Uncle Sam's Pool

I went to the washroom and washed my face. Reapplied my kohl, the black eyeliner Indian women wore. My strange, green-black eyes accused me from the mirror. Hours before I had thought myself so clever, so mature. But I knew nothing of this world.

Fiction by Kelly Watt, Winter 2016

*

I met Jeremy at the American embassy in Delhi, India, when I was only seventeen and wild and free in a foreign land. It was 1977 and I had just graduated from missionary high school in the Himalayas and longed to lose myself in the enchanting chaos that was India. The annual Fourth of July celebration was legendary. That night every Injie foreigner in the city who could wrangle an invite was at the embassy. I was crushed against the bar when these two guys sidled up beside me: one tall black dude and a skinny white guy with butterscotch for hair. Despite the occasion I had refused the free American draught to drink Indian beer. When the bartender returned with my Pink Pelican, the skinny guy said: “So our American beer isn’t good enough for you? That’s hardly patriotic.”

“Sorry, I’m Canadian,” I laughed. “Besides, we’re in India. Shouldn’t we be drinking the local brew?”

“Right you are,” the red-haired one said and clinked my bottle. “Cheers.”

It was the week before the annual July monsoon, and the sense of impending deluge, of something close to breaking, hung heavy in the air. It was so hot it hurt to breathe, let alone stand in the sun for even a minute. I could feel the sweat trickling down my thighs under my skirt. There was a swimming pool, but it was cordoned off in honor of the occasion. The Indian waiters scuttled about in white, starched jackets, sweating, looking penitent and underfed next to the corpulent expatriates.

I had been crashing all week at a friend’s diplomatic digs. I’m ashamed to say I hardly remember her name. Terry something. I had pretended to like her more than I did so that I could stay at the American compound. Her dad was away so for a few days we had the place to ourselves. It was a pampered life in a gated community: clean sheets and air-conditioning. The commissary sold Marlboros and macaroni and cheese. We spent our days by the pool, slurping nimbu panis, Indian limeade, served to us by white-coated bearers who called us memsahib. At night we put on our silver bangles and went out on the town, careening dangerously through the New Delhi crowds in rickshaws that narrowly missed the sacred cows decorated in marigolds, roaming freely through the traffic roundabouts.

I was in love with India. Bharat Mata. Her stench and perfume. The smell of hand-rolled bidis and urine commingling. The leering men with bare feet and the luscious young women with dark eyes who came out in the evenings to sell garlands of jasmine out of white buckets on the street. I never wanted to leave.

Then Terry’s father, the diplomat, came home. He insisted we join him at the embassy reception that night. It was only two years post-Vietnam, so that year’s celebration was embarrassingly lavish. Thousands of dollars had been spent. There were real deli hot dogs and apple pie with ice cream—although the latter melted to slush in seconds in the July heat. There was a hot air balloon. Free rides on an elephant, garishly painted in red, white, and blue. I was sure the party alone could feed the state of Bihar for a month, maybe more. The disparity between rich and poor in India filled me with despair, even though I lived a privileged life there. I loved the comforts of my friend’s embassy apartment but hated colonialism and capitalism. I was young then and full of rage and ideas.

For the first hour Terry and I slouched among the tents and dignitaries, swilling beer and sneering through the interminable speeches. Then Terry went off to join her father while I drowned my cynicism at the bar. That’s when Jeremy introduced himself. He was from Virginia, he told me. His buddy, Moses, was from Alabama.

“Pleased to meet you, Virginia, Alabama,” I said.

“Have you seen what they’ve done to the elephant?” Jeremy asked. He rolled his eyes. That’s when I knew we would be spending the night together.

A disc jockey appeared and people began dancing on the open-air dance floor. We shouted at one another over the music and danced. We sang, “Bye-bye, Miss American Pie”—the whole crowd linking arms to sing the lyrics in unison. Oddly, the song was not about the death of some promising musicians anymore, but the deaths of all those boys in uniform in a country far away. The crowd was full of soldiers. I spotted an empty shirtsleeve dangling. A wheelchair. Uniformed men strolled everywhere, spines erect, eyes defiant, medals jingling; their uniforms still crisp and tailored-looking after hours in 110-degree heat.

“Why are you guys here?” I asked my new friends.

“Ex-military,” Moses explained.

“Why aren’t you in uniform?” I asked, surprised.

“Ex is the operative word,” Jeremy said, looking around nervously. He gulped his beer.

“We’re civilians tonight,” Moses explained. “The war is over.”

