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“What I mean is, I can’t do time. I’ve got a problem with tight places. Like if I get in one, I hear popsicle sticks snapping inside my head.”
He motioned his empty jigger at the bar.
“Maybe your fears are getting ahead of you,” I said.
“You don’t understand. I had some trouble over there.”
“Where?”
“In Laos.” He waited until the barman had brought him another shot and a fresh draft chaser. He tipped the whiskey into the beer and watched it balloon in a brown cloud off the bottom of the glass. “We operated a kind of flying taxi service for some of the local warlords. We were also transporting some of their home-grown organic. Eventually it got processed into heroin in Hong Kong. For all I know, GIs in Saigon ended up shooting it in their arms. Not too good, huh?”
“Go on.”
“I got sick of it. On one trip I told this colonel, this half-Chinese character named Liu, that I wasn’t going to load his dope. I pushed him off the plane and took off down the runway. Big mistake. They shot the shit out of us, killed my copilot and two of my kickers. I got out of the wreck with another guy, and we ran through jungle for two hours. Then the other guy, this Vietnamese kid, said he was going to head for a village on the border. I told him I thought NVA were there, but he took off anyway. I never found out what happened to him, but Liu’s lice heads caught me an hour later. They marched me on a rope for three days to a camp in the mountains, and I spent the next eighty-three days in a bamboo cage just big enough to crawl around in.
“I lived in my own stink, I ate rice with worms in it, and I wedged my head through the bamboo to lick rainwater out of the mud. At night the lice heads would get drunk on hot beer and break the bottles against my cage. Then one morning I smelled this funny odor. It was blowing in the smoke from the campfire. It smelled like burned hair or cowhide, then, when the wind flattened out the smoke, I saw a half-dozen human heads on pikes around the fire. I don’t want to tell you what their faces looked like.
“Liu’s buttholes probably wanted to ransom me, but at the same time they were afraid of our guys because they’d shot up the plane and killed three of my crew. So I figured eventually they’d get tired of busting bottles on my cage and pissing on me through the bars, and my head was going to be curing in the smoke with those others.
“I used to wake with fear in the morning that was unbelievable. I’d pray at night that I would die in my sleep. Then one day some other guys came into the camp, guys who knew I was money on the hoof and who wanted to make some toady points with the CIA. They bought me for a case of Budweiser and six cartons of cigarettes.”
He drank from his boilermaker, his eyes glazed faintly with shame.
“It’s a funny experience to have,” he said. “It makes you wonder about your worth.”
“Cut it loose, Weldon.”
“What?”
“We already paid our dues. Why run the same old tape over and over again?”
“I volunteered for Air America. I can’t blame that on somebody else.”
“You didn’t volunteer to be a heroin mule.”
He pulled the cellophane off a cigar and rubbed it between his fingers until it was a small ball.
“If you were going to cut a deal with the feds, who would you go to?”
“It depends on what you did.”
“We’re talking about guns and dope.”
“You mean you got into it again?”
“Yes and no.”
I looked at him quietly. He made a series of wet rings on the table with his jigger.
“The guns and the dope didn’t get delivered, but I burned some guys for one hundred and eighty grand,” he said.
His eyes flicked away from mine.
“This is straight? You actually ripped off some traffickers for that kind of money?” I said.
“Yeah, I guess it was sort of a first for them.”
“One of the guys you burned is right there in the city jail, isn’t he?”
