 |
|||
|
|
The House of Singing Wind
By
Sir Marc Wyld
Chapter 7
Li
Li is six years old when the knowledge comes to her that her future depends on either finding a husband willing to live and work on her father’s farm growing rice, finding a man rich enough to forego a dowry or her father must sell her. Without money for a dowry, there can be no wedding; there is little money for food. Her father’s land has been the family homestead for over 80 years. The land came under her great-grandfather’s control the same year her Grandfather was born. Her great-grandfather built a rice paddy on the land and he was able to feed his family and sell a modest surplus for a modest profit and he made plans for another terrace he and his son could finish. Two more terraces are completed before her father is born.
1918 was a very bad year for the Ting family. Her grandfather lost two sons as well as a wife to influenza. His troubles were further compounded with a wet spring and a long, hot, dry summer that set the stage for Malaria that would take his youngest daughter also. He remarries two years later and his second wife has a baby a year from the time she is thirteen until she is twenty but only a single son, her father. Performing that act takes her life and just after her father’s third birthday, her Grandfather is killed by a Japanese soldier trying to make a point to the village that all rice production in this area is the property of the Imperial Japanese Army. In addition to all of the village rice stores, nineteen village women are taken by the soldiers and except for one, are never seen again. The woman that does return will be driven from the village because the villagers believe she is insane since the only sound she is capable of making is an incoherent mumbling. She had been assigned as a pleasure girl and one night a soldier cuts out her tongue in a drunken rage after she screamed at him. The only reason she is able to survive is the sensational blow job she gives with a mouth encumbered by a tongue. With this one skill, she will eke out an existence and finish out her days cleaning barroom floors on the waterfront, sleeping on pool tables and giving sailors a very unique blow job thanks to the sadistic cruelty unleashed by the inhumanity of war . Li, by her sixth birthday knows human life has little value, especially if you have a pussy.
Survival is a matter of being even more useful than pleasing. She expects her father to sell her since he cannot take her as a wife and she knows he is ashamed that he used her for his own pleasure when she turned sixteen.
* * *
The annual market day is held the 3rd Wednesday following the first orange full moon at the end of summer. To celebrate her sixteenth year her father takes her to Bangkok to sell his surplus rice. Her father, however, gets drunk and takes he virginity, a fact he learns upon waking up with a splitting headache next to her naked form. He has even greater pangs of guilt learning that in this drunken rage he has extracted a promise from Li to make this arrangement permanent. He rushes her back to the village and tries in vain to find anyone, someone, who will take his daughter as a bride with the meager dowry he can offer, lest she be pregnant. Finally, he decides that selling his daughter is his only option. Li accepts his decision with the knowledge this is expected and she will do the bidding of whoever would give her father enough money to feed the family or perhaps hire a strong man to open more of the unused terraces. Li will do her duty.
* * *
She remembers well the day the fat, stinking whore felt her body roughly. She remembers the American stopping the bargaining and turning it in to a bidding war. She remembers her father being paid more money than he had seen in the last five years. While she remembered the happiness she had felt seeing her father prosperous, she will never forget the grief she felt as her father turned and walked away without another word or look. She remembers the man named Tran who spoke Lao for the American, LT Mike, the sailor who does not ride on boats. She remembers staying as close to Tran as she can, learning as much about her new owner as she possibly can. The only important information she learns, however, is that he is an American and that Tran thinks he is a very good man, a very good fighter and his name is Lieutenant Mike. She learns this as they talk quietly waiting for the helicopter to take them to Team Two Two Delta’s Firebase November, LT Mike’s little command in the middle of nowhere.
In the days following, Tran begins to teach her the basics of English as he listens to her life and does not judge her. Tran is the one who explains to LT Mike that Li’s unhappiness is not due to homesickness, but because she is confused that LT Mike would give her father so many Baht and then not think she had value to him. The day Tran told Mike this, he took a long walk in the jungle and he did not carry a weapon. When he returned to camp, he sends for both her and Tran. Through Tran, he tells her that she is very valuable to him and that her father did not get enough Baht for her. Beginning that night, her English lessons were continued in the only place success can be guaranteed: in bed. Mike’s ability to speak Lao improved as well.
* * *
Early one morning, Tran crept quietly into LT Mike’s tent and softly spoke. LT Mike did not need to be awakened: he was fully awake and listening from the first rustle of his tent flap. The camp was up and very active but that fact could not be determined by any sound. The men gathered up equipment and silently connected wires that had been carefully laid around their little firebase to a detonator. Just as dawn was breaking, LT Mike spoke softly into a small box and fifty minutes later the unmistakable pounding of the sky in the distance announced the approach of a Huey. LT Mike spoke again into the box.
“Double Wop, this is November Actual.”
“Go, Actual.”
“Watch our position for red smoke. Extraction is 50 mikes downwind. White fog to follow on 15 count. Observe and report on approach for enemy flanking maneuver. Copy, Double Wop?”
“Copy, Actual. 50 mikes down wind, red then fog, observe and report Charlie on flanks. Rodger?”
“Rodger!”
LT Mike nods his head and Tran throws what looked like a small green ball across the clearing and it bounces once before spewing thick red smoke. Then LT Mike fires his weapon into the air. It does not make much noise but it sends a ball of fire into the sky to exploding just like the ones she once saw during Tet, the lunar New Year. A handle to the detonator is turned and the entire perimeter of the base becomes hidden behind a curtain of billowing fog-like white smoke. Anyone on the outside who wants to see in now must charge through the smoke curtain into a clearing filled with killing machines at the ready.
