Fiction: Drinking Kubulis at the Dead Cat Café [16]

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16. At night the rain would invade

[This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to any actual person, living, dead, or anywhere in between, is purely a figment of your own sick, twisted imagination. You really ought to seek professional help for that. Except for the cat, of course; that skin on the cover really is  t h e  Dead Cat, if that’s any consolation to you.]

At night the rain would invade, driving the bats before it, and Ras slept in the tiny concrete house as he hadn’t slept in a decade. Only in Vietnam did it rain like here. He wished he had his old helicopter tapes. It really pissed him off, him and about a million other vets, how the Hollywood clowns made movies where the sound of a helicopter sets a veteran off like some psycho violence bomb. Hey, you morons, he would think, the Cong didn’t have helicopters. The sound of choppers meant you were safe, that maybe you could sleep tight for a few lousy hours. Those were your helicopters. Like thousands of other survivors, Ras had purchased audio recordings of helicopter sounds, particularly the Hueys used so extensively during the campaign in Southeast Asia.

    The first man to sell those tapes was a reformed Jewish lad from Utica, New York, named Ammon ben Gurion Meir. He was a very distant relative, as he would frostily remind anyone so crass as to mention it, of Golda Meir, once Prime Minister of Israel and, in Ammon’s opinion, a horrible warmonger. His friend Moshe, who had served two brutal tours in Vietnam and come home minus half a leg and most of his sanity, had told him he could not sleep without the soothing sounds of helicopters. Ammon had found some recordings and the concept had just taken off. By 1987, he was moderately well-to-do by the standards of the Jewish community in Utica; by Erasmus Taft’s standards the bastard was stinking rich, although Ras was unaware of that. He was just one of countless veterans who had bought the tapes, which sold under the name of Patriotic Recordings, Inc. Ammon had branched out into recordings of automatic weapons fire, artillery barrages, and more, and although they had never sold as well as the helicopter tapes, he had still made a pretty penny from them.

    These sales had accorded Ammon the success he enjoyed, and this financial accomplishment had allowed him to send his mother, Sara Gideon Meir, on her dream vacation to Florida. He had long since forgiven Mother, God rest her soul, and his father too, might he burn in his Christian hell for eternity, for beating them both throughout Ammon’s childhood, for naming him after Israel’s second-worst warmonger, David ben Gurion. He wanted her to have some fun before she passed away. She did. She had the time of her life at the Florida theme parks and had visited her long-lost sister Rebekah in Port Saint Lucie for two whole weeks. On the way home, she was crushed and burned to death along with her worthless, expensive, and irritating little dog. A huge truck carrying wrecked cars had slammed into the back of her Hillel Tours bus, and Ammon would never see her again. There had been some unpleasantness about the driver of the bus and the dog, a lawsuit, but his cousin Abraham, the lawyer from Syracuse, had seen to it, for a fee, that the family of the driver never saw a dime.

Copyright © 2020 by Roger Owens