The Man From Saigon (27 page)

“VC say it poisoned,” he says. “The people don’t drink.”

“But surely they can see you and me drinking it.”

They stand in silence for a moment. The hours earlier, when the driver brought him bouncing through the dirt roads to the camp, seem as though they took place days ago. The driver says, “You expect someone take you to that girl?”

Marc laughs out loud, a miserable little laugh. “No, of course not.”

The driver seems satisfied with the answer and turns to go. Suddenly, Marc wants the man to stay with him, at least for another minute or two. “I don’t know when I’ll get Halliday to even talk to me,” he says, rushing the words. “I’m beginning to
wonder if Halliday
exists
—” The driver looks confused so he says, “If he’s real, or not.”

“What you expect?” says the driver.

Marc shakes his head. In the center of a large, round tent, someone has tied a bunch of pigs, now all tangled in their ropes and squealing loudly. To his left, just fifty yards away, two old women are trying to get through the wire to a clump of bushes they prefer to the newly erected latrines. Children stand, pant-less, crying, waiting for their mothers, who cannot find them in the crowd. The PA system is now broadcasting some kind of report on the new way in which the government will help these peasants, help them in every way.

The driver continues. “What you think going happen?” he says. “You see here. Chaos. Even more chaos in the villages. What you want happen?”

He thinks about how he killed the Loc Ninh story, about how he’d been brought down here for some sort of “help.” Where is Halliday? Not anywhere in the camp, as far as he can tell. Locke and he have worked together now for nine months solid, but he knows without having to ask that there will be no more teaming up with Locke. You don’t kill a story like that, not one that took days to develop.

“Nothing,” he says. “I don’t expect anything to happen.”

“Good,” says the driver, as though they’ve agreed on something. He walks away, balancing two paper cups in his hands.

I
n her hotel, that place she has begun to think of as home, are her books, her typewriter, an aluminum coffee mug she uses as a pencil holder, her stacks of notepaper and clippings, her stained coffee cups and the little area they’ve made into a kitchen. There is Son’s tidy collection of chemicals and processing trays, his photographs clipped to a web of gray wire that runs against the wall. The bed is still as she left it the morning of her departure, unmade, the sheets crumpled, gathering dust so that if someone were to sit on it now there would be a cloudy puff noticeable in the broad sunlight of morning. The pillow, sunken with the weight of her head, yellows in that same sun that pours through the glass, unprotected by the blind which she left up. The leaves of the plants that Son bought to purify the air and to bring into the room a scent other than traffic fumes and insecticide are covered in a film of dust so that the leaves no longer shine. Gathering like ash, the dust also creates a mask of downy white on the desktop, the typewriter, the chair seat, on Son’s things, too, which were left folded in a small corner of the room as he always left them. When he spent the night, he always arranged his clothes perfectly, making a neat small square. He was a man accustomed to small and crowded rooms; he could make anything fit into the tiniest of spaces. He never complained about the water turning rusty, the electricity being cut off. He would work by moonlight and
candlelight. His dark profile, the outline of his shaggy hair, his untucked shirt, its sleeves wagging unbuttoned at the wrist, his lean legs shifting silently across the darkened room are as familiar to Susan as her own reflection. If there was no water, which was the case now and again at the hotel, he washed with what was left in his canvas-covered bottle, using a handkerchief or a thin washcloth, a sliver of soap you could see through. He was able to sleep amid any noise—even gunfire—and she has never seen him with a bed fancier than an army cot.

The plants are dying, their soil cracking in chunks in their pots. The fern’s rumpled leaves fold in at the tips; the bushy ivy yellows, the lilies that had blossomed, have dropped now, the whole plant sagging. Son hung a map of Vietnam on the wall above the bed, not a map like Susan’s own, with the war zones and bases in thin ink, but an illustrated map showing the soft green hills, the wide expansive valleys, the mists that flow up and down the landscape. Tigers were portrayed in the jungle, porpoises along the eastern shore, parrots flying off the edges, the whole thing opening out, inviting, magical. The map was like something you might see in a child’s room, completely useless, except it was not: it has given Susan comfort to look at this map, to see Vietnam not as a place of war, with bases and field hospitals, the Demilitarized Zone, the 17th parallel, but as a magical place with parrots and monkeys, tigers hiding in thickets of bamboo, dolphins rising in arcs along the shore. The map is not old, but the sun is making it seem so, carving fissures in the corners, giving it the texture of drying leaves. She had always closed the blind, opened the window, protected the room from all that bright light, but she is not there now.

