to the army. Your right to him ends here —’

Arapeta pointed to the gateway.

‘He is ours now.’

Later in the afternoon, Sam, George and other young men of the village carried Turei up to the village graveyard. The hills echoed with the sounds of rifle shots from the Army’s guard of honour. The bugler sounded the Last Post.

At the graveside Florence, Patty and Monty stood beside Sam. On the other side, George was standing with Lilly and Emma — and Emma’s baby boy. Already George was taking Turei’s place as surrogate son.

Sam felt Florence press his arm.

‘It’s so good to see you, Sam,’ she said. ‘Are you well? Are you staying home for a while?’

‘No, Mum,’ Sam answered. ‘Just tonight. George and I return to Vietnam tomorrow.’

‘Did you bring me a present?’ Patty asked.

Sam gave her a smile. ‘Yes, one for you and one for Monty.’

Sam’s heart was aching, but the ceremony was almost over. The clouds were lowering.

The wind brought the promise of rain. As Turei was laid to rest, Lilly came forward and threw the first handful of dirt upon his coffin.

‘Farewell, son! Go to the threshold of the Pleiades. To Antares, farewell —’

In the evening, Sam sat with his father on the verandah of the homestead. The silence between them was forbidding, punitive. When Arapeta spoke, his voice curled out of Te Kore, The Void.

‘I promised Lilly that Turei would come back alive. Instead, he came back in a coffin. It was up to you to ensure that my promise was kept. You should have looked after him. You didn’t. The sperm that was in him from his father has died with him, and there will be no further issue. The whakapapa from his father to him is now terminated. Because of this, I have lost mana. You have let me down. The only way you can redeem yourself is to avenge his death. When you return to Vietnam, you must take utu against those who killed him.’

Back in Vietnam, Sam immediately went to Captain Fellowes to ask him when the next company manoeuvre might be ordered.

‘There’s nothing planned right now,’ Captain Fellowes said. ‘What’s the rush, Sergeant?’

‘I’ve gotta get back in there. For Turei —’

Captain Fellowes understood. ‘Listen, your mate’s gone and nothing will bring him back.’ But Sam wasn’t listening. ‘Okay,’ Captain Fellowes continued. ‘The best I can do is to put you on the roster whenever a spare man is required by the Aussies or the Yanks.’

‘Sir,’ Sam saluted. ‘I’ll take anything you can get.’

He wanted to get out, find some action, go anywhere — and hope the guilt of Turei’s death wouldn’t follow him.

The guilt was everywhere. Worse, it lay between Sam and George like a living thing. Instead of bringing them closer together, it pushed them apart.

‘Has he guessed?’ Sam wondered, ‘that I’m to blame?’

But George was on another track altogether, blaming himself and ashamed to look at Sam.

Over the next weeks Sam was called to complement an Aussie patrol on perimeter duty of the horseshoe minefield. An attachment to a local ARVN South Vietnamese unit followed. Then came a mission to search a village reported to be hostile to the Allied command. Exhausted by his grief and driven by his need for some kind of release, Sam was already juiced up and trigger happy. The hot sun was burning his skin off and the heat was like a hot oven coil frying his guts. He lost all perspective, all sense of who was the enemy and who wasn’t. When he glimpsed a movement at the corner of his eyes he was already swinging his rifle, his finger pressing the trigger — and the only thing that stopped him was hearing a baby cry as the young girl he had aimed at fell to the ground, protecting the baby as she fell. Sam remembered Jim, the Australian veteran:

‘Before you know it, the whole platoon is shooting up the village, setting it on fire, killing whatever happens to be in the way.’

The incident sounded warning bells for Sam. ‘What’s happening to me?’

The only person who got anywhere near explaining it to him was Cliff Harper when he happened across Sam at the base. Harper was still in his flying kit, having just come back from a mission. He was battle weary but:

‘That last time we talked was bad timing, right? I didn’t know then about your pal. I know what it’s like —’

‘You know nothing about what it’s like.’

‘Hey,’ said Harper. ‘I lost Fox, remember?’

Harper took a deep breath and spelt it out again.

‘I’m in trouble here, Sam. Doing my nut —’

Sam gave Harper an angry stare.

