The Man From Saigon (31 page)

I thought you might use one or two for your piece
, Son said now.
Free.

Don’t you believe it
, said Locke.

Susan said,
We can’t use your pictures and not pay you.

Oh, you’ll end up paying, all right
, Locke laughed.
The guy is Vietnamese. You hear me? Vi-et-nam-ese. He’ll find a way of getting the money out of you.

Please
, Son said. He looked at her urgently.
I would like so much to be in an American newspaper.

Your work’s been in plenty American papers
, said Locke. To Susan, he said,
Don’t let him charm you.

Son said,
No money. Just a credit.

Again, he’s bullshitting
, said Locke.

She told Son she wrote for an American women’s magazine. That she was here to cover stories of particular interest to women.

Yes
, he said, nodding his head. She was almost sure he had no idea what she was talking about. There was no such magazine for women here in Saigon, not one that would offer the same kind of features. The women in Vietnam were a diverse bunch. You’d see them filling sandbags, or breaking up concrete with pickaxes, doing laundry, cooking in the street, calling out to GIs, riding their bicycles in their flowing
ao dzais
which made them even more beautiful than they already were, but she had seen nothing to suggest that they read anything.

It is a national magazine?
was his only question.

She nodded.
Of course.

She told him she had two rolls of film of her own that the magazine could use for free, though she admitted his pictures were better. If he really wanted her to try for him, she’d send the prints with the film, but it didn’t mean anything would happen.

Son smiled. He stacked the photographs for her and placed them carefully into a manila folder. On the back of each was faint pencil, indicating his name, the place the photograph was taken, and a description of the contents. For the one of Susan photographing the marine, the caption read, “American journalist, Susan Gifford, working in Pleiku, 1967.”

May I keep this?
she asked.

Of course! I am delightful!
he said, giggling.

You mean, delighted
, said Locke.

Well, wouldn’t you be?
said Son.
If you were me, that is?

I’d be trying to get my job back at UPI
, Locke said, then quickly glanced at Susan.
No offense
, he said.

No offense taken. I am not an employer.

Son packed up the rest of his bag and left her with the photographs, going to the bar once more for coffee.

I’m warning you
, said Locke,
he’s a sneaky bastard. He has something planned. Maybe he’s hoping for an American girlfriend.

She didn’t know how to answer that. She wasn’t sure she liked Locke and so, if anything, his disapproval of Son worked in the other man’s favor. She was thinking anyway of how, if she worked with Son, she would have no problems with language. Her ability to write about people in the countryside would open up. Her inexperience, the fact she was a woman, that she did not have an association with one of the wires, would be less of a hindrance. Son looked over from the bar, smiling. Nothing about his manner made her feel he was looking for a girlfriend. The man genuinely appeared to want a job. She looked down at the photograph he’d taken of her, imagining his seeing her just so, her face through his eyes.

How does he know my last name?
she asked Locke.

Locke frowned.
Goddamn Son, he knows everything.

She prefers Long Hair to the other two. He is older, for one thing, and seems to possess an intelligence she can connect with. The Thin One is a wild card—she will avoid him as much as possible. Gap Tooth, with his sword and the giggling triumph with which he captures the insects to barbecue in his bowl of smoking charcoal, fascinates her. She hears him talking to himself, entertaining his teenager’s mind with stories, she imagines involve great heroism on his part and not a small amount of bloodshed.

Long Hair is a leader. She has seen him squatting on the ground explaining to the other two where they will go now, what they will do—at least she assumes that is what he is saying. He uses his hands in a manner not unlike one of her professors at university, who brought out the gravity of words through
gesticulations so concise and well timed they seemed to contain a language of their own. The other two nod, occasionally asking a question. They do not challenge Long Hair, but neither are they afraid of him.

