The Man From Saigon (24 page)

There is a crosswind and the plane crabs on the approach, then it straightens momentarily before the pilot lowers a wing into the wind to kill the drift. As the nose wheel touches down, Marc feels as though the ground is rushing beneath him. Then a strong pull to the left, all this happening in reverse throttle. Marc presses his own feet down into his boots as though braking, and the feeling is so real to him that it is almost as if he can feel the cycling of the anti-skid system. He’s been in the cockpit with these guys and he’s seen how their whole body is engaged in landing the plane. Feet working the pedals, hands gripping the steering wheel, pulling on the throttles. Every inch of the craft, rudder to nose wheel, controlled all at once by limbs and toes and fingers. He has watched the pilot’s eyes lock on to the end of the runway ahead while he works these subtle physics, studying the line where the runway meets the jungle, the treeline arriving disconcertingly fast, as though being pushed forward.

“Hey, man, we’re here.” It is the loadmaster. He stands by the door, his arms full, the cigarette bobbing as he speaks.

Minutes have passed and the plane is still. In his pocket, by necessity, Marc keeps a small flask of bourbon. He reaches for it now, ignoring the loadmaster’s gaze. When finally he steps from the plane, he feels as though he is pulling himself from
a wreck. Suddenly out into the noon-day sun, he can see as far as his eyes will take him. The Delta is flat, a mouth of land ready to take back in the salt water of the South China Sea, with air so wet it seems to have a texture, thick, viscous, a force he has to push himself through as he navigates the airfield under the strong glare of the sun. The bourbon heats him further, a little fire of his own. He crosses the airfield, the heat rising in waves from the ground. The plane ride is forgotten, already behind him. He ducks beneath the overbright sun, so close and hot it feels prehistoric, belonging to a place of tar pits and dinosaurs, of men dwelling in caves. He is here now to find something out, at least one thing, that was not in the report on Susan.

Son he does not care about, isn’t even looking for. On the phone, while making the arrangements to come down, he purposely avoided mentioning his name. What he has been thinking about, despite every attempt to push it from his mind, is that the last time he was in this area, about eighteen months ago, he reported on several killings in a small village. Six people had been murdered by the Vietcong, two of them women. It was alleged that the women had hung lanterns in the village as a warning to government troops that the Vietcong were there, scrounging rice and gathering up men to fight for them. He had seen the bodies, decapitated by scimitars which, it would appear, had not been sharp enough to make a clean job of it. All he can think about is how the women had been believed to be spies and how they had been executed with those dull blades, the bodies left to the flies. He has little comfort in the fact that there has been no report such as this, no report at all, in fact, about Susan. That is the reason he is here, to make such a report, if indeed anything has happened. Spies are not tolerated, their killings are public. The women’s heads were placed on stakes, fierce trophies set out as a warning, staying there until villagers had the courage to remove them, to kick the dust
over the fallen blood, burn the stakes, hide everything, even their grief. He’d seen all that, and done the story, then flown back and forgotten it until this day.

He is met by a jeep, courtesy of ARVN, thoughts of Susan so full in his mind that he cannot bring himself at first even to talk to the driver, a Vietnamese man a few years older than himself who crouches behind the steering wheel, a serious expression on his face.

“Davis?”

He nods.

“Welcome,” says the driver, whose bored expression suggests the opposite. The plane was way off schedule. He’s probably been waiting in the jeep for an hour.

As it happens, the driver doesn’t want to talk either. Nor does he accept Marc’s cigarettes when they are offered. Marc has come to associate this kind of behavior with the older ARVN officers, some of whom remember well the last war with the French and find the Americans patronizing. They may have had family members, a brother, a father, an uncle, “recruited” by the Vietcong—that is, taken away—so now they are suspected always of being Vietcong themselves and treated badly by the US military. It all spills over into a general disdain for Americans. He is used to it. Quite frankly he is so used to it that he does not care.

The heat is made tolerable by the breeze from the moving jeep. Though it is not raining now, there has been rain and the roads are not too dusty. His sunglasses guard against the worst of the afternoon’s glare. He has water on his hip. He looks confident. He looks like he knows exactly what he is doing, but he has no clue. No fucking clue, he thinks to himself. He wonders if the driver knows this, if he can tell.

