The Man From Saigon (18 page)

She should feel relieved, but she does not. They sleep in greater comfort, a roof over their heads, the dry earth beneath
them, her hammock set up in a corner. She is warmer than she has been since they were captured. Son was right, everything has changed, and yet she is even more uneasy.

“Where have all the people gone, Son?” she asks. He is near her, asleep. The soldiers have given him some rice wine, too, and he is completely out. He begins to snore. It is the same with the Thin One, who is meant to be guarding. She watches his head drop back, his shoulders relax, the gun lowering slowly to the ground. For a moment she considers taking the gun, or perhaps just walking slowly, quietly away, but then he wakes up once more, and she thinks anyway how foolish she’d be to try to escape. They would wake and shoot into the brush, and maybe they’d get her. Worse still, they might injure her just enough so that she died slowly of septic poisoning. And even if by some miracle she managed to escape into the jungle, where would she go? The jungle was emptying out, she thought. Deserted hamlets, lost troops. Even if she could get away, where would she get to?

A belly of rice, the promise of a dry night beneath shelter, a fire indoors so that the heat is kept. She ought to be able to fall asleep, but she has enough comfort now to lie awake instead and think. She is regretting the decisions that have added up to this occasion, all those small choices, the tiny determinations in her life that have brought her here, right now. She is thinking of how it might have been different if she’d gone to Marc’s room, knocked on the door, stood beside him in the grim neon lights that shined through his windows, and told him she was finished with Son, that she’d quit him, as he had suggested.

Good, because a guy like him is a chameleon. You can’t know him
, Marc would have said. He may have said something like this before. She hadn’t believed him then, of course, but she believes him now.

By the time the guards are up, by the time Son is awake near her, she has figured it out. A lever in her brain turns; the thoughts line up. The realization arrives effortlessly and she accepts it: an unwanted gift of her own imagining.

“What happens to spies when they are caught?” she asks Son. She wants him to know that she knows. Or thinks she knows. She sees no other reason why the soldiers have not already shot him. After all, he is Vietnamese; he is of military age; he is traveling with a woman who was almost certainly aligned in some way with enemy forces. Under most circumstances they’d have shot him outright—there would be no question. There was no reason
not
to shoot him, no weight in the decision. Old men, women, pregnant young wives, sometimes even children, the everyday kill of such soldiers. And here they are, drinking with a man who by all rights ought to be considered their enemy, playing cards with him.

She says, “You must know something they want to find out. Or maybe you have a high rank and they don’t dare kill you.”

He says nothing. The soldiers are making some kind of tea from curled leaves that give off a smell like freshly mown grass. She tries again. She says, “What will they do to you when they find out you spy for the Americans?”

There is a long silence, then, “I don’t spy for the Americans.”

Her stomach lurches and it feels for all the world as though the earth has suddenly swayed. A lever in her mind, and now she understands and wishes she did not. He’s a spy, all right, but she hadn’t understood correctly. Now she does. “You don’t spy for the Americans,” she says.

He shakes his head slowly.

“Not for the Americans,” she says again. She hates what she is learning. It enters her painfully, this information.

“You do a good imitation of a photographer,” she sighs. “Though I guess a spy has to have a convincing counterfeit profession to hide behind.”

“I
am
a photographer. You know that.”

“I don’t know anything,” she says, “except you hold powerful sway with these soldiers.”

There is a pause. It would seem that Son is quite willing to forfeit the conversation entirely, to let it stop right here.

“So explain this: why me?” says Susan. “Why did you choose me, of all people?”

He says nothing.

“I remember how you found me at Pleiku. That look on your face. You pegged me. I know you did.”

All this she says easily. No emotion to her voice. She does not want the soldiers—if they are listening—to guess at their conversation, or to imagine that they are arguing. She keeps her voice light, her inflections playful. Judging from the tone of the conversation you’d think she was reminiscing about a nice summer’s day.

She continues, “What will the Americans do to you when they find out? Or are you planning to go underground now? Or join these guys? Or live in Hanoi, if we ever make it that far? And you know we won’t.
I
won’t.”

