The Lotus Eaters: A Novel (34 page)

Helen bent down to hug the girl, smelling the stale sweat and sour milk. Small sores from the dirt and heat had erupted on her face and neck. The girl looked deep into Helen's eyes, took a breath, and wailed, bringing the slow-moving nurse over.

"She's a temperamental one, that girl," the nurse said.

"She'll get used to the idea we're coming back. Let's go."

Helen was relieved to be back out in the courtyard, breathing fresh air. The afternoon sun flooded the yard with cleansing light. The smell of grilled meat over the brazier of a street vendor on the sidewalk outside made her light-headed with hunger.

"Let's eat."

Over a cold beer and grilled pork, Helen couldn't help probing the new situation like a toothache. "She's an orphan?"

Darrow took another bite, then wiped his mouth. "In effect. The family's too poor to come this far. As far as they're concerned, she's just a girl."

"You've probably got plenty of footage already. We could finish in California."

Darrow turned and signaled for another dish. "I want to show her full... progress. We'll do other assignments in the meantime."

"I thought..."

He stopped and looked at her. He understood the fear, and he also understood, as she didn't, that she would get over it. He reached across the table and took her hand as the Vietnamese at the nearby tables tittered. "Hey, time is on our side now."

Helen looked across the street to the center's walls, blinding, its aspect dull and impassive and unyielding.

Thao went home that
night tired of the brattish girl she tended, filled with the certainty that the American woman was the reason she could not get Linh's affections. His duty was to marry her. It was not an unusual thing during the war for such unions of convenience. Linh appeared lost to her, and she could be a good wife, saving his money, caring for him, while he watched over her and her children.

That night, she invited him over for dinner. With the money she earned for Lan, she had bought a new smock and pants, new pillows for the apartment. She had never known such luxury. Thao and Mai had come from simple peasant stock; strong, healthy girls, Mai the beauty, Thao the brains.

She arranged for a neighbor to take the girl for the evening. The baby slept. She wouldn't wait Linh out any longer, what ever visions he had for himself. He was a man, after all, and she knew how to deal with a man.

When Linh arrived, the apartment was filled with smells of food cooking. It was uncharacteristically quiet.

"Where are the children?" His main reason for visiting was the joy he got playing with them.

"With neighbors. The baby sleeps."

Linh sat down. When Thao came out, his throat caught at the transformation: her hair oiled, face powdered, a pale pink smock of silk.

"You look beautiful," he said. What he meant was that she looked like Mai. She smiled and poured him a rice brandy she had bought for the occasion.

"What is all this?"

"Nothing. A thanks for all you have done for us."

The evening proceeded, Thao a perfect hostess, plying him with alcohol, serving his favorite crab and asparagus soup, heaping his plate with food, asking intelligent and flattering questions about his work. When the dinner was finished, she had him sit on the new cushions she had bought for the Western-style sofa that came with the apartment.

"I'm tired. Drunk," he said.

"Let me massage your neck," she said, and turned him away from her, lowered the lights, and began kneading into the muscles of his neck. "Lots of tension."

Afterward, they sat side by side and sipped tea. In the dimness, Linh looked over, and his heart skipped at the image of Mai. Although he knew better, he couldn't hold out against Thao, all these months of her seduction. He stroked her arm. But later, when she was naked and lying spread out on the bedding, when he felt his hardness begin, it felt like a desecration of Mai's memory. What type of a weak man was he? He pulled away from her, head hidden in hands in confusion and disgust. Thao got up, slammed a cup in the sink, went to check on the baby.

Weeks passed, and the
agreed-upon time to leave drew further and further away as they approached it. Darrow, swept into the pull of the war, gave terse answers when Helen questioned him.

In desperation she accepted an assignment to go with him and Linh into the field. Four other reporters were joining them to Quang Ngai province. Darrow almost always chose to work alone, hated the "junkets," but he accepted this situation. To Helen, it proved Robert right in guessing Darrow's desire to cover anything, indiscriminately.

