Remains to be Seen
An award-winning short story
Danielle de Valera
Copyright Danielle de Valera 2014
Remains to be Seen
Winner of the Ulitarra-Scheaffer Pen short story competition 1993
Cover and story glyphs by C S McClellan
All rights reserved. No part may be reproduced in any form by any means without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review.
If you would like to do any of the above, please seek permission first by contacting the author at
[email protected] ISBN 978-0-9923311-3-9
Published in the United States by Old Tiger Books.
First published in Australia in Ulitarra No. 4, December 1993.
In memory of the late Colonel David H Hackworth (US Army), whose memoir:About Face: The Odyssey of an Amercian Warrior, cowritten with Julie Sherman, provided the bulk of the research for this story.
Table of Contents
Story start
Halfway
Last scene
About the author
More O’Neill and Lawson (aka God) stories
Other works by this author
Remains to be Seen
The doorman at the Ex-Services Club won’t let us in. “Sorry, sir,” he says to Baby. “It’s your T-shirt.”
My T-shirt?!”
Baby stands six-foot-four in his fishnet stockings, so the doorman pretends to defer a bit.
“Today’s the anniversary of the Battle of the Coral Sea,” he goes on, little knowing the danger he’s in, “and there’s a lot of the old fellows here tonight. They wouldn’t like it; wouldn’t like it one bit, that T-shirt.”
“What’s wrong with the bloody thing?” I ask like a man possessed. Beside me I can hear the psychic whine of Baby revving up to high gear.
“It’s got a rising sun on it,” the doorman explains patiently. “It looks Japanese. I can let you in,” he waves a hand at me, “but not him. Not in that T-shirt. Sorry.”
I drag Baby back to the parking lot and push him into the car. As I ease the old Holden through the rain suddenly I can see, through the flashes of lightning, that the lot is filled with Japanese cars—Toyotas, Mitsubishis with bull bars—you name it, the place is full of them.
I slam my fist down onto the dashboard, but Baby just throws back his head and laughs. He seems to find it terribly amusing somehow.
He’s still laughing as we drive through the slashing rain to David’s with four six-packs.
This fucking rain, will it ever stop? I can see it through the open door of the chopper, though I can’t hear it over the noise of the blades. We’re the third drop into the landing zone. It was supposed to be a combined effort with the Americans, but the Marines won’t go. I can hear the American CO on the radio threatening them with court martials and damnation, but they’re not under his jurisdiction and they know it. They turn, all seven loads of them, and head back to where they came from.
So long, Marines, thanks a lot.
They’re not so dumb: we’re going straight down into an ambush. Looks like we’re jumping right into the middle of the Viet Cong’s training field and they’ve been planning for just such a contingency for months.
Across from me in the chopper Billy The Kid’s throwing up; he’s green with fear—he’s also Baby Johnson’s kid brother. Baby’s on R & R leave in Sydney. It’s up to me to keep The Kid safe while he’s away. Baby’d probably frag me during a raid if I lost him.
The gunships hover above us, hosing down the edges of the clearing. They pull up and we’re landing. Our door gunners let go one long burst and we run, heads down, for the trees.
The trees here are very different, unless you go right up into the mountains into rainforest country; and I don’t like rainforests.
Not anymore.
David’s place is a cabin eight ks or so from the Mullumbimby post office. No power, but there’s a small generator that he runs when he’s got the petrol.
David makes a point of looking derelict and appearing cynical. I asked Baby one day why Dave was on the Disability Pension.
“Aw, he went mad when ‘e turned nineteen,” Baby said off-handedly. “Rather than taking ‘im out an’ shooting ‘im, they put ‘im on Stelazine instead. Long as ‘e takes ‘is medication ‘e’s fine.”
“What happens if he doesn’t take his medication?” I had to ask.
“He goes around talking to God and the angels. So they tell me, anyway. Shit, how would I know?”
I’d looked at David more closely next time I saw him. He looked all right to me.
When we get to David’s, Bear’s already there, sitting at the kitchen table staring moodily at a half-full bottle of rum, which doesn’t please me particularly. Bear’s bonkers; I know bonkers when I see it, and he’s crazy. He’s got thick, matted red hair down to his shoulders, a thick red beard, and when he’s drunk he’s mean and dangerous. If he’s completely lost it, he carries a hand hewn staff and puts feathers in his hair. There’s no staff or feathers tonight; I guess that’s something.
I sit down at the kitchen table and rip open a beer. “Want one?” I ask David.
He sits down beside me on one of the torn vinyl chairs and peers at me through his government-issue glasses. “What’s up, Michael?”
“Arr, nothing really. We got thrown out of the Ex-Services Club.”
“Didn’ even get in t’ be thrown out,” Baby adds from the depths of his Conan book. He laughs as if he knows something I don’t.
I get up and go into the bedroom section of David’s one-room building and look through his tapes and records; I figure if I don’t get away from Baby I’ll hit him.
