The Weatherman (21 page)

Saigon was hot like Mississippi in the summertime. The monsoon season came early that year, just as I said it would. I’d been forecasting from the air base for five years. On the afternoon of the 29th the city was in chaos. I was hurrying by the evacuation center when the sky opened up and dropped sheet after sheet of cooling rain. I jumped in out of the weather.

The evacuation center was nothing but a gymnasium inside a ramshackle building on stilts just off the east-west runway. It stunk inside. Vietnamese evacuees were packed in there like powder kegs. Thousands of them. All considered at high risk. Good as dead if we left them behind.

She couldn’t have been more than four years old. I found her wandering around on her own, or more like she found me. She was dark-skinned, more brown than yellow, so I called her Tan Jan. She had perfectly rounded cheeks, a little chunky for a Vietnamese child. I’ll bet she had some French in her. She was wearing white shorts and a red shirt, western in style, with cheap rubber thongs on her stubby brown feet.

The first time she held up the cup I thought she was just another beggar doing what she’d been taught to do. I ignored her, as I had taught myself to do. I moved along. A storm of anxiety hung over the center but there still seemed some order to the evacuation. C-130 transport planes were landing on the runways, taking on evacuees and then lifting off.

When I stopped again to watch the rain, Tan Jan was right behind me, tugging on my khakis. She held up the cup, a red liquid inside. She wasn’t begging, she was offering it to me. I took the cup from her hands and took a whiff. No smell. I tried a sip. It was strawberry Kool-Aid. No sugar. It tasted terrible, but probably not to her.

Between my broken Vietnamese and some of the evacuees’ pidgin English I learned Tan Jan was one of the orphans from Quang Tri. Their plane had left.

Nobody wanted anything to do with her. “No papers … no papers,” they kept telling me, and dismissed me with a wave of their hands. It was then I realized how desperate these people were to get out of Vietnam.

I used my status as a big, ugly American to push my way to the front of the exit line. Two American Marines stood behind a folding table examining papers. They appeared to be the only two Americans in the building, besides me. “This little one here missed her plane,” I told them.

I must’ve sounded like an idiot. The Marines stared at me with their noses bent out of joint, like I was asking them to baby-sit. Marines don’t baby-sit, and by the end of the war my Air Force rank didn’t mean shit to them. “Where’s her papers?” the corporal asked.

“How can she have papers, she’s an orphan?”

“No fucking papers, no fucking exit visa.”

I never liked Marines. These men were new to Vietnam. Their lily-white skin had yet to tan. “Where are those planes going?” I demanded to know.

“Those are American planes and oddly enough they’re going to America.”

“So y’all put her on a plane and let ‘em worry about it at the other end.”

“Get her some papers!”

I walked Tan Jan over to the makeshift lunch counter. We shared a bowl of bun bo soup and polished off the Kool-Aid. This chick knew a sucker when she saw one. I fell for her over lunch.

I was trying to think who on the base could get papers for the little girl when the first mortar round hit the roof. Bits of debris rained down on us. The gym was on fire. Tan Jan jumped into my arms and there she stayed. We weren’t hurt, but others were badly wounded.

The incoming rounds were deadly accurate. Outside, rockets were hitting one a minute. Artillery fire began. The gymnasium was like a bird cage. The birds on the inside wanted out, and the birds on the outside wanted in. The fire squad arrived and doused the flames. Then the evacuees faced a choice-wait outside in the middle of a rocket attack, or stay inside and miss the planes. A thousand of them poured outside. I held Tan Jan tight as I could and followed.

It stopped raining. The sun came back. We stood in the welcome coolness and watched the air base shelled. A fully boarded C-130 ran down the runway and lifted into the sky. But another plane that had just landed took a hit to the wing. It spun off the runway and burst into flames. Other planes on the ground were exploding. With Tan Jan in my arms I watched all of this in the middle of a pushing, shoving mob being held back by South Vietnamese soldiers who were using their bayonetted rifles as barricades. I used my bulk and worked my way to the front.

