PURPLE HEARTS AND OTHER WOUNDS
Stephen Woodworth
PFC Billy Barnes stalked through the chaos of Tu Do Street, the humidity pasting the shirt of his civilian outfit to his chest. Sweat soaked and deflated the tissues padding the crotch of his underwear.
Stately French-style porticos and grillwork gave way to contemporary storefronts and garish bars. Street vendors and prostitutes, seeing a well-dressed American, pressed in upon him as he passed, making him offers in an incoherent mélange of English and Vietnamese. He scanned each female face for a certain set of Asian features, a distinct pair of brown eyes.
Feverish steps brought him to the Golden Flower, the massage parlor Cochrane had told him about. A svelte woman in a red satin gown leaned in the doorway, her mouth a jaded pout. Billy approached her, and she smiled languidly. “Hep you, sir?” she asked, running a finger down the buttoned front of his shirt.
“Vu Thi Tien.” He wiped the sweat from his mouth. “I was told she might be here.”
The woman’s expression cooled. “No, she not here. But we have many other girl—”
“I really need to find her.” He held up a twenty-dollar bill.
The woman smiled again.
After having her repeat the directions twice, Billy set out on the tortuous course through the Saigon streets. With a wave of giddy revulsion, he felt another erection stiffening at his crotch.
But the fly of his pants didn’t bulge at all.
The last time Billy had seen Tien was his last night as a whole man.
He had waited an hour for her in the storage shed that night, lying on a bedroll surrounded by crates of grenades and ammunition.
She was late.
Exhaling a sigh of smoke from his Lucky Strike, he had stubbed the butt out on the floor. Maybe Cochrane hadn’t been able to get her past the guards at the perimeter. They’d tightened security at Long Binh since Tet. Still, the guards wanted the services of Cochrane’s ladies as much as Billy did.
She had to come, he told himself. Tonight. Tomorrow his unit would go on search-and-destroy in the forest northeast of the camp, and God only knew when he’d be back. Out of habit, his hand brushed at his cheek, where he’d felt the sticky cling of blasted meat that struck his face when Spider stepped on a VC mine.
Billy hadn’t gone to Cochrane till then. He’d been saving himself for Marlene, for the promise that gleamed in her cheerleader’s smile and in the diamond ring on her hand. But after seeing what happened to Spider, he wasn’t sure there’d be anything left to save. He was nineteen when he came to Nam, and he’d never slept with a woman.
Until Tien.
A “shave-and-a-haircut” knock had sounded on the door of the shed. Billy had leaped to open it, and Cochrane stuck his smiling face inside. “Fear not, Mr. Happy is here!”
“It’s about time.” Billy swallowed. “Is she—”
“You have your donation to the base recreation fund?”
Billy had fished a five-dollar bill out of his fatigues and slapped it in Cochrane’s open palm.
“Better have one of these, too, Billy-boy,” Cochrane had said with a grin, holding up a condom. “Don’t want to catch that bad Oriental strain that’s goin’ around.”
Billy grunted and dug out another grimy bill to buy the rubber. With Marlene waiting for him back home, he couldn’t take a chance.
Cochrane took the money and winked. “Enjoy.” He left, and Tien stepped inside and shut the door behind her.
The light in the shed was so dim that he saw little more of her than the outline of her skinny limbs and the gloss of her long black hair. But he knew it was her from the plain, prim cotton dress she wore and the scent of strange spice about her.
She didn’t look like a prostitute. Billy had insisted that she not look like a prostitute.
“Hey.” He embraced and kissed her, pulling her down onto the bedroll with him. “I missed you.”
“I miss you too.” She felt tense, tentative in his grasp. “You have for me?”
He lifted his arms as if to be frisked. “You’ll have to find out for yourself.”
With a faint sigh, she searched the pockets of his jacket and pants, giggling as he groped and tickled her. It was a game they played. She would find her money in one of those pockets, plus maybe a Hershey bar or a pack of cigarettes. It let him pretend, let him maintain the illusion.
