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  After Tet, that violation would be an obscure footnote.

  Spider’s sex life (2)

  Spider was having an ugly dream. They were back in the reek of the clearing, but it was he who unbuttoned his fly and picked up the rotting mutilated head, turned the cold slimy thing around so that its open mouth—

  “Wake up! Get up, you lucky asshole!” Killer was shaking his arm. It was late afternoon; Spider had slept for a couple of hours.

  He levered himself over onto one elbow, bones creaking. “So what’s going on?” He had a painful erection that was wilting fast. A fragment of the dream stayed with him and he was horrified, confused.

  “You guys who were on the recon get a one-day pass into Pleiku, God knows why. But you gotta be down on the pad in a couple minutes.”

  “Pleiku?”

  “Pussy!” He punched him hard on the shoulder. “It’s one … big … whorehouse!”

  Spider got up and brushed himself off. He could hear a helicopter in the distance, more than one. “So do I leave my shit here?”

  “Shit, no, take it all along. Think I’m gonna hump it if we move out while you’re gettin’ your rocks off?”

  “Yeah, yeah, I’m not thinkin’ yet.” He kneeled, leaned back into his rucksack straps, and hoisted the pack up onto his back, then picked up his steel pot and rifle. “Maybe trade this sucker in while I’m in there.”

  “Yeah, rotsa ruck.” Killer extricated his wallet from three layers of dirty plastic bag. He handed Spider a ten-dollar Military Payment Certificate. “Look, if you think of it, get me a bottle of booze, some kinda whiskey.”

  “They take MPCs in Pleiku?”

  “Shit yes, good as money.” Merchants with Viet Cong sympathies especially liked MPCs. They sold them back to GIs for greenbacks at $1.25 to the dollar, and the American dollars wound up in North Vietnam, which desperately needed hard currency. The GIs got 25 percent more to spend at the PX and the massage parlor and Ho Chi Minh got surface-to-air missiles.

  Killer walked down to the LZ with Spider. “So you’ve been into town?”

  “Mmm, yes.” He closed his eyes. “Yes!”

  “So where should I go? What’s a good place?”

  “Ain’t no bad place with pussy, is there?” He shrugged and resorted to the truth. “I don’t know the name of the place we went to; I’ve only been in once. Just went with some other guys who knew where they were goin’.”

  “Sounds like a good idea. How much you pay?”

  “Twenty bucks for boom-boom, ten for a blowjob. Maybe you can cut a deal for both.”

  Both, Spider thought. How long would it take you to get it up again; what would you do with her in the meantime?

  Would he even know what to do at all? His total practical sex education comprised four handjobs in parked cars and one grainy black-and-white porno movie the sergeant at Graves showed on a sheet tacked up to the billet wall. What if you got it in the wrong hole?

  Well, animals did it without any instruction. The whore presumably would have had experience with virgins before. As the slicks came in, Spider was getting his hard-on back.

  “A penny for your thoughts,” Killer shouted as they crouched into the swirling storm kicked up by the blades.

  Six scared-looking men in clean creased fatigues got out of the helicopter, FNGs. Spider was momentarily confused by the way they looked at him, trading places, and then realized that he looked like an old hand—cruddy and unshaven, equipment beat up and dirty. He laughed out loud as the helicopter surged up into the sky.

  It took a couple of hours before all of them were choppered into Camp Enari and trucked to a transient billet By that time it was almost dark. They wouldn’t be going into town until the next morning; meanwhile, it was clean fatigues, a shower, a hot meal, and a movie, all of which were exotic novelties that would have been appreciated more under other circumstances. A gruff sergeant changed some of their money into Vietnamese piasters and read them a lecture about not hurting the local economy by using MPCs or dollars, and then gave each of them six condoms and an imaginative lecture about venereal disease. If you caught Brand X, for which there was no cure, you would spend the rest of your life quarantined on a little island in the Pacific. Use a rubber even for a blowjob.

  At least the outdoor movie was hilarious—John Wayne in The Green Berets. People laughed and passed joints around and threw empty beer cans at the Duke. Spider declined the marijuana and left the movie halfway through, to sit in the din of the EM Club and drink cold beer and read the Heinlein novel.

