by Paul Yoon
This happened every day. People attempted to walk across the valley to reach the hospital until Alisak or the others had to rush out with a bike and get them, all the while shouting at them not to take another step forward. Which someone always did.
The man in the distance, however, wasn’t a stranger. He wasn’t military either, which they were always fearful of, that one day they would head out on their bikes and it would be a trick. That the Pathet Lao or the North Vietnamese would be there. That they had always been there.
But the man now crawling around the field was, in fact, Vang. For a moment, Alisak thought he was wounded. Or deranged. The doctor had finally become deranged.
He held his breath as Vang crossed over the line of sticks and entered territory they knew nothing about. It was a minefield. Through the binoculars, he watched as Vang settled himself down against another large, broken piece of stone. Behind him, on a short ridge, stood the remnants of a tank they had, last season, managed to safely reach and rummage through, taking the pistol that was now in the room next door, under the floor with their backpacks. The tank’s long, slim cannon pointed out across the distance like the arm of a tree.
The doctor waved, a slow arc, and it was then Alisak realized Vang was drunk, the empty whiskey bottle beside a nearby tree stump in the field.
Alisak felt someone’s breath on his shoulder and turned to see Noi looking out past him. She rested her chin on his shoulder and took the binoculars.
“Shit,” she said.
He felt the weight of her there against him. He inhaled. She had just washed her face. She smelled like the awful, powdered hospital soap of which they only had a bag left and had been sharing among the three of them, pouring water over each other’s heads as slowly as possible. This morning he woke in a mess of limbs, uncertain of who the arm over him belonged to, the leg, whether it was Prany or Noi as his fingers grazed an ear. He kept his hand there, touching the softness of the lobe—in all this around them, every day, the earlobe was always soft—not yet wanting to get up, wanting this moment to go on.
They slept like young animals in a den, he realized, and had been doing so for as long as he could now remember. He didn’t know how to tell someone how improbable it seemed to ever want to sleep alone again. The vacancy of it. He had nothing, had always had nothing, but he had them. Today, he had the bike. He still had Vang.
Noi gave him back the binoculars and he returned to watching the doctor, who was now searching for his glasses in his shirt pocket—they were not there—and then squinting down at the ground beside him, his hands sweeping across the dirt.
In recent days, when the helicopters started to come with more frequency, evacuating the wounded, some of the doctors had brought up the last crates of whiskey and wine the Tobacco Captain had left in the basement. They had gone through most of it quickly and, in their exhaustion and their hunger, quickly vomited most of it out.
Vang must have saved a bottle and wandered out at night, unaware that he was doing so. Or fully aware. As unlikely as that was to Alisak, it was possible. Over the past year he had watched so many stumble out like the delirious farmer who thought he was a prisoner, so many ignoring the pleas as they entered the far fields, wanting only to go back home, not believing there wasn’t one anymore.
It seemed a miracle the doctor was still alive.
Prany came in, holding a bag. They were splitting the cash they had been earning and saving, and he folded it in whatever extra clothes he had found today from the dead. In the other bags under the floorboard were six packs of cigarettes, six tins of some kind of fish, two for each of them, and knives or a can opener, and matches.
A round of detonations began. They couldn’t see the planes but the distance blinked like there was a lightning storm in the morning light. Briefly, the tank was illuminated like some large animal against the sky.
Prany flipped the coin he always carried. Heads or tails. Alisak won. He flipped it again. Prany won and again Noi said, “Shit,” and tucked her pistol in the back of her pants. Then she tied a bandanna over her head, the glow of her washed face gone, and spun the ring around her thumb once.
Prany took the rifle they kept in the closet and pushed open the window slightly. He checked to see that the weapon was loaded and clean and adjusted the scope.
Alisak kept the binoculars and looked out again at Vang, who was still waving and now singing a song Alisak couldn’t remember the name of, only that there was a record of it in the kitchen.
“He’s a better piano player than a singer, yeah?” Prany said.
Ignoring him, Alisak scanned the front of the house, waiting for Noi to appear. They stopped using the grand main entrance with its columns. They simply stepped out where there had been a wall seven months ago, over the mound of rubble and the broken cots, and where they now kept their bikes.
He heard the engine starting up. Noi drove out slowly, taking what had been the main driveway and turning right into the field that had once grown tobacco. Beyond that lay the Plain of Jars, and where Vang was now trying to sit up, curious, hearing the motorcycle engine. He kept singing, in English:
Moon river wider than a mile
I’m crossing you in style someday…
If Prany were a better shot he would have told him to fire a warning to make Vang sit back down. He almost took the rifle himself, but he didn’t want to risk it either. He kept track of Vang wavering, the way the doctor gave up and sat back down. He scanned back to Noi on her BSA, beginning to speed in between a row of dead plants, entering the field.
But he couldn’t find the sticks they had stuck into the ground to guide them. Alisak’s breath caught in his chest and the panic began to set in. He tried to concentrate on his breathing the way he was taught to do. The binoculars had become slippery from his sweat and he gripped them harder. Then he noticed Noi was riding parallel to a line, which meant she had found them, her knee almost touching the sticks. The ends of her bandanna flapped slightly.
