In the meantime, Ivy not only kept putting me off about the cash she had promised to scratch up, but she fed my paranoia about the police. Telling me how they had been poking around, looking for me, questioning people. All lies. The police had never been looking for me. They didn’t find Dupont’s body for months. And I wasn’t a suspect when they did. At the same time, colluding with Bel, Ivy didn’t let me know how sick she was.
Again, it was Canopus who told me that in the end, when Bel couldn’t hide her pregnancy anymore, she hid out in a rented bungalow in Paradise, south of Vegas, until she gave birth to a child, which soon afterward she put up for adoption. He didn’t know when or where, exactly. Nor did anyone else who might have cared, so far as I knew; her uncle Junius, for example, didn’t even know that Bel and I had had a relationship, much less a child. The last time I talked to Bel was in a prearranged call, from one gas station pay phone to another, in February, 1956, nearly five months after we’d fled the ravine. With trucks roaring by on the interstate, and heavy static, I could barely hear her. I told her soon she would be well enough to travel to Mexico. Yes, I’ll be ready, she said through an ocean of static. Then we were cut off.
Finally Ivy assured me that she had gotten five thousand dollars and a pledge of secrecy out of the old lady who ran her uncle’s hotel. She sent me a check, but it was no good. I nearly got arrested trying to cash it at the bank in a town called Chiba, but I talked my way out of it. When I called Ivy about this, from another town, the sweat was pouring down my back. She heard me out, never denying anything or apologizing. She just waited, listening, and then put a knife through my heart.
Bel is dead, she said. Just like that. She died last night. In Paradise.
I didn’t care about the check anymore. About the police or anything else. I’ve never been much of a drinker. But I started drinking that day, alone, in Vega, Colorado, and I kept drinking, and I drove around as fast and hard as I could for two days and nights, trying to get myself killed. Except when you’re trying like that, you need some luck to get killed. Instead, I found myself sick and hungover in Boulder and the next thing I knew I had enlisted in the Air Force. You told me how you joined the Navy after the spider bit you, when you were at the end of your tether—it was something like that for me.
In fact, joining the Air Force probably saved my life. It certainly changed the course of it completely. And that’s what I wanted, if I wanted anything. Before I knew what hit me, I was stationed at a base near Bremen, in northern Germany, in the middle of winter. Two years later, I entered officer training school, specializing in navigation.
I never saw Ivy again, or my father. I don’t know any more now than I did then about where my mother Stella ended up. When I asked Canopus how he had come by his information, he just smiled and said he used to know people who knew such things—or something to that effect. Vague as he was, I believed him. For though he was motivated by vindictiveness (if he couldn’t hurt my father or Bel’s uncle, both of whom he despised, at least he could hurt me) and greed (promising that, for a modest amount, the secret of my having killed Dupont was safe with him), my gut tells me that Canopus didn’t invent the story of Bel’s having given birth to a child. From afar, I hired a detective to check the adoption agencies, but with so many agencies and so much confidentiality to cut through, a blind search was nearly impossible. So if such a child is still alive, I don’t see how I’ll ever cross paths with him. The trouble is, I don’t see how I’ll ever cross paths with you, either. And that is the fear which weighs heavily on me each day now.
16 October
As soon as I was on my feet again, Ji-Loq took me to the longhouse at the center of the village to meet the Bru elders. The village which was my home for so many months consisted of several dozen bamboo houses built in concentric circles in a clearing surrounded by dense forest. The design of the village was patterned after the heavens, which the Bru saw as a gigantic circular web in which the stars had been caught, like flies.
Like all the houses, the longhouse rested on six-foot stilts, protecting it from flash floods at that time of year. Protection from spirits came in a different form: as is customary in Bru villages, all the windows and doors were on one side of the houses—in this village, the western side. The Bru believed that evil spirits were only able to approach a village from one set direction, so they put access to their houses on the opposite side.
The interior walls of the longhouse were adorned with crossbows and the painted skulls of water buffaloes. The principal constellations of their zodiac were outlined in red chalk on a wooden disk fastened to the ceiling: a rat, a hawk, a scorpion, a fox, a tiger, and of course a water buffalo. At the center of the room, around a low fire in a circle of mud-bricks, a group of old men were sitting on thatch mats, smoking short clay pipes. They all had heavily tattooed faces and lizard bone earrings. In the corner, with his back to the others, a one-eyed man was squatting on his haunches mixing herbs in a wooden bowl by tallow light. He was the shaman, and he always wore only a loincloth and a blue hat. He never spoke to me or looked me directly in the eye. Beside the fire a green liquid simmered in a metal vat. This was reimu, the rice wine which as a visitor I was expected to drink before I could address the elders. The wine was sour and made my throat close up, every time.
