The Lotus Eaters: A Novel (24 page)

After the area had
been searched, Linh stood apart looking down a gully along the side of the road. Helen went to stand near him, hoping he would say something more about Darrow, but when he remained silent she squinted into the gully. "What is it?"

"Look at those white flowers. Everywhere on this hill. I noticed them while we were in the trucks."

Not understanding such callousness, she stared hard at his profile for a minute. "How did you know the rescue convoy would be attacked?"

"You mean do I have 'spy' knowledge? Do I have a secret phone to Viet Cong headquarters? Medlock knew it was a death mission. He had no choice. When the NVA leave a few alive, it is to lure more in. Guerilla tactics. I was a soldier once."

The Vietnamese troopers complained
about having to load the bodies onto the truck. Sergeant Medlock and another officer argued with them. Voices grew pitched and strident. Finally the Americans, even though there were fewer of them, loaded alone, and then the Vietnamese grudgingly helped. By the time all the bodies were on the truck, tension was high.

Helen took a shot of the back of the loaded truck with its inert human cargo like a sculpture from a circle of the
Inferno
. She knelt and framed the truck like a mountain, the focus sharp on the tread of the tires, the matching tread of the boots of the dead. The darkness of the surrounding jungle and the light on the road made it seem the most forlorn spot in the world.

"Man, let's blow this place," one of the soldiers said.

The trucks rumbled back to life. Helen rode in a jeep with Medlock while Linh rode with the Vietnamese soldiers in the trucks.

When they arrived back at base camp, the Americans went into the mess tent to eat while the bodies were loaded into helicopters for transport back to Saigon. Helen didn't know what else to do, so she followed the officers and stood in line for hamburgers and more fruit cocktail. She sat at table and spooned peaches into her mouth although they tasted obscene to her.

"Did you see the price of the new radios they're selling down at the PX?"

"It's easier to buy radios and trade them for cigarettes. Sell them on the black market and make a fortune."

"I'll start my retirement fund right in Saigon," Medlock joked from down the table.

"Next time I'm in town, I'm going to load up on chocolate."

A pause, a moment of panic because Helen did not hear half their words, so lost was she in the memory of the strawberry-haired soldier's chocolate, but then Medlock asked if anyone had caught the football scores from the paper. The world went on.

When Linh came inside, Helen was drinking coffee. "Can I talk with you?"

She felt exhausted and not up to dealing with him. Their relationship was wearing on both of them. She sighed but didn't want to make matters worse. "Can it wait?"

"I told Darrow we're going back to Saigon now. He wants for you to fly down to Mekong Delta today."

"He's really okay?" Helen hesitated. "About yesterday..." She was mortified by what now seemed like a temper tantrum on her part.

"I check when we're okay for flying out." He walked away, brusque, but he didn't want to be tampered with any longer. Easier to keep a distance. With Darrow, that had been acceptable. She wanted more, wanted too much, pushed him past his limits. What she wanted, finally, more than he was willing to give.

EIGHT
Xa

Village

Helen and Linh flew
low over the southern Mekong area to An Giang province, controlled by the Hoa Hao sect that opposed the Viet Cong. One of the few safe areas in the country, it was where Darrow had decided to stay and recuperate.

The air boiled hot and opaque, the sky a hard, saline blue. For miles the black mangrove swamp spread like a stagnant ocean, clotted, arthritic. Farther on they passed the swollen tributaries of the Mekong. Papaya, grapefruit, water palm, mangosteen, orange--fruit of every variety grew in abundance, dropping with heavy thuds on the ground to burst in hot flower in the sun. The soil so rich from the emptying of the Mekong that crops grew year-round, and the local food supply remained ample even during war time, allowing villages and hamlets to unspool loosely along the canals and rivers instead of circling tightly in privation behind bamboo hedgerows as in the north.

As they made a first pass over the dirt airstrip, Helen could see Darrow standing by a jeep with two other civilians. He stood straight, slightly too formal in this loose, watery world. A white short-sleeved shirt, his right arm supported by a cotton sling, he looked thinner, his brown hair shorter, eyes invisible behind the glare of his glasses.