Instead, 100 miles away, she pushes her face into the ground as the landscape explodes around her. It is not the Bouncing Betty that has detonated. That mine remains like a sleeping python in her line of vision, miraculously quiet, while the onslaught of air strikes further away blast through every
thought she tries to gather, so that she is left with nothing but the most basic of instincts: to make herself small, to draw in her arms and legs, curl her back, tuck her head into her chest, round her shoulders, ball her fists. Really, however, she needs to move. There is a thing called sympathetic detonation, an explosion resulting from a shock wave, from a sudden change in pressure, which is exactly what is going to happen to the Bouncing Betty if the air strike gets any closer. She begins to crawl back, enduring the combustion of bombs, a confusion of noise that comes from every direction. She feels a weight passing through her so that her bones themselves seem to catalog the blasts, so that she feels—she could swear this—her brain slosh against the inside of her skull, one direction, then another, with every blast and shock wave. She tells herself to keep moving, is engaged totally in this inch-by-inch retreat. She keeps hoping for something, but she doesn’t know what. There is just this single, raw desperate hope, like a cry from deep within her, inaudible but fully intact. It is what keeps her going.

And then, out of nowhere, Son appears. She sees him in the thick brush, a sudden, unexpected arrival. He has come back for her, shouting as he approaches, though with all the noise around them it appears as though he is silent, that she is watching him from behind a thick wall of glass. He is in front of her, yet unreachable; he is yelling at her but to no effect; his mouth moves, his hands; he strains to communicate but the sound is only articulated in the corded muscles of his neck, the open cave of his mouth. When the bombing began he must have run back to retrieve her. She cannot imagine risking such a thing. She cannot understand how it was possible for him to find her in the thick green of the jungle. From the moment she spots him, his legs stepping high over the brush, his head shaking with the movement, his arms out balancing against the thin, odd-shaped trees, she wants to yell to him about the
Bouncing Betty. But it is hopeless. He is so close and even though she is screaming he cannot hear her. If he runs into the mine, they will both be killed. As futile as it is, she yells loudly into the deafening air, pointing and gesturing and begging him to move away. But she can only watch and gesture and trust that somehow he will notice. He is already reaching for her, pulling her toward him as though she has no legs. She rises, pushing him away from the mine as she does so. Either he’s seen it or by luck he is avoiding it anyway. They run, fumbling through the brush, bent double, hands over their heads. They are together again while only minutes ago she thought surely she was both alone and dead.

He leads her to a shelter, nothing more than a hole in the earth. The entrance requires her to push herself down a vertical shaft no bigger than a chimney, arms above her head, wiggling to force herself down, holding her breath, hearing even through the layers of earth the great swells of noise that shake through her as she plunges steeply into what might be anything at all, a man-trap, an underground jail cell, a volcano, for all she knows. She doesn’t care. Suddenly, she drops a foot or more, banging her shoulder and hip, dislodging bits of earth as she moves, scraping her cheek, and getting an eyeful of grit. She reaches a landing and scrambles for footing, sliding along a trench no wider than her shoulders until the passage suddenly opens out. She balances on the floor of the shelter, her legs askew, feeling as though she has landed in a wet grave, for there is mud and water and slime all around her, oozing into her clothes, squelching between her fingers, coating her knees and elbows, her feet, her hands.

She cannot speak. It is hard enough to breath. She holds her knees to her chest, leans her cheek against the mud wall, and feels the wetness there, too. Son lands through the same narrow chute that she has clambered down, putting himself near her and wrapping his arms around his head, trying to
shield himself from the noise. She cannot see, but she can feel the presence of others. She is spooked as much by this as by the darkness and wetness, the heat and booming explosions. She begins to tremble. She can feel the discrete measure of elevated heat between herself and someone else, one of the soldiers. Her head pounds, her shoulders shake, her arms tremble around her knees. The smell of the wet earth is like urine and like rot. It feels as though a giant is marching above them; with every blast come sprinklings of earth from close above their heads. The shelter is a boggy, unstable hole. She wonders if it will cave in.