In the amalgam of pidgin English and Vietnamese with which we communicated, I told the elders I appreciated all they had done for me, but that I needed to get to Quang Tri, and then Saigon, as soon as possible. I had waited for Nol to return and serve as my guide, but Ji-Loq told me he had rejoined his FULRO unit in Laos, near the Thai border, and would not be returning anytime soon. The fact I had saved his life was between him and me, so far as the elders were concerned. They had their own interests at heart, and their own plans for me. As I was about to find out.
The chief, a wiry man with long white hair named Ren, heard me out and then replied that, with all the foot trails washed out, no one could get out of the forest during the rainy season. Not even the Bru. Furthermore, Ren added, Ji-Loq had told the elders I could read the stars, and so I might be of some use to the tribe while I was waiting for the rains to stop. I didn’t like the sound of that, and I insisted that I was trained to traverse the jungle in the worst of conditions. Go ahead, the old man exhorted me, but no Bru could accompany me. Not during the rainy season.
And so for four more months I was held captive in all but name by my rescuers. To them my astral knowledge was magical, obviously acquired during my years as an aviator, flying among the stars. None of them had ever been in an airplane. They imagined the stars to be situated at a low altitude. They peppered me with questions about their sizes and distances from one another. Who was it who said the sun is the size of a human palm? The Bru believe the stars are no bigger than a man’s teeth. I explained to them the principle of a light-year, but the notion that starlight reaches us many thousands of years after it has been emitted was inconceivable to them. When I told Ren that the night sky is a window onto the past, he corrected me, saying, no, it is a map of the future. For the Bru, too, believe that you can foretell the future in stars.
On paper I showed Ren some of the basics of celestial navigation. He enjoyed posing problems: for example, how many stars had to be visible for me to navigate properly. He had never seen the ocean, and because he imagined it must reflect all the stars in the sky, causing endless confusion, he wondered how I could sail across it.
Every two weeks I was permitted another audience in the long-house. Each time I petitioned Ren and the others for an escort to Quang Tri, I got the same answer, politely but firmly. I was beginning to worry that when the rainy season did end, they still wouldn’t let me go. Especially when Ji-Loq let slip that perhaps before the next rainy season I could direct the construction of a wooden watchtower from which the stars might be observed more clearly. So, when I was sure I was strong enough, I took matters into my own hands. I had been telling Ren how easy it would be to cross the ocean using only
a pocket compass and the stars: now I’d find out if they would be enough to help me thread my way out of the mountains through forests so dense, with canopies so uniform, that they felt nocturnal at noon.
I picked a moonless night after the rains ended. Ji-Loq had long since stopped watching over me, and Nol’s relatives, on Ren’s orders, allowed me my privacy so that I might occupy myself—as he hoped—in astral meditations. Around 2 A.M. I slipped on my Air Force boots and vinyl poncho, neither of which I had worn since being brought to the village, packed some dried meat and yams into a pouch, stuck a machete in my belt, and set out along one of the hunters’ trails that zigzagged across the mountain.
The village dogs all knew me, and none of them barked. The Bru always kept two lookouts in tall trees, but they were on the other side of the village. Everyone else was asleep. For a moment, as I left the last house behind, I thought I saw the shaman in his blue hat peer at me from behind a tree, but when I looked more closely it was a snake coiled around the trunk. Hours later, feeling as if I had been closely followed from that point on, I wondered whether I had been right the first time.
I traveled as far from the village as I could that first night and morning. I didn’t stop to rest until the following afternoon—and then only for two hours. Ji-Loq’s medicine, all those black roots I chewed and the white moss she kept wrapping around my slashed ankle, had done their work. The ankle had healed well. I was out of shape, but I had tried to prepare myself for my trek by doing push-ups and sit-ups and running in place barefoot in my room every night over the previous few weeks. And it turned out I was strong enough to walk at a steady clip for two hours, rest a half hour, and then continue on. In this way I crossed the mountains from North to South Vietnam in five days. If Ren sent a search party after me, I had managed with phenomenal luck (for the Bru are tenacious trackers) to elude it. More likely, knowing the deadly difficulties of the terrain, he had written me off as a goner and decided not to waste time and energy in locating a corpse.
Once I was in the South, things got a lot tougher. First, I suffered acute fatigue from hunger. After stretching out the dried meat and yams for four days, I was eating plants and roots, as I had done with Nol, and beetles from under rocks, which I had been taught to do in Air Force survival courses. Lack of food aside, the heat exhausted me, and the dampness that penetrated my bones when I was curled up on the ground at night. After a couple of sleepless nights in a row, feverish again, drenched in sweat, I was lucky I could push on. But I wondered how long my luck would hold.
I had navigated a course south-by-southeast toward Quang Tri and followed it to the T, and I had not encountered another human being the entire way. Nor even the trace of a village. I was in country so wild that no one inhabited it and no one was fighting over it—a small miracle in Vietnam. The air teemed with mosquitoes bigger than moths. In the lowland swamps, water rats proliferated, their yellow eyes shining even by day. And every night I had to pick the leeches from my legs. I saw monkeys in packs and giant lizards that walked on their hind legs. And even a tiger at one point, fording a river, about whom I felt a thrill of fear, thinking It’s Bok-Klia and because I ran away, offending the Bru, he’s come for me. If that was the case, I even managed to elude him, for no volley of orange-and-black feathered arrows materialized.