“I’m interested in a journalist who is missing,” he tells the driver.

“Yes, I hear about that,” the driver says. “Two are missing.”

“I’m looking for Susan Gifford, an American.”

“A woman. Oh, I see,” says the driver. “You should get to the radio that she only
bao chi.”

What he means is to get word to the press in Hanoi, particularly to the communist radio stations, that a non-combatant, a politically neutral journalist, has found her way into the hands of the People’s Liberation Front, and that she is not a spy. The choice of words is important, the language itself somehow infused with propaganda. To appeal to the Vietcong, one must use the term People’s Liberation Front. To his jeep driver, and to any American he might meet, Vietcong would be the correct term.

“I’ve done that,” he says. He hopes the guy will suggest another idea, that there is something he has overlooked. “I’ve told everyone I can think of,” he continues. “My friends, other correspondents, they have, too. They have gotten word to Hanoi.”

He gets out his cigarettes, offers his driver a smoke once again. This time, the man nods, so Marc lights the cigarette for him, placing it in his fingers.

The driver says, “You do right things, you maybe get her back. Who the man?”

“A Vietnamese.”

The driver makes a clucking noise. “That not so good,” he says.

He thinks about Son. He has never trusted him and never liked him. The way he drifted quietly into Susan’s life, the childlike manner he assumed whenever questioned about his past, about where he’s been when he disappeared for days at a time—it was all very odd. He was at best an opportunist. At worst, perhaps he was also a spook, keeping tabs on the press. There was always this tension between the government and the press. Even with all manner of embassy parties and invitations to
dinners, of private drinks, of information slipped graciously to newsmen, it was there. A strained demarcation of territory. A kind of fixed unseen barrier. He was never sure how Son fitted into it all, but always assumed he spied on them, reporting to the government and to the American military who among the press were the real trouble-makers.

“He’s a journalist, too,” he says now.
“Bao chi.”

“Vietnamese will be different,” says the driver. He means Son will be killed.

Mark feels tired. If he closes his eyes long enough, he thinks he’ll probably fall asleep—that is, until he’s bounced out of the jeep. But asleep, he has nightmares. Awake, he pushes away the most unbearable of imagined consequences of Susan’s disappearance with a tablet of Valium, five milligrams every four hours, another of which he takes now.

The jeep bounces and swerves, racing beside the rolls of barbed wire overgrown with weeds edging the road, while further back, fields of rice lie tranquil for the moment, churned up in places where bombs have fallen. They pass a mile-long path of evenly spaced craters made by B-52s, now filled with water so that they give the appearance of ponds set out along a flat land.

His driver keeps the accelerator down, swooping past stacks of earthenware crocks being loaded on to a wagon, a flock of chickens, a cyclist trying to make it down the damaged road with two enormous sacks of rice braced on the handle bars. The jeep makes dramatic sweeps through potholes and often straight across whatever debris is in the road—an empty crate, a broken basket. The physical jolts help to refocus his thoughts. Like this, he can convince himself he is on assignment, like any assignment, and feel a momentary peace. A bus pulls out and the driver brings the jeep to an abrupt halt, giving the bus driver a fierce glare. All at once there is stillness; the heat gathering around them like a cloud, insects collecting at his face as
though they’d been waiting for him right here at this resting place. His driver, punching the horn so that it sends out its useless bleating sound, calls out to the man driving the bus.

“Let him go ahead,” Marc says. The road has been torn apart and put back together dozens of times from bombs and mines. It will be abandoned tonight, as every night, even by the army. “Let him go first and sweep for us.”

