The Man From Saigon (32 page)

She thinks of Marc, of how he waited for her outside the hotel, or rested his hand on her back as they walked, or how he kissed, or talked, his head bobbing slightly as he recalled something important about a story he’d covered. She remembers the sound of the air conditioning in his hotel room, the ornate molding on the ceilings, the olive carpet, the great swags of silk that made up the curtains in his favorite restaurant, how they waited at airports, never sitting together lest she endure the gossip, how they arranged to see each other by cabling:

She prefers to think of these things rather than the fact that the bandages on her feet (the torn fabric of Son’s trouser legs) are now caked in mud, the sandals embedded with the same. Her fatigues are loose and she sometimes twists the waistband around her finger to make them tighter because, of course, the soldiers have taken her belt. How much harm could she do them with a belt? She supposes she could try to strangle one of them, but how far would she get before being shot by one of the other two? She considers asking for the belt again, or making one out of dry reeds. Her hipbones stick out, her shape more boyish by the day.

“What’s that one called?” she asks Son, nodding toward Gap Tooth.

“Minh,” he whispers.

The name sounds familiar to her. As soon as she hears it she thinks how she ought to have known this was the case. She imagines (perhaps incorrectly) that it was not Anh who decided to take her boots and make them into explosives but Gap Tooth, Minh, who seems always to be searching the jungle, looking for something to sabotage or kill or scar with his sword, which he no longer plays with quite so much, but which he carries nonetheless, as a boy might carry a toy pirate sword. The Thin
One trails behind, somehow deflated by his earlier outburst. She notices that Son walks between the Thin One and herself. She is grateful. She does not trust that soldier; he could attack her again at any time; he could shoot her through the back as she walks and she would never know. In the dim light, she cannot easily see him and anyway she is drained of energy. From the bombing, from what happened in the shelter, from the mud and insects, from being scared and sick, from being attacked and getting up again, from walking through the absurdly dark night, from the whole concentrated, awful effort.

She pulls up her fatigues once more and her hand catches on the plastic edge of her MACV card that Son stole back for her. She thinks of how he held her through all the artillery down in that terrible hole. She could feel anything toward him right now—love, betrayal, gratitude, need. She has felt all these things at different times, but there is no room for emotions now, for the five of them must walk, must keep walking. She cannot imagine getting back to Saigon, being again among the busy lanes, seeing the women gathered in the area outside her hotel, gossiping on the steps. An aging colonial building, the hotel had a grand sweep of stairs, showing signs of decay now, with troughs of rough earth in which silvery stems of weeds and grasses poked through. She cannot imagine climbing those crumbling steps, passing through the heavy, unguarded doors, requesting her key, finding her room, her bed, her clothes. To think she has so many clothes: cotton dresses and collared shirts and blue jeans and summer slacks, clean towels and underwear, a nightgown, coat, belts, scarves. All of them stacked in drawers, set out in a basket by the window, hung up over doors or on the small rail in the cupboard. It seems to her extraordinary, all those clothes. She feels a swell of homesickness; she feels herself wandering like a lonely ghost.

The blackness of the night is solid like a wall. They are hidden from each other and from the world, and the darkness, like
darkness everywhere, makes her honest and foolish, makes her bold. Nobody can see as she reaches back, taking Son’s hand. His fingers encase her own so effortlessly. They walk easily together, though they smell of rotting earth and have so much mud on them it is like they have taken a second skin. Even with this, they are comfortable with each other. It is an intimacy she will never know again, and she would do well to notice it, even more than the croaking of frogs, the abrupt, jarring sound of branches overhead, the unbearable darkness, or the fading memories of the city she has left.

