The Man From Saigon (19 page)

She is suddenly terrified of being alone. She thinks about the field hospitals, how the dying are put behind that awful curtain, some of them begging not for a doctor but for the
comfort of a friend, a nurse, a buddy, the face of someone to reassure them as they die. She feels the same way now, the frantic need for connection, the unwillingness to be left behind. The planes could come back and drop more napalm. The napalm terrifies her like nothing else. She’s seen cans of it, ribbed, innocent, silver cans that might hold apple sauce or peanuts, rather than jellied gasoline. She has heard the stories of how soldiers are cooked inside the flames, their skin falling from the bone as they dance in the fire that pours over them like water. Now, as she is surrounded by fires igniting the jungle as kindling, she begins to panic. She searches frantically from side to side and she sees, as though waiting specifically for her, a cluster of steel straws protruding from the ground, a set of ignites camouflaged so well into the earth that it is as though they are naturally part of the jungle, as much as the giant fronds, the elephant grass, the canopies of leaves. Her eyes fix on the mine and hold the rest of her completely still. She has to force herself to exhale, to look for a firing wire. Her vision begins to fracture and she uses every ounce of her concentration to bring herself back to the task at hand, to figure out how the mine has been set up, so that she can avoid it.

She has seen such a mine before, just once, close up, when a young sergeant held one up in front of a group of new guys and said, “Gentlemen, meet Betty.” Then, it had been isolated, contained. Seeing the Bouncing Betty here, ready in the jungle, is like seeing a rare, lethal animal that you have seen before only in a zoo. She feels herself swimming in heat, in desperation. She begins to tremble, to push herself back, to spin her head wildly around looking for where the wire leads. She must stay clear-headed or she will die. She knows this, but she feels herself unraveling.

The next explosion she thinks must be the Bouncing Betty. She covers her head with her hands, rolls into a ball; she feels time like a slow and expanding moment, like a dreadful weight.
She is waiting. But a mine can explode only one time and these explosions continue, over and over, waves of sound coming from everywhere. She digs her chin into the earth, pushes her face as far down as she can, unable think at all. Even with her eyes closed she sees a wall of red, a dazzling constellation of colors against the backs of her eyelids, the drum of the explosions coursing through her. She has not been hit. She knows this and it mystifies her. She feels as though she has been propelled up into the air, away from the earth, preserved through some miracle of physics. Only later will she realize she hasn’t left this patch of earth, that the Bouncing Betty remains where it is, that the explosions are not here but a quarter-mile away. For now, she is sailing along the rolling explosions, feeling the vibrations against her teeth, the bones of her nose, the tender hollows of her temples. The noise is through her and around her. She clutches her knees, presses her chin into her collarbone, waits for it all to end, as she knows it must. But the planes recede; they always do. And as much as they try, they cannot obliterate the whole of the jungle or the people within.

T
here is a rotting smell in the taxi, like overripe fruit, its scent lodging itself high inside his nose. He cranks the window down. The smell takes him back to a taxi ride with Susan, looking at her beside him on the balding cloth seat, her hair wild across her face, her pale eyes blinking against it. He remembers how she tried to comb back the locks with her fingers, but the hair escaped, streaming like kite tails. They’d rolled the windows down then, too, because the smell was so strong and sick-making.

That was not long ago, a couple of months, though of course in the curious manner in which time stretches and condenses with its own, peculiar logic in Vietnam, it seems a long time. This same smell—what is it? Cabbage, rotten food, dirty clothes?—draws him right back. Susan had buried her head in his chest. She’d shorn her hair from its previous length so that it was harder to collect all at once, and he remembers, too, how he’d walked into the room late one night and seen her there in front of the mirror, her reflection in the glass, the scissors in her hands. She turned to him, the length of her lopped hair in pieces across her shoulders, the corners of her mouth turned up, the hair like confetti all around her.
I’ve always wanted to do this
, she said, as though talking about a place she’d always wished to go to. She stepped to greet him, her neck newly exposed like some part of her he had not seen before. He
took the scissors from her hand, sifted his fingers through her hair, lifted her chin up to him, and kissed her.