As the helicopter touches the ground, behind them an explosion lights up the morning sky and destroys all useable equipment. Before the echo dies away, the personnel of Firebase November are safely airborne, headed toward Saigon at two hundred sixty miles an hour. They fly for an hour and 40 minutes and touch down in full sunlight at an airbase that is in chaos. LT Mike positions the men of Two Two Delta between two rows of Quonset huts, gives orders and takes off. He is back in about a half hour and motions for Li to follow him. She must run hard to keep up with what is a trot for him. He leads her up the tail ramp of a large airplane with four huge propellers already turning. He talks to a man in a green suit wearing a helmet with a lightning bolt painted on the side of it for a few minutes and then they laugh. LT Mike pushes Li toward the man who pulls her inside the big airplane. He leads her to a pad situated behind a pile of green duffle bags and the plane rumbles off into the sky.
Several times during the flight, the man brings her water and once, even a Coke. The plane has been flying many hours when he brings her a white box holding a sandwich, a banana, some cookies, a bag of potato chips, a warm A & W root beer and a little bag containing a napkin, a plastic knife, fork, spoon and straw. It is delicious. It is dark when the plane lands. The man tells her to be so quiet and so still and soon the lack of sounds around the plane tells her that they are alone. The man is waiting for something and she knows that is true when three trucks drive close to the airplane. The trucks are noisy because they all have refrigeration units running as they begin to unload the cargo. It is then she realized the piles of bags on the airplane are not duffle bags like LT Mike’s sea bag; they are the long, black bags of dead soldiers going home.
As the men in the trucks begin the slow, reverent task of transferring cargo, the man LT Mike trusted her to takes Li to a long building and into a dim room. The room is bare, save for a simple dresser, a single bed, a single nightstand holding a lamp and a locker against the wall opposite the window. The man strips off his flight suit, wraps his naked waist with a towel and leaves to go down the hall to the shower. When he gets back, he motions for her to follow him. He looks both ways down the hall before he motions her into the hall. She follows him on tiptoe to a bathroom made to be used by many men at once but is now is deserted. He watches her strip while he guards the room. He never takes his eyes off of her naked body as she lathers her firm, young, brown body in the large, tiled room. He makes sure she misses a single millimeter of her wet nakedness and insists she washes her long, chestnut colored hair repeatedly. He wraps her in a towel and carefully takes her back to his room in the barracks. One inside his room, he motions for her to drop to her knees to use her well practiced mouth on his swollen cock and dutifully swallows a huge load of sperm. She redresses in the same clothes she arrived in as the man puts on a pair of khaki shorts with a very loud tropical shirt. A pair of sandals and an umbrella completes his attire and he is dressed for liberty. He walks out of the barracks and on to the street as if they own the place. They enter a building with loud rock music coming from inside that has a sign that reads “Subic Bay EM Club”. The man talks to an oriental woman for a while and gives her some money and she gives him card that he pins to her shirt before they leave. They walk out onto the street and cross a bridge that has a high chain link fence on each side that she can see through. Tied to the bridge pilings below are long, narrow canoe-like boats each with a girl in a long dress, red on the bottom and white on the top, standing holding a wire baskets and catcalling to the sailors crossing the bridge heading into town on liberty to throw them money. Sometimes the sailors will stop and show a coin to the girls and ask them to show their tits. In the desperation of abject poverty, the girls lower their tops of the dress and show their breasts. The sailors then flip the coin over the chain link fence and continue on their way, usually at the prompting of the stern Marine sentry, guarding the entrance to the base. Sometimes, the girls catch the coins in the basket and sometimes it splashes into the water where young boys, usually their brothers, are waiting to dive beneath the murky water to retrieve the coin for the girls. Li stopped beside the man to take this all in. He points to the river water and says “That’s Shit River: The boys swimming in that won’t live to be ten years old.”
He motions for her to follow him across the bridge past the two Marines guards in beautiful blue pants with red stripes down each side, through a gate into the hustle and bustle of Magsaysay Street of Olongopo City. The man takes her arm in the crowd and guides her near the curb where he makes a noise that sounds like “sit-sit” between his teeth and long Jeepney, painted wildly and covered with silver horse ornaments stops. There are two benches facing each other in the rear where they board and the man passes a coin to the driver as he drives away. She watches the sidewalks jammed with sailors and sexy Filipino girls and the streets lined with bar after bar, some having uniformed men wearing holstered guns to holding the door, motioning for sailors to enter. At the end of the street, there is a traffic circle where the man she is with says “Dito!” and the Jeepney stops and they get off, and move to the curb. The crowd has thinned considerably and they walk into a bar with a neon sign that reads “Molokai Club”. The man orders a San Miguel beer and asks the barmaid a question. He does not offer Li the seat next to him and she does not take it.
A few minutes later, a beautiful oriental woman in a miniskirt wearing stiletto heels comes and sits next to him. He orders her a drink and they begin to talk but Li can not keep up with the conversation. After he has finished his beer and the woman has finished the drink that had actually been tea and very weak tea at that, the man motions for the lady behind the bar over to him.
“Mamasan, I pay her bar fine.” He says and shoves some money toward her and waits for a paper receipt and the three of them leave the bar. On the street again, the man talks some more with the woman then abruptly turns and leaves without another word to Li. The girl abruptly takes her arm and says, “You come with me, now. My name is Solly. LT Mike say I take care of you.”
With that, Sollie entwines her arm in Li’s and leads her away from the hustle and bustle
of Magsaysay street into the narrow and winding streets of the barrio.
|
|
|