to Joshua with her eyes, and the unequivocal message in that look was, “You see the trouble I’m having. Come on, turkey, give me a hand.” Joshua circled the crowd at the rail to do just that.
After some initial fumbling for handholds, Joshua and the girl walked her dehydrated beau back up the beach to the Miracle Strip, where they thrust his head beneath a shower spray and tried to revive him to at least zombie status. No go. The trainee regarded them with the bulging, transparent eyes of a whitefish. Dragon Lady’s kid sister wiped his face with a silk scarf and signaled her helplessness to Joshua by shrugging. They had exchanged no more than ten words since leaving the pavilion.
“Where’s he from?”
“Hurlbutt Field,” said the girl with no trace of accent, in spite of which Joshua had decided that she was of Thai or Vietnamese extraction. “He tells me he’s going to be a Ranger.”
“Hockey, baseball, or forest?”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“Never mind. We’d better put him someplace where he can sleep off his zonk. If he goes back to Hurlbutt like this, he’ll spend the next few days bayonetting potatoes instead of make-believe Iranians.”
“He rented a car. It’s over there.”
They laid the would-be Ranger in the back seat of the rental car, a blue Plymouth Fury, rolled up his pants legs, and placed the girl’s dampened scarf on his head for a compress.
The girl drove west along the highway to a deserted section of the dunes. Joshua followed on his Kawasaki. In the lee of a mimosa tree they discussed what else they should do for the fellow. By now, stars were guttering in a fabric of blowing clouds.
“He doesn’t have to be back until five o’clock Sunday evening. His pass is for the entire weekend.”
“Let’s crack a couple of windows, lock the keys up in the car with him, and let him sleep. He’s not going to convulse or suffocate, and nobody’ll bother him out here.”
In khaki-colored shorts and a T-shirt like her companion’s, the girl resembled a rather coltish Brownie Scout. She was almost exactly Joshua’s height, but slender, ethereal-looking. She was noticeably hesitant about accepting his suggestions, not so much out of loyalty to her date, Joshua thought, as from a cagey distrust of his own motives. No dummy, this one.
“I’ll let you drive,” he said, pointing at his motorbike. “If I misbehave, you can steer us into oncoming traffic and put the fear of God back into me.”
“If you drive, maybe you’ll be too busy to misbehave.”
“But you’d have no control over where I was taking you.”
“Would you go someplace besides where I asked you to?” She cocked her head and studied him critically. “If it comes to it, I can hitchhike home.” She set off through the dunes toward the highway.
Flustered, Joshua walked along beside her. How was he supposed to address this sensuous Asian waif with magical hair and eyes like a pair of melting chocolate kisses? Not even his residence in New York—his exile, as he sometimes thought of it—had taught him how to proceed. He was a novice in these matters, an aspirant.
“How old are you?” he blurted.
“Seventeen.”
“I’m nineteen this November.” Even though November seemed at least as far away as Ho Chi Minh City, that put him back up. “I meant it when I said you could drive. I’ve just been paid. Take me back to the Strip and I’ll buy you something to eat.”
The girl halted. “A foot-long and a Coke?”
“Anything you want. I’ve just been paid.”
“Yeah, you told me.” She glanced back at the rental car beneath the mimosa tree. “All Rudy wanted was uppers, downers, and onion rings. He washed ’em down with white wine and Pabst Blue Ribbon, back and forth—just like this.” Rustling her hair like a veil of chain, she demonstrated Rudy’s unmannerly technique.
“Jesus.”
The girl smiled. Her smile was the fulcrum upon which his hopes precariously teetered. “I’ve never ridden a motorcycle,” she said. “I think I’d like to try.”
* * *
Her name, once upon a time, had been Tru Tran Quan, but now she was known as Jacqueline Tru. Her father, who had emigrated to the United States long before anyone had ever heard of Boat People or suspected that Saigon was ripe for the picking, ran a small ethnic restaurant where foot-longs and onion rings were not even on the menu. Although Joshua and Jackie did not eat in the old man’s establishment that first night, before the summer