Sorry for the delay. School. Personal issues. Sheer laziness. You know how it is. But— here’s a story. Fresh from the archives and remade better, stronger than it was before. Go ahead and read it and, since I’ve got your attention, go ahead and subscribe while you’re at it. Maybe if I string enough of you together I can afford a real graphic designer.
PERFUME RIVER. HUE. SOUTH VIETNAM. 1956.
Logan Chase felt a deep unease as he watched the incense coil slowly burn away. It wasn’t anything specific. That’s what was eating away at him. The last time he was in Hawaii, the japs bombed Pearl Harbor. Since then, he’d always taken time off with one eye towards the nearest exit. If he was under fire, on a mission, behind enemy lines, he could speak to it, enumerate the problems. Adjudicate the damn thing. This? He only knew one way to deal with the lulls and, as it stood, his mai tai had run dry. He set the empty glass down on his nightstand. It clinked against the little kerosine lantern set there. The sound was enough to wake up the girl lying on his chest. Just as well, she was still on the clock.
She went by the name of Belle and as far as he could tell, it was neither her first or last name. Probably didn’t even have a middle. Just “Belle.” He could sympathize. He didn’t use his real name for work, either. The girl was in her early twenties, Eurasian, and spoke, inexplicably, in a mid-Atlantic accent. Based on the price she ran, he was not the only one charmed by this affectation. He booked her less than two hours after he booked the houseboat. Now that he thought about it, the houseboat was cheaper than she was.
“I had a dream,” she said in her pitch-perfect Hepburn.
“Oh?” His eyes firmly locked on the empty glass.
“We were on a houseboat just like this. But not like this. There was no river, only the sky.”
“Were we sailing?”
“No. The world was moving around us. Just us and the stars.”
“And the bed.”
“Yes, of course.”
“That sounds like a lot for a dream.”
“Dreams don’t take time, they just happen.”
“I’m sure.”
She made a little moan and ran painted fingernails over his chest and stopping at one of the long scars that crisscrossed it.
She ran her hand over his chest and stopped when she touched one of the long, ugly scars that crisscrossed it.
“Where did you get this?” she asked. Her nails followed a jagged trail that ran down his belly.
“Oh that? A fishing accident,” he said. “You ever been fishing?”
“No. I have made a point of avoiding such things.”
“If you ever do, careful how you fling your hook, it might catch you right there.”
“And this one?” An inch long divot in his upper shoulder.
His hand met hers and he traced it along with her. He forgot he even had that one. “A hunting accident.”
“And—"
“Skiing accident.”
“You don’t seem like a klutz to me.”
“Trouble has a way of finding me, that’s all,” he replied.
“Now I know that you’re telling the truth,” she said. He could hear the limits of her mid-Atlantic roll up against her French. “Donne-mois une clope.”
“Mais oui.” He groaned as he rolled over and found his Lucky Strikes. Only one left. He tsked and lit it anyways. He took a good drag and handed it to her. He closed his eyes. He did not want to go ashore. He wanted to float here for as long as he possibly could. Until Doomsday, preferably. “Un fumer por tu, madame.”
“Your French is an atrocity,” she said.
“You should hear my German,” he said.
“You are making fun of me.”
“That’s why I like you, you’re smart.”
“You’re a naughty schoolboy.” She swatted his belly. “I should discipline you.”
“Big talk.”
Belle slipped out of the mosquito nest and into a robe. It was the same color as the river just beyond the boat’s deck. Prehistoric-sized butterflies danced in the silk.
“I will fix us a drink,” she said.
“Don’t take too long,” he said.
She put her on slippers and walked out the door and onto the little deck that made up the back of the houseboat.
There probably wasn’t a place on earth where Belle would not fit in. From the Tuileries to Tian Shar there would be some cushioned corner for her, just waiting. It would all seem terribly natural to her, he imagined. He crumpled up the cigarette packet and tossed it into the corner with the spent Moët magnum.
Wherever he belonged, it wasn’t Indochina, nor was it in Tehran or Seoul or anywhere else where he got to stand on a perch and watch a shoeless mass of humanity limp on by. He closed his eyes and tried not to think of where they’d send him next. That would come in its own time. Before then, he decided he needed two more things. One of them was a drink—which the girl was taking forever with. The second thing—he opened the little nightstand and pushed aside the Browning automatic in there and grabbed his well-worn Timex. His money was good for another eighty minutes. Lot you could do in that amount of time and he was going to try to squeeze all of it in. He checked that he was still good to go. He was. He threw on his briefs and the watch and went to the deck. All this relaxation was going to get him killed one of these days.
The cool air wrapped around him like a veil. Beyond the deck of the painted houseboat was a vast field of black water. Beyond that was the haze of Hue at night. Lanterns flickered as people walked by. The vague sounds of commerce and arguing and music and laughter wafted over as a single sound. The funhouse mirror incarnation of the scene waving on the river. Of all the things he saw, Belle was not one of them. The bar was untouched. The lantern was placed on a small table. Under the railing were her slippers and on it, was her cigarette laid flat. It was still smoking.
It took him a second to do the math. He hit the deck just in time.
“Goddamnit.”