The blasts continue. She is sure they will throw down more napalm. She remembers what the nurse in Pleiku said about white phosphorus, how it keeps burning to the bone. She looks at the spine of cotton wood which props up the walls of the shelter, the crumbling ceiling, the dark, damp corners. If it caves in, they will all die, as there will be nobody there to dig them out. If they rush from the shelter, they will have the Willie Pete, the bombs, the jellied gasoline to contend with.

She would not have guessed it would be so hot here this far under the earth. There is no ventilation except through the narrow shoot that runs six feet up to the surface. The darkness itself seems to produce a heat. The noise outside suddenly fills the area around them, then there is silence, then another great sound. When the bombs hit, the small bit of space they occupy seems to contract like a muscle. At those times it feels to Susan almost as though they are sitting on top of each other, as though they are inside a live animal, consumed by this beast of earth.

As her eyes adjust she can see the outline of the soldiers. A flashlight is switched on, the same one she has carried for months now, and through its dim glow comes the face of Long Hair. He has his weapon beside him, at his ankles like a loyal dog, and is tightening one end of the flashlight, shaking it, then
tightening it again. The bulb is dying but in the darkness of their shelter it casts a fair-sized glow. She can see Gap Tooth and the Thin One on either side of the cave-like walls, but she doesn’t look at them; it is the light that holds her. The light from the small flashlight given to her by Marc, who tossed it her direction one day as she was setting off. At various times she has worn it around her neck or kept it deep in the front pocket of her fatigues. If the soldiers were to unscrew the stem of it, they would find a letter written to her by Marc. She keeps the letter hidden there the way that some women keep their own love letters in jewelry cases.
Nothing happens as we imagine it
, it begins. The letter describes where he is, the soldiers he accompanies, how they march, probing like bait into what they believe to be enemy territory, waiting for an ambush.
During the lull times, they sleep and smoke and listen to their small transistor radios. If I hear “Windy” one more time, I may have to shoot the DJ
…He describes a little of what they’ve filmed, and a great deal of all the different ways in which she enters his thoughts, how she had cost him a chess game because he kept daydreaming of her. Of course it does not mention the future. No love letter does, and anyway they were always careful never to speak of the future. Of the end of the war, of the world back in America, of his wife. Now, of course, it doesn’t matter. She does not think about Marc the way she used to. He occupies a different world, one that feels far away. Nothing matters now, except what happens in this minute, then the next.

Nobody speaks. They endure the air raid each in their own way. Son with his hands over his head, Long Hair with his head on his knees, his rifle tucked between his legs, Gap Tooth staring at the walls, his eyes glassy, the Thin One holding on to Gap Tooth’s shoulder, as though for balance.

She watches the flashlight bulb like it is a thing alive, comforted by its meager glow. She rubs some sweat from her brow, and then there is a huge explosion so near to them she
screams. She feels a spasm in her gut and begins to vomit. She is scared. She imagines what would have happened if she was still out in the brush, close to the Bouncing Betty at the moment of the last explosion. So close. She thinks to herself,
I am scared to death
, and then empties her stomach once again. She wipes her face with her sleeve, dabs her eyes, tries to swallow. Long Hair gives her water, for which she is grateful, but as she lifts the canteen to her lips she smells the ooze of the shelter’s floor on her fingers and vomits again. She tries to dig a hole in the earth floor to bury her vomit, but as she digs she reveals only more wetness, the ground nothing more than a thin layer above boggy, sodden terrain. She feels she must cover the vomit, but this is impossible. She becomes immediately and acutely aware of the air supply, feeling herself breathe in and out more rapidly now, her skin clammy from being sick, worried now about suffocating in this gap in the earth. Her fingers glide over the dark floor. The smell will stay with them a long time, she thinks, mingling with the scent of stale sweat and new sweat. The soldiers say nothing but look at her slightly disgusted, she thinks, as though they cannot believe they are stuck with her once more.