by Jack Twist
Chapter 31
I called out as I ran to the entrance. “Abbie! The baby!” I had to move quickly and watch the child and didn’t risk looking back.
The marching parade was now passing in the street outside, line after line of soldiers, all American. The sky was overcast. A squadron of US Air Force Phantom jets zoomed in overhead, coming in low out of the clouds in the direction of the marchers and then swinging away over the city. I looked both ways through the spectators and with the scream of the aircraft lingering in the hot air I saw the girl disappearing into the crowd.
When I had almost caught up to her she turned, stopped and faced me. For all its emaciated little body the baby seemed bigger in her arms.
“Mai?”
There was no defiance or challenge in her look. Not even a plea. Just a sadness, and a resignation so devoid of all the emotions I expected to see, that it seemed to express a tremendous knowing. She just looked at me steadily.
The band section of the parade, somewhere in the distance, had started up with Yankee Doodle when Abbie arrived behind me, with Julie behind her. They came to a stop beside me and we all watched the little girl. Abbie crouched down, moving in closer, slowly, afraid the child might take flight. But she did not look scared or ready to run. Her face’s melancholy found new depths, a hint of contempt, as she stood there watching Abbie, gripping the baby who now lay still and quiet, her face turned in against the girl’s chest.
“Mai. Can I have baby, please?” Mai made no move to go but neither did she offer anything. “She is my sister too, Mai.”
I sensed a movement in Julie, standing beside me, checking her watch, and when I looked I saw Chuck coming through the crowd.
“Sister,” Abbie said, pointing at herself and then moving her hands towards the child gingerly, like someone wanting to calm a frightened animal.
“Abbie.” Julie was being careful too, but her voice wasn’t as gentle in the commotion of marching feet and Yankee Doodle approaching from somewhere down the street. “I’m sorry. The plane. If we’re going to do this we have to go.”
“Please, Mai. I will take the baby to America. Where her papa comes from. She will have a good life and we will tell you where she is, I promise.” Mai did not move and nor did she look afraid. She watched Abbie and it was strange to see a tear form in one eye and roll down her cheek without her facial expression changing. “Maybe ... Maybe you could come too, one day.”
Julie crouched down too then. “Abbie. You can’t say that. It’s not fair to the child. Please leave this to me now. I know where the family lives. I will follow it up and do what I can do. But you really have to go now.”
When Abbie touched the baby, one hand gently on the side of her face, Mai showed no resistance, so Abbie turned her full attention to the baby. But as she put both hands on her and tried to take hold she trembled. She seemed unable to do it. Julie said, “Abbie?” and with genuine concern. There were more tears in Mai’s eyes then as Abbie tried in vain to take a hold. The baby lay perfectly still, too still. The little girl was neither handing the baby over nor keeping her and yet Abbie could not take her. Attempting again to get a better grip on the tiny body, her hands shook. She shuddered all over, even her legs shaking, and her head dropped suddenly and she fell to one side, her hands on the dusty street as she struggled to keep herself from falling over completely.
All three of us came down beside her. Julie took hold of her upper arm and I held her shoulder on the other side. “Chuck. Take a hold,” said Julie. I was not pushed aside. Just ignored. They lifted Abbie to her feet. Her eyes were dazed, dull and defeated.
The marching soldiers continued on beside us, Yankee Doodle getting closer, so that Julie almost shouted. “You okay?” Abbie nodded faintly but speech seemed beyond her. “Now let’s get you on the plane so you can rest, and then home where you belong. As quick as she’s able, Chuck, before the plane takes off. Come on, Abbie. It’s all been too much. You fainted. Take it easy now. You can rest on the plane. Let’s go.”
Abbie had no reply. Julie was back in charge.
“What about the baby?”
Julie looked at me but did not answer. She was putting her arm around Abbie and Chuck had hold of her elbow when I noticed that Mai was gone. I looked around and saw her disappearing into the crowd.
“There she is! Wait! Just a minute!”
When I caught up with her again the little girl was walking beside a broken concrete wall, behind the crowds who watched the marching parade and when I called her name she turned to face me with the same sad, knowing expression. The marching band had almost reached us now and I had to shout.
She showed no fear and I moved in quickly. In all the marching, band-playing din, the baby was still quiet. “Baby, please Mai! Quick! Baby for Abbie, her sister. To take to America!” I was down on my haunches, right in front of her, my arms reached out in open plea.
“Quick, Mai! Before the plane leaves!” There was a little space between her and the old wall behind her but she made no move away from me so I moved in closer still, reaching one hand out close to her. “Come with me, Mai!” I called above the band. “Come and say goodbye to Abbie! And to baby! We have to go quickly!”
