If You Lived Here (34 page)

“Out where?” Avery asked. “I don’t know.”

Avery took a sip of water, turned, and looked out at the street. The traffic on the alley had picked up as workers headed home for dinner. Now that even more people had turned on their TV sets, the sounds of the programming drifted in from all directions, and I could hear the voice of the news announcer coming at me in stereo. That noise, mixed with the blare of the traffic and the cacophony of the birds, gave the oth-erwise empty room a noticeable clatter. But Avery didn’t seem to mind. He may have been sixty, but his face was still handsome, unwrinkled, and tranquil as a child’s. I couldn’t understand how a face could remain so youthful through three wars, and countless corpses.

“How can you stay so calm through all this?” I asked.

He turned to me. “Calm?” He looked back out at the street again. “What have I got to be nervous about? We’re not here to save lives, you know, Martin. The stakes are very low in our profession.” Then he pushed himself up out of his chair and, turning to me, said, “Feel like getting a bite to eat?”

I shrugged. “Sure.” The throbbing in my leg had finally eased and it didn’t hurt when I stood up.

Avery paused for a moment in front of one of the birdcages. He made a little cooing sound, then blew gently through the bars. Two red birds lifted off their perches. “Lovely, aren’t they?” he asked.

“Yeah,” I said. We stood watching them for a long time, because they looked like they were dancing through the air.

So. I wish the story ended there. Unfortunately, it doesn’t. For

a while after that, my life got bearable. I considered Avery my savior. Nearly every free day, we’d go into Danang together. We visited pagodas and temples. Wandered through markets. In my memory, it seemed like we mostly just ate. I could eat four, five meals a day and then eat more. Grilled shrimp. Steamed catfish. Big bowls of noodle soup. I couldn’t get enough of the food. I felt like kicking myself for spending the first three months of my tour eating meat loaf and hot dogs. Avery could not believe that one person could eat so much.

One day the two of us found a famous pagoda at the end of an alley near the market. Not far from the entrance sat a small statue of the Buddha, described as a “Must See” in Avery’s old guidebook. It was slate black, carved from a single piece of stone, with a face that was peaceful and pitiful at the same time. Avery lifted the tip of his finger and traced a line along the Buddha’s brow. “Is it worth it to you, Martin, to see this?” he asked.

I looked at the Buddha, and then at Avery’s own calm features. We’d had a lot of people die lately, and I was worn out. “I don’t know,” I said. “Is it worth it to you?”

He stared at the statue. “I come from Akers, Texas,” he said. I was curious. He had never mentioned his past.

“Sixty miles from the county seat. Desolate little town. No one I knew had ever traveled farther than Abilene. But, from the time I was a kid, I wanted to live somewhere else. Not just another part of Texas, or another state. I wanted to live in another country.” He turned and I followed him farther back into the pagoda. “When Pearl Harbor happened, I was already thirty years old, working in my uncle’s funeral home in Akers, and I saw my chance to get out of there. My family couldn’t argue with patriotism. Two days later, I left. That was it. I’ve never been back. While my mother was still alive, I bought her tickets so she could come meet me when I took leave in the States. We had wonderful vis-its together. San Francisco. Chicago. New York. Mother hated Akers as much as I did.”

We reached the central altar of the pagoda. A bronze Buddha, surrounded by a ring of dull yellow lightbulbs, stared down at us. “Mother

died about ten years ago,” Avery said. “I haven’t had a reason to go back to the States since then.”

Neither one of us said anything for a while. At this moment, the United States seemed impossibly exotic. I asked again, “Is it worth it?”

Avery laughed. “Well, it’s worth it not to spend one’s life in Akers, Martin.”