“The third is named Hien,” whispers Son. It is a miracle how he can time his words to the exact moment of another sound—this time of Minh coughing—so that their conversation is between them only, contained in the small space between them. She thinks, not for the first time, that it is as though Son possesses a sixth sense, or that he is aware at all times of everything around him. She forgets, or perhaps has never understood, that the jungle is not so foreign to him, that hunger is a condition he has passed through many times and that he treats it as one might an inconvenient virus, like a cold. That he is not truly captive, as any day now they will find the rest of the unit and eventually the officers who will know who he is, or take him to those who do. He is one of their own, not among the enemy, as she reminds herself they must properly be called. If Son is fearful it is only for her sake. He holds her hand with its coating of mud, touching the delicate fingers. She feels for the reassuring pulse in the crook of his thumb. Her fingers are longer than his, though his palm is blocky and wider. They fit together; they have always fitted, always belonged as one. She realizes this now and the thought, arriving in such circumstances, is as unexpected as the call of a nightjar in this dark forest, a sound she knows so well from home.

Weeks earlier she and Son made a trip to a civilian hospital in the Highlands. They flew to Kontum, skirting the blue-green
hills, heading for a wide, dusty track that served as a runway between them. She looked down at the houses with their lush gardens, staked with bamboo, ringed now by the same concertina wire that surrounded American bunkers. She thought how once long ago this would have been a pleasant place. They were flying with equipment that was being delivered to the hospital in Dak Nhon, just south of Kontum, some kind of barter with the military. There were always these excursions with equipment or food or blood or mechanical parts. At different times they had traveled with ammunition and crates of grenades, which made her nervous, but it did not seem to bother Son. He’d sit on top of the boxes, resting, relaxed, his eyes closed.

Closer now she could see the goats with their dainty legs and low-slung bellies, ambling among rusting Food-for-Peace cans embedded in the dried mud near the runway. An ambulance sat near by, a jeep trailer attached to it, empty. She thought how ominous the ambulance looked, parked by the runway, as though anticipating somebody’s disastrous landing, but it turned out the ambulance was their taxi, the trailer a bed for the generator the hospital staff thought they were receiving. There was no generator, of course. Only batteries and a few other parts.

The driver was a thin German wearing a T-shirt and jeans. He had watery blue eyes irritated by the sun, a lot of dark blond hair and the beginnings of a beard. He waved, then pulled his hand back to shield his eyes from the small pebbles and clumps of dried earth sent up from the ground by the windstorm created by the chopper rotors. When the rotors slowed he jogged in their direction, then walked the rest of the way as if the effort to run had defeated him.

Not a smile or a handshake.
Welcome
, he said, but he didn’t appear at all interested in Susan and Son. He put his head inside the chopper door, looking for the goods he hoped had
arrived. The staff believed they had bartered for a new generator, not just parts to fix the old one, which hadn’t worked in months. It was a disappointment to discover this was not the case, and when he saw that there was no generator, only parts, he became agitated. He marched to the pilot, explaining that they were meant to have an entire generator, that they didn’t have a mechanic and though the car batteries might come in useful, could someone at least come out to help them fix the generator, assuming it was not beyond repair?

He sounded impatient; it was not the way Susan was used to hearing civilians speak to military. She and Son hung back, trying to distract themselves from the conversation, which ended with the German shaking his head and turning in a huff toward the ambulance, its dented fenders and fading paint giving it a dry, reptilian appearance, like a crocodile in the sun.
This is typical!
said the German, as the chopper pilot smoked a cigarette and surveyed the surrounding countryside, the desolate houses, the bushy, low trees, his face registering a lazy indifference which seemed to further annoy the other man.

Are you coming, then?
The German said, glancing over his shoulder at Susan and Son. He pointed his chin to the ambulance and they followed a few feet behind as he walked, his steps purposeful, his hands balled into fists. There was a splatter of ink across the hip pocket of his jeans, a water bottle on his belt. He muttered,
We cannot get any supplies and when we do, they spoil. Primitive refrigerators, no reliable electricity!
He dropped into the driver’s seat, his boots resting on a worn patch of carpet rugged up so that it showed the metal underneath.
We have no blood, you know
, he said.
No blood bank.

The door creaked loudly as he slammed it shut, the window rattling. Then he reached across the seat and pushed open the other door for Susan, while Son found a place in the back.