He feels her absence now like a sudden space once comfortably filled, a solid piece of himself now missing. He is no longer anchored by her, is drifting dangerously. To say he misses her is an insulting, ridiculous statement. He is frightened for her and there is no relief.

The taxi in which they’d traveled, like the one he is in now, had been filthy It looked as if it had been buried, then excavated. That’s what he’d told her.
Thing looks like it’s been exhumed
, he said, and felt the satisfaction of her small laugh.

Sometimes the cars in Vietnam were constructed out of several other wrecks. Susan had told him this, not then, but another time. Another of the many taxi rides they’d taken together. She’d likened the ingenious recycling of auto parts to the Vietcong practice of making mines out of dud howitzer shells, houses from flattened cans of Cola, and told him the only waste there was left in the country was what happened to the people. That was true, he’d agreed. That was true.

There had been the smell of a soldering iron among the other, less pleasant scents. She pointed this out. Rust on the inside, the outside. If it had been raining, the roof would have leaked. He could see that from the watermarks darkening the upholstery above him. But there was no rain that night, only dust and noise. His foot rested on a sandbag that almost certainly covered a hole in the floor.

I don’t think the doors match
, Susan said, laughing.

Beside him, she looked crisp and pale, out of place, a cool glass of water on a summer’s day. She wore a white blouse he particularly liked, jeans with embroidery, a slim military watch, a gift from a colonel who had also given her a ticket to Hawaii which she’d had to decline, although she was quite willing to have dinner with him in Saigon. The colonel had shown her how by pulling the watch’s crown one could stop the sweep
hand, allowing soldiers to synchronize the time.
The guy is so old
, Marc had said,
probably that watch is from World War II.
Susan laughed at him.
You’re just jealous
, she said, to which he grunted,
Don’t be ridiculous. I have no right to be jealous in any case.
It was true he didn’t like it when another man showed her attention. One time, it had been so hot when they’d been together on a patrol that the soldiers quickly ran out of water. A private, some nineteen-year-old kid from Michigan, let Susan have the last slug from his canteen. Watching her head tipped back, the workings of her throat as she drank gratefully, the soldier standing close to her, admiring her, Marc had to look away, pretend it didn’t matter, that he hadn’t noticed. He’d run out of water a mile ago and it had never even occurred to him to share it.

You’re all right?
he said as they crossed into Cholon in the taxi.

I’m thinking about Thanh.
Thanh owned the hotel where she stayed. He was a fat, balding little guy who gave Marc disapproving looks whenever he entered the hotel with her.
He brought me another lizard.

They’re not lizards. They’re geckos. Or anoles.

He says they will eat the insects.

Bug spray. And a new lock on your door. Basic stuff. Tell him you would like running water, for example.
He didn’t like that hotel. He was always trying to get her to leave it, find a room elsewhere.

You don’t have to hate him.

I don’t hate him.

The taxi glided down the road; he kissed her.
Stay in my room. If I’m there, if I’m not
, he said, though he knew she wouldn’t. She did not keep a change of clothes in the room, not so much as a pair of socks. She didn’t belong to him—that was the truth—and he often felt that the way in which she left no trace of herself was more revealing than if she were to keep
an extra pair of underwear in his drawers, or a comb, or a toothbrush in the echoing bathroom with its high ceilings and black and white tiles.

He found the nape of her neck with his thumb, whispered into her ear:
It’s paid for and half the time it’s empty. You can get room service. The windows don’t leak when it rains.

And leave my lizards? Sorry, my
anoles.

Bring them. I’ll stick them to the walls myself.

If you’re not going to be there, then why would I want to be there without you?

Well, there’s a lot more room
, he said. He was thinking of Son, how the guy slept on her floor like a tramp.

Ah, the truth reveals itself
, she laughed.