But she didn’t move and I reached out further and touched the baby, one hand on her cheek, the way Abbie had done. The band had reached us now, was right beside us, Yankee Doodle a crescendo of celebration as I put my hands on the baby. And there were tears in Mai’s eyes again and her face broke and she shook with sobs as I moved in to take the baby from her.
The baby still showed no reaction to the noise of the parade and as I put my hands around her wasted chest and shoulders, there was no movement. There should have been something. If not a sound then some sort of reaction. Mai’s grip had tightened but she let me turn the baby towards me. Her eyes stared, blank and glazed.
I looked at Mai, who was clutching the baby now while the soldiers marched past, the band blasting us. She let me put my hands on the baby’s neck. There was so little flesh I should have felt a pulse easily. I tried again. Nothing. I put my hand over her mouth to force some reaction, some resistance. I took my hand away, wanting her to cry, begging her to cry as I had heard her cry so often.
But there was no cry. There was nothing.
“Come on, Mai! Come and say good bye!”
But as I moved to pick her up she tensed. Lifting her shoulders she moved out of my reach. She looked at me once, turned and walked away. She did not look back. She walked away slowly, carrying the baby, and vanished into the crowd.
I turned and began running down the street, beside the marching soldiers, dodging people as best I could, my mind turning to Abbie. Because there was nothing I could do for the baby now, or for Mai. And there was no time then to wonder where the little girl was headed. Back to her home in Muc Thap? Another body for the old woman to take care of? No time to wonder what all this would do to her. A child without a childhood. What becomes of her? Another Con Ma Nu, ghost woman? A creation of war. And nothing more.
Now, as I ran, my mind turned to Abbie. “You say my father has died. Please let me save his baby.”
Chuck was sitting in his jeep near the airport entrance. He pointed to the doorway. “She had to go! The pilot couldn’t wait any longer!” Inside Julie was talking to one of the MPs. I interrupted her rudely but she looked at me with genuine sympathy. “I’m sorry. She’s gone. The plane is nearly twenty minutes late now. Did you catch up with ...?”
But I was gone. I ran down to the gate that led out on to the tarmac where a number ofguards quickly blocked my path. Adjacent to the gate there was a high wire fence with people lined along it and pressed against it watching the aircraft. I ran to the end of this crowd and saw her being escorted by the big military policeman. They were almost at the steps to the plane.
“Abbie! Abbie!” But the plane was whining impatiently and she couldn’t have heard anything else. All other passengers were on the plane.
She stopped to take her bag from the policeman at the bottom of the steps and turned before she climbed them. I waved my arms but she was looking back at the gate. When she reached the door she turned again but very briefly. A hand went out to her from inside the plane. She stepped towards it and disappeared. The doors were quickly closed.
I moved through the crowd back to the gate and called to the MP as he passed through. “Heh! Please! Did she say anything? The girl? Did she say anything to you?”
“Nothin’ that I could hear.” He kept walking. “Was my job to get her on the plane. Sometimes I wonder who these embassy types think they are. That plane’s been held up nearly half an hour for her.” He stopped and turned to look at me. “And I suggest you get back to your unit now, soldier. Your girlfriend’s gone.”
“She said nothing you can remember?”
He glared at me. “Suggest you get back to your unit now, soldier.”
I could have punched him in the mouth. I wanted to scream into his uncompromising, military face. I haven’t got a fucking unit! I don’t know what that would have meant. I just wanted to scream, to fight, to cry, for myself, for the girl on the plane, alone now and in shock, maybe for everyone who had been scarred, maimed or killed by this war. Everyone from Al Stanley to the infantry sergeant who had dragged him out of a truck at Nui Dat. “We don’t want no risks. And he’s a risk.” Everyone from Arkansas the deserter, who’d climbed into a tree to lose himself in some hallucinatory hope that the war would end, to that wasted baby being carried through the streets of Saigon by a little girl who had to think and feel like an adult when she should have been chanting her times table during the day and playing with a doll at night.
“How many babies you kill today, Al?”
“I’m gonna do it, papa san. I’m gonna save my little sister.”
“Yes, Abbie. Of course, Abbie.”
But I’d have been screaming at a brick wall. Sounds like a personal problem, son. See the padre. And this man was just doing his job, serving, and he was in charge. “Back to your unit now, soldier.”
As I turned away I muttered, “I haven’t got a fuckin’ unit.”
“Wha’d you say?”
I ignored him. I still wasn’t sure what I meant. I did have a unit and I would be getting back to it. Serving. That’s what you did.
I felt him watching me but I stopped and looked around before I left the building. I couldn’t see Julie Shields anywhere. She was not an inconspicuous person. She had gone.