She ducked under the wash of the rotors and ran, embracing him so that he winced as she pressed his shoulder. Linh followed, forgotten.

The reality of Darrow's injury struck her with new force, frightened her all over again. "Are you okay?"

"Except from your manhandling," He smiled and held her off. "Meet some friends. They've offered to put us up while my shoulder heals."

Both of the men worked for USAID, handling rice production and irrigation in the area. The younger one, Jerry Nichols, had a sunburned face and blond hair so sun-bleached it was almost white, giving him an albino look. He pumped Helen's hand and smiled, his mouth crowded with large teeth. The other man, Ted Sanders, was portly, with buzz-cut hair, also retired military, polite and formal in front of her.

"How long are you here for?" Helen asked. Darrow's attitude irritated her, the presumption she had nothing better to do.

"An eternity. Four weeks. But I haven't had a vacation in five years, so I'm overdue."

His hesitation went unnoticed except by Linh. Only he would understand how Darrow must have bargained as the plane went down--how many times could one escape unharmed? The fear that the crash had paralyzed him again like in Angkor.

Linh came up, and Darrow moved to embrace him. Seeing the easy friendship between the two men, Helen thought how stupidly she had handled things.

"You took good care of her."

"But
you
have got sloppy without me, it seems." He would have given anything for it to be only him and Darrow in the village, the way it had been in Angkor. A woman changed everything.

"These damned helicopters can't seem to stay in the air."

They got into the jeep, Helen sliding across the hot and dusty canvas, stepping over the semiautomatics lying on the floor. Nichols drove them a short way along the washboard dirt road to the hamlet of thatched buildings straddling a wide bend in the Hau River. The jeep stopped in front of a small hut in a shaded grove of coconut palms and mango trees.

"Home, sweet home," Darrow said.

"Are you sure this shack's okay?" Ted asked.

"She's a girl with simple tastes."

"We don't all go native like Darrow," Nichols said. "If you get tired of it, we can offer steaks and hot showers."

"Go away, guys. If she changes her mind, we'll show up for dinner."

The two men ignored Linh; he had hardly gotten out of the jeep with his bag before it raced off, covering him in dust.

The front of the hut was a narrow veranda of dirt floor and thatched overhang supported by thick poles of bamboo. Large clay cisterns filled with rainwater formed the boundary with the outside. The framework was bamboo, walls and ceiling interlaced palm fronds with a layer of rice straw on top that smelled thickly of grass in the heat of the day, reminding Helen of sleeping in a barn loft as a child.

Inside was a single room with a dirt floor, a low wood table used for eating, sitting, and sleeping. Around the sides of the room were additional clay pots filled with rice. In the corner was a stack of woven mats.

A young woman in dark blue pajamas, Ngan, carried in a tray with small ceramic cups of mango juice. An older Vietnamese man entered, and she bowed low. He was the village chief, Ho Tung, an elegant man with flowing silver hair and features softened by time like soapstone. After he welcomed them, he stalled long enough to share a cup of juice before leaving.

"We are very cosmopolitan in An Giang, used to Westerners," he said. "After all, my granddaughter lives in St. Louis."

"Really?" Darrow said.

"We have not heard from her in two years, but her last letter said that in St. Louis it snows. That things move very quickly."

"I'm sure that is true."

"That is how I've learned most excellent English."

Helen pictured the granddaughter living alone in the great foreign city, working long hours in some invisible job, yet back in her village she was a celebrity. After Ho Tung left, Ngan carried in their bags.

"I'm supposed to take it easy at least a month. Not much use for a one-armed photographer. I'm hoping a couple of weeks will do it. So I thought we'd have a little in-country R&R." He wished it were that simple. Since the accident, night sweats, insomnia, shaking, everything back with a vengeance. He couldn't say aloud that he hoped to be saved by her.

"And you just assumed I'd drop everything?"

Darrow picked up her hand and kissed it. He hadn't counted on her being standoffish, prickly, and he almost wished for the company of his native women, their docile willingness. After saying good-bye to the chief, Helen went back under the shade of the roof, sat down, but it was hardly any cooler than standing in the road.

"How about it, Linh? You could use a rest, too," Darrow said.

