Run Me to Earth

by Paul Yoon

  (They had all gotten better at conjugating verbs—Coudre! Couds! Coud! Cousons!—and listing Parisian landmarks as Vang took them along on a quick tour around the city in his mind. How did he know Paris? They would never find out.)

  Other days, he played the piano for them. It was upstairs, in the corner room where they—the three lost orphans, as Vang called them affectionately, referring to an ancient children’s story everyone knew—took turns as lookout, panning across the valley for movement with a pair of binoculars and a rifle as their ears were invaded suddenly by the foreignness of a few bars of Bach.

  Wild, reckless notes that Alisak felt under his ribs. Spaces of quiet.

  When Vang wasn’t there, Alisak would flip through the stack of music sheets that had been left behind, trying to decipher the coded symbols for himself.

  Vang was never able to finish what he was playing. He adjusted his glasses that almost always slid down his nose as he ran out to answer another doctor shouting for him. Or, he rushed into the room where they had brought in a radio so that they could communicate with the government or with the Hmong fighters who, if they could, relayed back the advancing positions of the Pathet Lao and the North Vietnamese.

  Mostly, though, Alisak, Prany, and Noi kept to themselves, performing the tasks they were assigned. Or they were away, riding the motorcycles, following each other and the route they made into Phonsavan, where there was another hospital that had been set up.

  There was also the river where they could pick up supplies that were delivered by an old woman operating a boat. They had known this boat woman since they were children, and their parents had known the woman because they used to buy food from her. It had also been a way for them to travel. They rarely ever spoke to her—Prany was convinced she was actually a mute—but when they were younger, she used to let them ride with her upriver past the villages. If they helped her sell, she gave them extra food or some money and brought them to the riverbank, where they jumped off the boat without her ever stopping.

  She was still alive, still with her boat, and still silent, though she didn’t have any extra food now. There was instead a rifle in a basket by her legs, Alisak not knowing if she had ever had the reason to use it.

  They carried pistols when they were on their missions but they rarely had the chance to fire them. Here, the fighting on the ground had for the most part ceased after the majority of the roads had been bombed, and because of the rain, so they had in the recent months encountered very little of the armies. Instead, there was the new landscape the fighting had left behind: abandoned tanks in the fields, trucks split in half in a muddy crater, clothing, unidentifiable bones that were bright as steel, weapons, cases of ammunition they quickly loaded onto their bikes, and empty shell casings they could bring back to collect rainwater.

  Now, in this corner of the country, everything happened from the air, from the side that was supposedly theirs. There had been times when they were forced to outrun jets flying low, the pilots unsure of who they were, whether they were enemies, the three of them with their faces wrapped in bandannas like bandits as they sped quickly into the woods and vanished under its thick canopy.

  They stayed a full night once in the woods, sitting on the ground by their bikes and listening not to the rain, which fell silently, but to the endless torrent of bombers somewhere above the canopy that seemed so close they kept expecting one to crash down on them, cutting off the tops of the trees. They had never seen an airplane up close before and a part of Alisak wished one would come down. He wanted to see where the bombs were stored, how they were released, what a pilot did to release them. What kind of person a pilot was.

  In the woods that night, they didn’t sleep. They huddled under the thickest canopy and tried to ignore the rain seeping through their clothes. They reached out to soak some stale bread they had found in the kitchen, to soften it, and passed it around, biting off pieces. Couds, cousons.

  At first light, they returned to the town that had for the most part remained intact, though hardly anyone was there anymore. Yet they continued to raid and scavenge, in case they overlooked places: in the cupboards and closets of the café where there was a half-torn propaganda poster depicting a monk standing beside a soldier, both of them with their fists raised; in the rooms of homes or the guesthouse they would never have dared entered years ago, where an old, blind woman hid behind a door and listened to them walking around. Or in the restaurant behind which they used to loiter with the stray cats, waiting for a cook to give them some leftovers. Alisak remembered how Prany always fed the animals, their teeth sometimes breaking his skin, though Prany never seemed to mind, wiping the blood away with a silk handkerchief he had untied from the collar of a dead dog when they were wandering the south.

  What happened to that handkerchief?

  In the town the next morning, after scavenging for supplies, they hurried to the other hospital, where a terrified doctor, who appeared as though he had crawled out of a cave from another century, handed them one last box of morphine. He had wrapped it in his doctor’s coat because the box was soaked from the rain and about to fall apart.

  “Tell Vang there’s no more,” the doctor said. “Please stop coming. Leave us alone. We can’t help anymore. We can’t help.”

  He hurried back inside. He had spoken to them like the beggars they had been. Noi took out her pistol and aimed it at him, at the glass door that was still there, beyond which they watched the man returning down a corridor with some kind of limp. When he was gone, she fired, shattering the glass. A nurse who had appeared in the lobby screamed and ducked behind a man she had been pushing in a wheelchair. Noi would have fired again if Prany didn’t remind her they needed to save the bullets.

  Noi kicked the hospital door once for good measure. Prany claimed the doctor’s coat.

