William Boyd - On the Yankee Station - Stories

Throughout this time Lydecker appeased his tired and numb body by hating Pfitz. The man came to obsess him. His throat would be thick with emotion and fury as he forced the launching cable onto the Crusader’s grips. Sometimes he would wander over to the plane when the crew were working on it, but he was invariably met with insults and told to stay away. Slowly he came to feel that Pfitz had deliberately set out to deprive his life of the little meaning and satisfaction it had, and for some reason the only solace he found, the only way he knew of combating this emptiness, was to replace it with his hatred. The emotion gave his life a structure of sorts; it became something he could rely on, constant and unwavering, like a picture he had once seen of Saint Paul’s cathedral in the London blitz. Lydecker’s hatred was a familiar comfort; it had done able service from his earliest days. It had sustained him as he had lain in bed and listened to his father batter his frail mother in a frenzy of crapulous rage. It had provided support when Werbel took him off cars and put him on the pumps and had then restricted him to cleaning the rest rooms and sweeping the concrete apron. As he had freed plugged drains or picked sodden cigar butts from chill pools of oil, listening to the laughter and banter of the mechanics in the warm garage, all that had kept his mind from tilting over into twitching insanity was his passionate hatred. It was this and the knowledge that no matter what Werbel made him do, no matter how he was debased by him, the hate lived on — secretly firing and fueling his spirit. He was grateful to the Navy for allowing the hate to subside for a while. He still had no friends, was still one of the few despised and ignored that figure in any large company, but his ability with machinery was recognized and his self-esteem inched up from ground zero. He found his reward in the perfect roar of an engine, the smooth retraction of an undercarriage, or the clean function of an aileron. Never having asked for much, he needed nothing more, and his life reached a plateau of tolerance which was as close as he’d come to happiness. Until Pfitz had lost his Phantom.

Working away from Pfitz’s immediate sphere of influence, Lydecker became more aware of the man’s other obsession. Pfitz’s fascination with napalm was the subject of bemused reflection among the members of the catapult maintenance crew. “Hell, there goes Fireball Pfitz,” one of them would remark, and there would ensue some discussion about the “poor fuckin’ gooks.” Lydecker didn’t pay much attention at first. He had never been to Vietnam, even though he’d been on the Yankee Station for four months. The fleet made an endless patrol, usually just over the horizon from the coast, rarely steaming into sight unless cruisers or destroyers were called to bring their large guns into play. But gradually Lydecker came to see that Pfitz hated Vietnam as much as he loathed Lydecker himself; and he felt an involuntary sympathy start up in his body as Pfitz lovingly recounted, to the wide-mouthed audience of his ground crew, the devastation eight canisters of napalm had wrought in a straw village. The Rose Train climbed the gradients into the sky weighted with seething latent fire like some modern archangelic predator. Lydecker would watch it go, his head a confused muddle of thoughts and sensations.

And each night, exhausted, he would gaze at the slightly buckled beer can as if it were some icon or idol of his hate. In the distorted planes of its surface he seemed to see a vague metallic template of Pfitz’s bullish features. He would stroke the scar on his forehead and think about Pfitz and the men he had known like him — his father and Werbel — and the intensity of his hatred brought his flesh up in goose pimples. He would clutch the sides of his bunk and screw his eyes tight shut as if in the grip of an acute migraine attack. Men like that shouldn’t be allowed to go about unhindered, he would think distractedly; something should be done to them.

Then one day Pfitz had an engine cut out as Lydecker was shackling the expendable wire bridle to the nose wheel of the Crusader. The air vibrated with the idling jets of planes waiting in line and the hot gases of the exhausts made the crowded deck of the carrier shimmer and dance in the haze. Pfitz had to be towed off line and there was some delay as Lydecker fought to free the cable from the stiff nose-wheel clamps. Pfitz had raised his cockpit canopy and as Lydecker stood up, the cable finally released, he saw Pfitz’s purple enraged face screaming inaudible obscenities at him through arcs of spittle. It was as if Lydecker had been responsible for the cutout, as if his particular touch on the nose wheel had mysteriously spooked the functioning of the jet. And in the waves of Pfitz’s anger, Lydecker was disturbed by the sudden realization that Pfitz was a hater, too; that, like him, he needed his hate, needed his malice to beat the world.

That evening Lydecker applied for some long-overdue shore leave. The bizarre feeling of kinship had unsettled him. It appeared that Pfitz’s plane would be out of action for a week, and now — more than ever — Lydecker didn’t want to be around.

Lydecker was granted five days and opted for Saigon. He passed nearly all of his time in a Tu-Do bar brothel, methodically working his way through the nine girls who serviced the clients. Out at the back of the bar there were three lean-to-cabins with rickety iron beds. Lydecker spent the day drinking beer and every now and then would stagger up to one of the girls — comicbook whores with thickly mascara-ed eyes, miniskirts and padded bras — and lurch outside to a cabin.

It was only on the third day that he noticed the young, thin-shouldered girl who wiped and cleared the tables and periodically swept out the cabins. She was quiet and withdrawn and had slightly buck teeth. Unlike the others, she wore an ao-dai and a thigh-length chemise. Her status in the bar was indeterminate. He never saw her with G.I.’s and she never used the cabins. Sometimes she would go out to the back or into the toilets, but only with civilians or the occasional Vietnamese soldier, only spending the briefest time — about two minutes — away from her chores. She did not pout, flirt or posture like the other girls and never wore their cheap Western clothes. Yet for all her quiet dignity and restraint, she was the lowest creature in the bar. A quick-time girl — lower than the pimps and shoeshine boys, lower even than the many cats and stray dogs that nosed around and were temporarily adopted and spoiled by the American servicemen. Why is she doing this? Lydecker found himself asking. What was it about her that kept her in this whores’ city, so calmly accepting the shitty jobs and compliantly carrying out the spurious sex acts demanded of her? The paradox enraged and excited him and the girl gradually took a hold on his mind. Not having noticed her at first, he now seemed to see her everywhere. She hovered around the perimeter of his vision: taking the empty bottles from his table, slipping from a cabin as he entered, mopping up pools of vomit in the men’s room. He discovered a disproportionate irritation in this, and despite himself swore and shouted at her if she approached. Strengthened by his uniform in this city of obsequious servants, he befriended other servicemen who used the bar and in his noontide drunkenness wove obscene stories around the thin girl, flashing his eyes in her direction as he joined in the raucous guffaws.

She paid no attention to him, her frail body moving among the tables, her straight, shiny hair framing her face.

At night, Lydecker tossed in his bed and found his thoughts turning again and again to the thin girl. He stayed away from the bar a whole day before crashing in late at night in a beer haze to seek her out. He found her in the corridor that led out to the cabins at the back, her arms full of dirty sheets. Lydecker bore down on her, maddened by her inscrutability and at the same time potently aroused. He wrenched the sheets from her hands and forced her against the wall, drunkenly nuzzling her neck.