It wasn't until they had already boarded the cargo plane for the first leg up to Danang that they realized one of the four was Tanner. As soon as he noticed Darrow, he came over, cracking a tight smile over his small, yellowish teeth. He held out his large hand. "Let's forget that other day."

Darrow paused, then clasped the man's hand. "What other day?"

Tanner nodded his long, narrow head. "That's it, man. The war's bad enough, we don't need to fight each other."

The journalists divided up between two companies. Helen was irritated to see that Tanner had joined theirs; his presence would only grate at Darrow. Bad luck. The companies had orders to sweep three hamlets and meet back at base camp if they didn't encounter resistance.

When they met the commanding officer, Captain Molina, a slight, dark-complexioned, humorless man, he told them his company had been ambushed the day before, although it had sustained no casualties. The coolness of his report belied the tension visible in the troops. Helen saw spooked faces; the eyes of the soldiers hard and distrustful. Jumpy. Hot and without sleep, walking around with fingers tight on the triggers of their weapons. Linh's presence created a stirring, soldiers growling low to each other, casting long, stony looks. Molina went to talk with his NCO and returned.

"He can't come along," he said, pointing his thumb at Linh.

Darrow stretched his arms overhead, then bent to retie his bootlaces. "Do you have any moleskin you can spare? I think I've got the beginning of a blister."

Molina took off his helmet and wiped his face. "Sure."

Darrow untied the laces and began to pull off the boot. "He's accredited, and he's been my assistant for the last four years. I can't do my job without him."

Molina moved closer. "The men are a little wired after yesterday. Thing is, I can't guarantee his safety."

"Can I quote you? Their commanding officer?" Darrow pulled off his boot and his sock. "Besides, who speaks enough Vietnamese to question these villagers?"

Tanner had come up and stood listening. "Listen, Molina, these guys are okay," he said. "They'll make your little company look like heroes." The captain went back to talk with his men.

They waited in the shade of a large granite boulder, drinking warm sodas someone had scrounged up. Darrow nodded at Tanner. Linh stood to the side. "Too much, huh?" Darrow said, rolling his eyes. "Too much. What kind of captain admits he can't control his men?" Fifteen minutes later, Molina came back saying they reluctantly agreed.

"Linh's the best scout you could hope to find."

Molina grimaced. "He gets it first if he leads us into an ambush."

After he walked away, Helen tugged on Darrow's arm. "This feels bad. We should get out of here."

"You're skittish."

The soldiers moved out single file along the narrow trail of crushed shell that wound through the high sand dunes. Tanner walked point singing, " 'Hi, ho. Hi, ho. It's off to work we go,' " making the soldiers around him snicker. Midmorning, the temperature climbed over a hundred, the sky a low, gloomy, saline white. The soldiers wore flak jackets open over bare chests. Under their helmets, they wore bandannas to keep sweat out of their eyes.

The first hamlet contained fifty adults. The huts clustered at the base of a chiseled limestone cliff next to the ocean. The villagers seemed friendly enough; they smiled and went through the charade of carrying on as if the soldiers were not there. A thorough search yielded nothing, and the soldiers got ready to move out again.

Linh and Helen entered a hut at the urging of an old woman who waved them in. The room was small and dark, filled from floor to ceiling with paper flowers. Rows of reds and yellows and white lined up. Linh hesitated, wiping his face. "She makes these," he said, "for celebrations, for altars."

The old woman spoke in a low mumble to Linh.

"What is she saying?" Helen asked.

"She's afraid the soldiers will burn the village. She has a year of work inside. All on its way to be sold in Danang."

"Tell her we're on our way out."

As they gathered on the edge of the hamlet, bunched up in a group, sipping from their canteens in the smoldering heat, lighting cigarettes, a mortar whistled down between the palms. Everyone dove, but when they rose, four men on the left side of the tree were dead, while two others crawled along the ground.

When they heard the strike, Helen and Linh pitched themselves against a sand dune next to the old woman's house. All the fear that Helen thought she had recovered from came back tenfold. Her legs useless, acid in her throat. Darrow ran over, cameras hitting against his chest in his hurry. He put his hand on the back of her head. "You okay?"

She nodded.

"Linh, take care of her."