He put a fatherly hand on Jeremy’s shoulder. I was stunned by the protectiveness of this gesture.

“We’re just here for the free beer,” Jeremy said, laughing, offering to get me a fresh one. He rushed down the bar, shouting to get the attention of the bartender.

“How long have you known each other?” I asked Moses when Jeremy had left.

“Long enough,” he said, towering above me. “We hooked up in Nam. Any friend you make there is a friend for life, man.”

I felt I had wandered into an America I had never known. Happened upon some secret inland sea. War was only something I’d seen on TV.

After dark there were fireworks. The national anthem. As soon as the dignitaries left, the party turned rowdy. Terry reappeared to urge me to come home with her, but I refused to go, so I was left on my own. Solo. A wild child in a foreign country without a chaperone.

At midnight Jeremy and Moses stripped down to their jockey shorts and cannonballed into the pool. People cheered. We’d been perspiring all night, dancing beside a closed swimming pool. The water swayed and blurred. Before I could stop myself, I stripped down to my underwear and jumped in too. The water was a rude slap, then gloriously cool. I dove down to touch the silent, gritty bottom, then arose for air. When I popped up, I saw security closing in.

“Hey, you there,” a soldier said, medals flashing in the darkness. “The party is over, Private,” he shouted. “Get out of the pool!”

He was yelling at Jeremy. Moses and I began swimming toward the ladders in obedience. The last stragglers on the dance floor backed away.

“Hey, it’s okay, man,” Moses said, “we were just cooling off. We’re getting out now. Come on, Jeremy, let’s go.”

But Jeremy was stubborn. He began doing laps, arms flailing, legs splashing in thunderous defiance.

“That’s Sergeant,” he shouted, “I’ve got as many medals as you do. This is my Fourth of July too. I’m going to damn well swim in Uncle Sam’s pool if I want to.”

“Who is Uncle Sam?” I asked Moses.

His eyes widened in disbelief.

I was standing by the pool, dripping wet, wrapped in my shawl. My skin smelled of chlorine. The disturbed water glowed an eerie blue. I had never been anywhere before coming to India. I had managed to escape the clutches of the missionaries, Terry’s father, and now this. I felt as green as an American one-dollar bill.

There was an argument at the edge of the pool, but Moses restrained the officer and had a quiet word with him. The music shut down. The last dancers drifted off. Bearers began dismantling the speakers and stacking chairs, tidying up the bar. Except for the clinking of glasses, it was deathly quiet. Whatever Moses had said had been enough to make the military man back down.

“I’m coming back in five minutes. If you’re not out by then, there’ll be hell to pay,” he shouted over his shoulder as he stomped off.

* * *

We laughed about it afterward at Danny-Ji’s Disco, the lights pulsing, the beat thumping along the floor, massaging our feet. We quaffed masala chickpeas and clinked beer bottles, laughing, congratulating ourselves on our audacity.

“Who the fuck did that guy think he was,” Jeremy said, “kicking us out of the pool? I served my country. I have as many medals as that asshole.”

It was comical the first time, but on the third repetition, drunk as I was, I knew something was strange.

“It’s cool now, man,” Moses said, shushing Jeremy in a gentle voice, like a parent would hush a frightened child. “It’s over now, man, you got your swim.”

“Yeah, I showed him.”

“Yeah, you showed him.”

They made fists and bumped them.

I had ditched my sopping panties in the washroom, so I was naked now under my skirt but I didn’t care. It was dark in Danny-Ji’s anyway. You could go anywhere in India as long as you had rupees. I still had the feeling that I’d waded into a new country, a lowland full of swampy lagoons with watery depths I couldn’t see.

“You were in the war?” I asked.

Jeremy took a gulp of beer and squeezed my hand.

“Did I tell you, you were beautiful, baby?”

I leaned into his body. Felt the jumpy electricity that coursed through him.

“Jeremy saved my leg, saved my sorry life for that matter, in a miserable jungle shithole that I hope I never see again,” Moses said in a measured voice.

Jeremy looked down. Peeled the label off his Pink Pelican beer.

I was tired of treading water; I wanted to feel solid ground under my feet.

I put down my beer, turned to Jeremy, and asked: “What did you do in the war?”

His eyes went vacant. His stare fixed on the wall for a few interminable seconds. He had left us. Was no longer here with us in the present. I understood then. How naïve I’d been. The swamp was full of crocodiles, and I had dropped a bloody fish. When Jeremy returned, he looked around like a lost child, not sure where he was or where he had been. He turned to Moses, who put a big palm on his shoulder again to calm him.