"I need to do some errands," Linh said.

"Stay and relax. They've got a place for you up the road." He wanted to say,
Stay and keep me company
.

"I'll be back at the end of the month." The smallest intuition that Darrow longed for the days at Angkor also. Instead, he had saddled both of them with this woman. He remembered how Mai used to exasperate him, and yet now he would give almost anything to have that irritation back. Was it like that for Darrow?

"What in the world are you going to find to do around here, in the middle of... nowhere?" Darrow asked.

Linh spoke in Vietnamese to Ngan, and they both laughed.

"What's funny?" Helen said.

"That we are in the middle of nowhere. Everyone knows this is the center of the universe."

"Don't go all Buddha on me," Darrow said.

During lunch the two men talked about people they knew, upcoming operations that might be interesting to go on, although they agreed it all could change in a month's time.

"I'll keep an eye out for things," Linh said.

It struck Helen how differently Linh acted now, at ease and forthcoming to Darrow where he had been so strained with her.

Darrow sighed and pushed his plate aside. "I hear you two got a little trouble outside Pleiku?"

"Yes," Linh said. "They sent in a suicide convoy. We waited till next morning and then we went in."

Darrow turned to Helen. "Bad?"

Helen continued to eat. She burned with humiliation.

"It's okay."

When Linh was ready to leave, he stuck out his hand to her, but she moved around it and hugged him. A silent peace offering. "Come back soon. Let's have a little fun together, the three of us, okay?"

He nodded but was already walking off down the dirt path. He loved them each separately, but he was ashamed he did not want to see them together.

"Where does he disappear to, do you think?" Helen asked.

"Maybe he has a beautiful little bar girl that he keeps. Or he's a Viet Cong spy."

She laughed. "What? Linh?"

"You've got to start seeing underneath things. Finding the real story."

"You sound like MacCrae now."

"Once when we were in Cu Chi, my camera got... smashed, and he constructed spare parts out of nothing. I worried about the film, and he said he would process it in a bunker if I wanted. Since it was dark, we did it by starlight. He traveled with two porcelain plates--one for the developer, one for the fixer. Tied a small stone at the end of the strip and dipped it into the stream to wash it. Only the NVA are taught that."

Helen laughed. "You're joking. Not Linh. That's impossible."

At dusk, Helen and
Darrow sat inside the doorway of the hut. Ngan served them dinner--bowls of sticky rice and fried paddy crab and shrimp--and then bowed away. The USAID workers had sent over a cooler of beer, and Helen pressed an icy bottle against her neck.

There was an element of performance when Darrow was around others, but alone, he seemed tired, distracted. Although she was happy to be there, she had not had time to wind down from the mission. She traced the scar on his good arm; the warmth of his skin made her realize how happy she was to be with him again.

"At least I'll know the cause of this new scar."

"It's a sign that something worse didn't happen. It's a sign that I survived."

"Linh stopped me going on that convoy."

"What're you talking about?"

"In Pleiku. I wanted to show off how ballsy I was. I thought he was a coward for not going."

"It's experience. But he's a guardian angel." "So who guards him?"

Darkness fell; the jungle suddenly quieted. The only sounds the faint pulse of flame in their kerosene lamp, the lapping of water against moored boats along the river's bank. Small bats fluttered over the trees and river in loose rolls like drunks.

"I love... this country," Darrow said. "My dream is to photograph the North and South in peace."

"Why did you ask me to come down here? I mean, we could have met in Saigon."

"This is the third time I've been in a helicopter that went down. One time we ran out of gas and crashed into a hillside. One time we were rocketed. My mind was always clear before, ready; this time all I thought of was you."

"That's a good thing, right?" Helen took a long sip of beer. All his words were the right ones, but she wondered if they had just come too late for her to hear them. "What exactly did you think about me?"

"You've made me selfish," he said. "You've made me greedy for life again."

In the middle of
the night, a rustling on the roof woke Helen. She grabbed a flashlight and poked it through the opening of the mosquito netting and onto the ceiling. In the corner, a greenish gold gecko turned to pose in the light, in his mouth the wiggling body of a scorpion.