Darrow was gone back through the smoke.

Captain Molina ordered the casualties pulled down the road, and called in air power. Helen watched as he held the radio receiver, his face wet and tight. She saw the tremor in his hand as he handed the receiver down to the radio operator.

The helicopters would come in from the west, forcing the fleeing VC toward the ocean, where the other companies would block their escape north and south. A young boy, Costello, had frag wounds to both legs, his skin peppered with black holes. Darrow and Tanner together pulled him along with the other wounded to the road. As the shock wore off, the kid trembled but made no sound.

Helen felt nauseous from the heat and the blood and the noise, but she picked up her camera and focused through the viewfinder. Molina stood over the boy, his face a mottled red, his lips tight and pulled back from his teeth. In the viewfinder, framed, he had a terrible kind of power. Helen framed a shot of him on the radio handset while the operator crouched next to him, fingers stuffed in his ears at the sound of another mortar, face clenched, reluctantly attached by the umbilical of the cord. Molina waved his arm and brought it down hard on his thigh as if he could will the helicopter's appearance, oblivious to the flames snaking their way up a thatched roof behind him, oblivious to the comatose boy at his feet. If he had taken any more notice of Costello, he might have shot him.

Helen put down the camera, puzzled, when she saw blackened, fluttering shapes in the air like dark butterflies. The sight of his injured legs mesmerized Costello; Helen grabbed a plastic field poncho and draped it over his lower body.

"Let me see them," Costello said.

"You're not hurt that bad," the medic said.

But Costello was past hearing.

"You'll be okay," Helen said. She said the words by rote, as if comforting a child, but she felt angry at his squeamishness when there were dead bodies yards away. There was a sense of release in the coldness she felt, her lack of concern for the man. She didn't want his name and rank, or his picture. She wanted to forget him the moment he was on that helicopter.

Within minutes assault helicopters flew overhead and sprayed bullets and bombs over the village. An inferno, the fire created a hot wind that fed upon itself, heat upon heat, until Helen felt each breath she took scorched her lungs.

Linh pointed, and Helen again noticed a swarm of black fluttering shapes that looked like swallows or bats rising above the old woman's hut. "Her flowers."

Helen remembered when her father returned from duty in Italy. How he had brought her a red tin of amoretti. How he took the waxy wrapping as she ate each cookie, lit a match beneath it and smiled as it flew skyward like a spirit, to her screams of delight.

Although they watched the hut burn to cinders, the old woman was nowhere in sight.

The action seemed to be mostly over, and so it was a shock when a dozen men burst out of a tunnel opening at the edge of the village, the heat from the burning hut above the entrance roasting them in the tunnel, parts of their clothing curling off their backs in flame. They ran down the beach to reach the water, wanting to plunge in the wetness and stop the burning, but the running alerted the soldiers, who opened fire.

Linh yelled, but Darrow grabbed him. "No!" He pointed to Helen. "Stay between him and the soldiers." She held Linh's shoulder, felt the quivering of his muscles.

"They're villagers, not VC," he said.

Darrow ran down through the sound of the automatic weapons' fire. So much smoke and the deafening pound of the helicopters--it was impossible to make out clearly what had happened.

Fifteen minutes later, the helicopters gone, the beach was strewn with bodies on the sand and down into the surf. An eerie quiet except for the keening cries of the village women who had a view of the beach. The mood of the soldiers had turned murderous. They went back again and again to the bodies of the dead men, as if they feared they would resurrect. Tanner took pictures, moving bodies with his foot into more graphic positions. "Don't think this one is running anywhere," he said to a soldier, who glared down, bayonet pointed.

Darrow's forehead creased, his head bent down as he walked over. "That's enough. Women are watching up there."

Tanner turned and narrowed his eyes. "Don't get jealous, Sam. You're not the only photographer in Vietnam."

A few of the soldiers glared at Linh as he moved along the beach with Helen. "How come he didn't warn us?" they asked over and over.

"Because he didn't know. He's on our side," Darrow said.

When the first medevac landed, Darrow joined Helen and Linh. "Let's take this one out. We've got enough."

Tanner stayed with the company.