‘But I’ve been thinking this through,’ Harper continued. ‘Maybe you’re not just another guy. You’re Sam. People make these other categories, but maybe you and I don’t fit, maybe they don’t apply to us.’

Sam was in turmoil.

‘I’m a soldier, you’re a flier,’ Sam said. ‘I’m a Maori, you’re a Yank. We come from different places, different cultures. Let’s keep it that way.’

Harper’s face grew still. Then, ‘Okay, you arsehole,’ he said. ‘I’ve admitted I’m wide open for you but you can’t do that for me. I could have been the best thing for you but you haven’t got the guts to admit it. Somebody should give you a medal for being the chickenshit coward you are.’

They split up, and Sam wanted to say: ‘No don’t go away.’ He went back to his tent and for a long while lay on his bunk staring at nothing.

Meanwhile, drama was unfolding in the skies above him.

Deep into enemy territory an American bombing strike was on its way to Hanoi. The bombers were escorted by a Phantom F-4 defence wing. One of the F-4s was being piloted by the two-man crew of Riccardo ‘Speedy’ Gonzalez and Johnny Johnson. They were keeping a look-out for enemy aircraft above and any surface-to-air missiles from below. Gonzalez heard Adams in an F-4 to the left of him:

‘Two MiGs at ten o’clock, another two bogies at six o’clock high. Okay, fellas, intercept and engage —’

With that, Gonzalez put his F-4 into a turn — and was into a dogfight with one of the enemy MiGs. The dual was a hair-raising series of spins, loops and other acrobatics in which each craft tried to get the other into their firing envelope. Gonzalez had a lucky break. He was on the MiG’s tail, trying to outguess the enemy pilot, when the MIG broke left. Gonzalez had chosen to go left also — and the MiG was right there in the middle of his sights. He got a rocket away and, next moment, the MiG exploded. However, Bailey was calling:

‘Gonzalez, another bogey coming at ya.’

It was a classic attack straight out of the sun. In a matter of seconds the MiG had Gonzalez in the middle of his firing envelope and had sent his missile, tracking it for a hit. Over the radio, Gonzalez heard Bailey yelling out, ‘Break right and roll,’ so he pressed the F-4 into an escape maneuvre to shake the MiG off his arse. The missile exploded just above the F-4 and the concussion threw the aircraft into a wild spin. Gonzalez corrected and managed to put the F-4 into a descending seven-G turn. Before he knew it, the MiG had the F-4 in its sights again. Its cannons raked the F-4’s underbelly. There was a sickening lurch, the red warning lights started to flash — and Gonzalez heard the telltale warbling sound which warned that the F-4 was on fire. Next moment, black smoke started to fill the cockpit and they were flaming down like a torch.

Gonzalez tried to get the F-4 backup flight control system operational. But the MiG had done its stuff and the F-4 fell through 2500 metres, through 1800 metres and all of a sudden they were at 1200 metres.

Gonzalez yelled to Johnny Johnson: ‘Eject, bail out now.’

There was no answer. Johnson was dead, peppered with enemy cannon shots.

Gonzalez realised he was getting pretty close to riding the F-4 into the ground. He pulled the ejection ring. The canopy flew off and the ejection sequence kicked in — and he was clear. His chute opened at under 600 metres and before he could utter a prayer he was hurtling into the jungle canopy, crashing through the branches like a rag doll. The ground hit him and he felt every bone in his body jolt and crack. But he was alive and, although dazed, had his wits about him. He remembered his training and activated the beeper which would let his buddies know he was still alive and where to find him — and waited.

When Sam got the call he was on his feet in an instant, and on the run down to Nui Dat’s airbase. Even before he reported to the duty officer he knew there was a problem: there were only two helicopters on the field, and one — Harper’s — was being serviced. In the adjoining crewroom he heard Harper’s voice raised in argument with his fellow airmen. He walked to the door in time to see Seymour remonstrating with Harper.

‘Sir, let some other squadron do the rescue.’

‘We’re the closest. That’s why we got asked,’ Harper said.

One of the other men, Tom Pike, groaned. ‘We’re whacked, Sir.’