But not tonight. Tonight she found Marlene’s last letter, folded and stuffed in the back pocket of his pants. “In here?” she asked, unfolding the page of flowery script.
“That’s nothing.” Billy snatched the paper from her and crumpled it. “From my sister.” He leaned close and licked at her ear.
She rested against him as he slid the dress off her thin shoulders. “Your sister? She live in California, too?”
He tongued the nipple of her left breast. “Mmm-hmm.” Tien’s English had improved remarkably in the short time he’d known her, and he didn’t like to think about how and where she practiced it.
“You take me there?” She pulled up his T-shirt and kissed the pale skin of his chest, just above the dangling dog tags. “You take?”
He stroked her cheek and looked into the brown eyes he couldn’t see. “Sure.”
“I be good to you.” She lowered his pants, placed her lips against his erect cock.
“Yeah.” He ruffled her hair. “Yeah, you would.”
They made distracted, melancholy love. As he gripped her waist to thrust into her, Billy could feel the bone of her pelvis, the ribs that stood out beneath her skin. He tried to ignore the striations on her belly.
After thirty minutes, Cochrane knocked again. Tien left with her money, and Billy returned to his unit to try to sleep.
His platoon left Long Binh just after dawn the following morning, and they were deep into a forest of mangrove trees before the sun had fully risen above the horizon. A listlessness lingered over Billy, which even bitter breakfast coffee couldn’t dispel, and he scanned the vegetation on either side of the trail with an unsteady glance.
They marched through the woods for three hours, and nothing happened. Billy’s eyes ached from enforced alertness, from scrutinizing every leaf and lump in the path for traps.
“Was she good?” Jack, the grenadier, whispered, his gaze never leaving the trail.
“Shut up, Garrity,” Billy answered with a smirk, letting him know she was.
“Quiet back there!” Scat, their team leader, scowled at them over his shoulder. “Don’t make me come and kick yo’ ass!”
“Good job, Jack,” Billy muttered. “You’ll have us on latrine duty by the time we get back.”
Jack didn’t have a snappy comeback. His body pitched backward as the report of the rifle caught up with the bullet.
“Sniper!” Scat yelled. He sprayed the trees ahead of them with gunfire.
Before Billy could react, another shot sounded from behind him. The VC had them in a crossfire. Ashe spun around and lifted his M-16, Billy felt a scorching impact at his crotch, which sent a white-hot ripple of pain to his skull. He collapsed, screaming, clutching at the blood that spurted from between his legs.
A medic bent over him, trying to pull his hands away from his groin long enough to stanch the bleeding. Through the sounds of gunfire and his own raw moans, Billy heard the radio-telephone carrier calling for choppers. Then he went into shock, his senses shut down, and the world turned black.
He awoke on a cot in the hospital back at the base, groggy but alive. When he tried to sit up, however, he became aware of a dull twinge of pain from his groin.
A bald black doctor attending to another patient’s I.V. noticed that Billy was conscious and hastened over to check on him. “How you feeling, son?”
“Fine … little weak, maybe.” Billy propped himself up on his elbows.
“Not surprising. You lost a lot of blood.” He put a firm hand on Billy’s shoulder and gently pushed him back down on the cot. “You rest now.”
Billy pulled aside the sheet that covered his waist and found his crotch swathed in gauze, a plastic catheter jutting from it like a soda straw. “What… ?”
The doctor grimaced and patted Billy’s back. “I’m sorry, son. We couldn’t save it.”
“Save it?” Billy repeated, numb. As the meaning of the doctor’s words meshed with the sight of the bandages he wore, Billy let out an agonized howl. The doctor finally had to administer a sedative to get him to stop crying.