“Steady,” Moses said.

Jeremy shrugged him off, bolted onto the dance floor. He began flailing to the music, leaping like a man on fire, dancing alone with his torment. I was shocked and guilt-stricken.

“Holy shit,” I said to Moses, “what just happened?”

“Jeremy’s a little messed up about the war,” Moses said, eyeing me critically now. I could see the soldier in him judging whether I was friend or foe. I thought of Terry back at the compound. I saw that Moses was a more loyal friend than I had ever had or been to anyone.

“He was a medic in the war. A lot of boys got blown up pretty bad. We were in the jungle for months. He was running onto the field, bombs going off everywhere, body parts flying, and it was his job to collect them all and put those boys back together. We were there those last weeks when we were losing the war and everyone was dying. You can’t blame him for being a little messed up. He’ll be okay in a bit.”

I looked over at Jeremy on the dance floor, jerking and flailing, a marionette with tangled strings, a soul possessed. I felt something like love for him. A humid tenderness that was somehow one and the same as the monsoon and the mad infatuation I had for India. A door opened and I smelled jasmine and diesel.

“He sure likes you,” Moses said.

“I like him too,” I answered.

Moses smiled. “Any friend of Jeremy’s is a friend of mine, man. If you want my advice, don’t ask him about the war for a bit. Most of us just want to put it behind us. Have a good time, you know what I mean?”

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t know.”

I went to the washroom and washed my face. Reapplied my kohl, the black eyeliner Indian women wore. My strange, green-black eyes accused me from the mirror. Hours before I had thought myself so clever, so mature. But I knew nothing of this world.

I went out onto the dance floor and began flinging myself about, mimicking Jeremy’s wild abandon, my bangles jingling, hair flying, my bare feet pounding the floor. The rhythmic strobe lights captured our courting ritual in staccato moments. He reeled me into him. Sinking his face into my neck, he whispered: “My Angel, finally I’ve found you.”

When Danny’s closed we tore around Connaught Place in a Pink Pelican delirium, the three of us in the back of a rickshaw, me sitting on Jeremy’s lap, while we motored from cheap hotel to cheaper hotel, looking for a pukkah room with a shower and a single next door for Moses. Moses had to be right next door. On this Jeremy was adamant. Finally we found two adjacent hotel rooms with double beds and showers. Ancient bamboo fans right above the beds. The guys joked that the diplomat would send out the Indian Police Service to look for me by morning. But I knew my American hosts would be relieved to be rid of me.

Once we were alone, I let Jeremy, crazed Jeremy, undress me. I stood under the bare bulb as he carefully unwrapped me as though I were a prized Christmas gift. He kissed me everywhere I’d let him. Then we ravaged each other on the double bed, the springs creaking, the fan thumping in rotation, the two of us sliding over one another, slick with sweat. Somewhere in the midst of our carnal desperation, I heard the thunder. The sky clattered and there was the sweet release of rain and more rain as it pummeled the roof of our little hovel. The monsoon had come. Finally.

When we began to reek, we showered and soaked the sheet, then laid it over our craven bodies, drying it with our body heat. No man I knew made love like Jeremy. He was relentless. He was slogging through the jungle, collecting my body parts and putting them back together again. I felt plundered and saved all in the same evening.

In the morning we awakened late. There was a note from Moses under the door saying he’d gone out. We stumbled outside, eyes blinking. Delhi was changed. The streets were flooded with water up to our knees. We rolled up our pant legs to walk to breakfast. When the street became a river, Jeremy carried me across the torrent to the restaurant. While we ate chili omelets, children swam in the street, their brown faces shiny with rain. It rained in hot, heavy sheets, at times so dense it was hard to see. But no one complained. People laughed and sprinted gaily, holding black umbrellas, lifting their pant legs or saris.

“Everyone is happy when the monsoon has come, memsahib,” the waiter told me. “The rain is good for the crops, and the heat is less now, isn’t it?”

“Let’s make love all day,” Jeremy whispered when the waiter had gone.

“Whatever you say, Doctor,” I said and kissed him.

“I’m not a doctor,” he hissed angrily. “I was a medic. Just a combat medic.”

“Okay, okay,” I said.

* * *

We shacked up for three days. There was a rickshaw ride back to the American compound to make my apologies to Terry’s family and pack up my things. The damn putt-putt kept stalling as the rain flooded the engine. When the driver turned the corners, water would rush in over our feet.

