The Man From Saigon (40 page)

“They won’t hold on to her,” Murray is saying. “I wouldn’t have thought. A woman, a non-combatant—”

“Stop it!” Marc says.

“Murray’s got a point—”

“Stop it now! I can’t talk about it!” He is thinking again about the children, how they were held like sacks of rice over the shoulders of the troops, their legs bobbing, their faces turned up to the choppers as the bullets sent the water into a foamy confusion around them. They were close enough for him to see which were girls and which were boys. One had put his hands over his ears. One had crawled almost completely over the back of the soldier who carried him so that his head was partly submerged in the water. There was a girl who clung piggy-back, crying into the soldier’s neck. If you didn’t know what was happening, you might think the troops were saving the children from drowning, or from the menace of the helicopters above, from an invasion or fire or storm or other peril. But they were being used as shields. That was their only function. Later, the children were found dead, shot by the Vietcong, and surrounded by leaflets claiming they’d been killed by Americans.

“You might think about taking a little R&R,” Halliday says now. “You’ve been in some scraps. Now this. It’s a burden. It’s a big thing to carry.”

“No R&R,” Marc says. What he is thinking is that his wife would find out, that she’d come, meeting him in Singapore as they had done in the past, planning the dinners and the sightseeing and the lovemaking. He couldn’t bear it. “I don’t want my wife to know—”

He suddenly finds it difficult to keep himself from talking about it, about all the things that are wrong. About Susan, about the barrage of intrusive thoughts that come daily now, not only when he is dreaming. Even with Halliday, a guy he doesn’t like, a guy who has used him, he is ready to talk about anything the man cares to discuss. This is not how he usually behaves and it feels as though something dangerous has broken free inside him. He opens his mouth to speak. There will be no stopping him once he begins.

“A wife can be a useful thing at time like this,” Murray says. “Heck, we all have wives—”

“I don’t want to see anyone right now.”

“I think it would be a good idea to talk to your wife,” says Halliday. “Spend some time—”

“No!”

Murray looks at Halliday. “What about Locke?” he says.

Locke was the kind of man who stood up to film when everyone else was flat on the ground. No helmet because the rim got in the way of the viewfinder, and because he always claimed it wouldn’t make any difference anyway. He crouched on the backs of trucks and tracks and leaned out of helicopters, balancing thirty pounds of camera on his shoulder. It was with Locke that Marc had been on every killing ground, and nearly every story. They had hidden together behind low walls and the corners of buildings, beneath the overpowering noise, the furious cacophony of bullets and blasts and thunderous
explosions that made the earth shake beneath them. They had run in tandem, hearing the fizz and buzz of bullets beside them, dropped as though they were one at the low, hollow sounds of rocket-propelled grenades, climbed over dead bodies getting into Chinooks and once, evacuating a Special Forces camp, they’d carried a dying soldier in a poncho, both of them screaming to the guy to stay with them, not to pass out, not to die. That time filming the children on the backs of Vietcong soldiers, and later when they filmed them all dead—the little bodies like broken flowers on the ground, perfect except for the bullet holes—they had not been able to speak, nor look at one another afterwards. It was as though they had been part of that awful crime just by being there. Or that being in the chopper from which the soldiers had been running made them somehow complicit in what followed. He remembers, too, how once he’d been so badly hit by tear gas he spent a memorable quarter-hour in a taxi, streaming tears and spitting fiercely on to the carpeted floor with Locke pouring water from his bottle over his face. In his frenzy to escape the chemicals, Marc had rubbed his eyes along the upholstery of the back seat. He’d pulled off his shirt, which had been sprayed, and thrown it out the window. A block from the bureau, deciding he couldn’t be stuck in so small a space with Marc, Locke had opened the door, got him out on the street, pushing wads of dollar bills through the taxi man’s window, yelling at Marc they were going to the bureau now and asking him please not to strip off any more clothes.

“Get Locke,” Marc says. Jesus, he needs to talk to someone and it had better not be these two. “If he’ll come.”