Out in the street the jeep was gone too. I wondered if Julie and Chuck had taken off after Mai, the link with her aunt, Con Ma Nu, still priority.
The marchers were now local troops, though Yankee Doodle was still audible in the distance. I turned in the direction from which the troops came and walked into the crowd where the little girl had gone. Surely Julie would leave her alone at this point. They knew where she lived.
I saw no jeep but kept walking. Perhaps Mai had stopped of her own accord. Was having second thoughts. Had decided she would like to say goodbye. But of course she hadn’t. Not far beyond the broken wall where I had last seen her I stopped. It was too late. I was chasing after a dead baby. Abbie was gone and the baby was dead.
The clouds closed in further as I walked back. I stopped again, at the wall, feeling alone,disoriented and then dizzy, lost, in a humid, darkening whirl of marching and music and crowds watching and not watching and the smells of the city and concrete crumbling into the hot dust around me.
I leaned against the wall, held my head in my hands, and moved along into some shade, finding myself under a rusty iron awning where a woman tried to sell me a little flag. A choice of American or South Vietnamese. She had a bundle of them in a cane basket rested on a pile of rubble and they were plastic and flimsy, the American ones short of at least twenty stars. When I shook my head she went back to eating rice from a bowl.
So I leaned there in the shade like a part of the broken surrounds and only the sight of approaching slouch hats would return me to the present, to the reality of where I was, although it was not until they were passing right beside me that I remembered. This was what I was supposed to be doing. I straightened up to see, but kept myself back, out of sight, the self-preservation instinct indomitable still. I suppose I should have felt some shame in myself, but my head ached as I struggled with images of my countrymen marching before me, of little plastic flags and the multitudes around me. And then with images of Mai and the baby, Julie and Chuck, and of Abbie. So I was beyond shame, even for my malingering self. And as my vision cleared, nor did I feel any sense of pride in the marchers. The anger I had felt inside the airport had subsided and morphed into a dull throbbing behind my forehead and apart from that, as I watched the Aussie contingent march by, all I could feel was a growing sense of sadness.
Compared to the Americans they were a very small group and individually they looked smaller in stature too, than the average GI The admin captain out in front, stepping out proudly, head high, reminded me of Lieutenant Malcolm Jefferies, and when I looked at the ordinary diggers following him, the pride in their step not quite as pronounced, I saw Lyle O’Malley. The same quiet, unassuming willingness.
They were just a group of pogos marching in the street, and the uniform, khaki polyesters, black belt and slouch hat with one side turned up, meant little if anything to the crowd watching them. And as the final small contingent of the big parade, they had to keep in step with the fading strains of Yankee Doodle. There was no Waltzing Matilda. But they did the job well, and with pride. Happy young men, pleased with themselves, looking forward to going home soon, back to sunny Oz, out of the endless rain. But all I could feel was sadness, and hopelessness.
I looked down, dropping my aching forehead onto one hand and saw the woman with the flags reach forward to feed a small child who stood near her, beside the rubble, bare feet in the dust, watching in silence, the final line of soldiers, the end of all the commotion. She looked like a small Mai.
Her mother, I presumed her mother, turned to me again, concerned perhaps, with my continued presence. I wondered what she made of it all. Was it anything more to her than a chance to make a few dollars? Whatever she thought of it, there was no going home from the war for her. These people lived with it. With the waste. The countless dead.
I felt shaky again, my head pounding. I could have sat down there in the dust and cried, like some abandoned lunatic, reject from all the regimented pride and glory that had just filled the city. So I stepped slowly, staggered, out into the street. Back to your unit now, soldier. And get that head up. Where’s your pride? You’re a soldier. At war. What did you expect? Funny hats and fairy-floss?
The crowded street came back into focus, the last line of marching soldiers well down the road, moving out of view. The brass section of the band in the distance had stopped, leaving only drums, their fading military beat signaling a close to the procession.
As I walked, the clouds hung thick and close, one more malevolence in the world, and at that moment of peak, late morning humidity, the air seemed perfectly still, and as the troops moved beyond my sight I felt a few raindrops on my face and quickened my pace until I could see them again. But I didn’t have to hurry. There was to be a presentation ceremony at the base parade ground to complete the formalities of the march. I only had to make sure that I was back at the barracks block before they were all dismissed.
And so they marched, into the annals of military history, as they say, and under a heavy ominous cloud. Before they had reached the base, the cloud had become steady, permanent rain, and as they assembled on the parade ground it poured, so that there were no commemorative speeches and no celebrations. They were simply dismissed, in a vain attempt to get out of the rain.