Billy drifted in and out of consciousness over the next few hours. Medics appeared and vanished each time his eyes rolled open. A small figure in baggy, illfitting fatigues swept past him, clutching something in the folds of its oversized jacket. It cast a furtive glance in his direction, and Billy thought he caught a glimpse of glittering brown eyes and coppery skin beneath the brim of its military cap. An aroma of spice seemed to filter through the atmosphere of sweat and disinfectant for a moment. Billy tried to focus on the figure’s face, but another wave of exhaustion dragged him back into sleep.
After a week in the hospital, Billy was transferred to Saigon to await a flight to Hawaii and, from there, home to California. The army apparently decided that Billy had given enough for his country. “Pecker’s a small price to pay for getting outta this place, man,” Scat muttered as Billy packed to go. “I almos’ think you lucky.” He figured Scat was making fun of him until he saw his expression.
But I’m not lucky, Billy thought as he stared at a yellowed snapshot of Marlene on the flight out of Honolulu. I’d have been better off coming back in a body bag. He pictured Marlene rushing up to him as he descended from the plane, blond hair billowing, almost leaping to wrap her arms around him. He imagined her smile wilting as he whispered in her ear. His head lolled against the airplane window, and a tear seeped through his shut eyelids.
Somewhere over the depths of the Pacific, he had a dream.
He was in the back seat of his dad’s Chrysler, fumbling with the buttons of Marlene’s cheerleader outfit, pulling down her pleated skirt to reveal wet pink panties. But when he pulled her close for a kiss, the hair he clutched was black, the face Tien’s. She pressed her tongue into his mouth and unbuckled his belt. To his amazement, he discovered that he still had a cock, healthy and hard as a baton. He shuddered as it penetrated the slick suction of her labia. The climax shook his entire frame, jolting him awake.
Billy sat up, hyperventilating. His bladder felt as if it were about to burst. The other servicemen on the plane stared at him, some with amusement, others with contempt. Face burning, he rose and lurched down the aisle to the lavatory.
With the lavatory door locked, he lowered his pants, reminding himself to sit down to piss. The rush of his dream orgasm lingering in his mind, he glanced down in disgust at the nub end of tissue where his dick should have been, the tatters of tender skin cinched together with sutures and scabbed over with scar tissue. Below, his scrotum clenched his one remaining testicle in a tight, shriveled fist.
As he looked more closely, though, he noticed something else. A drop of pearly white fluid hung on the rim of the tiny puckered hole through which he pissed. Billy wiped it off with a scrap of toilet paper and examined it with concern. The tissue exuded a recognizable chlorine odor.
Semen.
Marlene wasn’t at the airport when he landed. Billy didn’t see her until three days after he got home. She met him for lunch at a Bob’s Big Boy, greeting him at the front door with a tepid hug, her mouth closed when he kissed her. Her blue eyes flicked from the window to the salad in front of her as they made pointless small talk.
“I missed you,” he said as he strolled beside her in the park afterward, hands in his pockets.
She stopped to watch some children play hide-and-seek among the trees. “I missed you, too,” she murmured, a distant echo. He waited for her to turn around. She didn’t.
“I guess my folks told you.”
She made a small sound, and her blond ponytail bobbed as she nodded.
Billy swallowed the saliva that had pooled in his lower jaw. “It’s okay. I wouldn’t expect you to—”
“I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.” She put a hand over her unseen face. “It’s just… I want to have kids. I want…” But she stopped short of saying “I want a man.” With downcast eyes and smeared makeup, she faced him, took hold of his hand, and dropped a cold circle of metal into it.
When he got back to his parents’ house that afternoon, Billy found that his Purple Heart had arrived in the mail with a letter commending his service and sacrifice. His expression blank, he tossed the medal and the engagement ring in the jar of loose pennies that sat on his dresser.
That night he twisted in sleep, his lips moving as if in prayer. Sweet, impossible kisses showered upon his invisible erection.
At first the dreams were a comfort, a refuge from the futility and powerlessness of his waking world. By day he tortured himself with dirty magazines and X-rated movies, sat on benches in shopping malls and stared at passing women who bowed their heads to avoid his dark glare. By night he moaned in ecstasy as Tien caressed his dream penis, healing him, restoring him.