She hears him sigh. Or perhaps it is a yawn. “I’ve told them you are English,” he says, finishing the sentence with her name; not her given name, Susan, but a nickname that she allows only him to use: “Susey” “And that you’ve been a help to me.”

“Well, that’s certainly the truth,” she says. “Did you mention I had no idea what kind of help I was providing?”

“I have told them to take me with them and verify my identity and position. If you make yourself into my enemy, you may be in danger. Not from me, you understand.”

“They have my papers. And those say I am American. From Chicago. It’s all there.”

“They have no papers.”

“Of course they do.”

“No. They do not yet realize, but they do not have them.”

“Why not?”

“I ate them. Last night. With the rice. They weren’t paying so much attention.”

In other circumstances, it might have been funny. “What about my MACV card?” she says. “Did you eat that, too?”

It was hard plastic-coated card, like a driver’s license, that identified her as press.

“You have your MACV card,” he says.

She feels in her pockets and there it is, a rectangle of stern plastic. It is there, like an egg conjured up by a magician, appearing at once from behind her ear. “You stole it back,” she whispers. He says nothing. “What will happen after they figure out who you are?”

“They may be glad they didn’t kill me.”

“Will you be released?”

“I would hope.”

“And then what happens?”

“Then? It is up to you what happens.”

Up to her?
“Son, who are you? Who are you exactly?”

With the new supply of rice the soldiers are more relaxed. The next day they give her back her canteen, which she tops up whenever possible from the small pools that collect in the jungle’s wide, oversized leaves. Gap Tooth shows her how to get clean water from a bank, and even how water comes out of bamboo. She has already learned to tie the thin branches of low trees into a canopy that creates shade, to squat on her heels when eating. Long Hair removes his necklace on which hangs a P-38, a US Army tool that opens combat-ration cans, and shares one of the precious cans of rations with her. It holds peaches, and when she realizes this she feels overwhelmed with gratitude, her dry mouth suddenly moist with the thought of eating them, the juice so good it might be from another world. If this is how she feels about canned peaches, she wonders what
her response would be to other foods. She imagines grilled trout, lemons. She imagines black cherries and bacon. She forces herself to stop thinking about food, because it is almost unbearable to do so, but she finds once more her mind drifting: lemonade, a cold sweet orange.

Her actual diet, apart from rice, is now crickets and other insects, brought to a smoky crisp in a small bowl of charcoal carried on a pole like a kind of mobile barbecue. The bowl is another of the treasures discovered at the hamlet. It serves as a kitchen and a focus for their attention, too, as they collect worms and termites from the jungle floor, charring them in the charcoal one after the other. The rice makes all the difference. It smells a little like mildew (not that she cares), and the peaches are a godsend.
Thank you
, she says in French, and again in Vietnamese, for it is one of the few phrases she knows.
Thank you, thank you.

There are places so thick with bush that the soldiers could shrug their rifles over their shoulders, give a command, and all disappear into the bush. Other areas are like a dark, dense forest, the sunlight filtering through in small spiky bursts of light, so that it feels like living inside the green glass of a bottle. They march at night, and though it is cooler she is spooked by the phosphorescence of the jungle floor, a ghostly swimming light caused by fungus on the ground.

She is given a mixture of water and lime juice to pour on her feet. She does this, shuddering with pain. They bring out the iodine next. She looks hard at the medicine, trying to judge how much has evaporated since last time and pressing the cap with her fingers, trying to repair the damaged threading that makes it leak. Lime juice, then iodine. She can almost feel the goodness of this combination in her flesh. Afterwards, Son tears strips of his trousers, tying them just below her knee to keep the leeches from climbing up her legs. As he bends over her, carefully arranging the leech straps, whatever vestiges of anger
from the day before vanish. He is a spy but right now it does not matter. He’s negotiated with the soldiers for her food, her medicine. He is helping protect her from the leeches she dreads. This is all that she can consider at the moment, and that she is alive because of him.

She puts her hand on his cheek.

“Don’t,” he says, jerking his cheek from her palm. “I don’t deserve it.”