He thought this would calm him but it didn’t. He kept squeezing the binoculars. In his periphery, he spotted Prany scanning the distance with the rifle, across the broken pieces of jars around Vang, some as tall as the homes they had been born in.
Noi reached him. Or reached a spot as close as it was possible. The doctor was suddenly delighted by her presence and stood, singing more loudly, lifting his arms and bellowing as though he were in an opera.
Stop!
Noi, yelling, lifted her arms in front of her, palms out. Alisak would never know if it was her or her voice or something else, but the doctor’s expression changed just then. He froze and, in a moment of sobriety, Vang seemed to understand where he was and the situation he had put himself in. Now, through the binoculars, Alisak caught the tremors beginning in the doctor’s limbs. First his knees and then his wrists.
(Loose wrists, Vang once said, playing the piano, Alisak not sure what he meant until now.)
Vang covered his face with his hands. His mouth was open but no sound came from him anymore. He tried to keep still. A line of drool spilled down from his bottom lip.
“I don’t want to look,” Vang said to Noi.
He didn’t mean it about himself. He was talking about Noi. She had taken off her shoes. She left the boundary of the sticks and stepped forward into the unknown field, where Alisak could already see some bombies that hadn’t dropped hard enough to go off or to sink underground, their smooth surfaces reflecting the daylight like points in water.
Alisak and Prany watched all this from the second-floor window, through their respective lenses. They watched Noi move across upturned earth and broken bits of stone, the soles of her feet searching for patches that appeared untouched. She would be avoiding the feel of a hard, curved surface under the dirt as much as she could. Every time she stepped forward, she dug her heel in, leaving a solid footprint she could follow back.
Alisak wanted to scream.
She was two steps away when another round of denot
ations started in the distance, perhaps a little closer, concussing the air. Alisak felt it, Prany did, too. It was like a ghost had passed through his chest. He looked through the binoculars as Noi stepped closer, and then the doctor, shouting, stepped forward and ran to her.
Alisak shut his eyes, held his breath. Waited. No pop. Nothing. When he opened his eyes, he saw the doctor embracing Noi and crying, and then they were walking back with Vang behind, his arms wrapped around her waist as she led, retracing her own steps.
Prany kept the rifle pointed out as his sister helped Vang onto the back of the motorcycle and returned across the fields, the bike running over a pile of dead tobacco leaves and rounding the side of the house.
Still no airplanes approaching or men on the ground.
Prany, his face inscrutable, returned the rifle to the wall and hurried down. Almost at once, Alisak heard a scuffle downstairs, someone shouting, and knew Prany had struck Vang, or attempted to, and then there was silence for a little while.
Alisak stayed in the piano room, holding the binoculars. He waited for Noi to come back up, but she didn’t. Then he fell to his knees and vomited the little he had eaten an hour before. A pale, bubbly puddle that was already vanishing through a crack in the floor.
He wiped his mouth with his wrist and hurried down to the room next door. It was covered in wallpaper that was peeling and had an empty metal bed frame. He crouched near the frame and lifted a floorboard. Below were three backpacks and a pistol wrapped in a cloth.
“I can’t be here anymore,” he said, not realizing he was saying this out loud. He was breathing heavily. He took the gun and slipped it behind his waistband.
He couldn’t be here, he said again. Everyone would be all right. Noi and Prany would be all right. They would have each other. The doctor would be all right.
Slinging a backpack over his shoulder, he stood, grew nauseous again, rested for a moment against the bed frame. He focused on the painting above the headboard. It was the one of the girl by a river, the hem of her skirt drawn up above the water. He could cut the painting out of the frame right now, he thought. He could roll it up and sell it and live off that money forever. He could do that, and he wasn’t sure why he didn’t. He had never even touched any of the paintings, as though someone had told him he never could, and for some reason he had listened.
He imagined Noi, older, holding a basket of fish in France. Maybe Prany would be the one painting her there by a river. Someone else. Not him.
He stepped over the empty bed frame and stood very close to the painting, close enough to see the brushstrokes and the old pigments. His hands were shaking. They had been shaking since he had entered this room. He thought it was his knees, because it was always his knees, but it was his hands this time, for the first time. He didn’t know what to do.
Maybe it wasn’t France but Thailand. There were times this year when all he did was imagine their futures, but stopped himself before he went too deeply in. Now he did. Or he attempted to. He kept pushing his mind forward, from a day to a month to a year, but the more he tried the more he couldn’t. He saw nothing. In that moment, he could imagine nothing.
He reached up and touched the painting. Pressed his fingertips against it. Felt the ridges of the brushstrokes. Then he returned the backpack and the pistol to the space under the floorboard.
Outside, it was like the sunlight was blinking. Daylight lightning. From downstairs, from the bottom of the steps, he heard a voice shouting, “Helicopter.”
A moment later, the same voice said, “I found them,” referring to Vang’s glasses.
* * *
One night during a rain shower, before they knew for certain that they were leaving, Alisak noticed Noi sitting beside the woman with the ruined legs. They were talking. There was only the light from the windows, so their shapes were vague in the dark. Every so often he could see the arc of Prany’s flashlight panning over the rows as he checked on each patient and then walked over to the hole in the roof, where water was coming down. He saw Prany open his mouth, the flashlight catching his chin briefly and the falling water striking his lips, bouncing away.