We spent most of our time at the same café where I first spotted Avery. He and the old man, Mr. Quang, would sit over their chessboard for hours, while Mr. Quang’s granddaughter, Thuy Linh, and I played round after round of Vietnamese “Go Fish.” Once Avery had introduced me to a few trustworthy cyclo drivers, I got around town quite easily. I never saw that Charlie again. Some days I stopped at the market on my way to the café. I always bought birdseed. And fruit. I wanted to try every variety while I had the chance: mango, star fruit, guava, rambutan, pineapple, dragon fruit, papaya, even durian (they said it smelled like hell and tasted like heaven). “Breast milk fruit” was green and round and firm, I remember, with a juice as white and creamy as mother’s milk. I discovered five different kinds of banana, some no big-ger than my thumb. When I arrived at the café with my purchases, Thuy Linh took the bags from my hand. First, she filled all the little feeder boxes with seeds, which sent the birds into flutters of pleasure. Then she disappeared into the back room, and returned a few minutes later, holding two plates piled high with cut-up fruit. After she delivered one plate to her grandfather and Avery outside, she and I dug in.

I was halfway through my tour. If anyone had asked me, I would have said I was almost happy then.

You’re expecting worse, of course. So here it is: Avery died. Even after all these years, I have a hard time writing the words on the page.

It’s morning now. I had to take a break last night. The rain has stopped, but the pavement is covered with puddles. I can see dark thun-derclouds coming in from the west. The paper says we’ll get more rain later. I should take a walk or something while I can.

I’m going to try to finish now.

We were in the market. I loved that market. I had a favorite vendor

for every fruit I bought. The pregnant lady for jackfruit. A gray-haired woman with black teeth for bananas. And I always bought mangos from an old man who sat near the exit heading to Thuy Linh’s café. Why did I buy from him? I liked the long black hair that grew out of the mole on his chin.

That day, Avery came with me, hoping to teach me the right way to pick a mango. I thought I knew already. I’d been buying them for months, but Avery, Mr. Quang, and Thuy Linh laughed about the ones I brought to the café. My mangos were either too soft or too hard, too sour or too pulpy, or so stringy that, after eating them, you’d have to spend an hour picking your teeth. “I’ll go over there with you, Martin,” Avery told me. “Introduce you to my vendor. I’ve been going to her for a year. She always has the most delicious fruit.”

So we went. I walked right by my man with the mole, following Avery to his special vendor located closer toward the center of the mar-ket. She was no older than thirty, well dressed and pretty. She was sitting on a small plastic stool, painting her toenails. When she saw Avery, she grinned with recognition. “Hey, mister,” she said. “Buy from me.”

Avery smiled. “I always do,” he told her quietly, then he squatted down beside her pile of mangos, spread out on a burlap sack. I squatted next to him.

“It needs to have a give to it, Martin,” Avery told me, his hands mov-ing lightly from fruit to fruit, pressing here, pushing there. “They should be pliant, but firm, like the muscle on your arm.”

“Mister, mister,” the vendor said. I wasn’t paying attention then, but later, when I thought back on it, I remembered how she spoke. She wasn’t looking at us. She seemed to be talking to herself, but louder. She put down her polish and craned her neck, looking here and there around the market. Then she started talking loudly in Vietnamese.

At that moment, I was just squatting on the dirty market floor, pressing the muscle on my arm, pressing the mangos. Avery had three before I’d even decided on one. He pushed them to the side of the mat and stood up. “Bow New?” he asked (I remember the phrase, but I don’t know how to spell it). “How much?”

The woman was turned around, looking backward, into the next aisle of vendors. Avery stood waiting. “Mister, mister,” she said.

I heard a yell, then firing. I dove into the mangos. Something exploded. I felt an intense heat, then debris and ash poured down on my head. And something like rain. Hot rain. I didn’t move. Then I heard screaming, screaming mixed with yelling, and more gunfire. I opened my eyes and turned my head. The first thing I saw was that the vendor had disappeared. Her nail polish lay next to her newspaper. The next thing I saw was Avery, stretched out on the market floor. Most of his chest was gone. I put my head back down on the mangoes.

It took me most of that night to prepare Avery’s body. He was one of those “tough jobs,” where there was too much left for cremation, but not enough to supply a solid foundation for the work. I tried to do the things he would have done himself. I cleaned the nails on his remaining hand, even though they were clean already. I shaved his face. The shrap-nel had ripped through his chest, and so, before putting on his dress uniform, I padded the cavity, being careful not to pad too much, which would have made him look like a weight lifter, or too little, which would have made him look like he’d been sick. I didn’t have to do anything to his face but close his eyes. His face looked as handsome and peaceful as ever and, because he had such rigid posture to begin with, he actually looked quite natural in death. When I was nearly finished, I pulled a ring out of my pocket. It wasn’t a real ring, just one of the beer tab rings that Thuy Linh had given me. It was the only souvenir I had from any of them, and just before I closed the zipper on the bag that held Avery’s body, I lifted the breast pocket on his dress uniform, and slipped it in.