‘Come on, guys,’ Harper pleaded. He turned to Prick Preston. ‘You’ve got a full tank, Preston.’

‘Listen,’ said Preston, ‘we don’t owe nobody anything and neither do you. You’ve done your job. Forget it. Seymour’s right — there must be someone else to do the pick-up. Live to fly another day.’

Sam saw the look on Harper’s face. He watched as Harper picked up a chair and hurled it across the room. Before Preston could move, Harper had him by the collar of his flying jacket.

‘Give me your keys, Preston. Give me the goddam keys. And you —’ he pointed angrily at Frank Seymour, ‘you get saddled up. We’ve got a job to do.’

Harper was off at a fast walk. When he came through the door and saw Sam standing there he came to a standstill. His eyes narrowed.

‘You’re not going to tell me that you’re the spare?’

‘I’m here to do a job. That’s all you need to know.’

‘Well, don’t get under my feet, that’s all I’ve got to say to you, Kiwi.’

As they left, Sam heard someone swearing and shouting. He looked back and saw that two of the other men, led by Pike, were shambling after Harper.

‘Do you always have to show you’ve got big nuts?’ Pike said to Harper. ‘Do you always have to be a hero, you fuck!’

In the chopper Harper hit the trigger. A high-pitched whine began. He fuelled the igniters and the engine wound up to a start. Two minutes later, he put the chopper into fast idle, warming up. He did the usual radio check.

‘Tower, this is Woody Woodpecker. We’re lifting off.’

The engines roared. The chopper lifted off the ground. Above, two Skyraiders cruised in from their orbit to join the mission.

Seymour had his headset on.

‘Uh-oh,’ he said. ‘Sir, the odds have just gone up. One of the F-4s is standing by and can see the enemy advancing on the ground, but he’s only got air-to-air missiles on board. They know we’ve got a man down. The enemy must have fixed his position from the emergency transmission.’

Sam watched as Harper nodded.

‘Tell that F-4 to confirm to Gonzalez that a search and rescue is in progress. Get in touch with those Skyraiders and request fire support. What’s their call sign?’

Seymour laughed. ‘MacDuff. And they have confirmed they will suppress any enemy ground fire at the rescue site.’

‘ETA 30 minutes,’ Harper said.

Twenty minutes later the two Skyraiders arrived at the crash site. Moose Bailey, in the F-4 circling above, heaved a sigh of relief. He’d stayed behind to ensure that Gonzalez’s position was pinpointed. Now he vamoosed for a rendezvous with a tanker before his fuel ran out.

Ten minutes later, Seymour turned to Harper.

‘MacDuff has made contact with Gonzalez. He’s guiding them to him. He can hear their propellers west of his position, but he can’t see them.’ A pause. ‘Sir, they’re now initiating authentication procedure.’

Pike burst into laughter.

‘MacDuff has just copied Gonzalez’s question. Who was the girl of his dreams and did she come across? His answer is — Wanda Rodriguez and, no, she didn’t, so he fucked her big sister. He’s our man.’

Sam looked down at the jungle. The canopy was impenetrable. No way would you be able to see one downed man. A needle in a green haystack.

‘Sir,’ Seymour interrupted again. ‘MacDuff reports bad guys moving into the area, ten minutes from where they think Gonzalez is.’

Cliff Harper nodded. ‘Confirm ETA five minutes. Are we close enough now to be in direct contact with Gonzalez?’

Seymour tried for a frequency. Secured it.

‘Copy,’ he said. ‘Damn, Gonzalez only has visibility straight up. Can’t see the Skyraiders but he can hear them. They’re trying to get him to fix his location with his compass. Got him!’

Quickly, Seymour worked out the coordinates. They were three minutes out. Then Harper got the news:

‘Woody Woodpecker, bad guys closing in. MacDuff will decoy them to where Gonzalez’s F-4 went down. Maybe they’ll take the bait. No, bad guys have split up. Small party still heading for Gonzalez.’

The noose was closing.

‘Copy. Tell MacDuff to buy me time. Tell Gonzalez: sit tight, friend. Pop the flare at my command.’

One minute later, Harper made the command.

‘Where the hell is he?’ he yelled. ‘Can you see him?’