  When they drove back to the farmhouse, all the windows dark because the electricity had gone out again, the nurses, even Vang, tried to hide their surprise as they lifted candle flames toward them in the hall, thinking the three of them had run away, or that they had died.

  * * *

  The bikes were BSAs. British. Birmingham Small Arms Company Limited. Alisak often said that out loud to himself, wondering where in England Birmingham was. They were three decades old and ran perfectly. Alisak was unsure how the bikes had managed to come here, but like the piano and the art, and just about everything in the house, they had already been here, in a garage, when Vang first arrived to take the place over.

  The bikes were lighter than they appeared and had enough stability to handle the terrain of the fields and the hills all the while being fast and maneuverable.

  There was a fourth courier, as the nurses called them—never the orphans—but he missed the line of sticks they had planted to indicate a safe route by half a meter and triggered a bombie. He—the fourth—was from the mountains in northern Thailand near the border and he had come across the Mekong to help, having cousins in the area.

  They used to speak together in that mix of languages. He knew good jokes. Was a good singer and knew some card games they didn’t know. He wore on his right wrist a woven bracelet he said his Auntie gave him. They thought he was referring to his relative, an actual aunt, until they realized, hearing the woman’s voice on the radio one afternoon, that it was a nickname and that she was someone Vang communicated with. When they pressed the young man further about who this Auntie was, he wouldn’t say anything more.

  That was all they knew about him. He was older than them and Alisak thought Noi was a little in love with him. He would watch the way she avoided looking at him, which was something she never did; she wasn’t shy.

  That day on their bikes, Prany and Alisak were too far ahead to realize what had happened, but Noi heard the loud pop, like the air around them had broken, and then there was nothing, only the pieces of the bike, the front wheel, released from its body, still spinning forward.

  They stopped, all of them, and did what they had been tol
d to do. They walked carefully into the smoke that was misted in red—that color they had grown so accustomed to it didn’t startle them anymore—and salvaged what they could: parts of the bike, clothes they could find that were still wearable, the backpack. Then they stored it all in one of the stone jars in the field so that they could pick the things up on their way back.

  (A decade later, in another country a world away, Alisak would enter a festival on the bay of a hill town and, as music blared and people danced, he would watch a man hold up a can that sprayed red, would watch him graffiti a seawall, and he would hold his breath, not realizing, for a moment, what exactly was coming out of the can.)

  They learned from the dead. They adjusted where to place the sticks in the ground, the three of them fanning out barefoot across the valley to better feel the ground. Around the back, where there used to be a garden at the end of a slope, they created a circle so that the helicopters from the Royal Lao Government could land safely and take away as many of the wounded as possible.

  * * *

  It was seven months ago when the American bombers that had been aiming for the roads missed their targets, striking locations close to the farmhouse. It was like the entire valley had erupted and was breaking apart over them.

  We’re on the same side, you idiots!

  Only Alisak heard Vang screaming this as he grabbed the doctor’s waist and tried to prevent him from opening the second-floor window and leaning out into the roar of wind and the debris hurling toward them. The sky suddenly gone, replaced by smoke and fire. The bombs dropped across the Plain of Jars, reaching the north wing of the house, the entire roof and the wall collapsing there, burying five people.

  It took a day for Alisak’s hearing to return, for his legs to calm so that he could stand and look for Prany and Noi, whom he eventually found hiding together in a bedroom closet, their bodies folded over each other and their eyes shut even as Alisak leaned down to touch them.

  Everyone in the house was trapped. Their only access in and out of this area to find food and supplies—to find any survivors who were wounded—became the bomb-ridden field, which the three of them began to explore, slowly, every day, using the bikes and walking. They came back—every day they made it back—to find a stack of money on top of the piano for them.

  Ten days ago, as Vang predicted, they learned through the radio that the American planes were coming again and that the hospital would need to be evacuated. There was the promise that the government would send helicopters. So far, four had arrived but they didn’t know how many more would come. Or what would become of the wounded who were unable to be moved. Only that the hospital workers had agreed to stay for as long as they were able to.

  Vang began to make the ones who were too injured to transport as comfortable as possible. He kept the curtains open if a farmer wanted to look out or shut them if a townsperson wanted to sleep. He gave a woman from a hill village as much morphine as she wanted—he gave all of them, if they were able to eat, his ration of food. If they wanted it, they were bathed more often, Alisak bringing in the rainwater they had been collecting outside in the shell casings they had propped up near the side.

  No one had yet to tell the three of them where they were going. They were assured it was soon and that Vang had acquired them safe passage out.

  But where?

  Prany thought it would be either Chiang Mai in Thailand or farther, to somewhere in France.

  Prany wanted to go to France. So did his sister. It would make sense, they said to Alisak, because Vang had been teaching them French. They wanted what he had described to them: French cigarettes and wine and bread and the Seine. The museums. All those gardens and monuments.

  Noi thought they should steal a painting and bring it with them before they were all gone. She said everyone was now doing it. She said she saw a nurse do it yesterday, take one down from the wall, cut the canvas out of the frame, and roll it up.

