Never Fear (26 page)

“
But is porsoot of
happiness, bebe, no?” She handed me the candy-cane joint. I took a
cloyingly heady drag. The paper made my lips taste of
peppermint.

“
Well, the rest of us
would be a damn sight more inclined to pursue our happiness if
assholes like him didn’t pursue theirs by fleecing us at every
goddamn turn. And needlessly, no less. He’s got plenty of money,
but for some reason that makes him immune to the idea of ever
actually perfecting a skill. That’s not just lazy, that’s actively
being useless.” I coughed and handed her back the candy-striped
peppermint joint. “I don’t know how you can stand all this
peppermint crap.”

“
You no’ like it?”
Reclining, she sipped on the joint and slowly French-inhaled the
smoke. I’d paint her like that, if I could paint.

“
No, I can’t just
not like
it. It makes me
think of you.”

She smiled mischievously. “Do a little
bump with me.”

What the hell, it was a
snow day. I sprinkled a snowflake’s worth of blow onto the crest of
her breast and (
laying a finger aside of
his nose
) rode it into my face like a
champion skier slamming into the first powder run of the day. My
heart got tight in my chest. I groaned as I pulled back.

“
No good,
bebe?”

“
Good. All good,” I
wheezed. “You just make my heart stop, beautiful.” I forced a smile
that the blow held firmly in place.

She sucked on the peppermint joint and
handed it to me. The minty coolness met the weed’s burning flavor
and the chemical drip of the coke, blending into one heady
sensation that made me fall backward and sink into the couch as if
it were a warm snowbank. Clara climbed onto my lap.

“
And what do you want for
Christmas, little girl?”

“
A key,” she said
immediately. “
De
perrico
.”

I hoped she couldn’t feel my heart
plummet from her perch. “Perrico”—Spanish for “parakeet”—was local
slang for coke.

“
That’s too much parakeet
for a pretty little bird like you,” I replied.

“
No for me, bebe. I cut
and sell. Then we have fuuun.” She pouted in a way that made me
wish I could buy her all of Colombia.

“
I dunno,
babe.”

“
For school money. For
better job,” she attempted.

“
Why don’t I just give you
money for that, then?”

“
No. I make it. And
more.”

I hated how right she was. Flipping a
kilo of coke at her club, or between her and Mariana working at the
bikini bar… they’d clean up. Even more if they cooked it to crack.
Then repeat customers, bigger buys, bigger scores… probably not
going to be used as school money at that point, though.

Unless I made sure she stayed on the
straight and narrow. Relatively speaking, I mean.

“
I’ll think about it.
You’d have to be a really, really nice girl.”

She coyly narrowed her eyes. “I’m a
nice girl.” My heart rose again. She tugged at the elastic of my
boxers. “You wanna go down my chimney, bebe?”

I extinguished the peppermint joint
and grabbed her pillowy ass in both hands.

“
Did you leave me some
cookies?”

*

The next morning, we bundled up and I
hailed a cab to take us back downtown. I wasn’t up for another
arduous train-trek, and anyway I always liked seeing Clara safely
to the door of the Pussycat. As we pulled away, I pondered giving
the driver the address of my apartment or Trooley’s.

I went with the former, just so I
could pregame. With Clara now ensconced in her exotic realm for the
day, I started noticing my other surroundings again. It started
with a “Support The Troops” sticker on the taxi console. Then by
default, my eyes did recon on the driver.

I instantly began questioning if I had
any reason to be hallucinating.

The back of the driver’s head was a
crisscross of scars where hair had staunchly refused to grow in. A
strap that appeared to lead to an eye-patch ran across the back of
his head.

Two fingers were missing from his
right hand.

Almost subconsciously, I uttered one
of the few Vietnamese phrases I’d ever learned, asking if he was a
Degar soldier.

He responded in elegant,
perfectly-enunciated English, in a resonant baritone
voice.

“
Why yes, I am a veteran
of Degar descent. How did you know?”

“
I thought I killed you on
Christmas. 1972.”

“
Excuse me?” He turned and
looked me full in the face. It wasn’t an instant realization, but
it was a singular one.

“
Jiminy Christmas,” he
breathed. I suppressed a weird laugh.

The light turned green. He didn’t
notice.

“
Change of plans,” I
stated. “We’re going to Trooley’s Tourist Tavern, right now. You
and me.” I couldn’t contain my shock, but added in a stunned
monotone, “’Tis the season to be jolly.”

Several cars behind us honked. The
cabbie immediately cut left and continued, now toward the
bar.

A few moments of introspective silence
passed. Fat snowflakes whirled outside like puzzle pieces fitting
perfectly into their picturesque snowbanks.

The driver broke the silence in a
surprisingly worried tone. “Please don’t make an attempt to kill
me. I’m armed and would unfortunately have to
reciprocate.”

“
What?”

The driver spoke evenly, but
anxiously. “I didn’t give the enemy any intel on you guys. I wasn’t
a double agent. They were just… there. I had no way of
contacting…”

“
Stop,” I said. “You
didn’t do anything wrong. Jesus. We were the ones who called in a
fucking airstrike. I thought I burned you alive.”

“
I trained and worked with
the Americans long enough, I figured an airstrike would follow,”
the cabbie noted, his one good eye probing my face via the
rearview. “I ran out of there like hell was on my heels. I was
worried YOU guys were done for.”

“
Came close. Not as close
as it did you, though. Jesus, you were just a kid. You didn’t
deserve to lose an eye and half a hand just because we were too
ass-backwards to spot an ambush. And on fucking Christmas.
Jesus.”

Another stop light. He turned, his one
eye doubling-down on a meaningful stare. “Forget the eye, forget
the hand. You gave me the greatest Christmas present I could have
possibly desired: plausible hope, and the realistic expectation of
escape from an impossible, terrifying and violent end. Do you know
how rare that is?”