The chopper was skimming across the jungle. Sam was looking out one side of the chopper. Pike was looking out the other.

‘There!’

Coloured smoke, drifting straight up through the jungle canopy. One and a half minutes out.

Harper pointed to the sky. The Skyraiders were moving in perfect coordination to straddle the chopper as it made its final approach towards Gonzalez. Thirty seconds out, they crossed over a vertiginous river valley that had what looked like a derelict swingbridge connecting one side to the other. Harper pointed it out to Sam. On one side was a steep ridge. The coloured smoke was coming up from the valley behind it.

‘He can’t see us,’ Seymour said. ‘But we’re right on top of him.’

The chopper was hovering over the trees.

‘Let down the rescue cable,’ Harper answered.

‘Sir, Gonzalez says he needs help for the ride up. He’s injured.’

At that moment the chopper came under attack. From out of the jungle came a small puff and a rocket sizzled through the air and whooshed past the front windscreen.

‘Fuck,’ Harper swore. ‘They’ve got a rocket launcher —’

He held the chopper steady. He radioed to MacDuff to take the rocket launcher out. Sam looked at Pike and nodded:

‘I’m the spare,’ Sam said. ‘I’ll go.’

Harper didn’t even know what Sam was doing until after he had clipped himself onto the rescue cable and stepped out of the chopper. When Harper looked back and saw Sam motioning to begin letting him down it was too late to stop him. The hydraulic winch began to whirr and whine, and Sam was swinging like Tarzan. Thirty metres below, the jungle waited to claim him.

He was twenty metres down when he began hearing the crack and pop of rifle fire. He heard the clinking sound as bullets hit the chopper. His left trouser leg tore with the impact from a near-hit. Then he was down among the foliage, trying to steer the rescue cable through the branches to the ground.

Gonzalez lay in a sitting position, frantic with fear. ‘My leg’s broken —’

‘It’s okay, buddy,’ Sam said. ‘No time to talk.’ He buckled the safety strap around Gonzalez’s chest. Yelled instructions into the emergency radio: ‘Gonzalez secured. Take him up.’

Sam felt the upward force of the chopper’s hydraulic winch as it reeled in the cable. Gonzalez was spinning through the foliage, smashing through the branches, trying to protect his head. Then, all of a sudden, there was a whump, the chopper juddered in the air and Gonzalez was spinning back to the ground.

‘We’ve sustained a hit,’ Seymour yelled. ‘Hydraulic winch malfunction.’

Harper heard Seymour yelling in panic. His body flooded with adrenalin. ‘God, don’t let me go down like Fox.’ He was checking the gauges, his training automatically initiating the procedures to ensure damage control. To his right he heard the Skyraiders coming in again with high-speed strafing of the area from which the rocket had been launched. They walked their incendiary shells down the slope, and the forest flamed and smoked; and Seymour yelled:

‘They’ve got the fucker! But, Sir, MacDuff, advise enemy moving fast towards us. They estimate we have only five minutes to exit area.’

There was a moment’s silence. Then MacDuff radioed:

‘Your call, Woody Woodpecker.’

Harper’s heart was racing but his body was ice.

‘I’m not leaving them.’

On the ground, Sam could hear the enemy shouting, approaching, and the chatter of gunfire. He realised the odds had just stacked up, too high, and fallen on top of him and Gonzalez. He reached for the emergency radio. He knew he had to give Harper permission to leave.

‘Hey, Harper! Do you know what haere ra means?’

In the chopper, Harper couldn’t respond.

‘It means goodbye. So get out of here.’

Seymour was listening in and looked at Harper.

‘No,’ Harper said.

He worked the controls and the chopper started descending into the foliage.

‘What are ya?’ Seymour yelled. ‘Are you crazy?’

Harper was seesawing the chopper back and forth across the top of the trees, cutting down the treetops with the rotor blades, mowing through the upper density. Startled, Sam scrambled away as branches and leaves began to fall like an avalanche around him.

‘I want to see him,’ Harper said.

He lifted the chopper. Peered down.