They had been instructed to change the woman’s bandages as often as they could, to keep the festering wounds as clean as possible. He had stepped out to retrieve what turned out to be the last pack of bandages—no one knew if any more were coming, possibly from the next helicopter—and he had paused at the threshold of the ward, watching for the first time the woman talking to one of them.
Now, as he approached, Noi and the woman left whatever world they had been in together. He gripped his flashlight with his teeth and shone it down on her body. If this sudden light bothered her she didn’t show it. She was in that moment of clarity during the morphine before she usually slept, and he didn’t know how much longer she would be awake.
“I remember you,” she said as he unbuttoned her shirt, Noi helping him, both of them careful not to touch her skin. Not because it would hurt her, but because their hands were cold and they were aware of the heat of her and didn’t want her to feel the shock of temperature. Alisak began to peel away the bandages across her stomach, lighting his movements with the flashlight in his mouth. Prany was still standing in the corner, his back to them, looking up.
“I remember the two of you,” she said.
It turned out she was a basket weaver who shared a stall at the night market once a week in the town with a potter from her village. The potter’s goods were heavier. If the potter couldn’t borrow a truck he carted his wares himself on a wheelbarrow down the hills. If they went together, she helped him.
“That night I didn’t,” she said. “He had gone down ahead of me. He wanted to shop for a gift for his daughter. It was her birthday the next day. We did that. We sometimes got something from the town because our children always wanted something from the town. My baskets. They’re light. They’re sturdy, but they’re light. I slip the handles over a pole, twenty of them, and I carry the pole across my shoulders. Easy enough. I follow the road. I love the walk at the start of night. I love the low stars and the fields and the smell. The smell. What is that smell? I haven’t smelled it since. Lovely air. Deep grass. It’s my only time alone. My husband is taking care of our daughter. I am alone. The road passes some homes on a slope. Before you get to town. Shanties. Metal roofs and some thatch ones and narrow doors following the slope and a maze of paths. You of course know. I saw you both there. You were sitting on the branch of a tree together near those homes, looking out across the slope. You didn’t notice me. I passed under you and I saw you lean over and whisper something into his ear. Yes, you. To him. Tell me: What did you say to him?”
Alisak had removed the entire bandage and had begun dabbing the wounds with ointment. He and Noi looked across at each other. He had no memory of this. He wanted the woman to keep talking as he cleaned her stomach.
“We have this game,” Noi said. “We imagine someplace we would like to go. We were talking about that.”
“I sold seven baskets that night,” the woman said. “The most I ever sold. It was a great success. Have you seen my baskets? They are light and sturdy. I can give you a discount.”
“Yes,” Noi said. “We would like that.”
The rain came down harder. And then came the wind. Prany, his feet soaked, turned as though someone had called for him. He walked over, leaving his wet footprints across the length of the floor, and stood nearby, watching as Alisak changed more of the woman’s bandages and then moved down to her thighs and her shins. Prany was restless with his flashlight. He kept panning it across the room.
“I walked back the same way that night but you weren’t there,” the woman said. “Up in the tree. Carrying thirteen baskets. You see, I thought you were spirits. You brought me luck. That is why I remember you. That was what I believed. That you were spirits who brought me luck.”
“Boo,” Noi said.
The woman smiled. She reached for Noi’s hand.
“
Yes. Boo. And luck.”
“What was the gift?” Noi said.
“The gift?”
“The potter. His daughter. The birthday gift.”
“I think it was a bracelet. From the market. Red and yellow. He traded it for a teacup he had made.”
She didn’t let go of Noi’s hand. In the distance, the air began to concuss. Dust fell from the corner of the ceiling, widening the gap a little more.
“Where do you go at night?” Prany said.
He was helping Alisak now, talking to the woman. Alisak’s mouth had gone numb from holding the flashlight. Prany gripped his own with his teeth to replace Alisak’s and together they stood at the foot of the bed, cleaning her.
“Khit,” the woman said.
They didn’t know where that was. They had never heard of a place called Khit. Now they heard airplanes.
“The smell,” the woman said. “I can’t smell it anymore. It was so lovely. The night. Deep grass. Walking alone. Only thirteen baskets. You can carry thirteen forever. I want to walk.”
The woman slowly shut her eyes. Alisak, who had been avoiding looking at her face, finished dressing her legs as the rain stopped.
* * *
Wake up.
The face of the doctor filled his vision. In his half sleep, he thought it was Prany and Noi’s father. Perhaps Alisak had been dreaming of him, he could no longer remember. Perhaps he had been thinking of the man who had taught them how to drive a motorbike.
Vang was wearing his glasses and sober. It was three days after, but Alisak wasn’t sure what hour it was until he found a window. He was lying in the corner of the main ward, hugging a pillow, his back against the wall. The gap above him. He was alone and it was the start of evening. He caught a star through the windowpane and then the sound of more bombs, louder this time, rattling the metal tray on the stand beside him.