Then he got a hard-on while sitting in an office of the Veterans Administration at three in the afternoon.
Eyes glazed, he was listening to a portly man in horn-rimmed glasses seated behind a large desk. On the wall to the right hung framed military decorations and insignia and black-and-white photos of a much younger and thinner version of the man standing beside a tank in Korea, as if the man wished to assure his visitors that he was indeed one of them. “Well, Mr. Barnes,” he said, “the bad news is I don’t think we can get you a greater disability benefit. Painful as it may be, your … injury doesn’t really prevent you from earning a living.”
Billy shivered and straightened himself in his chair. His nonexistent dick stiffened, massaged by soft, unseen fingers. He looked down in his lap and saw only the slack, zipped fly of his pants, vacant air where he felt the pulsing head of his cock.
“The good news is there are plenty of jobs out there for an able young man like you.”
A tongue flicked over the glans, teeth scraped lightly down the shaft. Billy drew a sharp breath and crossed his legs.
“Now let’s talk about what skills you … Mr. Barnes?”
Billy hunched forward in his chair, gasping, as his imaginary dick slid deep into the viscous tube of an open throat. “P-pardon …” He stood and hurried from the office, the man gaping after him. He came just as he shut himself inside a toilet stall in the rest room.
It happened to him again that evening during dinner with his parents. And again the following morning while driving down the freeway. And againstanding in the cereal aisle at the supermarket. Seven times that day and ten the next, including once in the elevator on the way up to his family doctor’s office.
“What the hell’s going on?” Billy asked, his face drawn, as he sat naked on a table covered with sterile paper.
The doctor peeled off the rubber gloves he’d worn to examine the remains of Billy’s genitals. “Well, I think we can safely assume that you did not experience orgasm.” He threw the gloves in a waste can and rubbed his graying beard. “I’d say it’s a phantom limb.”
Billy squirmed, the paper rustling as it clung to his ass. “What?”
“Amputees often claim to have sensations in the place where their limbs used to be.”
“Like right here?” Billy put his hand in the empty space at his crotch where his invisible cock jutted, tender and sore from overuse.
The doctor nodded. “The brain isn’t used to the fact that there’s nothing there, so it projects sensation where it thinks the … organ should be.” He cleared his throat. “Obviously your case is more unusual than most, possibly complicated by certain … psychological factors. A sort of wish fulfillment, if you will,” he added with an apologetic look.
Billy stared past him. “But what if…”
But what if someone stole my cock and was fucking herself with it right now, jamming it down her throat and up her ass and licking and sucking and screwing, over and over and over?
A crooked rictus of a smile stretched across Billy’s face. “I guess you’re right, Doc. It’s all in my head.” He laughed as if that were the funniest joke he’d ever heard.
The doctor frowned and stepped away from him.
As he quivered in bed that night, Billy pictured Tien with his severed dick in her hands, kneading and rolling it in her fingers like putty.
In the next week he begged, bribed, and connived his way back to Vietnam, back to Long Binh. He learned to control his facial expressions during the unexpected orgasms, reducing the spasms to a nervous tic. Still, the effort wore on him. He lost weight, and his body ached with fatigue.
“You look like hell, buddy,” Cochrane said, slapping Billy’s shoulder as they met. “No wonder you’re back here.”
“Where’s Tien?”
“Tien? Oh, yeah, the skinny one.” Cochrane shook his head. “Gone, man. They evacuated her village. Think she ended up in Saigon.”
Billy twitched. “Know where I could find her?”
“Try the Golden Flower. When she heard about you, she probably figured she’d need some new customers.” He grinned. “Funny, though, I thought she would’ve told you herself.”
Billy’s hands closed into fists. “What do you mean?”
Cochrane chuckled. “Hell, she paid me twenty bucks to sneak her into the infirmary—”
Billy ran, and the rest of Cochrane’s words were lost in the sound of helicopter blades cutting the air.
