Once again, as the ambush at Bao Cat quieted, newer, curious birds of prey flew to perch on the surrounding boulders. Ulises drowned in a sob, longing for Kikei Santos’s embracing arms.  

“Sad memories are like unburied cadavers,” he grumbled with spite. “They stench as soon as they are uncovered.”  

Other harsh sentiments streamed back to him about the somber morgue by the foot of Monkey Mountain, by the isolated coastal stretch he accessed so many times over a narrow, hard-packed sand road, marked only by makeshift Off Limits signs. In his mind’s eye, Ulises saw the beaten-up corpse of the suspected National Liberation Front agent with a sewn-in secret pocket in his professor’s suit jacket at Hue University. It is where he hid the document coveted by Captain Cardenas, a list of student and cultural organizations in the Quang Nam province infiltrated by Viet Cong cadre. Cardenas desperately hoped to find Quyet Thang’s presence on the list.

The mortician had the professor’s cadaver lying over a metal plank inside a narrow, chilled niche of the morgue. Close by, on a gurney, the body of the Special Operations Lieutenant colonel Cavazo, a close friend of Cardenas. Just weeks before the expedition to Bao Cat, Ulises found out the colonel himself directed the suspected Viet Cong cadre abduction at Hue University. And weeks after –ironically– both dark ops players shared a final respite from warfare by lying lifeless, side-by-side inside Lieutenant Kikei Santos’ refrigerated morgue. 

Ulises later found out that once the colonel’s death mask had been sent to the next of kin, they requested his remains be cremated and then dispersed over the South China Sea. He knew all this because Lieutenant Santos asked Ulises to help her expeditiously dispose of both body’s remains in a rustic stone crematorium sitting behind the morgue. Another horrific absurdity: Two shadow warriors once hell-bent on killing each other on a battlefield now sharing the warm companionship of the disposal’s oven flames.  

Afterward, Armand Amador, Ulises’s pilot friend from the 11^th Aviation Company requested that Cardenas authorize Ulises to go along to handle the urns during the ash-scattering flight. In that way, Ulises gradually began performing varied mortuary duties that happily pushed him closer and closer to Lieutenant Kikei Santos’ shadowy morgue operations.  

Ulises never told Kikei, but he already knew the colonel and Captain Cardenas were secretly working together on the Bao Cat mission to capture Quyet Thang at his unknown hideout in the Annamese Cordillera near the same Laotian border area where the colonel had his Special Forces base. Cardenas suspected Quyet Thang had personally executed the Sky Raider pilot after his capture and interrogation and later did likewise with the colonel. Such executions were the guerrilla chieftain’s trademark when dealing with American spook captives. 

In all, a blood-soaked charade into which the stumblebum Ulises had chanced upon in the convolutions of Vietnam’s proxy wars. That memory triggered happier events. He remembered how, during their first encounter at the morgue, mortician Kikei Santos became playful with him as soon as the autoclave and the captured documents had been exchanged.  

“Mission accomplished,” Ulises said as he prepared to take leave. 

“I’ll get back to you for this,” the mortician suddenly joked. “You got more than what you gave. Soon, I’ll also extract something heftier from you.”

Ulises took the cue. “What about an exchange of savagely beating hearts?” he replied teasingly. 

Kikei feigned seriousness again and began unwrapping the autoclave. Ulises was starting to adapt to her fast-swinging moods. She then gave him a hard stare. 

 “I know one cannot expect formalities in Vietnam, but since I have not been briefed about you, I need to know more. What did you say your name was?” 

“Luis Ulises Duquel, US Army draftee. I was a candidate for a doctorate in music anthropology at Syracuse University. Almost upon graduation, the Selective Service grabbed me hard by the balls and threw my sambo ass into basic training and quartermaster school at Fort Hamilton, New York. No one calls me Luis. Not even my mother who gave me the name. And what about you?” 

Kikei chuckled briefly. “Me? I am the Lady of the Lamps for the US Army Mortuary Services. You know, all that Florence Nightingale kinda crap.” 

“Sure, that’s what they used to call Miss Nightingale during her nursing forays in the battlefields of France. I also like that Catcher in the Rye phrase. I see you read the novel.” 

“Of course, at Honolulu High. Who hasn’t read Pierre Salinger?  Anyway, I hope your security pass is strong. Otherwise, I need to get you arrested, now on the spot.” 

Her new attitude took Ulises aback.   