  His dreams were gentler that night, sexual but romantic, and after an amazing breakfast of bacon and eggs, he caught the second jeep into town. The RTO Morrison and three other guys were stuffed into the jeep; Morrison recommended Suzy Wong’s Massage Parlor for a start. The driver nodded wordlessly and drove them through the heavily guarded gate.

  The half-hour ride into town was interesting, a kind of scenery Spider had never seen at ground level. A dry grassy plain surrounded by the low mountains they’d been clambering around on the day before. Every couple of miles there was a cluster of shacks with walls that seemed to be constructed from flattened-out soft drink cans, fronted by children in rags standing beside the road with their hands out. Scrawny dogs, chickens, pigs. Sometimes green lawns decorated with piles of human-looking shit. Morrison confirmed that that’s what it was—all the fertilizer the poor bastards could afford.

  The town was dusty and dirty, littered with garbage. Faded signs advertised Winstons and Cokes in incomprehensible language. Old men and women and children stared at them with pleading or hostility. Some of the buildings were piles of charred rubble, a lot of them pocked with bullet and shrapnel scars. A new-looking Mercedes-Benz sat on flat tires, its doors stitched by machine-gun fire, the bullet holes fresh enough to show bright metal.

  The jeep stopped in front of the building with a weirdly lettered cardboard sign in the window: SUZY WONG’S MASSAGE PARLOR AND BAR—AMERICAN FOOD AND BEER. The driver, a buck sergeant who’d been silent all the way in, gave his speech. “I’ll be back here at fourteen-thirty sharp. Anybody’s not here has to find his own way back. Cab ride’s fifty bucks and you might get rolled. Or killed. If you’re not back at Enari by sundown, it’s a general court-martial and LBJ.” Long Binh Jail, a place of legendary cruelty; it made Marine boot camp look like the Campfire Girls. “Don’t lock and load unless you’re fired upon. Don’t kill any fucking women or children unless they’re shooting at you. And keep your fucking ammo secure. The little gooks’ll pick your pockets and take the ammo to Papasan; you’ll be eatin’ it up in the hills next week. Any questions?” They murmured no and started to get out of the jeep. “And use those fucking rubbers! Otherwise you’ll be pickin’ your pecker up off the floor.”

  The jeep peeled out. “Fuck that shit,” Morrison said, and threw his rubbers into the gutter.

  Spider was properly shocked. “You’re not afraid of the clap?”

  “Shit, you get the clap, you go to the hospital. You rather be in a hospital or out in the boonies?” He coughed and spit. “Besides, I got two hundred thirty-seven fuckin’ days. No way I’m gonna make it. I’m gonna leave this fuckin’ place in a body bag and so are you.” One of the other guys said “Damn straight,” and tossed his rubbers away, too.

  They trooped into Suzy Wong’s, but rather than a seductive temptress in a slit skirt, they ran into a hard-eyed old gent who bore a striking resemblance to Ho Chi Minh, standing in front of an empty rifle rack. “Give him your gun but keep the magazine and the bolt,” Morrison said.

  Spider had a hard time getting the bolt out, because his hands were shaking and slippery with sweat. His mouth was dry and he felt dizzy and he could taste bacon and eggs and bile at the back of his throat. He hadn’t known exactly what it was going to be like, but he hadn’t foreseen anything quite like this. The old man locked their M16s in the rack and gave Morrison a key on a loop of string. “If the shit hits the fan,” Morrison said, �
�get on down here and I’ll hand out the rifles. Make sure you get your own.” As if anyone else would want it.

  They walked up a dusty flight of stairs; when Spider was halfway up, a tinny speaker started playing “I Wanna Hold Your Hand.” The room they walked into was pleasant but disorienting, too American: jukebox, red vinyl booths with Formica tables. The walls were decorated with posters from stateside—the Beatles and the Doors and a peace symbol with the slogan WHAT IF THEY GAVE A WAR AND NOBODY CAME? One corner of that one was charred. The air smelled of stale hamburger grease and oriental perfume.

  Eleven small women sat in the booths, one per booth, wearing low-cut silk dresses or shorts. They smiled what looked like sincere smiles of welcome. Spider thought they all looked uniformly impossibly desirable, and just went to the closest one.