“
I’m glad things worked
out for the best,” was all my stunned mind could murmur.

The driver persisted,
forceful but friendly. “Do you understand what I’m saying? I’m not
sure I could even know
how
to offer that level of ruthlessly effective
gratitude to anyone else. You’re not exactly going to get picked
off by V.C. coming out of the subway tunnels or fall in a pungi pit
going down Broadway. There’s no way I can ever repay
you!

“
Sir, you killed seven men
to save me, and you didn’t even know my name.”

The whirling snow outside seemed to
give a low, ghostly whistle of appreciation in the wind. I glanced
at the faded photograph on the license stuck behind the bulletproof
glass of the driver’s partition, and sort of hated that despite the
gravity of the situation, I still couldn’t stifle a
snicker.

“
Phuc? Your name is
Phuc Tat
?”

Phuc rolled his one good eye hard
enough to serve extra for the missing one.

“
Yes, you base-humored
beast. In my language, it means ‘blessings and luck.’ Don’t
hate—appreciate.”

The Fourth Day of
Christmas.

The next several hours were spent in
the kind of clarity-cultivating haze that only a dark bar and a
long-lost person of importance can induce.

First, Phuc demanded to learn
everything about me. I swooped through what must have seemed like a
bland personal history in comparison… I’d served the rest of my war
tour mostly uneventfully, had left Vietnam in 1973 and had never
been back. I’d gone home to NYC, did the standard
wife/job/apartment thing, put it on autopilot for the next thirty
years. Initially thought I could have been a jazz or rock drummer
at one of the clubs downtown, settled for pounding garbage cans
into trucks for a very decent city wage. Still, that wasn’t enough
to keep an upwardly-mobile New York Wife happy, and an
appropriate-feeling divorce followed. I’d retired a few years ago
and got by on a fair union pension and the seasonal Santa thing.
Phuc got a chuckle out of that.

“
And how does it feel to
be a person of part-time magical character?” he asked.

I laughed some of my French Hens beer
foam into my beard. “One of the Batman villains said that there’s
no true despair without hope. That’s basically true for everyone in
real-life Gotham. Maybe the rest of America too, maybe the whole
world. I wouldn’t know anymore. Magic’s the same deal. There’s
nothing that makes reality hurt as bad as being offered the glimmer
of magic.”

“
I don’t know about that,”
Phuc mused. “What you did for me was damned close to magic. Perhaps
myopic magic, but magic nonetheless.”

I didn’t like talking about this sort
of shit now that it was no longer my professional obligation,
either as a soldier or as Santa. I switched the subject, genuinely
interested in my new friend Phuc. “How’s your English so
good?”

“
My parents were Degar,
but we were all influenced by the French missionaries that came to
our region when I was young. I grew up with Christmas and all the
trimmings, including
Petit Papa
Noel—
that’s you, Mr. Claus. When the war
ended, I took what little cash I had and made my way to France… I
might have behaved a little inappropriately, but it paid the bills,
and it was Paris… I put myself through hell, but I also put myself
through the Sorbonne.”

“
So why are you driving a
taxicab?”

Phuc shrugged. “American Dream, right?
‘On The Road’? It just works for me. I’m my own boss, I’m not stuck
in an office or a foxhole, and it makes me feel useful.
Particularly with my side-gig. And that’s where yoooooou…”—he
tipped his martini glass at me, then inhaled half of it without
missing a conversational beat—“are in for a Christmas
miracle.”

“
I’m done with the holiday
cheer,” I said, skulling more of my beer. “I’ll try my luck again
on St. Patrick’s Day.”

Phuc chuckled. “Oh, I think you’re in
luck. You see, I too do a bit of superheroic sanitation, as it
were.”

“
How do you
mean?”

“
I get a lot of
interesting clients in my cab. Some of them admire my mobility, my
resourcefulness. Some inquire as to my former life, as you did, and
are interested to learn that I was an American-trained soldier
who’d seen so much battle. Sam, you know the question that follows,
what people ask when they learn things like that.”

I did. It was a terrible question, one
that nobody in their right mind should ever ask a man who’s seen
the horrors of war.

“
I never talk about my
kill count,” I said sternly. “To anyone.”

“
I understand that, Sam.
And I do indeed understand why. However, the difference between us
is, that discussion is one
I
entertain. And one that I have, let’s say,
extrapolated.”

I wasn’t sure if the beer was hitting
me harder than usual, or the weird events of the last few days were
wearing on me harder than I thought. Subtlety was not going to
tiptoe through this discussion any further. “Phuc, are you telling
me you’re a contract killer?”

Phuc’s one eye went wide in
mock-horror. “Heavens no! Nothing that assiduous. However… I may
have, once or twice, used my well-honed skills and spacious car
trunk to aid in the… removal of certain societal
blights.”

“
Certain blights that were
in human form, I take it?”

“
A wife-beating Triad
underling and an unscrupulous pedophilic pimp, specifically. I
assure you, they are not missed. Doesn’t sound like your unsavory
Santa successor would be, either.”

I probably should have been shocked,
but I just muttered, “Amen to that.”

We sat in somber but understanding
silence for a minute.

“
It’s all relative,” Phuc
mused. “That Christmas we underwent that little rumble in the
jungle? The Americans were dropping legendary bombs on Hanoi. You
and I had it easy, comparatively.”

“
Operation Linebacker II,”
I remembered. “Largest heavy bomber strike since the end of World
War II. The Prime Minister of Sweden compared it to the Holocaust,
we strafed Hanoi so hard.”

“
And yet we called it a
‘success.’”

“
A success no one talks
about.”