A sunlit space. Sam stepping into the space. The chopper was stationary, in a holding position, its rotors seeming to slice at the sun. Leaves and branches were whirling to the ground. Sam knew that Harper could see him. The situation was hopeless. Ah well. With a shrug of his shoulders, Sam motioned Harper to climb. He made a sweeping gesture with both hands:

Go.

Harper looked down. His eyes unseen behind dark glasses. His face impassive. Coming into the trees were the enemy soldiers.

I said, Go, damn you, Sam signalled again. ‘Can’t you take orders you crazy gringo American? For God’s sake, go!’

The motor of the chopper roared. But Harper wasn’t leaving. He was making jabbing motions to Sam.

Look left. Go left. I’ll decoy the enemy, make him think the chopper is going down. If I succeed they’ll come after me.

Harper put up his hand and showed four fingers.

Four minutes. Go. Rendezvous.

And Sam remembered: the derelict swingbridge.

The chopper dipped and left. Sam knelt beside Gonzalez.

‘Okay, Gonzalez, the enemy have shot up Plan A. We have to go to Plan B.’

‘What’s Plan B!’

‘We’ve got to get over that ridge. Can you walk?’

‘I’ll try.’

‘Then lean on me.’

Meantime, Harper put the chopper into a steep turn, orbited, and did a fast series of 360 degree spins. He saw the astonished faces of the Vietcong as he spun over them. Next moment the belly of the chopper was raked with bullets.

Sam hoisted Gonzalez up. They were in luck. Harper’s ruse had worked. He heard the enemy moving off to the right, in pursuit of a chopper that they thought was going down.

‘Let’s go,’ Sam said.

He hauled Gonzalez through the jungle. He followed the contours of a slope and began to climb. His lungs were burning by the time he stumbled across the old track which must have been used when the swingbridge was still functioning. He ran, pulling Gonzalez with him, as fast as he could along the track.

As for Harper, he had bought Sam as much time as he could, and it was time to make the pick-up. He went flying back with the wind, losing altitude, dropping down to tree-top level, balls to the wall. The gunners portside and starboard were blazing away, pow pow pow. Tracer whizzed through one door of the chopper and out the other.

Sam heard the shouts of the enemy as they returned to the chase. Suddenly he was clear — and almost falling from the sheer cliff into the river far below. For a moment he swayed there, the edge crumbling away from beneath his feet. He paused. Immediately in front of him was the swingbridge.

‘Holy Hone Hika —’

The swingbridge hung by a thread — one long span of what looked like No.8 wire. The rest of it, a series of broken planks, dangled from the wire. So near and so far.

Gonzalez began to gibber.

‘We’re never going to get out. We’re going to die in this stinkin’ country.’

‘Shut up, Gonzalez,’ Sam said.

Sam looked at his watch. He had 65 seconds to position himself and Gonzalez on the bridge. Ah well, they’d have to do it the hard way.

‘Belt yourself on and hold me tight.’

Sam made a jump for the wire. Grabbed and pulled himself up so that his legs were also gripping the wire. The dead weight of Gonzalez was pulling at his grip as he began to work himself and Gonzalez along. Halfway across, streaming with sweat and exhausted, he stopped. Waited.

Ten seconds. Where was Harper?

‘Come on, Harper, I can’t hold on much longer.’

Sam heard the sound of the chopper approaching. The steady whop-whop-whop of the rotor blades was the most wonderful sound he had ever heard. He began to laugh and grinned at Gonzalez.

‘So what did I tell you?’

The chopper roared over the ridge and filled the ravine with its clatter. Harper heard Pike drawl out:

‘Looks like there’s two lucky sons of a bitch waiting to hitch a ride.’

The chopper dropped into the narrow corridor of jungle, its engine sending explosive echoes down the gap, and then rose like an angel, sideways on to the bridge.

Harper took off his sunglasses. Grinned.

What are you waiting for fellas?

Suddenly the tree canopy off to Sam’s right erupted with tracers. A bone-shuddering whoosh enveloped him. It was now or never. He jumped — Gonzalez screaming — and caught one of the landing skids. Dangled for a moment. Bullets zinged past him and bounced off the underside armour plate of the helicopter. He reached in panic for the entry door. Missed. But rough hands were around his and Gonzalez’s shoulders, pulling them in. The chopper banked.