Susan once heard her father explaining how they were able to pick out the soldiers with leadership potential, those who would one day guide and direct the very men with whom they stood shoulder-to-shoulder in lines, with whom they ate and bunked and endured long drills. It was a matter of looking not so much at the individual as the way in which others responded to him. Did he offer practical solutions that made sense to the other men? Did they listen to him? Had her father been present, had Long Hair been one of the thousands of young soldiers that her father must have seen through his years in the military, he’d no doubt have selected the boy for officer training. Of course, for the Vietcong, there would be a much different system. Or so she imagines anyway. Before now, she has only ever seen VC as prisoners or casualties. How the three before her fit into the larger picture is anyone’s guess. Long Hair is not an officer. And there’s nothing about his clothes—plain, washed out, threadbare—to indicate he had any rank at all. Even so, he is a leader.

Long Hair’s true name, she discovers, is Anh. He has not told her this, but in the hours listening to the soldiers’ conversations as they course through the jungle, she has picked out the name Anh associated with him. She has noticed that Son addresses him this way, and that Anh speaks to him more often than to the others. It would be like Son to ingratiate himself to the man who mattered, though not in his usual manner of appearing innocent, harmless, unthreatening, not the same charm with which he had moved so easily among the Americans. He seems to understand that, in this case, such a ruse would be useless, even dangerous, and so instead presents to the leader the opportunity of a right-hand man. She has noticed how Son
often walks point with Anh, how he positions himself next to him when they sit down. He is entirely different from how he was when in Saigon, suddenly himself a soldier, an equal, a fighting man. Perhaps in the end, Son will convince his captors in the same way he has been able to persuade everyone else to do what he wants, by assuming whatever traits of personality are required. She thinks that this quality is not one that was ever described by her father when listing the attributes of a leader, and she wishes now she’d asked her father how the American military undertook recruitment of its spies.

She calls to Anh, using his name, and he turns as naturally as if she has always addressed him so. He is holding a water coconut that they will eat later, a thing the size of a pumpkin. His hair, parted down the middle, is less caked with mud than hers, but even so it clings to his scalp, dry now. He looks at her casually. The days of narrowing his eyes at her, baring his teeth that small amount, steadying his hands on his rifle when looking her way, those days are over. She has become so unthreatening she might as well be a mascot, like one of the dogs seen with American units, inevitably named after a fighter plane or perhaps the place where they picked up the dog or where it began to follow them. Anh steps toward her, his shoulders relaxed, flicking a mosquito from his arm. He uncases a cigarette from a box he keeps in his pocket, bending over the flame as he lights it. The cigarettes are not one brand but a mix of different brands and roll-ups, which cast a smell that does not resemble the tobacco of Americans. In the same box as the cigarettes he keeps half-spent butts, and broken wooden matches that she supposes he might use again, though she has no idea why. She has seen him lining up the broken match-sticks on top of the map he studies, which darkens with an encroaching fungus, so that it appears at times the landscape is narrowing into a shadowy fuzz. She has no idea where they are located now in this jumble of wilderness. She must
remember to ask Son. He would know, or at least have a fairly accurate guess.

“Anh,” she says. “Could we find some water to bathe in?” She imagines he is just as uncomfortable as she is. She has seen him scraping the mud off the backs of his hands with his fingernails. She has noticed, too, how he twiddles locks of his hair between his fingers so that the mud flakes off. The discomfort of the dried mud is such that Susan holds her fingers apart, rubbing the skin between them. She brushes her hands over her clumped hair, wipes her forearm across the cracking mud in the folds of her neck. She knows she has leeches, too, and it occurs to her now, all at once, why Anh has kept his spent matches: to relight as torches in order to burn off the leeches once his cigarettes run out. The matchsticks are a good tool for the job, though not as good as cigarettes, which do not require being relit. She wonders if the careful manner with which he holds on to the matchsticks means that Anh does not believe they will come across the rest of their unit any time soon. She hopes as much as the soldiers do that they find the remainder of their unit. The alternative is being hungry, tired, with no real rest or shelter or end to all the marching. That is what she really wants: to end this now. She indicates the mud on herself, shrugs her shoulders, and says, “Il pourrait nous faire malade.” Anh nods in one swift movement, then carries on walking. He’s gotten used to her schoolgirl French. His response, however, is usually the same. A nod, the command, “Tien.” Sometimes he points with his arm, sometimes his gun.