They pass stagnant marshes, low-lying mangrove swamps, rivers with their fish traps, their small tributaries over which might be a wooden footbridge, shallow banks on which the muddy-bottomed sampans are stacked next to houses on stilts, perched like bird hides along the water’s edge. Children swim at the edges of the docks, rising out of the water, their skin sleek and shining. In Saigon he has seen so many amputees, driven from their homes into the crush of the city, that he has gotten in the habit of counting the limbs on children. It no longer surprises him when he sees a baby gurgling up from his mother’s arms, a stump where his leg should be. Or when, along the street, he follows the unsteady gait of a ten-year-old with a prosthetic leg. Now, as he passes through a market taking place under parasols and tarpaulins, conducted out of baskets and clay pots and sacks which might hold rice or dried beans, he sees that here, at least, the people are whole. The children wear school uniforms, ride bicycles, looking much like children everywhere. A pet dog, a pair of sisters sharing a single bicycle, a couple of brothers playing soldier. It all looks very normal.

They pass through a village. It is wash day and the women have strung lines house to house, looping them from telephone poles and drainpipes, scrubby trees with their tangle of small branches, wooden stakes, porch pillars, anything upright around which they can wind their spools of twine. The clothes weigh the lines down so that sometimes a pair of black trouser legs or a white sheet drags in the coarse grass and Marc finds himself looking twice to check if it is a body.

The air smells of wet grass and mud, a kind of earthy reptilian smell. The whole of the Delta feels to Marc like a ragged, wet landscape, like some dubious treasure dredged up from the sea, rich with the eyeballs of lizards and birds and fish. As they pass some women filling a mine hole, he is reminded how the Vietcong put charges on the edges of roads beside potholes, knowing that Americans will drive around the potholes. In their black pajama trousers, their shaded hats, their sandals, the women work slowly, methodically, in the 100-plus-degree heat. The driver doesn’t slow—would never slow for anything, just in case it was a set-up—and so the women move back from their work, wiping their brows, making room for the jeep, which passes so close that Marc could have reached out his hand and taken the hats from their heads.

Finally, after what seems like miles and miles, they come to a stop.

“Here,” says the driver.

He is not sure what he is being shown, or even why they’ve paused where they have, out in the wild among ant hills and elephant grass. To his right is a wild thatch of green bamboo, the same verdant bushes he sees everywhere in the Delta, an opaque greenness that closes the country in. He can hear the insects with their swell of sound rising and falling like breath, smell the brackish water hidden by shrubs. It feels good to be on his feet after so long in the jeep. He lights a Camel, offering one to the driver, who gets out his own pack. They stand together, smoking. Then the driver speaks in a casual manner, as though filling in a small point. “It where that girl was taken,” he says. “Your friend.”

And now he knows why they’ve stopped.

“Man, Charlie is ingenious down here. The suicide squads strap themselves with dynamite and dress up like trees. They got
Chicoms and AKs, sure, but also all this other shit: flying mace, spear launchers, arrows, crossbows—”

“Russian fucking rockets, that’s what you got to worry about—”

“—all kinds of knives, not to mention the traps, like punji—”

“Punji, fuck that, this marine—this riverine—he stepped into a bear trap. And that was
it
from the knee down.”

“There are no damned bears in the Delta. Chinese flamethrowers, they got. Plenty of
them
around.”

“I said trap, man, just the trap.”

He listens to the soldiers, sitting inside a small hut in a row of others beneath some palms, the only shade in the camp other than beneath the open-sided marquis-style tents set up for the refugees. He stares out the entrance of the hut, his eyes crossing the humid, swimming air to the command tent, empty for the moment, like most of the tents. No sign of Halliday, and there hasn’t been since he arrived. Just scores and scores of Vietnamese peasants, looking aimless and bewildered. There must be hundreds, thousands, in the camp. He has no idea.

The refugees don’t think much of the tents, which trap heat. The insides of these newly erected structures have the same smell as a terrarium, with hot, unmoving air like a henhouse in summer. Though the tents provide some shade, there is more shade within the bordering jungle; its trees and creepers and broad shadows of larger leaves block out the imposing sun. Some of the people want to go there, but are prevented from finding the natural shelter of trees by the perimeter which has been set up all around, rolls of concertina wire arranged untidily on the ground, guarded by ARVN soldiers who look tired and bored. Marc feels any minute the atmosphere could shift from this sleepy steamhouse to one of violence, not by the peasants, who appear too disheartened even to raise their voices, but from outside the camp. He keeps waiting for the explosions.