He waits for Locke’s plane, wishing he could scrape all the mud off his boots and clothing, his pack and notebooks, but there is too much and anyway it is so hot he doesn’t have the energy. The sky is relentlessly clear and bright, the sun so close it feels
twice the size it should be. Locke comes off the plane wearing dark glasses and a hat. He is carrying his pack and camera, but also Marc’s recording equipment, so loaded down he has to walk with a shortened gait. “I don’t know why you’ve been down here, man. There’s no story here,” he says. He has a deeply lined forehead, a dark tan. His eyebrows, once black, have been sunbleached a rust color. He looks like a man who has lived a long time in the desert, as though he’s just stripped off his
howli
and
guerba
, and has been put into Western clothes. He doesn’t mention that he’s been asked to come down here by Murray, possibly by others, but pretends it was his idea. “I’m glad I finally ran you to earth,” he says.

He also doesn’t mention how Marc looks in his dirty clothes, the scabs from insects up and down any part of him that has been exposed, the weight loss. More importantly, much to Marc’s relief, there is no mention of Loc Ninh or the last conversation they had, in which Locke shook his fist in Marc’s face, told him he was an imbecile—
a fucking moron
were his exact words. It is the only time they have argued. Their friendship is drawn in blood. Whole weeks have passed working alongside Locke, talking to him, smoking with him, hitching rides and traveling with him. Once or twice, Marc has had the curious experience of almost forgetting they are not the same person, so that when he looks in a mirror he is surprised by his own face. Perhaps a friendship like this can endure almost anything, but he would not like to test it again, and more than anything he’s glad Locke has come.

They drive to the area where the ambush took place, this time as part of a convoy similar to the one that Susan rode with. They sit with the soldiers and smoke, riding the lurching track, waiting for something or nothing to happen. Marc takes some still shots of the area where the ambush took place; Locke films him as he describes the recent events on this road, the evacuation of villages, the movement of refugees. In the north,
at Mang Yang Pass, they have defoliated the trees up to a half-mile from the road either side to prevent enemy attacks like the one resulting in Susan and Son’s disappearance. Here, bulldozers have dug out huge boulevards through the jungle, though it seems less orderly than up north. There are haphazard chops through the jungle as though a giant lawnmower has gone awry. So much napalm has been deployed that the smell of charred wood saturates the air. They report these facts, or rather subdued versions of these facts, then pack up and thank the drivers, who have waited for them.

“The camp is a mess,” Marc tells Locke. “You won’t believe it.”

“We’re not going to the camp,” Locke says. “We’re getting a lift back, then getting on a plane and going the fuck back to Saigon.”

“Why?”

“Take a look at yourself, man. That’s why.”

“Don’t you want the story?”

“There
is
no story,” Locke says impatiently. They drive for a mile or so in silence. Then Locks says, “We’re too late.”

“Who said that?”

“Your employer—you might remember a little thing called the network. I’ve been covering for you for almost a week now, Davis, but the ’flu I made up can only last so long.” He runs a hand through his hair. He looks like a father, worn out chasing his teenage kid. “It’s stressful, all this lying. I don’t know how MACV keeps it up.”

They laugh. They watch the sun lower itself like a hawk, level for level, in the evening sky. They do not talk about Loc Ninh. It’s among the unmentionable facts, like the way Marc allowed himself to be taken in by the military, despatched on a useless voyage to the Delta. The scent of coal fire and warm urine that pervaded the camp is in his clothes and shoes, his hair. It has embedded itself into his very skin, so that he smells
like one of the thousands of homeless. He feels almost as displaced.

They hitch a ride to Saigon, sitting among cargo. It’s a bumpy, awful journey and they get out of the plane into a shower storm. By the time they get back into the city he is shivering from the cold and yet his face is dark with sun, looking like pottery left too long in a kiln. He needs to stay in a dark, cool room, possibly for a long time, drink lemonade with ice, not move for a while.

At the hotel room, Locke says, “Sit on the floor, not the bed, unless you want to pollute that, too.”

“Am I allowed a chair?”

“No, no chair. Burn those clothes. Put them in a bag and get them incinerated, understand?”

“Affirmative,” says Marc.

“I’m surprised the taxi driver didn’t throw us out on the street. Honestly, Davis, what on earth did you step in?”

“I told you we should go down and look. Then you’d know what I stepped in.”

