The Point Team (15 page)

“You know they say a charging bear runs faster than a racehorse.”

“Yeah, man, grizzlies are meaner than black bears, but grizzlies don’t climb trees. Them black mothers’d run up a tree right
after you. You got nowhere to go when they decide to kick ass.”

“You should play dead. Lie face down and don’t move. Even if they paw you.”

“Talk loud. That’s what we should do is talk loud. It frightens the fuckers, and you can hear ’em crashing through trees as
they run away and get a shot at ’em.”

“But don’t whistle. You know why? ’Cause human whistling is like the sounds bears make when they got the hots for each other.
You might get a big mamma bear come out of the sticks and put it to you.”

That really broke them up.

They climbed on a way, their confidence building. None of them had gotten around to raising false alarms yet. They still believed
that any moment now—maybe around the
next big rock or behind that bush—a bear might jump out on the roadway and challenge them.

“Hey!” One of them stopped and pointed to patches of chest-high bushes along a ridge. “I saw something move.”

The others waited and watched.

“It was probably a bird.”

“Or a squirrel.”

“Maybe just wolves.”

“Sure. Nothing to worry about.”

They had only taken a couple of steps when one shouted, “Goddamn! It’s bear! Look at the black fur! A fucking big bear.”

“I saw it,” the second confirmed.

The third hadn’t seen it, but all the same he took his pistol from his belt, a .357 Colt MK III Lawman with a four-inch barrel.
The other two had .357 Smith & Wesson M28 Highway Patrolman models, one with a four-inch and the other with a six-inch barrel.
They packed a lot of stopping power and were none too worried as they spread out of each others’ way and advanced on the bushes
concealing the bear.

“He’s got to break left or right. If he tries to go back over the top of the ridge, we got him sitting out in the open.”

“Instead of going to either side, he can come right at us.”

“Yeah. Gotta think of that.”

“Mothers are faster than racehorses.”

“Soon as you see him, blow the fucker away.”

They advanced carefully, three abreast.

All three of them saw an area of black fur and then, to resolve all their doubts, they saw the bear’s head and its bulging
eyes glistening as it watched them. They started shooting. The bushes waved about as the bear threshed among them.

“I think we hit him!”

“Let’s finish him off!”

They ran forward.

Zip! A bullet whizzed between two of them, followed by a gunshot. They stopped.

“What the fuck was that?”

“Come on, man. Must have been an insect flying by.”

“That was a shot.”

“From where the bear was.”

Two more bullets whined passed them. Then to their horror, they clearly saw in the bushes a black bear with a revolver in
its hand taking aim at them again!

They ran.

“You’re really going to bring that imbecile along?” Andre Verdoux said to Mike Campbell under his breath.

Mike nodded and relaxed in the leather upholstered easy chair.

“He dresses up in a bearskin and shoots at hunters!” the Frenchman expostulated. “And you’re going to bring him into Vietnam!”

“Yes.”

“He insults us at dinner before his charming wife—who is no beauty, but she is sincere—”

“He didn’t insult us,” Mike explained. “He was joking.”

Bob Murphy had persuaded them to stay overnight with him in order to meet an English acquaintance who had fought in Malaysia
with him. Bob thought he would be the right man for the job. Verdoux had argued against this, out of Bob’s hearing.

“Andre, you were the one who was against me seeing unknowns who answered ads. Now you don’t want me to see someone with a
personal recommendation.”

The Frenchman snorted. “I would not call a recommendation from this Australian as something to take seriously.”

“Perhaps not. But let’s take a look. If you’d seen those two creeps I had to interview on Long Island yesterday, you’d know
why I want to wrap this thing up any way I can. I’m sure one of them was a cop. When he saw I wasn’t going to hire him, he
thought about trying to bust
me on the spot. I’ve seen enough of these guys. Besides, I don’t feel like a five-hour drive back to New York this evening.”

They had been surprised at the severe grandeur of Bob’s residence. Somehow the restrained, traditional New England architecture
and furnishings did not reflect Bob’s personality. They understood when they met Eunice, whom they both liked. Needless to
say, not a word was breathed to her concerning the forthcoming mission.