‘Men aboard. Woody Woodpecker moving out.’

The chopper moved away quickly out of the ravine, heading fast out of the area. When they crossed back into South Vietnam, Seymour gave a joyful whoop and holler. Harper radioed to the Skyraiders:

‘Thanks for the help, MacDuff.’

‘Pleasure to be of service, Woody Woodpecker. Over and out.’

Back at the base Sam watched as the chopper team slapped each other and congratulated themselves on the rescue. Seymour had extra reason to be joyful. When he lifted his canteen from his web gear to take a drink, there was nothing in it but a bullet hole.

‘I’ve been shot!’ Seymour laughed as he kissed the canteen.

Sam went to find Harper. He saw him stoically flushing out the chopper. Dusk had turned the landscape into a charcoal-grey haze.

‘Thanks,’ Sam said.

‘All in the line of duty,’ Harper answered.

His glasses glinted in the sun.

Two days later Sam heard that Harper had been medevaced to a hospital for wounds sustained by automatic enemy fire during the rescue operation. He had five wire sutures attaching his two bottom ribs to his ribcage.

When Sam walked into the hospital, Harper turned and looked out the window.

‘You didn’t have to come,’ he said.

Sam tried to make conversation.

‘Now I know why you rescue pilots are the most decorated combatants of the war. It takes guts to hover over the jungle like that. To sustain all that enemy fire and hold on. You could have left me out there —’

‘And risk the wrath of your tribe, let alone the New Zealand Government? I’ve heard all about you Kiwis and you Maoris and the revenge you take. No, it was better to bring you back alive. All part of the service.’

Cliff paused, a wan smile on his face. Then:

What happened to us, Sam? We got so close to making it.

Sam looked into Harper’s eyes and knew he had to explain.

‘I’m no good for people, Harper, ‘he said. ‘My mate, Turei, I think I’m to blame for his death. I don’t want you on my conscience. I’m here for one reason and that’s to fight this war and get out in one piece and go home.’

Harper sighed and leaned back into the pillow.

‘Is that what happened? Well, I’m not letting you off the hook so easy. Sometimes, when I talk, I know too much of me falls out. But that’s the way I am and I’m not about to change.’

Sam stared at Harper. He stood up quickly.

‘Back off. Back off me. Leave me alone.’

‘Answer me one question. Do you think about me?’

‘No.’

‘So you still want to give me the flick?’

‘Yes.’

‘You are one fucken liar, Mahana. May you fry in hell.’

Sam stood up. His voice was firm.

‘I’ve already told you, I can’t have you on my conscience. Goodbye, Harper.’

Sam was halfway down the ward when he heard a shout.

‘Wait!’

Harper was struggling out of bed. His bandages were flying all over the place.

‘You can’t leave like that, you arsehole.’

Harper grabbed his crutches and came limping toward Sam. When he got close enough he threw one of them at Sam.

‘You want to know why I didn’t leave you back there when you were down with Gonzalez? I never leave anybody behind, but you’re not just anybody. I didn’t want to lose you. You talk about conscience. Put that on your damn conscience.’

Sam felt all the walls crumbling around him.

‘You’re in my heart, and I can’t get you out —’

‘Haven’t you been listening to me, Harper? I said no to you —’

‘Look, don’t I have a say in your decision? I don’t care. I’m prepared to take the risks. Don’t you understand? We were meant to be. We owe it to ourselves to see this thing through.’

Sam took a step back. He began to sign:

We can’t. It will never work.

‘God, Sam, this is your last chance. Face up to yourself. For once in your life, let somebody in. Let me in.’

At that moment two nurses, attracted by the commotion, came rushing towards Harper.

‘This man should be in bed,’ one of them said crossly. ‘Whatever he wants, say yes so that we can get him back there.’

It was said in innocence, but the shock of it made Harper and Sam look at each other, their jaws open. Sam started to laugh, and so did Harper. Next moment they were holding each other, doubling up with tears of laughter.

‘Oh, what the hell,’ Sam said. ‘All right then, yes.’

Sam ended his tour of duty in Vietnam three weeks after Harper was released from hospital. They were able to get a day’s leave in Vung Tau. A photograph was taken of them at the beach.