  He started to slide in across from her, but she said, “No, ovah heah, GI,” and giggled, patting the seat next to her. He got in, unsure of what to do or say next; she slid over so that their thighs were in contact and caressed his bicep. “Big muscle.” Her breasts brushed his elbow and jasmine perfume made him dizzy. “What’s you’ name?”

  “Spider.” He looked down and saw an absolutely perfect pair of breasts, nipples and all, no bra, nestled in rustling silk.

  “Nice name, Spida’,” she said, and made a spiderly walk with her sharp nails down his arm. She saw the activity in his lap and dropped her hand for a friendly squeeze, perhaps unaware of how close she had come to giving him a freebie. He made a noise between a sigh and a groan.

  “My name’s Li. You buy me some tea, Spida’?”

  “Uh … couldn’t we just …”

  “Sure thing, GI. You buy me tea later.” She bumped his hip with hers. “Upstairs, numbah five.” They got out of the booth and she led him by the hand. Some of the other guys hooted and made sarcastic comments, but Spider couldn’t hear them for the blood roaring in his ears.

  Number five was just a swinging door; the room was a small area set off by plywood partitions, furnished with a rickety sagging bed and a screen and a stand with a water basin and a rag. She pointed to the bed. “You get undress’. You got rubbers?”

  “Uh, sure.” Spider dropped a handful of condoms on the bed and started unbuttoning his shirt. He didn’t do too good a job because he was hypnotized: the screen was in front of a bright window; when she went behind it to undress, it was a slow seductive shadow show. He only had the shirt halfway done when she came back out.

  She laughed. “You hurry, now.”

  Spider had never seen a naked woman before. He had felt Beverly’s sex, but always under layers of clothing. Li’s was a plain frank slit, shaved, an indescribable miracle of flesh that she carried over to the basin and washed. Spider tried to undo one button and failed.

  Her back to him, Li replaced the rag and bent over in a gymnast’s pose, her pretty face in syzygy with the delicate petals of her labia and clenched pink anus dot. “How much you want?” she said, upside down. “Blowjob fifteen doll’, boom-boom twenty five, ’roun’ the worl’, fifty. Massage free.”

  Spider had no idea what “around the world” might be, but he had over a hundred dollars as well as two thousand piasters. “Everything,” he said.

  “Okay.” She glided over to him and nimbly unbuttoned his shirt and slipped it off. She rubbed his neck and stood on tiptoe to kiss him, and then unfastened his belt and worked slowly down the buttons of his fly. Fortunately, Spider wasn’t encumbered by underwear. She looked at his erection and said, “Pretty,” and touched it lightly as she reached for a condom. It was more than Spider could take. He shot a string of ejaculate over her shoulder. With the speed of commerce she took him between her soft lips and sucked, cradling his testicles with one hand, gently stroking the shaft of his penis with the other, draining him as expertly and dispassionately as a milking machine. When he started to soften, she licked him down and up and then slowly took all of his average-sized dick into her mouth and throat. There was not even a term for this practice yet in America, not for another four years, and it was not something Spider would have thought physically possible. He stood in the presence of a miracle, raunchy but transfigured.

  She slowly released herself from him and had him sit down while she removed his boots and socks and trousers. “You lie down now.” He started to recline on his back. “The other way. I give massage now.”

  First she rubbed him all over, shoulders, back, and buttocks, soft circular motions with fingertips and teasing nails. Then she got up on the bed with her knees on either side of him and dug into the tense ropy neck and shoulder muscles that yesterday had complained so much about the rucksack. She was surprisingly strong, strong enough to hurt, but it drew out the deeper pain. Then she rubbed his scalp vigorously and did something strange with his ears. She sat back on him to rub his ribs and lower back, making playful circular motions around his tailbone with her wet vagina; he had to raise up to make room for a fresh erection.

  Then she stood up on the bed and carefully stepped onto his back, all eighty pounds of her, and walked up toward his head, her toes massaging his backbone. She turned around and walked back and stepped off, straddling him. “Okay, now you turn over.”