This was weeks ago—six, eight? The taxi seat had a tear mark, he remembers, the foam beneath it rising up like proud flesh. She pushed the foam back into position, smoothed the upholstery, put her hand on his knee. The window, when he’d rolled it down, became stuck in position. He could not move it unless he got out and lifted the glass. He apologized for this, but Susan shrugged it off.

I like the breeze
, she said.

He spoke again but the sounds from the road drowned out his words. Pedicabs, motorbikes, the heaving drone of an ancient bus. The noise awakened inside him a feeling he associated only with this city. Whenever he was in Saigon he began to feel a kind of controlled desperation, something he picked up from the place itself. The size, the dense clusters of people and buildings, overwhelmed him with its mad logic, its combustion of heat and energy that cloaked him like the fine dust that he washed off in the evenings. He felt all of it, all at once: the discreet corner swindlings, the meetings of money-changers, the pickpockets, the girls dressed up to attract business, the courteous hotel staff who tolerated, more than tolerated, who
absorbed
the indiscretions of their Western guests. All the
hundreds of vendors, floating markets, corrupt police and restaurants in which this group gathered, or this other group, he seemed to take the whole of it inside himself, swallowed in one big gulp. He tapped his chin, his fingers fluttered, his leg vibrated in a steady rhythm. He couldn’t remember when he’d acquired these habits. It was part of the electricity that coursed through him and to which he’d become accustomed.

What’s the matter?
she asked.

Nothing. Put your hand back. Keep it there. If I move, press down.

Yes, sir.

I’m sorry. I’m a little strange tonight.

Tonight?

Ah, ha, ha. I’ve had an awful day.

I know, sweetheart
, she told him.

And it was true. That afternoon, he’d been threatened by the police because he had brought a camera to a student protest. The police were everywhere, an army in white, and among the pale uniforms of the Saigon police were Westerners, too, men in crisp shirts, cropped hair, pale uncallused hands. The CIA advisors looked like thoroughbreds before a race. Charged up, even sleek, in their pressed trousers, their almost identical blue blazers and ties. He watched them among the crowd, noticing the air of authority they projected, something they seemed to acquire in training. Even the youngest of such advisors had it. One of the men broke away from his companion and approached Marc, his eyes leveled at him, fists clenched, head hunkered down upon his collar. Marc knew the man’s name, had even had a drink with him once at an embassy party.
We wouldn’t want you to get shot, Mr. Davis
, the man said.
Stray bullet.

Marc had nodded at the statement, showing no sentiment one way or another. Part of the treachery he was able to bring upon such people was his ability to hide his emotions.

He issued his own question coolly, as though grateful for the advisor’s admission of violence.
Are you planning to shoot people this morning?
he asked in his reporter’s voice, the recorder on, his cameraman, Don Locke, to his left, just behind him, the camera resting on his shoulder, the film ticking through.

There are always stray bullets, Mr. Davis.

Marc was not on camera. The steady focus of Locke’s camera was on the CIA man, whose face was as solemn and angry as though he’d had altogether enough of newsmen, of cameras and notepads, of the press demanding special rights and access—who had agreed to all that in the first place?

Marc pretended he did not notice. He smiled as though the man was making a joke, and said,
How many stray bullets are you expecting today?

The advisor turned away now, out of the frame of the shot, pushing past the Vietnamese policemen.
One may be enough
, he whispered as Marc stumbled along beside him, trying to get his tape recorder in range.

It was not the first time, but he’d never grown used to such intimidations. They filmed the American as he spoke and then watched the Vietnamese policemen with their billy clubs, their white gloves, their Honda steeds. The students were beaten, shot at, dispersing after not much fuss. It was over so quickly it was hardly a story. Then they came upon a girl, maybe seventeen, eighteen, her hair wet with blood, lying on the hot asphalt. Locke put the camera on her, following her as she was lifted by another student who himself was struck, hauled off by four officers who met his protests with their clubs. Another student arrived at the girl’s side and he, too, was pushed back. They kept the film rolling. The arrival of ambulances, shouting, circling police. Twenty seconds, maybe half a minute.