He is the Son she has always known, the boy who taught her how to play Tien Len, who slept on her floor, who sometimes grabbed her thumb with his hand and lurched along the street like a chimpanzee, who could make a sound like a cricket, who taught her to blow smoke rings, and once showed her the magnificent scar from his burst appendix. She does not want to leave him—whatever he has done or is doing. If they let her go but keep him, she thinks how hard it would be never to see him again. Not to go with him to milk bars in Saigon, watch him working on his photographs in the small hotel room that has become a kind of office and home, not to travel with him beside her, or to see his face which is more familiar to her now than her own. It feels to her the universal theme in this country: departure and loss. Everyone is always in the process of leaving. Everyone is dying or disappearing or going away or being sent home. You never got used to it. Even the soldiers who had served two or three tours, even they didn’t, and certainly not her.

“Son—” she begins. She thinks the worst thing about his being a spy is that they will have to be separated. Or that one of them will die.

He does not let her finish. He pats her knee, stands up all at once, and turns his back, walking away. They are now moving again through the brush, making slow headway, the whole process tedious and uncomfortable.

The next day it is she who holds the smoking charcoal pot and Gap Tooth who goes barefoot. Gap Tooth’s sandals fit her the best, the outline of his feet being covered easily by her own. She is more comfortable now; walking with less trouble than the day before. Even so, it is a wonder to her that these soldiers can march barefoot without pain or injury. At a rest stop Gap Tooth sits beside her and she finds herself staring at his feet, at the tough soles that are caked with calluses. He notices her doing this and takes the opportunity to show off his feet the way he once showed off his sword. He points to the leathery skin, brown and smooth. He explains that the soles of his feet are shoes.

“Yours, maybe. Mine are casualties,” she says.

“You need work,” he says. “You need practice.”

She is supposed to use a long wooden pole with a fan at the end to catch insects for the charcoal pot. The pot smokes and crackles as she moves down the path, giving off a heat that causes her to sweat even more. Try as she might, she cannot target an insect correctly and little makes its way into the pot. Long Hair takes the pole from her and shows her how to sweep the fan. He scoops up several insects and drops them quickly on to the hot charcoal, then pushes one into his mouth as though it were popcorn. She tries again, but she is no good at it. Finally, she is allowed to pass the project on to the Thin One, who stares at her as though she is utterly useless, so that she cringes under his gaze. But at least he takes on the pot and fan.

She is settling into the walk again when suddenly the soldiers freeze, speaking rapidly to one another. There is the sound of airplanes, like a rumble of thunder that grows louder by the second.

“Don’t move,” she is told.

This has happened before, planes going overhead, never spotting them, never even swinging back to take a second look in
case what they saw down there was a person. You would think spotter planes would see the five of them walking, but it seems never to be the case. However, this time feels different. She knows it is different even before anything happens, though she cannot say why. The planes are screaming; she can feel the earth vibrate. She yells to Son that it is an air strike and, just as she does so, there is an enormous explosion. The soldiers have their guns out but they do not move an inch. She wants to run. She begins to argue but Long Hair grabs her arm and demands that she not move. “Stay!” he growls, pinching her elbow. But then another explosion; this from napalm, and the soldiers’ reactions change abruptly. Long Hair lets her go, pushing her aside now as they run, crashing through the thick brush.

She tries to follow. It is the natural thing to do. She is shouting but the noise is so loud around them that she cannot be heard, the jungle exploding, ribbons of fire sailing above them. She can feel the heat from the flames, the air changing around her; she runs as fast as she can but Son and the soldiers have disappeared. She cannot find them and she is racing forward now through brush that scratches her face, tears her clothes. The sandals cannot protect the tops of her feet from thorns and vines. The air seems to hold no weight to it—it is as though she is breathing in a vacuum. Then within minutes, within seconds even, the sound of the planes lifts, leaving in their wake clouds of black smoke rising from all around her, so thick it might be solid matter, a small planet erupting. She doesn’t know where to go now. She drops to the ground, her feet bleeding, her toes balled together, the whole foot arching inward in pain. She can hear the planes on their way out. She looks up, her eyes stinging, a sharp throb across her forehead. She can see fires all around her. She wonders if she’s been hit.