The Lotus Eaters: A Novel (31 page)

Helen squinted, unable to make out a face but recognizing the voice. "Samuels, get out."

"A little Laos heaven? Or how 'bout a sip of dago red?"

"No thanks." A rotten smell came from him; they had been out for days, while she had showered that morning.

"Talk to me. Tell me about the big lovely world."

"If Hornblower finds you here, he'll can me."

"He's snoring away. And I have a lookout."

"Not a good idea." She was indulging him like a child, but it was too dangerous.

"So good to see you again... you have no idea. Just to touch something soft." He reached out and placed his hand on her stomach.

"If you don't leave when I count to three, I'll scream. Wake them all up."

He withdrew his hand. "Just remember this. I go to sleep every night dreaming about lying next to you in that foxhole. That's as close to a woman as I've been in a while."

"My heart breaks. Good night, Samuels," she said loudly, and he was gone in another squeak of plastic. In the dark, she heard chuckles all around.

At dawn they broke
camp and walked, single file, along a narrow dirt road; tree trunks and leaves and vines and bushes on each side so dense they formed a solid wall, curving overhead, forming a shadowed tunnel.

Samuels avoided her all morning, walking point, while Helen trudged behind Captain Horner. If possible, the captain's face seemed even thinner and bonier than the day before. When he spoke to her, the sight of his Adam's apple made him seem oddly vulnerable.

Now that she had exiled herself from Samuels and the other men, Horner seemed to have a change of heart and was anxious to include her on the mission, bring her to see his side of things. "This area is a major trade route for supplies from the north. We're supposed to figure out where they are and then bring in airpower."

"Sounds tough." She wondered if he was too green to know that he was being sent out as bait to see what was in the area.

"I don't get asked for my opinion on operations, you know?"

"Sorry."

"My goal is to get all these guys back to base in five days."

"Gotcha."

His profile was to her, and she saw his Adam's apple go up and down, twice, before he spoke. "I didn't mean for those men to die."

Helen looked up in surprise, but Horner's small, stony eyes revealed nothing, and it seemed as if the words had not come from him. "Understood," she said.

"But you don't write. I mean, you're only a photographer?"

Horner enforced strict discipline
on the men. No talking, five feet between each man, fire only when fired upon. Despite herself, she was impressed. They walked for two days in deep backcountry, not encountering another human being. Later, Helen would remember the patrol with the haziness of hallucination, the silence so complete it made one's ears ring. If one stood still, one could hear an undercurrent, a hum, to the forest, even the sound of water on leaves, trees dripping moisture as if they were perspiring.

Giant teak trunks blocked the sun, and the vegetation lay thick and snarled below; unseen animals crashed away through the brush while birds screamed overhead. A russet-colored dust floated in the air. The ground a springy compost that left behind perfect footprints; Helen thought of Hansel and Gretel leaving a trail. During the heat of the day, the air was so hot and thick it tasted green on the tongue, like swallowing a pond.

It was not Helen's job to keep track of where she was, only to follow the man in front of her, and so the days became a series of rutted paths climbed, narrow grassy valleys traversed, rocky dry streambeds to be crossed. In the morning, they woke to a thick fog that reduced visibility to the end of one's arm, muffling sound so that their voices seemed to have been snatched away. By noon, the sun burned away the fog. In a clearing, with blue sky overhead, the light emerged, harsh and chalky and forbidding.

Although their attention was strained, constantly on the lookout for an ambush or mines, the silence, as palpable as the sunlight, made them dreamy. Helen found long stretches of time when her mind was empty, her thoughts ceased; her present and immediate future and even her past, all receded. As free as she had ever felt in her life. The illusion grew within her that she had always been in this forest. At times it seemed as if they were the only human beings left on the earth, and it was simply a fantasy to think that cities like Saigon or, for that matter, Los Angeles existed.

Two nights after the incident with Samuels, Helen dropped off a pack of cigarettes on his bedroll. The next morning, she found a small pyramid of canned peaches on her pack. Samuels moved back in formation so that he walked in front of Helen again, taking back his role of big brother.

"You stay right behind me. I'm charmed. No mine is going to get me."