  The massage was evidently over. She kneeled and scooted back, taking him in her mouth again while presenting a view of her private parts so close up that Spider’s eyes crossed painfully, focusing, memorizing. Then he buried his face in the musky wetness—dismissing one flickering worry about venereal and other diseases—and licked and sucked with enthusiasm and curiosity. Then she slipped her finger past his mouth, slowly up into her vagina and back, and then slid it up his rectum and touched him inside and he exploded again, an almost painful and desperate kind of orgasm, trying to discharge after there was nothing left. When she slid her finger out he bucked so hard he almost threw her off the bed.

  She slithered around to lie with her chin on his shoulder. She was quiet, almost motionless, for more than a minute. “I wash up now,” she said softly. “You buy me tea now?” She slipped off the bed and padded to the basin.

  “Yeah, tea. Me, too.” So that was “around the world.” He wondered how long it would be before he could get another pass. “Thank you, Li. That was, it was, it was great.”

  She was scrubbing her finger with soap. She smiled and blushed. “You numba’ one GI, Spida’.” She shrugged into a kimono not quite long enough to cover her ass and stepped into slippers and was gone.

  Spider thought about Beverly for the first time. They hadn’t discussed his staying true to her, because the possibility of his being tempted by a prostitute had never come up. Well, they could talk about it later. Much later, after they were married. If he lived through the year. He was only human, he thought, getting a little angry at Beverly, in advance, for not understanding. Who could resist a woman like Li? (A moral man could, he scolded himself; a man with self-control; a man truly in love.) Well, he would use a rubber from now on.

  Li backed through the swinging door and abstractions evaporated. She had a small tray with two glasses of tea and a pastry on a saucer. She slid the tray under the bed and handed Spider a glass of tea. It was cool and mint-flavored. He watched her hang up the kimono and step out of the slippers. Was there more to come?

  She crouched at his feet and drank about half of her tea in two unfeminine gulps. Then she fed him the pastry one delicate bit at a time. It was sweet and rich. “What do you call this, Li?”

  “Petty four,” she said. “Numba’ one Bit-nam pastry. You lie down now.” She put his glass back on the floor and guided him down with one palm on his chest and the other pulling on his dick. So there would be more.

  She worked on him gently with both hands and her mouth. He was a little sore but surprisingly eager. When he was stiff, she scrambled up on the bed to straddle him, unrolled a condom over his penis, and with a series of little thrusts and sideways wiggles, impaled herself on him to the hilt, and then rose up to his tip and waited. She passively let him p
ush into her a few times, arching his back, penetrating as deeply as possible, and then she began a complex rhythm of partial retreats and sudden downward plunges, digging into his waist with her sharp nails, completely in control, watching his face with no expression, her own face and body misting with sweat.

  It was almost more than he could bear: This was the real thing, the complicated insides of her rubbing up and down on him, a tiny round muscle grasping him as tightly as her lips had (he didn’t realize that not all women had that talent), and the sight of her beautiful body straining above him—

  But then she took him out, holding him firmly by the dick. “Now you stand.”

  “What?”

  “On de floor, you stand. Now!” While he was untangling his legs to obey the order, she produced a blue glass jar with a white cream. She rubbed the stuff around her anus and, biting her lower lip, pushed some inside and moved it around with her finger. Then she covered most of Spider’s condom with it and leaned forward with her head on her arms, eyes closed. “You go ahead now. Roun’ de worl’.” Spider tentatively touched her between the buttocks with the tip of his penis and she surged back, enveloping him suddenly, weirdly tight and hot. He thrust deeply three times and came so fast he hardly had time to enjoy it. Li eased forward, panting, and his dick popped out. He was surprised that the rubber looked clean, but stripped it off carefully, holding it by the end that hadn’t been inside. “Where should I put this?”

  Li opened one eye and shrugged. “Flo’.” Then she stretched like a cat, sighing, and sat up. “You like that okay, Spida’?”

  “It was real nice. It was wonderful.”

  “You ask for Li next time you come. We do more nex’ time.” She slid off the bed and repeated the washing ritual. Spider watched her while he dressed. He couldn’t believe it had happened.

  “I pay you, or the guy downstairs?”

  “Pay Li. Fifty dolla’ plus five fo’ tea plus tip.”

  “How much is that in piasters?”