Gunfire exploded over his head. Low-caliber. Lots of it. Coming in waves. He scrambled on his hands and knees back into the cabin. A bottle of Curacao exploded. He rolled into the bedroom and kicked the rickety door shut. Splinters filled the air. He choked on dust. The shutters bounced off of the house and swung and slammed open as if possessed. He knocked over the nightstand by his bed and found his Browning automic pistol. A bullet struck one of the lanterns, sending kerosine and glass everywhere. He found feel the glass grind into his hair and the slick wet of the kerosine cooling on his skin. A split second later one of the stray rounds struck the incense coil. It sent sparks everywhere. The room went up instantly and Chase with it.
“Goddamnit.”
This was not the first time he’d been set on fire. It was not a welcome change of pace. He eyeballed the deck was by the door. The shooters would come from there. No doubt. Stupid or smart, they’d want to do this in person. Point blank. Loud and messy. Time counting down. He could smell his hair burning off his skin. He slapped to put it out. He breathed in smoke. He could feel a thousand little cuts creeping across his skin. He eyeballed the broken window opposite the door. There was only one way out of here and it wasn’t through the front door.
“Goddamnit.”
And here he was with only one magazine.
Buzzing through his thoughts were the pain rolling across his back and in his scalp and the sound of the motorboat smacking up against the hull.
He ran. Glass cut into his feet. He felt the warmth of blood with every step. He dived through one of the windows. More cuts. More splinters. Something jagged skinned all along the front of his ankle and into his foot. For all that, it was a good dive. The black water of the Perfume River swallowed him up. He thought about Belle’s dream. Maybe this is where he belonged, in the warm senseless nothing. The drumbeat of gunfire pumped into the water around him. Above him was the lantern glow of the houseboat. He turned and swam under it. He fought the urge to breathe and swam some more. His limbs screamed at him along with everything else. He pushed. Ahead: the hulk of the motorboat. He got under it, only breaking the surface when he got to the stern of the little boat. He resisted the urge to gulp and gasp. That could wait. He had some killing to do first.
He grabbed the motorboat and pulled himself on board. What a sight I must look like. His foot hit the deck and pain shot through him. He landed on his side, hard and bad and right at the feet of the boat’s pilot.
“Sacre b—”
Chase shoved the gun into the man’s groin and fired. One, two, three times. His trousers caught fire on contact. Inchoate Gallic cursing as the bullets ripped out through the base of his spine and collapsed. Chase moved. No time to count how many rounds he had. He propped his elbows up on the gunwale and faced the houseboat deck. There were three men. The fire swirled behind them. They were all armed with brand new MAT-49 submachineguns. Their white shirts slick with sweat and speckled with fresh ash. Small, medium, and large. They were slow on the uptake.
Chase shot the big one twice through the back. He shot the medium man twice right above his right nipple and his neck. He fell backwards into the open doorway, shitting and dying as he went. By the time he had a bead on the third man, the twerp had his hands up. His SMG clattered onto the deck next to Belle’s slippers. The sound of wood cracking cut through the air passed between them.
The last would-be ex-gunman was a frog. It was clear as day. Fresh from whatever concern still pumped out little men like this. He remembered London was lousy with little shits like this with their military-issue pencil mustaches and the piss rolling down the front of their chinos. All of it looking sharp and stylish and with crypto-fascist rolling off him like cigarette smoke. The kind of cunts who thought it was the duty of the little people of the world to pay them rent.
“Can you swim?” Chase asked.
“Quois?” the goon said.
“Never mind.”
The frog moved with a kind of hustle that he didn’t know their kind still had. Chase caught him in the lower back as he vaulted over the railing. Chase sighed. He pulled the rope from its mooring and tossed it onto the boat deck and pushed the throttle, taking the boat away from the fire.
He looked at the dead man at his feet. He looked the same as the others. There must have been a three-for-one sale when their dad shot his wad. He reached into the dead wheelman’s pocket and pulled out a packet of Galouises and a gold-plated lighter with something Japanese stamped into it. He smoked and steered the boat. He thought about the girl. If she was smart—and she most certainly wasn’t an idiot—she’d be halfway to Hong Kong by now. Indochine was played out. The only people who couldn’t see that were the types of idiots who stormed into stranger’s houseboats without any real follow up. This was Vietnam now. Somebody should have told you.
The final frog came up for air a good thirty feet from port. He was moving with all of the speed and energy of a man with a perforated gut. Chase threw him a life preserver.
“Come on, don’t be shy! Come on!”
The man grabbed on with both hands.
“Great,” Chase said. “Stay right there.
He grabbed the pilot’s submachinegun. The man in the water was too tired to do anything about it. Chase emptied the mag into the frog’s head. When the weapon clicked dry, he tossed it into the man’s wake. He turned the motorboat towards the shore. Behind him he heard the houseboat’s roof collapse. He checked his watch. That bitch had stiffed him nearly twenty whole minutes. Good for her. At least somebody got paid.
He turned the boat upriver, away from the sea. He guided a narrow notch between the light. She belonged in flight. He belonged here, above the jaws. He could see it just ahead there in the dark. It was a trap built only for him. He closed his eyes and the shore went away. He felt himself hanging there, in Belle’s dreams, floating in that dark, forever.
I’ll see you sooner than two weeks from now. I’m working on another horror (?) story right now and, if it doesn’t get accepted, you’ll be seeing it here. Like all of them, it’s pretty good. You should dig it.
Anyways, until then. . .