He moved down Tu Do Street in the direction the woman at the Golden Flower had indicated, a hand tugging at his invisible erection as if it were a leash.
He turned several corners in succession and threaded his way deep into a knotted avenue in Saigon’s slums. An emaciated man and two little girls picked through the piles of uncollected garbage that lined the curbs. Across from them, an old woman washed her clothes in the brown water of the gutter, faceless beneath her conical straw hat. On either side of the lane stood ill-constructed wooden houses with roofs of tile or corrugated tin.
As instructed by the woman at the Golden Flower, he counted the doorways on the left until he reached the seventh from the street corner. He rapped on the flimsy wooden door with the restrained impatience of a traveling salesman.
The unseen fingers abruptly stopped toying with his hard-on.
Having expected her to hide or to refuse to see him, Billy was dumbstruck when Tien opened the door and greeted him with a disarming smile.
“I knew,” she murmured. “I knew you come back.” Bowing her head like a gracious hostess, she motioned him inside. He shuffled across the threshold as if sleepwalking.
The house consisted of a single room, small and bare. Clothes hung from nails hammered into the walls. The only real furnishing was a simple altar to the family ancestors. The scent of spice suffused the air but failed to mask the odor of urine and sewage emanating from a wooden bucket in the far corner. A small cooking fire crackled in the center of the floor, surrounded by assorted pots and utensils and two straw mats.
A withered crone sat cross-legged on one of the mats, her parchment face inscrutable. In her lap shecradled an infant girl. Beside her stood a boy of about three with spiky black hair, who stared at Billy with one finger in his mouth. Tien gestured toward them. “This is my mother, and my first husband’s childs, Chau”—the boy—“and Thu.”
She chattered to her mother in Vietnamese and pointed at Billy. The old woman grinned at him, revealing teeth lacquered black.
Billy’s eyes darted around the room. “Where is it?”
Tien either ignored him or misunderstood the question. “First husband, he kill by VC before we meet—”
Billy grabbed her wrist. “I know you have it. Where is it?”
Irritation flickered across her face, and she twisted free from his grasp. Then she gave an impish smile. Kneeling on the mat beside her mother’s, she picked up off the floor a stick that Billy had mistaken for one of the cooking utensils. She held it up like a scepter, and Billy’s legs turned to water.
His mummified penis sheathed the point of the stick, stretched taut into a wooden erection. Its flesh had turned a bruise-colored purple; its skin was shriveled and leathery.
“I save it for you,” Tien said, tittering.
Billy staggered forward a step. “You … you give me that!”
She shook her head and giggled. “You see. I be a good wife for you—good mother for your boy.” She patted her stomach.
Mother? Billy pressed his palms to his temples, straining to think straight. She couldn’t be … He’d always worn a rubber….
“No,” he croaked. “I can’t—”
“Good family. You see.” Her eyes twinkled. “I know what you like.”
She licked the dead cock as though it were a Popsicle. He let out a groan, his eyes rolling up in his head.
“Give me that, you bitch!”
He lunged toward her, arm outstretched. With an insouciant air, she relaxed her wrist and let the impaled dick dangle among the flames of the cooking fire.
Billy shrieked at the searing pain and clapped his hands over his crotch, dropping to his knees.
He looked up, whimpering, at Tien. Her smile had disappeared. In its place was an expression of cold resolve, of ruthlessness born of desperation, her eyes shiny and hard as glass buttons. She brushed some soot off the singed phallus, and he realized why she had stolen it, why she had preserved it and prayed over it night after night, willing it back to life.
Pecker’s a small price to pay for getting outta this place, man….
Billy opened his mouth to speak, but his tongue felt thick, sluggish. His hands dangled at his sides, useless.
Tien smiled affectionately at him. “Happy family. You see,” she cooed. “My mother, she like you too.”
She placed the mounted penis in her mother’s palsied hand, and the old woman gurgled in delight.