Locke shakes his head, opens a window. Then he goes to the bathroom and turns on the tap, pouring shampoo from a bottle in order to make the water foam. He comes back in the room and slaps a bar of soap in Marc’s hand. Marc goes into the bathroom, takes off his T-shirt, and stares into the bath in which a rising circle of foam is gathering. Then he returns again to where Locke is now sitting in the corner of the room in an imitation Queen Anne chair beside the high, shuttered window.

“Thank you,” he says. Hands on his hips, chest out, as though he’s making some kind of announcement. “Thank you, Don.”

Locke notices the deep V of sunburn on Marc’s chest, the sudden line where his tanned forearm meets the area always covered by a shirt. He is even thinner than usual, but he is in one piece. And he’s not as nutty as the guys had warned him—the other reporters at the camp—including fucking Murray,
who told him Marc was making an ass of himself.
Heartsick as a puppy.
It still makes him burn, the way Murray said that.
Heartsick as a puppy. You better come get him out of here.

“I’m waiting for you to scrub up so we can get something to eat,” says Locke.

Later, in the bath, Marc hears Locke call out from the room.

“I didn’t want to say anything until now,” he says, “but Christine is on her way. I read the cable. Maybe you better pull yourself together before she gets here, huh? Meet her at the airport. Act natural.”

His wife, Christine.

There is the sound of water against tile, a big
whoosh
, and then a pounding of footsteps. Marc storms into the room, dripping water everywhere, a towel around his waist, four days of beard growth, his teeth flashing as he yells, “Who the fuck thought
that
was a good idea!”

“Her,” Locke replies. “The network told her you were sick. They think you should take some time. What should I have done? Suggest that you weren’t sick at all, and that the last person you wanted to see was your wife?”

“You could have thought of something!”

Locke wipes his brow. “No, not this time. I’ve been dodging for you for a week, man. The bureau is, like,
Where the fuck is he?
I’m out of bright ideas.”

His wife hates her name because it conjures in her mind the leathery face of a veteran socialite, some kind of country-club-going housewife whose children are grown, gone, and who has been left with bridge parties and ladies’ golf.

Which is one reason I will never learn how to play either
, she once told him. They were engaged then, the autumn of 1965, one brief month during which they planned a hurried wedding.

Both are great games
, Marc said. He was stubborn even in
small things. He knew he was, and occasionally shocked even himself with his own inflexibility. Christine smiled, unfazed, agreeing with him. It was the simplicity with which she tossed off such appeals to argument that allowed her to defeat him, and he loved that in her company he could find himself unwittingly becoming a gracious, even friendly man.
You make me into someone I can stand
, he told her once late at night at the height of their romance.
Someone I might even like.
She raised an eyebrow; she had the most wonderful dark golden hair and it arched up away from her forehead in a crest.
Well
, I
like you
, she said.

He taught her honeymoon bridge, mostly because of the name. Fresh from the wedding, still finding confetti in their shoes. They played on the mattress in the mornings after making love. Two dummy hands. They’d thought she would have a baby then, too, which was why it had all happened so fast—the engagement, the marriage. She was ten weeks along, two days married. Her belly was just beginning to harden above the rim of her pubic bone. He admired her long hands as she shuffled and dealt. She had creamy skin, shapely calves. Her belly was a long expanse of naturally tanned skin. She was a beauty. He used to watch how people treated her, those incidental exchanges at stores, or news-stands, in a doctor’s waiting room, or standing in line at the bank, and he’d see how differently they treated her, simply because of how lovely she was, how fine. When he pointed out how the world responds in a unique way to a beautiful woman, how
he
was never given quite the same consideration she got as a matter of course, she smiled and told him he was exaggerating, or imagining.
Rose-tinted glasses
, she said.

He told her she’d make a great bridge player.
It’s a memory game
, he explained.

She sighed.
But I have a terrible memory I can’t even remember the order of suits, much less what’s been played.
She dismissed
herself like this all the time. He sensed that she had some kind of odd, almost clairvoyant knowledge of her life and its contents, as though each year had already been exposed to her, end to end, and that she’d peered into the vast plain of her years and found everything ahead of her a little disappointing. He felt at these times a need to cheer her up, urge her on, but he saw, too, that there was peace in having limited expectations. Christine did not want more than she had; she was hardworking without being ambitious, game without being aspiring. She was so beautiful. He touched her leg. He didn’t want to upset her. If he disturbed her equilibrium he feared everything that made their lives together possible would come undone.