On the fifth morning they reached their objective, a small plateau overlooking a valley with a village below. The relief on Horner's face made Helen start to like the man. When they opened radio contact, they got orders to abandon their patrol and move as quickly as possible to the main road and head north. A convoy would pick them up en route and join them to two companies that had run into heavy NVA fire.

They fanned out and moved quickly down the gentle grass slope, their long, loose strides stirring up hundreds of greenish yellow grasshoppers that jumped waist-high in their path. Helen felt like the prow of a ship, grass brushing her thighs, flecks of green-gold insect life like the spray of water from a bow. The sun fell in heavy, flat planks, smothering sound, the great silence of the forest extending to the valley so that she felt they had been bewitched. Nature hushed and waiting for a misstep on their part to yawn awake.

They reached the rice paddies bordering the village. As far as they could see in any direction, no human being visible, their enchantment continued. The surface of the paddies feathered in the imperceptible breeze.

"Let's have three men go through the paddies," Horner said.

The men looked down or away. They weren't returning to base but were heading to combat; no one wanted the extra danger of the paddy. The men had told Helen that Horner ordered the men who had died to scout a paddy after a villager confessed it was mined.

"Who wants to volunteer?" Horner again asked, and the men, again, remained silent.

Helen felt sick to her stomach, the calm of the last week gone. For the first time in the five days, she desperately needed Linh or Darrow.

Finally Samuels coughed. "Captain, we need to meet up with the convoy. Why don't we skirt the paddy and village to reach the road quicker?"

"Negative. We will finish the original mission."

Samuels took a deep breath, and Helen wanted to reach out a cautionary arm but didn't.

"With all due respect, sir. An empty paddy in the middle of the day is a live one."

Two of the men shook their heads and began to hand off extra equipment.

Horner nodded, satisfied. "We'll need one more," he said, staring down at his map.

"Oh, fuck it," Samuels said, and threw off his equipment.

Helen crouched down and took a picture of the three men standing at the edge of the paddy. She got one picture of Samuels knee-deep in water, turning to give the other two a thumbs-up with his dragon-tattooed arm.

Ten minutes later she heard the shrill whistling of a mortar shell from the village. They all ducked, but Helen looked in time to see the explosion of water all around Samuels. The other two men in the paddy splashed through the water, reaching him as shells burst at their old positions. They all ran to the shelter of a paddy dike.

"Shit!" Horner yelled. He flattened on the ground, and when he saw Helen rise to take a shot, he screamed, "Down!" After a few minutes, the shelling stopped. The three men in the paddy scuttled back across the water and scrambled up the bank, collapsing next to Helen.

Samuels was panting. "Not a scratch."

The men chuckled and spread out, gulped water from their canteens.

Figuring she had enough shots, Helen took off her lens and put the camera away, intending to have a smoke.

"That was close," one of them said.

"Everyone's okay," Horner said.

"No thanks to you, stupid motherfucker," Samuels said and glared up at Horner.

Horner scanned the village with his binoculars but said nothing. The other two soldiers remained silent. The air tense, Helen almost wished another mortar would fire just to distract them.

"Goddamn West Point asshole," Samuels continued.

"Did you make it to the other side of the paddy?" Horner asked sadly.

Samuels blew air out through his lips in a slow hiss, the fight knocked out of him.

"No, I don't think you did." Horner looked tired but kindly, like a father urging his son to finish a necessary task. "Go back across."

The other men shifted, but Horner held up his hand. "Just Samuels."

No movement except for the scanning of Horner's binoculars over the paddy.

"No," Samuels said.

Horner sighed and put down the glasses. He brushed a dried weed off his shirt. "That's an order."

In a burst of energy, Samuels was on his feet, his revolver unholstered. "You go."

Horner's skin went red; he seemed more offended than frightened. "You're looking at a court-martial, mister, unless you put that thing down," he said, his voice almost a whisper. When Samuels didn't move, he leaned forward. "
Now
, I said."

"It's not even loaded, you stupid fuck." Before Horner could get close, Samuels turned the gun at his own head, grimaced, and fired. Everyone crouched for a minute, unable to comprehend what had happened.

As they laid him
out, Horner got on the radio, ordering an immediate medevac. Helen knelt down next to the corpsman.