She got out her pad. She thought perhaps the man was telling her this because he wanted her to write down the information.
Has this always been the case, or only recently, when your generator went down?
she asked. Perhaps that was the trouble, that they could not keep the blood cold. She assumed it was a new problem. She couldn’t imagine how they could have coped very long without any blood at all.

How would I know?
he said. He couldn’t look at her because the sun swept through her window straight at his shoulder, blinding him if he turned in her direction. He drove with one hand on the steering wheel, another spread like a visor over his eyes, ducking and peering through the bright sunshine. There was a fly on his hair and on his thumb, Susan saw, flies on the dashboard, buzzing against the windshield.
I’ve only been here six months
, he said.
It seems a lifetime, but that is what the calendar says. Only six.

The ambulance seats were split, the torn vinyl stiff and sharp. The dashboard looked slightly melted. The doors were wired on and they rattled with every turn and pothole as the ambulance moved along a dusty, gray road pitted with craters. The trailer bounced behind them, empty. In the back, amongst an assortment of other boxes, including a set of tools which might have been kept there in case of breakdown, were the batteries and parts.

The German told them his name: Jonas.

How do you get blood?
Susan asked.
When you need it, how do you…
For a moment she had the awful thought his answer would be that they did
not
get blood. That they did without, and that the patients died. Hadn’t she seen similar, unbearable circumstances already in the country? Burn victims whose bodies resembled unfinished wax mannequins, a starving baby, lying in a cardboard box, an old man smoking a pipe through the bones of his amputated forearm?

We have a card catalog of names
, Jonas sighed. They were heading south across the Dak Bla, Kontum’s river, past the sprawling Command Control Central, out into the jungle.
We
go directly from one person to the other, checking the dates they last gave.

I see.

It is very
—he hesitated, searching for a word—
strenuous.

They drove in silence now, the landscape increasingly rural and wild, until at last they reached a cluster of low buildings arranged around a dusty courtyard. The hospital was run by a woman doctor from America. She was waiting at the door when the ambulance arrived.

What’s going on?
she said.
The trailer is empty. Didn’t they meet you?

No generator
, Jonas said. He walked past her, shaking his head.

The doctor followed.
Where are you going? What did they say? I should have got out my damned self
, she called.

Jonas wheeled around.
There was nothing I could do! If I’d let him take the parts back, then we’d have nothing.

No, I mean I ought to have gone and watched and made sure they loaded the thing!

Susan and Son followed the woman doctor inside, where the air was stale but at least somewhat cooler. The doctor was well known for helping the Montagnards, an indigenous group who came under pressure from both the North and the South Vietnamese. Among the Montagnards, infant mortality was so high they didn’t celebrate a child’s birth before the age of two. If a person died outside the village, their body was not allowed back for burial. Sometimes grief-stricken parents kidnapped their own sick children from wards, stealing them back in the night so that they could die within the village, where their spirits were believed to stay for eternity. The nurses were always on guard for such thefts, but many of the nurses were themselves Montagnards, and they understood. Even so, they lost children to this practice who would otherwise not have died.

She learned this upon entering the hospital, within the first
few minutes, listening and nodding and writing as quickly as she could while following the doctor, who walked briskly ahead. The doctor had shock of light hair that stood up, a narrow waist, long legs. A man’s watch hung from her belt loop and she frequently pushed back a stethoscope that kept working its way out of her front pocket. The doctor explained who these mountain people were, why she’d come to the Highlands, what the hospital tried to provide. She showed Susan and Son where to put the car batteries, which they were carrying. Between the commentary and instructions she interrupted herself to address her patients, using a mixture of English and Vietnamese, sometimes a bit of French, and wrote notes to herself on the inside of her arm. When she greeted Susan, a cigarette hanging in her lip, the first thing she said was,
You look fresh out of high school.
To Son, she only nodded. She seemed to take an immediate dislike to him. Susan noticed this; she was used to Americans reacting this way to Son. The soldiers were worse.