“What do you do, Mr. Campbell?” Eunice asked at the dinner table.

“I’m retired from the army,” Mike replied.

“They’re bird-watchers,” Bob told his wife.

“Really?” She looked at them with interest. “I’m sure you’d prefer to be called ornithologists. Did you spot anything interesting
today?”

Mike was not sure how to field this question. “Well, I live in Arizona. Desert birds are my specialty. I guess everything
up here is new to me.”

She turned to Andre. “And you, Mr. Verdoux. How does the avian wildlife here compare with that in France?”

Andre shot a look of hatred in Bob’s direction before answering her. “Very different, I can assure you.”

“Did you see a robin?” she asked.

“Ah yes, of course. With the red breast, no?” Andre said vaguely.

“What do you think of our American robin compared to the French robin?” she asked brightly. “Ours is huge in comparison, isn’t
it?”

“Yes, indeed. Big. Much bigger. Everything in America is much bigger.” With cold fury Andre looked down the table at Bob,
who was leering at him openly. Andre asked Bob, “What is that you call your Australian kingfisher?”

“Laughing jackass,” Bob answered.

“Exactly.” The Frenchman folded his napkin before him with satisfaction.

“V
AN
H
O
Ven, get up!”

Eric Vanderhoven received a light kick on the thigh as he slept on a pile of rice straw, half covered with more of the same.

The next kick was a bit harder, so he opened his eyes and sat up.

“I’ll wake the others,” he said and struggled to his feet.

“This evening, after your work, we will discuss the burdens placed upon small countries by the great colonialist powers,”
the party cadre told him. “I want you to make a statement in front of the others.”

“I’ll remember to mention Russia as the biggest present-day colonial power,” Eric said enthusiastically.

“Why? Why?” the cadre shouted. Then the cadaverously thin man in his thirties wrung his hands and lowered his voice so as
not to wake the others. “Don’t do this, Van Ho Ven. They will keep you here when I report it. I don’t want you here. I want
you to go away. You have been warned over and over. If you make this accusation of Russia, you will make me look like a failure.
When I report it, they will punish you.”

“Then don’t report it,” Eric suggested calmly. “Tell them I’m reeducated.”

“I would if you could hold your tongue,” the cadre said desperately.

“Let me see the papers you are putting through recommending our return to Ho Chi Minh City, and I’ll keep quiet. So long as
you don’t ask my opinion at one of your dumb meetings.”

The cadre thought for a moment, obviously tempted. Finally he shook his head regretfully. “No. The other cadres would know,
and at least one of them would inform on me. I could be thrown out of the party.”

“And have to go back to working again,” Eric said sarcastically.

“Yes, indeed,” the cadre answered with great feeling, “that could happen.”

Eric pointed a finger at the cadre. “You do a deal with me on getting us out of this reeducation camp, and I’ll keep my part
of the bargain. But so long as I have to slop shit all day, I’m not keeping my mouth shut and there’s fuck-all anyone can
do about it except shoot me.”

“They will,” the cadre promised. “Now you are still a child, but when you turn sixteen, if you are then saying the things
you say now, they will shoot you.”

“I’ll never see the age of sixteen in this goddamn piss-hole of a country. That’s three years away,” Eric said with a thirteen-year-old’s
awe of such a vast tract of time. “I’ll be dead by then or gone out of Vietnam.”

“You keep this up and you’ll still be working here in this camp,” the cadre muttered darkly. “I’ll be the one who is dead
or gone from Vietnam.”

The skinny man exited through the door of bamboo canes. The walls of the hut were constructed of bamboo canes also, and the
roof was thatched rice straw. The floor was bare earth beneath a covering of straw. Eric smiled to himself after the man was
gone. He could see the gray streaks of dawn spreading in the east. There would be a
struggle of wills at the ideology meeting tonight after work about whether he would be asked to speak. Eric guessed he might
be, if only the cadre and the Amerasian kids were present. If other cadres or local peasants came to the meeting, Eric knew
he would not be asked.