Samuels's helmet was still on, and as the medic pulled off the compress wrapped under his nose to his neck, a wave of black passed over Helen's eyes. The forehead, the eyes, the nose, all of it was the old Samuels, but the lower jaw was missing. Blood poured in luxuriant gushes down his chest. The entire crescent of his upper teeth was laid bare; she quickly turned away. The corpsman grabbed a large body compress and pressed it up into the hole beneath the nose.

"Hold this down tight, okay?"

Helen nodded and held, breath gone, pressure behind her eyes as if she were going to pass out.

"Don't press on the neck," the corpsman yelled as he punctured the skin, creating a trache hole. "You'll block his breathing passage."

Helen followed orders instinctually. She looked into Samuels's eyes, and his look said he couldn't believe in the reality of what had happened, either. She leaned down to his ear. "Don't you give up on me."

A few minutes later his body went into convulsions, the torso bouncing as if an electric current pulsed through him, legs stretched out and trembling, arms reaching, throwing Helen and the corpsman off.

"I need help to hold him down!"

One of the solders came, knelt on the other side of Samuels, and pinned his arms. The medic couldn't give morphine because it was a head wound. After a minute, Samuels's body relaxed, the tension loosened. His eyes, which had been wild and fierce with pain, now flattened out. When she looked into his eyes, his gaze was cool and impersonal, a great distance and solitude in them.

The medic wrapped an elastic bandage around the compress and over the helmet. "No need taking it off and having things spill out."

Helen moved off, hands covered in blood. She didn't want to dig out her bandanna from her camera bag, smearing blood on her equipment. Too afraid of snipers to get water from the paddy, she settled for wiping her hands on her pants. Horner sat on a rock alone, face crumpled and worn, years of training all unraveled in minutes.

When she returned to Samuels, she concentrated on his tanned arms, still perfect, the dragon tattoo still wrapped around the muscled left forearm. She took his hand and held it to her.

When they placed him in the helicopter, Helen got on also. "I don't want him to be alone."

The corpsman squeezed her shoulder. "He's not going to make it, okay? Nothing you can do either way to change that."

At the field hospital, stretcher bearers ran Samuels into the tent. An hour passed. The noise of the planes and jeeps, the rushing of the medical staff, unreal after the silence of the forest.

Finally a nurse came out to have a cigarette and offered one to her. "Honey, you need to clean up."

Helen wiped her hands against her pants and felt the dry crustiness of them.

"Over there," the nurse said. "The supply building. Hot water and soap, a cot to lie down in. You need it."

"Samuels?" Helen said, barely able to mumble the words, her mouth dry, tongue thick.

"Oh, sorry, honey. Didn't make it to the operating table. Somebody should have told you."

Helen nodded her head. Before, there had been this small, shiny thing inside her that kept her immune from what was happening, and now she knew it had only been her ignorance, and she felt herself falling into a deep, dark place.

"Come on," the woman said. "Let's get you cleaned up and fed."

After the nurse went
back on duty, Helen returned to the supply building. Inside, it was hot, close, and dim, the only light from a row of exposed lightbulbs at the front of the building and the cracks of light through the rough, uneven seams of the metal walls. Racks of metal shelving stood eight feet tall, piled with supplies as tight as the stacks in a library. The air smelled of cardboard and plastic. As promised, a small cot was made up in one of the rows.

Helen put her equipment underneath the cot, then stretched out. She rolled onto her side, dragging her muddy boots across the blanket, too tired to take them off. Her arms and legs and chest trembled so that she had to clench her teeth as if against cold, and yet her skin was bathed in sweat. Beyond tears. She longed for something, anything, even physical pain, to provide a diversion.

"Adams."

She did not know how much time had passed, but she woke to the sound of a helicopter coming in. The flights had been constant, the radioed battle that Horner's unit was joining, the wounded piling in. She prayed that Horner had delayed the unit but knew he wouldn't. Just as he wouldn't take blame for breaking Samuels. Although now he would die in shame, Samuels had simply chosen the method of his suicide. Horner's way would have earned him a metal for bravery. It sickened her. She heard a soldier calling her name again. This was her ride to rejoin the company.