Just when everybody thought there were no more planes we saw it drop out of the sky like a big green angel. Another C-130. But by then the runway was littered with debris and I thought it might not be able to land. But land it did. It circled over to the taxiway. The door was pushed open by a big, mean American man in a white shirt. He looked like a mechanic. He dropped the ramp. Then all hell broke loose.

The crowd surged forward. Me and Tan Jan were being shoved from behind by throngs of evacuees. The soldiers with their rifles were pushing us back from the front.

Further down the line soldiers threw their rifles aside and ran for the plane. The mob of people they’d been holding back broke rank and ran after them. Nobody needed papers anymore. Within seconds the doorway to the plane looked like a rugby scrum, only this mass of bodies was mean and ugly. I could see kicking feet and swinging fists flying out of the doorway. The man in the white shirt was hauling in children and punching back soldiers. The screaming and fighting was almost drowning out the bombs that were still incoming. The pilot must of sensed the danger of being overloaded because he began taxiing away almost immediately.

Most of the South Vietnamese soldiers hung on to their dignity and held the rest of the mob at bay, not afraid to use their bayonets. The soldiers in front of me weren’t budging. Shells were exploding around us. The runway was being blown to bits. Several buildings were on fire. The stench of artillery stung my nose. I covered Tan Jan’s face with my hand.

The C-130 left the taxiway and turned onto the runway, leaving behind it a mob of hangers-on tumbling along the ground. The plane came rolling our way. I saw men fighting to close the door. I knew in my heart no more planes would be taking off from Tan Son Nhut.

I’d been given my code words the day before. I was assigned my pick-up point that morning. I’d be choppered out later with the last of the Americans. Out in the Gulf the
USS
Midway was waiting for us. But the final evacuation would be strictly military and intelligence personnel, and when the time came who was to say it would be any more orderly than what I saw before me?

I was bigger and stronger than anybody else in that desperate mob that desperate day. As the plane lumbered our way they were still pushing and shoving each other in the doorway, trying to pull the door closed. The plane rolled by us and started down the runway. It was a long shot. An end run. But I decided to go for it. Whole hog.

I wrapped Tan Jan in my arms like she was a football and I was the tight end for the Dallas Cowboys just like I always wanted to be. I burst out of the pack and knocked down the two soldiers in front of me. Then I was off chasing the plane.

I hadn’t run ten yards when I had to leap the bodies of two American Marines, the same Marines I’d argued with less than an hour before. In the few seconds I glimpsed their horribly disfigured faces I could tell they’d taken a direct hit from a rocket. I felt a shiver of shame run up my spine for the way I’d talked to those boys.

I held Tan Jan tight and ran as fast as I’d ever run in my life, ran even faster than I had when I caught that pass over the middle during the Homecoming game and made the longest run in Vicksburg history. I could hear the South Vietnamese soldiers swearing. They were chasing us, rifles in hand. Just don’t

shoot, I prayed. Then I heard American voices yelling, “Run, Dixon, run!” My buddies cheering me on from their bunkers. A rocket exploded at the end of the runway, the flash stinging my eyes.

If Dixon Graham Bell could outrun an airplane I’d have joined Ole Miss instead of the Air Force. But that big C-130 was so overloaded, and it lumbered down that runway so slow that I was catching up with it. This was the run of my life, a high I’d never experienced before. My sides were aching. Tan Jan was crying. She was holding on to me for dear life, didn’t want to let go. But I pulled the child away and held her out to them. “Take her,” I screamed. “Please, take her!”

They were still trying to close the door to the plane, but when they saw I wasn’t going to try and board, that I just wanted them to take the girl, they held out their arms and waved me on. Their mouths were screaming encouragement but I couldn’t hear the words. The plane was picking up speed.

Thank God it had just rained because I’d have doubled over in the heat. As it was I had just enough left in me for one last burst. I thrust Tan Jan as far forward as I could. Then the mean looking man in the white shirt snatched her from my arms and I fought to keep my balance without her. She got pulled kicking and screaming into the plane and the door swung closed.

I stumbled and fell onto the runway, still wet from the rain. The South Vietnamese soldiers arrived out of breath and put the boot to me. A bayonet slashed my face. I covered my head. They were just taking out their frustration on the only American they were free to stomp on. When their anger was spent I peeked through my bloody fingers and saw the fat plane lift slowly off the ground, barely clearing the abandoned control tower. The big green angel climbed higher and higher into the smoky sky until I lost sight of it in the Asian sun.