  Alisak said what if the men in France were all like the Tobacco Captain, but Noi wasn’t convinced of it. They couldn’t recall if the man eventually returned to France during the war or went somewhere else. Or nowhere at all. He could have drunk himself to death in one of these rooms. The husband of a Phonsavan woman might have come and murdered him and buried his body.

  “The woman herself might have,” Noi said.

  The Tobacco Captain was gone when the Vientiane doctors took the house over two years earlier. Some of the staff, however, came back, helping the doctors, helping run the house that was falling apart, that no longer had water or a garden, only intermittent electricity. They helped for as long as they could, until they gave up, left, or died.

  When Alisak, Prany, and Noi were recruited months later, they were asleep in the shade of a tree beside the river. Alisak heard the jeep first. It was an RLG jeep, and two nurses walked up to them with an envelope full of money. The nurses spoke to them in Lao and then Hmong, not sure which they would understand. They understood the Lao better.

  “Can you drive motorbikes?” the nurses said.

  It was afternoon, and for a moment the sky was quiet. They had only been back to the town for a few days, and they were starving, dehydrated, their bodies numb. They had been waiting for the boat woman to appear in the hopes she had some food. Alisak was in the thread of some dream. Some mountain road he kept walking down, passing animals and seeing a coast in the distance but never getting there. By then, they had been living and surviving with only each other for so long that it took them a moment to understand these strange women in their uniforms were unthreatening.

  Only Prany stepped toward them. He examined the money. U.S. dollars. He licked his thumb and flipped through the bills because he had seen a man do that once at a gambling house. Then he tightened the headband he had made for himself from a torn shirt and said, “Miss, for this, we can fly.”

  He was pleased by his humor. It made Noi laugh.

  But not the nurses. They opened the door of the jeep. Across the river, a house that had caught fire in the morning had finally crumbled into a mound. It belonged to the family of a monk. A thief had burned it down in anger after hearing a rumor there was treasure hidden inside but found nothing. The monk had come down to the temple that was still open, and before heading to the farmhouse, the five of them watched from inside the jeep as he lifted the hem of his robe, revealing his sandals, and walked around the smoldering debris that had been his childhood home.

  France or Thailand. Alisak felt indifferent about the not knowing and the where. Everywhere seemed far and foreign. It had been more than a year now since they had moved into this farmhouse, and he couldn’t recall the last time he had been in one place for so long. Where there was no one telling him to go.

  He had grown used to the house. The wounded. The chaos that was so plentiful it was less like rain, he thought, more like a silence.

  He was good at driving. Knew the bike now, he thought, better than he knew himself. Knew how it turned or sped or hesitated and groaned. He could pick up a farmer who had lost his legs faster than anyone, slip him behind, hold on to his arms as they raced back to the hospital before the man bled out. He could do things like that. He knew how to find veins and he knew his suturing threads.

  What would he do somewhere else? What did he do before? He laughed at this, too. He was a cook for one week at a café. He bicycled a rickshaw. Sometimes, he sketched the faces of farmers in the fields in a notebook and asked if anyone wanted to buy them. Near Vientiane one year, when there was a period of calm during a rainy season, he stood outside a gambling house and didn’t let in anyone the owner didn’t want inside. It never worked, he was a child, he was all bones and short—he still was—so he was beaten.

  He was beaten so often for smelling rotten or for begging for food or because of the way he was dressed or simply because it was easy to beat a child. All this in wartime. He fought back, got cut four times, swallowed his own tooth once, and waited a day thinking it would exit out of him—tha
t he would get it back—and then wept when he searched for it in his own shit, alone, in a field, and it wasn’t there.

  His own tooth had vanished somewhere inside of him. There were times this fact bothered him more than his own hunger or the sudden volley of gunfire.

  What did Prany and Noi do before that was better?

  They all lived lives where they kept losing things. Sometimes even each other, for days, because someone had hired only one of them, or they were caught in the opposite ends of a field, hiding, their voices useless in the deafening, unbearable air, the three of them afraid to look or to stand above the level of the high grass.

  He wished he could take a BSA with him. He pictured them remaining in the back of the hospital beside the dead tobacco plants. He imagined them surviving everything and the years, ruined by the weather, sunk into the ground, but there. He imagined coming back for his. Listening to the breath of its engine. The handlebars where bits of his blistered palms were probably stuck like dust. The gunpowder smell all over its body. He could never stop the shaking in his knees until he got on his bike.

  Wherever they ended up, he would get a new bike. Noi and Prany would get one, too. They would all race the way they did across the valley even though they weren’t supposed to. But they did, coming back, knowing the routes now, the farmhouse rising up out of the horizon. An enormous stone jar that maybe a giant made standing there untouched, carrying rain from the night before. Probably an undetonated bombie floating in there, too. Or a flash of color in the water that they knew was human.

  Another helicopter roared in and down, the wind so strong as to feel impossible, and Vang, behind a second-floor window, during his first break in three days, delirious and unable to sleep, to keep his body quiet, rushed a melody on the out-of-tune piano.

  * * *

  Alisak was upstairs, scanning the field with a pair of binoculars when a figure emerged from behind a piece of large stone. He thought perhaps it was someone coming to them for help.