The rain drums down on the cabin’s tin roof, Bear’s off in some other space, which suits me fine, and as the night wears on David pulls two single mattresses off the bed in the kitchen and throws them onto the floor. He keeps them stacked there, all six of them one on top of the other, in case somebody wants a bed for the night. Sometimes I’ve arrived at seven in the morning and there’s been six, maybe seven, people, some of them kids, sleeping on those mattresses in the kitchen. When you’re the only person there at night and the mattresses are all stacked up, you need a chair to get onto the bed.
Bear says it reminds him of “The Princess and the Pea,” which is a Hans Anderson fairy tale, I think. He tells David, from the lofty heights of the top mattress, that he can actually feel the pea and that proves that he’s of royal blood, now doesn’t it? But David doesn’t understand the allusion at all—or so he says—while Baby and I pretend to be asleep.
It’s twelve hours later. The radio won’t work and we still can’t find our unit. But we’ve been trained to work behind enemy lines. It’s shithouse and you’re scared all the time, but you’ll get out if you stay cool, maintain discipline and keep a tight perimeter when you stop.
We move through the jungle, Australian style, scouts well out front and back and on both flanks. Even the Americans admit we’re the only people, apart from the VC, who know how to fight this fucking war and get good body counts for very few friendly KIA.
I walk down the line to see how Smithy’s going, on my way encouraging The Kid, who’s sobbing loudly. If I don’t shut him up, he’ll get us all killed. We can’t make the time I’d like because Sebastian and Daddy Cool are carrying Smith under the shoulders, his legs dangling uselessly beneath him. He was hit before he even reached the tree line.
“You’re doing fine, Smithy,” I say to him; I’ve got this fucking routine off by heart. “Just a few more miles. You’re gonna make it.”
He opens his eyes and smiles at me. He knows I’m lying. His face is as
hen from loss of blood. We’ve got no morphine, no medics; but he’s an old NCO from WWII.
He doesn’t make a sound.
When I wake up the next morning, Baby’s gone. David’s ex, Doreen (who now calls herself Crystal), is sitting at the kitchen table, working her way through a flagon of port.
“Want some?” She smiles at me, flashing teeth and dreadlocks, the habitual blue heeler at her feet.
“What happened to the True Vine racket?” I say.
She hitches up close to me in case David’s not as asleep as he seems. “The leader,” she tells me. “We had a good thing going. Then he goes mental one night when I’m asleep and crucifies himself on a big ironbark with lashings of barbed wire.”
“Still alive?”
She nods. “The followers came and fetched me when they found him in the morning. I took one look; then I tossed them the wire cutters and walked away. Never went back.”
“Un huh.” I wonder how long she and David will last this time with their history of bitter brawls and rapturous reunions that never last.
I get up and make myself coffee, using the wood stove in the lean to. Only David really understands the confusing collection of electrical cords fed by the generator and he’s still asleep, knocked cold by the Stelazine. The coffee’s good, sweet and black, the way I like it. David never has any milk, but there’s always plenty of sugar.
I stare into the bottom of the mug. What’s a retired narc doing drifting around the far north coast of New South Wales, living on the Vets’ Pension and hanging with what David affectionately calls “the low life?”
The bottom of the mug stares back at me. No answer.
I can hardly blame it on Azure.
I was working undercover as a bouncer in a nightclub in Kings Cross when I first saw her come in with six other people—Az is rarely alone; that’s something I learned very early in my relationship with her. Getting Azure alone is tougher than having your teeth pulled.
But I also learned very early in the piece that she was a junkie and how she made the money to support her habit.
Classy, sure. But still ...
She never tried to hide it from me. Azure doesn’t know how to lie, she’s like a child. Maybe it’s because of her childlike quality that everyone loves her and even the women don’t hate her, in spite of her beauty. She was just nineteen when I met her, and within three months we were living together, she was clean and wasn’t working anymore, and I was the happiest guy in town.
I don’t know what made me decide to return to the Northern Rivers. Maybe it was memories of childhood, of my time here with the old man. Maybe it was getting shot in that bust on God. Maybe it was knowing that I had to get Azure out of Sydney if I was going to keep her clean. Whatever it was, I decided to quit the agency. It took a couple of years to make this happen, but in the end we had a garage sale one weekend and got on the train to Mulumbimby. Baby turned up soon after. Cherchez la femme, like they say—in his case, Star, the little hippy chick who’d lived next door to Az and me on the dunes in New Brighton. But Baby’s bad luck’s still holding. Now that Wayne the Despicable’s going to be released from jail shortly (he’s got connections), she’s talking of going back to him for the kids’ sake. Like I said, nothing ever works out for Baby. Everything he touches turns to trouble.
Azure and I were idyllically happy for a while, living near the sea on my retirement money. Getting all-over tans and surfing every day. Then we moved to a farmhouse in the country, and the nightmares came back.
As the winter passed into the spring of that year and I couldn’t find any work we began to understand for the first time in our lives what it was like to be poor. Neither of us had ever lived below the poverty line before. It didn’t take long to get to us.
Towards the end I started spending days at a time away, staying with Baby in his converted banana-packing shed in the mountains. Az and I were miserable all the time: we couldn’t live together and we couldn’t live apart. When it all finally exploded, neither of us had the slightest idea just what exactly it was that had gone wrong.