Eric’s threat of becoming a blot on a bureaucrat’s otherwise perfect record was his sole power. There could be no failure
permitted in this new workers’ paradise—and thus if Eric, a child of thirteen, could not be reeducated, it was because the
cadre’s approach to him was incorrect. The least hint of “incorrectness” in a cadre would be a calamity to his immediate progress
within the party and could prove to be a taint difficult to lose in the future. Eric Vanderhoven was the kind of problem a
party worker did not solve, but one whose responsibility he tried to shift elsewhere as soon as possible.

Eric woke up the eleven other Amerasian boys in the hut, using the cadre’s light kick on the thigh followed by a somewhat
harder one. Then he went outside and lit a fire, went to the well with two wooden buckets on a yoke across his shoulders,
heaved a black cast iron pot upon the fire and partly filled it with water. When the water was boiling, he poured rice into
it.

The other eleven youths, all twelve or thirteen years old, appeared in ones and twos. The first had a songbird he had killed
the previous night with a stick. He poured some boiling water from the pot on it to make it easier to pluck. Others were foraging
for edible herbs. One boy had some shredded pork left over from the cadres’ dinner the night before. Another had a mouse that
he had smothered with a shirt in the hut during the night. He disemboweled and skinned it and added its piteously small carcass
to that of the tiny plucked and cleaned bird. They fried the meat in a skillet, deboned it, and chopped it into exceedingly
fine morsels. They stir-fried the edible plants and chopped those up also. When the rice was cooked and drained, they mixed
the meat and vegetables into it and then divided the
whole into twelve equal portions. By the time they had wolfed the food with their fingers from wooden bowls, the sun stood
clear of the eastern horizon and had burnt some of the mist from above the jungle trees.

The twelve Amerasian boys headed for the rice fields with the other workers. They kept apart from the others on the way in
order to talk English among themselves. When Eric had first arrived at the camp, three of the Amerasian youths did not know
a word of English. In only a few months they now had built up a limited vocabulary—what they could say, they said colloquially
and naturally. The other boys, who had a basic knowledge of English, improved their skills rapidly under the strict standards
and unforgiving attitude of Eric Vanderhoven.

“The cadres said yesterday they know we talk English out here,” one boy told Eric.

“So let them come out to the rice fields and see for themselves,” Eric said unconcernedly. “You’ll never find a party member
anywhere near where there’s hard work to be done. It’s the one place we don’t have to listen to their crap.”

“Yeah, but the informers tell them everything,” the boy argued.

“The other people here are the same as us. Their word counts for nothing. Relax. We’re Americans. We talk English.” He raised
his voice to a shout. “Fuck the commies.”

Several of the workers looked over at him and quickly averted their heads. They did not understand what he said, but the tone
of his voice had been clear, and he had spoken in English.

“You’ll be reported,” the boy said fearfully.

“Let me take care of that,” Eric reassured him. “Quit worrying all the time. I’m looking out for us all.”

Eric had this kind of talk—building up the morale and courage of the nervous—several times a day. Mitch and Red had been sent
to the reeducation camp with him.
Although the other nine Amerasian boys had been strangers to him, he had become their unopposed leader within hours of his
arrival at the camp.

As another boy approached, Eric realized that this morning he was having to deal with two extremes—the fearful and now the
reckless.

“Pete. I’ve been thinking about Pete,” the boy said. “They never caught him. Right now I bet he’s walking the streets of Danang.
He just walked out of here.”

Eric sighed. “You suggesting we head south down the road and walk a few hundred miles to Ho Chi Minh City?”

“I am,” the boy said steadfastly.

Eric pointed at the steaming, thick jungle bordering the rice fields. “If I walk anywhere, I’d prefer to take my chances in
that direction, across Laos, into Thailand and
real
freedom.”

“Over the mountains?” the nervous boy said aghast.

The reckless one said, “You go, I’ll go with you. Right now.”

“You think I haven’t thought about all this before?” Eric said irritably. “Look, why do you think they don’t bother to put
guards on this reeducation camp? Simple. We don’t have to run anywhere. If we want to get out of here all that bad, all we’ve
got to do is become reeducated. Learn some of Ho Chi Minh’s poems and quote a bit of Lenin, smile at the cadres, and we’d
be out of here in a couple of weeks—after we’ve got the rice planted.”