After Avery died, I didn’t leave the base again, even though I knew that I should go back to Mr. Quang’s café and say good-bye. Time has passed in strange ways since then (I’ve never told you this, either). Sometimes, I feel like each moment lasts hours. Sometimes, I feel like I close my eyes and open them to find a week or two has passed. For a while, I worried that something was wrong with my brain, but I wasn’t injured and you can’t call messed-up time perception a symptom of anything, really. I felt some consolation when I learned that a lot of vets

found their thinking altered in some way after leaving Vietnam. We’re the lucky ones. I came home in one piece, so I can’t complain at all. And my story is such a little one, just another moment of guerrilla warfare, back-page news compared to worse things that were happening all over Vietnam.

When I think of those last few months in Vietnam, after Avery died, I think of the earth there as acid, bubbling, sending out black fumes that made it impossible to breathe. When I remember the day I finally got on the plane to leave, I imagine myself running across the tarmac, stepping lightly, my feet seared, my lungs burning. Of course, it didn’t happen that way. Nobody attacked us. I got out fine. But that’s how I remember it. When I think of going over there to help you, I find it difficult to breathe.

I don’t expect you to forgive me. I don’t.

Martin

For a long time after I finished Martin’s letter, I lay on the bed, the yel-low pages scattered around me. Now, with the blank of his life filled in, some of the puzzles of our marriage become easier to comprehend. Those days when he could barely speak. The days he wouldn’t get out of bed at all. Were those the days he would wake up later to find he’d missed entirely? I felt sad for him, and angry that our country had put him through that trauma, and for no good reason either. I knew that Martin expected me to feel angry at him, as well, but I didn’t. I don’t doubt that those emotions might come later, when I am forced to abandon hope that I will ever get my boy. But, lying there on the bed, I merely thought of the way he’d damaged our marriage (and, probably, his first marriage, too) because he could never talk about it. How many lives do we get here? I wanted to ask him. I even said it out loud, just to hear it myself. “How many lives do we get, Martin?” I whispered, willing the words out through the walls of my skinny hotel, up into the sky above Hanoi to merge with a cloud that would carry them, within seconds, across the Pacific, across North America, to Wilmington and into Martin’s ear. How

many lives do we get here, Martin? If death is so easy, so imminent, why are we wasting our time?

And then I thought of Mai, wasting her time, too. After that single creeping peek at her sister, she’d stopped. She hadn’t mentioned her father in days. She approached this city like a jumpy cat, edging close to the door of the house, to the light, to the milk, and then, at the slightest sound, racing away. How many lives does Mai have? How many lives does her father have, sick and coughing?

And so, because Mai refused to do it, because Martin refused to do it, I got up and entered the house myself.

It is one
A
.
M
. when I hear the key jiggle in the door. I have left the lights on but fallen asleep anyway. Mai comes in almost silently, switches off the light, then stands there, her purse dangling from her hand, slipping off her shoes with the quiet care of a teenager returning late from a date.

I sit up on my elbows. “How was it?” I ask.

She looks at me, sets her shoes and purse by the door, then sits down on her bed. Her body sags sleepily, but I can see in the light from the street that she’s smiling. Apparently, she’s no longer annoyed with me for making her go. “Better than I thought,” she says. She leans back onto her hands. “I should have been a nurse or a doctor. Learned to help people, do good in my life.”

I switch on the little light by the bed. “Mai,” I say. “I have to tell you something.”

She sits up again. “Martin’s coming!”

I shake my head. Not that good. Really. “I saw your sister.”

An almost imperceptible tremor crosses her face, then passes, like an earthquake just below the surface. “When?” she wants to know.

At this point, she may still believe in accidents. But I operated with a clearer purpose than that. “Today. At her café,” I say. “She wants us to come over tomorrow morning.”

Her eyes turn suspicious. “Why you go there?”