‘I want you to have this,’ Sam said. He took Tunui a te Ika from his neck and placed it over Harper’s head. ‘It looks better on you than on me!’

He looked deep into Harper’s eyes.

‘It will keep you safe. I want you to bring it back to me. In New Zealand.’

‘You want me to come to New Zealand?’ Harper asked. His eyes were shining.

‘Yes.’

At Vung Tau airbase, just as Sam was about to board the freighter back to Singapore, there was a shattering sound. Harper’s helicopter was there, hovering. He dipped the rotors. His face was serious. He made hand movements.

He pointed to Sam. You.

He pointed at himself. Me.

He made a thumbs-up signal.

Love you.

He saluted, and the gunship was wheeling away and thundering into the sun.

Chapter Eleven

The gunship was lifting and wheeling back into the past. Thirty years later it had all come to this: me and a Vietnam Vet named George, sitting in a pub in Porirua on a cold, rainy night, talking about Uncle Sam.

George looked up. A clock on the wall ticked its way to closing time at the Porirua Tavern. The regular thump thump thump of the band reverberated through the night.

‘Sam and I ended our tour of duty in Vietnam in late 1970. We finished our time with the Army in Singapore, and when we arrived home we had a big welcome on the marae. That welcome was different from the one we got from everyone else where the hostility really brought us down to earth. We had no formal recognition from government. We were humiliated by the protest groups. Some of us began to die from the chemicals. Sam’s Dad wanted him to stay in Waituhi, but I decided to come down to Wellington. I managed to get a job as an Army instructor at Trentham. I got married twice. The first time was a mistake. The second time was to a nice girl from the South Island and we had four kids. I didn’t treat her too well and she took off. Around ten years ago I bought this pub. It’s been my life. I get the cough now and then. Cancer. Yeah, it got me too — Agent Orange. I’m up and down. Right now I’m up. I still see a few of the old mates at Company reunions, RSAs and so on. There are fewer of us every year. Time is passing. Very soon nobody will remember us.’

George’s voice trailed into silence. Then:

‘I’d better get back to the bar. Help the boys out before we close for the night. But thanks for coming out. I’ve enjoyed talking about my mate.’ He looked at me with rough admiration. ‘Do you realise how much you look like Sam? It’s like looking at a bloody ghost. You’re about his size, maybe a little thinner. You have his eyes and, from the looks of you, his stubborn streak. He was a great mate. You could trust in him. Rely on him. There was something fearless about him. In a scrape he never let you down.’

George saw me to the door.

‘Sam will always remain young in my mind. It’s only the rest of us who get old and develop beer guts so that we can’t see what’s down below — if there’s anything still there.’

Smiling ruefully, he shook my hand. His eyes were moist and I realised he was still thinking about old times and people who had gone from his life.

‘Tell Patty that it was really nice to hear from her. If she’s ever down this way, tell her to call in, okay?’

I arrived home just after midnight. I couldn’t sleep, so I took Uncle Sam’s diary and finished it just before dawn. I found some ash-edged remnants of letters Uncle Sam and Cliff Harper had written to each other while Uncle Sam was in Singapore and Harper was still in Vietnam:

‘… happened, yesterday. It made me realise how precious life is and that you have to hold on to what it is that you …’

‘I often think of you and … (Hell, do you think some censor is reading this stuff?) Well, if he is, enjoy it pal because …’

Whatever else was in the letters, the fragments confirm that the attraction (or was it love?) that Uncle Sam and Cliff Harper felt for each other had deepened. They would see each other, war or no war.

Uncle Sam must have returned to New Zealand some time in January 1971. Cliff Harper’s own tour of duty in Vietnam ended two months later, in March. The last entry in Uncle Sam’s diary was dated 7 March:

‘Cliff hitched a ride via Singapore on one of the American military aircraft doing the weekly hop to Australia. He telephoned from Sydney last night to say he gets in to Auckland tomorrow morning. It’s been almost two years since I last saw him. We’ve defied the gods so far. He’ll get to Gisborne by bus tomorrow afternoon.’

The final words in Uncle Sam’s diary, however, were not written by him. You can tell because they are scrawled with a different pen.

May God have mercy.