We played all day and danced all evening, crawling back to our room in the wee hours of the morning to dissipate each other again. Afterward we lay naked under the fan, delirious but happy.

Still the end hung over our new love from the very beginning. My return ticket had already been bought. My parents expected me home. I was supposed to go to university in a few months. There was a tearful international phone call, an argument, threats. I couldn’t get out of it, or I would end up penniless in India. Jeremy begged me to stay, promised to look after me, but he could barely look after himself.

The day before I was to leave, we lay together, sweaty and spent, holding hands.

“Tell me,” I said.

“What? Tell you what?”

“Tell me everything,” I said. “Tell me about Jeremy. Who is Jeremy really?”

He stared at the ceiling. Thump, thump went the fan.

“You can’t think for the noise,” he said. “I don’t know how many died in my arms. Crying for their mothers. I did everything I could, but sometimes there was nothing I could do to save them.”

“You saved Moses,” I said.

He rolled into me then, his legs curling into fetal position. I held him while he cried. I kissed his tears. When he was finished, he said, “Marry me, Angel. Come with me to Virginia. We’ll live in the country. Have a garden. Don’t leave.”

* * *

For our last night we got a case of Budweiser from the embassy. I teased them that American beer tasted like piss but it was cheap. Jeremy and Moses took turns carrying the two-four on their shoulders while we waded through the streets. A tribe of children swam after us, holding out their hands, begging for baksheesh. Jeremy tossed paisa coins after him, which sent them shrieking and diving with glee.

We sat in our hotel and drank beer after beer. Moses showed me his scar. Told me how Jeremy had put a tourniquet on his leg, just above where the shrapnel had ruptured the artery. I looked at the puckered, ruined flesh. I had not known how much the body could suffer and still go on living.

When we ran out of beer, we did the rounds of all the hotel bars: the Intercontinental, the Oberon, the Hyatt Regency. Our drinking was always out of control, but on this night it took on a special desperation. We smoked joint after joint of Hindu Kush. Indulged in dangerous powdery substances we would never have touched any other night.

At Danny-Ji’s Disco Jeremy went into his wild man’s trance once more on the dance floor.

“He’s dancing to forget,” Moses said.

“I know,” I answered.

“You know the last guys to escape during the fall of Saigon were airlifted by helicopter off the roof of the embassy,” Moses told me. “One of those guys was there that night.”

“At the Fourth of July party?”

“Yeah. He was the officer who kicked Jeremy out of the pool.”

“No way! Why would he be here in Delhi?”

“After the evacuation the last guys out went to either Thailand or India,” Moses said. “They sent them where there was cheap booze and easy women, present company excepted. The best R and R. Hoping we would forget after a few weeks. Wake up one morning well-adjusted. Of course it doesn’t really work that way. In our case a few weeks turned into two years. Bangkok’s where the guys usually go.”

“But you guys didn’t go there.”

“No, we came here. Jeremy likes India.”

“He had to come here to meet me,” I said, “and now I’m going to go away and break his heart.”

Moses didn’t smile or nod; his brown eyes remained level with mine, giving nothing away. I swallowed, unsure.

* * *

I promised to write. Took Jeremy’s latest hotel address. But we both knew if I got on that plane, we would never see each other again. When I got to the airport, I was bedraggled and drenched, my black kohl running in rivulets down my face. I was drunk and high and had been up for thirty-six hours straight. The American customs agent took one look at my sitar and asked: “You got any drugs in that thing, little lady?”

“No,” I told him, “go ahead, check.” I laughed but my laughter kept coming in waves until I was sobbing, and tears were breaking onto my face like the monsoon rain.

The customs official frowned.

“He asked me to marry him,” I explained. “I said no when I wanted to say yes.”

The official nodded. “You still have half an hour, if you want to go back through security for one last good-bye.”

But I knew what I’d find if I ran through that terminal—I could see Jeremy’s tousled red hair, the cuffs of his white pajama pants, still folded and dirty from walking in the rain. He would be with Moses at the airport bar, was probably already there now, buying drinks for the next blonde angel.

*

Kelly Watt completed her last year of high school at a missionary boarding school in India. She has lived in Canada, France, India, Mexico and the United States. Her award-winning short fiction has been published internationally, and long listed for the CBC Radio Short Story Award (2015). She has published two books—the novel Mad Dog (2001) and the travel memoir Camino Meditations (2014). She lives in the Ontario countryside and is currently working on a novel set in India.

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