“The mud is awful,” she says. “And unhealthy.”

But he only tells her to keep walking, nodding in the direction they are going, concentrating on the path ahead.

“Yes, all right,” she says, rolling her eyes. In English she adds, “I have not forgotten I’m your prisoner, Decision Boy.”

Son hears this and gives her an amused glance. Then he looks at Anh and mumbles something, possibly a translation
of her comment into Vietnamese, because suddenly Anh looks back at her and, for the first time, she sees him smile.

There is no longer any distinction between inside and outside; she feels part of the jungle and moves through it as though through a roomy mansion, discovering always some new feature. Some details are not important: the way the branches contrive to find space to grow, the way logs disintegrate under the savagery of termites. But just as she has discerned Anh’s name, she has also begun to make out the signs the Vietcong use to signal to each other which trails are safe and which are not, and it is as though she has discovered a new language. The gathering of grass together, knotting it in a particular fashion, the breaking of branches at certain turns of the trail so that it could be followed safely without fear of booby-traps, these are the things that Anh watches for. She wondered—she used to wonder—how it was that the Vietcong didn’t die in the same mines that killed and maimed Americans by the thousands. It was because they set messages for each other in the grasses and trees, reading easily this code of the bush. The language has evolved through decades of war. It seems so remarkable, this discovery, that she wishes to share it. In her mind she taps out the keys of a typewriter. She can picture the keyboard exactly, and so imagines the letters G and H on either side of the central bone of her palate. The P is next to her second molar, the T and Y form her eye teeth. The way she keeps her sanity, one of the ways, is to tap out words in this fashion. With her tongue, she now writes,
We think we have been at war a long time. Three years now, depending on where you begin to count, but the Vietnamese have made war against intruders for many decades. There are signs of this everywhere, in the knotted grass, the snapped-off branches, the twisting trails that wind in a manner that seems pointless to an outsider. There is a point to everything. Communication lines coil through every mile of the jungle. The landscape itself is set up for war.

Son looks at her, no doubt noticing the way she is moving her mouth. She shakes her head, indicating there is nothing the matter, and they walk on.

Once the evening has lapsed into darkness, they have to bunch up to stay together. It is then that she realizes how much they all smell; not that this small matter bothers her. The night is alive with the sounds of insects. They walk in a blur of darkness surrounded by the unseen vibrations of wing tips, of whistles, crackling branches, the wormy glow of fungus on the jungle’s floor, all of them filthy, all of them tired enough they might just lie down at any moment and sleep like enchanted, doomed children. Before now she thought of the Mekong as a place of endless water, and this description is true for the most part. But the jungle is a troublesome tangle, difficult to get through, and not all of it is water, not in the least. It is mud and rot and mist, but not water, not clean water, in any case.

She thinks of Marc, who said that when he first came to Vietnam he memorized all the different names of the trees there, banyan, ironwood, umbrella, rubber, teak, aquilaria, aloeswood, and then forgot them all, deliberately, aggressively.
Why
, she’d asked him?
Because I didn’t want to know any more
, he said.

She understands now what he meant, that you reach a kind of saturation point. Whenever possible, she tunes out of the jungle, pushes the Delta from her mind, absents herself from her present company and concentrates instead on things in the past. She does not want the giant dark leaves, the gnarled peeling bark, the vines and roots and mysterious, poisonous berries, everything for the moment shrouded in darkness so complete it is as though a cape has been thrown over the whole of the rainforest, to become so familiar that it replaces what she still thinks of as her real life. She struggles to recall as much detail as possible about Saigon, the bend of the roads, the canopy of shade allowed by the plane trees, the clamor of traffic, the silky warm evenings in which she wore dresses with bare shoulders.