Who, or what, was to blame? We didn’t know.
My RTO’s got the radio working. I find we’re about six ks from an American unit that’s just digging in for the night. I talk to their G6 and tell him we’re coming in from the south-east at around 1800 hours. I ask him to warn the men in that sector to watch out for us. Getting back to an American unit after dark’s got to be just about the most dangerous manoeuvre you can execute. So many guys get blown away by trigger-happy friendlies.
We travel two ks without incident. Just as I’m beginning to think we’re going to make it my tail scout tells me there’s a full platoon of Viet Cong, probably the NVA’s 95th, all well geared up with AK47s, helmets, fatigues, the lot, coming up fast behind us.
I go back down the line to Smithy. While I’m weighing up what to do his eyes snap open and he says in a surprisingly clear voice, “Request permission to remain behind, sir.”
The men watch me. The word’s all down the line we’ve got an NVA platoon on our tail.
“What’d you have in mind, Top?” I say.
He tells me he wants us to prop him up against a tree off the track with all the grenades we can spare and extra ammo. I accede to this request and we push on faster now.
We haven’t been gone from the spot fifteen minutes when I hear the first frags exploding behind us. There are some bursts of intermittent gunfire, mostly AK 47s, then silence.
We tramp on; I hope like hell Smithy made sure he wasn’t taken alive. Beside me my corporal watches my face for some sign of emotion, but apart from that one hope, I don’t have any emotion.
I’m just a robot with a mission.
Baby’s in jail again. He went back and got the doorman after I fell asleep. He chose to go into Brunswick Heads lock-up, for word on the street has it that that’s the best place to work your fines off.
We go down to visit him in the afternoon, Azure and I, though we’re still separated. At the last moment David and Doreen aka Crystal, arrive. Rather than leaving them there to wreck the place—they’re already well into the port and on the way to one of their innumerable arguments—we cram them in with us, flagons of port and all, and drive into Brunswick Heads.
We find Baby doing the police station’s laundry at the laundromat down the road, drinking a can of Fosters and eating a pie as he aimlessly watches the dryers whirling around.
“Where’re the cops?” asks Crystal Doreen, who has warrants out for her all over south-east Queensland and northern New South Wales.
“Aw, they’re off duty, the place’s all locked up. The sergeant’s taken ‘is wife down t’ Ballina t’ do ‘er shopping.”
“How are you going to get back in?” I ask him.
Baby looks sheepish. “Well, I can’t. Not until they open the place at four.”
“You mean you’re locked out?! They’ve gone away and locked you out?”
“Get fucked, O’Neill.”
“Want a snort of the port?” Crystal asks him. “It’s in the car. Two flagons.”
When Baby has got the laundry out of the dryers, we go back to the police station and lie on the front lawn in the sun, drinking port out of empty Coca Cola bottles. It’s a beautiful day. Little clouds are scudding across the sky, seagulls wheel overhead. Dimly in the distance you can hear the sound of the breakers smashing against the rock walls at the river’s entrance.
I stare up into the sky and watch the seagulls, while Crystal keeps on refilling the coke bottles and the levels of the flagons in the car go down.
Up the path to the police station comes a little old lady carrying a straw basket and looking very confused at finding the place all locked up. Baby lurches off the lawn and lumbers across to her in his board shorts, tank top and thongs.
“Can I help ya, ma’am?”
“Oh, officer,” she begins; she’s mistaken him for an off-duty cop. I don’t bother to listen to the rest, she’s pro
bably lost her cat or something, poor bitch, it’ll only ruin my day.
Baby takes down all the details with a pencil and pad which he’s miraculously whipped out of his back pocket. He asks her to come back at four.
“So’s the sergeant can see ya, ma’am.”
“Thank you, officer,” she smiles at him bravely. “You’re very kind.”
“Think nothin’ of it, ma’am, think nothing of it. That’s what we’re here for.”
David and Crystal are fighting again, and the grog is running out. They say they’ll go round to the Brunswick Pub and get some more, but I know they won’t come back. They’ll end up going nine rounds in Casuarina Park and throwing one another off the pier. I don’t care. It’s good just lying here, listening to the drone of everyone’s voices and watching Azure laugh. She laughs a lot—when she isn’t crying.
I think a great deal about Azure and me that day. I wonder if it might’ve worked if we’d had more money, but there’s a catch-22 in that. As long as Az is poor, she can’t reacquire a habit. If she gets a job, and she’s applied for one at the Top Pub back in town, she’ll have the money to start again, and I won’t be there to keep her on the rails.
The heat comes up out of the ground and soaks pleasantly through my body. I gaze up into the sky. My head is in Azure’s lap and I’m not thinking straight—or maybe I’m thinking too straight. It’ll be my birthday in five more days. In five days’ time I’ll be thirty-nine. Half my life’s gone, probably more; four combat wounds’ve got to affect your life expectancy.
What if we’d had a kid, Azure and I? She’d wanted one but I told her I was scared of the Agent Orange. Christ knows I saw enough of it, so that part’s true. But the real truth of the matter is I don’t want a kid. I lose my head completely every time the subject comes up.