The Weatherman laid down his pen. It helped to record such memories. Again he picked up the letter and traced his scar. Perhaps some night he’d write about it. But not this night. He folded the letter and slipped it into his diary. Closed it. Walked to the window.

The downpour continued. Rain driven by wind had stripped the trees of their glorious colors. An occasional burst of lightning lit up the Cities, revealing naked limbs against a black sky. The ugly season. When he was a little boy back in the early fifties, his granddaddy and he got caught in a thunderstorm in Louisiana. They were driving home from Baton Rouge and his granddaddy pulled off the road because it was raining cats and dogs and he couldn’t see a thing. Then lightning lit up the sky just as a truck was passing by and Dixon Bell saw that the truck had a big wooden chair strapped to its flatbed. His granddaddy told him it was the electric chair. Louisiana just had that one chair and they drove it around to the counties where a prisoner needed to be executed. To this day it remained the most frightening thing he’d ever seen.

Dixon Bell switched on a lamp over the work table and flipped through the surface maps. Three maps down somebody had scrawled in red ink, “I’m gonna ice you, Weatherman.”

If these juvenile threats were coming every day, or every week, he might have reported them. But they came only once every three or four months. Obviously some jerk in the newsroom. No big deal.

The Weatherman checked the national database. Water temperatures were rising off the Pacific coast of South America. They already had snow in the Dakotas. He studied the computer’s answers to his calculations. No doubt in his mind. Harsh winter due.

“Captain, I am really sorry to bother you on Christmas Eve, but we found a letter our little princess wrote. We think you should have it,”

Les Angelbeck thought he could make it out to Afton and then back again. “If the weather holds.” But it didn’t hold. All hell broke loose, just like the Weatherman said it would. Now he was driving through an infernal snowstorm, beating a hasty retreat home. He had the letter.

Search dogs found victim number seven buried in the wet autumn leaves. She was fifteen years old, mildly retarded and strangely gifted. Her name was Karen Rochelle. An only child, her parents called her the Princess of Afton. She got off a school bus one rainy afternoon in late October and was never again seen alive.

Afton Township sat tucked into the south end of the St. Croix Valley on the Minnesota side of the river. Her rolling hills and thick woods reminded early settlers so much of the New England countryside that they drew up plans to ensure that the land would remain pristine. But now the Cities were only an on-ramp away.

The white-haired father of the murdered girl led Les Angelbeck past a lonely Christmas tree and into the girl’s bedroom. A small desk stood in the corner. The bereaved father picked up a white notepad and showed it to the police captain. “I noticed the indents on the paper, so I scribbled over it with a pencil. This is what appeared.”

I saw u on TV. I no u r the killer. I saw u on TV. I no u r the killer. I saw u on TV. I no u r the killer.

That was all it said. He handed the captain a book of first-class stamps, the Virgin Mary cradling the Christ Child. Angelbeck flipped open the book. One stamp of Mary and the baby was missing. “And you think she mailed this to somebody?”

“I don’t know how else to explain it, Captain. There is no sign of the actual letter, and just that one stamp missing.”

“Your daughter was mentally retarded. Did she have the capacity to write and mail letters?”

“Oh, yes. She was quite functional. She could read and write at a third-grade level. She was always sending things off-Publishers Clearing House, free samples, things like that. She loved getting mail with her name on it. But she never wrote anything like this.”

“Would she have put her return address on something like this?”

“Oh, yes. Upper-left-hand corner of the envelope, just as we taught her.”

Les Angelbeck examined again the small white letters in the stormy scribble.

I saw u on TV. I no u r the killer.

“What kind of shows did she watch?”

“Oh, ‘Wheel of Fortune,’ ‘Cheers,’ ‘Jeopardy,’ that sort of harmless fare. After dinner she watched television until she went to bed.”

“Any local programming?”

“Just the news. I think she had a crush on Dixon Bell, that weatherman.”

“Does anybody else know about this letter?”