“It is. I told you I am a special aide to Sysops captain Ruddy Cardenas, at Chu Lai base camp, over at Hill 54, which we baptized Rumba Hill.” Ulises took on a stern demeanor.

“Yeah, yeah. Man, you are so reactive,” Kikei said impatiently, grabbing a plastic sack from under the gurney. “Help me put the Coronel in a body bag. He’s tall and heavy.” 

Ulises stared in surprise at how adept she was at bagging a corpse. The container was up to the body’s torso in a few seconds. Ulises lifted the cadaver’s torax, and she finished the insertion.” 

“This man is a Jeff Chandler look-alike,” Ulises commented. “You know, the smiling, silver-haired Hollywood actor?”  

“Broken Arrow! My favorite of his films,” Kikei quipped. She was back in a light mood again. Want to hear a real-life horror movie story?”  

Ulises nodded. 

“I’ve had GIs in a catatonic shock mistakenly placed by medics in plastic bags on the battlefield. They later wake up in my morgue. That always scares the shit out of me.” 

Ulises lifted his shoulders in amazement. He began to zip up the body bag. Kikei swung around on her boot heels.

“No, wait. One more thing I need to do here today. Bear with me a second.”  She took out a scalpel from a drawer and made a small cut of the Colonel’s flesh on the thorax near the cross-chest autopsy incision. She then made a small culture.  She stored the tissue sample in a vial and stuck it in her pocket.  

“Huh?” muffled Duquel. 

“Some more shadowy stuff. I cannot talk about it,” said Kikei. 

“Of course,” Ulises accepted. He was about to walk out when Lieutenant Santos yawned hard again.  

“Sorry. I get up before dawn every day at Da Nang base. An MP jeeps me in early to the morgue. I never have a good night’s sleep with all the roar of jets, incoming rocket attacks, artillery response. You know, the symphony of war.” 

“Yeah. I hear that music, too,” said Ulises. “It’s more the cacophony of war. A scriptless operetta with a dissonant rock and roll soundtrack. At Chu Lai base, we all get up before the first rooster crows. Sun up makes the tents too warm to be in a bunk. And the morning artillery volleys are too loud. A hot and sweaty dawn every day”  

“If you’re hot, you’re hot; if you’re not, you’re not,” quipped Kikei playfully again. “War is outside, and fear is inside everyone’s heart.”

Ulises detected another of her tiny grins as she rolled her sleeves above the elbows. She then touched his wrist.  

“Let’s see how fast your heart pulses. Hope my hands are not too cold.”  

“Oh, I am now so alive,” Ulises joked. As she moved her hand towards his bulging jugular neck vein, he began to feel like one of her corpses in the refrigerator niches.  

“You’re all accelerated,” Kikei said, touching his chest. 

It was true. Water drums beat inside Ulises’s chest with a savage tempo. Or was it his heart pounding? The air around him felt aromatized by mating hormones. Or, at least, he imagined so. Again he felt how it was so long he had been without a woman. He drowned in sudden, wanton lust.  

Next, Kikei put her hand on his upper arm. Despite the low temps inside the morgue, her touch was not cold. Instead, it transmitted a sensual torrent into his body as if inoculating his insides with bursts of lava bombs.                

“I like your conversation,” she said brashly. “It’s so lonely in here. This duty… You know, dead bodies, clandestine work. I think we can be friends.” 

“Of course,” Ulises said with stumbling words. “We can become tropical confidants.” 

Kikei moved her other open hand up Duque’s arm, skin to skin, as if feeling out his biceps. He noticed a small jade-rock Samoan love symbol dangling from her neck, under her dog tags chain.  

He felt her full resonance now. Frequencies of craving, pulsating out from deep inside her psyche. A song of longing. She blushed lightly, aware of how quickly he sensed her sentiments. Her urge for attachment. Her lava flows.

In truth, her actions may just have been an innocent call for intimate cordiality and companionship. A muffled call for mere sentimental solidarity, a silent urge for closeness.

Still, in Ulises mind it was about sentiments stifled by protocol and social manners, yet ready to erupt as if from the roaring Hawaiian caldera. To him, Lieutenant Kikei Santos was now a volcanic goddess, ready to flare up uncontrollably. A woman in a desperate search for a calming force somewhere outside her fiery realms.

He was now in the path of the flowing lava. Willing to let himself be scorched.

♠

NEXT CHAPTER: SENSES