On the seventh day after I left the village, I came on the first signs of the war I had seen since escaping the Pathet Lao: a line of bomb craters along a dirt road, a riverbed red with chemical residue, and a smoldering barren expanse where an entire valley had been napalmed, maybe a week earlier. In a matter of a single mile, the wilderness turned into a wasteland.
Until then I had been wary of wild beasts: now I had to be wary of men, which was far worse. Dressed as I was, in loose Bru clothing and my poncho, I could easily be shot on sight by either side. Certainly, in an active battle zone, the NVA would ask no questions. And no GI would have any reason to think me an American. Not to mention the fact the bombers might return. I knew that they rarely hit a target area just once. Those craters could have been left by payloads from Phantom F-4s, T-28s, Skyraiders. Or even B-52s out of Guam.
As twilight descended that day, I heard gunfire—the first since I had been shot down. At first, sporadic small arms, maybe a mile off. Then a real firefight that made the hair bristle on the back of my neck. I couldn’t tell if I was walking toward, or away from, the firefight. All I knew was that it was growing louder by the minute. Approaching me faster than I was approaching it. I was nearing jungle again, the darkness deepening, when suddenly the gunfire tapered off. Maybe too suddenly. Just a lull.
The good news about the fighting was it meant both sides were in the area. The bad news was that when I did encounter the NVA, they’d see me before I saw them.
The moment I entered the jungle again, all hell broke loose. Flares lit up the treetops and gunfire flashed on either side of me. First I hit the ground. Then, when I heard gunfire behind me as well, I jumped up and began zigzagging as fast as I could through the trees. I fell twice in the brush. I heard shouts and a scream far to my left and veered in the other direction. Finally the fighting seemed well behind me.
After crouching behind a fallen tree to catch my breath, I sprinted off again and immediately felt a tremendous blow, and then an explosion of blood, in my left leg. I never heard the shots that caught me in quick succession just above the knee. Maybe the sniper was in a tree a thousand yards off, or a foxhole fifty feet away. I know I screamed, but I couldn’t hear that either as my body crumpled and the jungle, upside-down, flew away from me and the wet grass swallowed me up.
When I opened my eyes again, I smelled the iodine that someone was pouring onto my wounds. He was an American medic with a red cross on his helmet. I was on a stretcher. In a clearing. Beside six other stretchers with shot-up GIs in battle gear. It was night and several lanterns lit a circle around us. A tremendous racket started up just outside the circle. A Jolly Green Giant helicopter revving its blades. The Army’s going to take you home, fly-boy, the medic said. The first words of English spoken to me in months. And they lifted me into the chopper and we rose straight up over the trees into the black sky.
I must have passed out again, because the next thing I remember is being indoors looking up at a nurse. I was on a cot in the field hospital at Quang Tri, the postsurgical ward. My leg was throbbing and my head felt on fire. A bare lightbulb burned behind her, so I couldn’t see the nurse’s face, just her silhouette. The electric lights hurt my eyes. Everything else ached as well when I lifted my hand toward the nurse. In her palm she was holding the bullets they had taken from my leg, which, as they put me under, I asked the surgeons to save for me.
I thought it was you, Mala, standing there beside me, and my heart leapt. Then the nurse leaned closer and her face came clear. And now, a year later, I still wake up from dreams thinking it was you there with me in Quang Tri. Feeling you take my hand. Feeling your breath on my cheek.
17 October
In Honolulu six months later I looked everywhere for you. Bribed, pleaded, pulled rank, pulled strings. I requisitioned files. Demanded interviews. Questioned people who had been on the Repose with you. And others who encountered you in Honolulu. Yet I learned very little. You had a hospital stay. You received an honorable discharge. After that, nothing. As far as the Navy was concerned, your last known address was the Admiral Perry Hospital. They couldn’t find you, they said; that wasn’t their business. If you contacted them, they would notify me. If I wrote to you, they would hold the letter until they could forward it.
Here in Albuquerque it’s 6 A.M. I’m checking out of the Hotel Rigel in an hour. They tell me I’m the last guest. I have two more days’ leave. I lay awake last night thinking how close I was to Vegas, and to Reno. I flew into Holloman Air Force Base, near the Mexican border, before driving up here. At nine o’clock I’ll be flying to Chicago for a night, and then on to North Dakota. That’s where I take up my next assignment. I had my pick
because of my war record. Never mind that I never completed my surveillance mission: for getting shot down and wounded again, for being captured and escaping, I was awarded that Distinguished Flying Cross the CO in Saigon had dangled. A big-ticket item, he called it.
It was my ticket back to aerial observation. Not high-altitude espionage, but cartography. First I’ll have a desk job until my leg heals completely. Then I’ll be charting remote places from the sky, far from North America and Southeast Asia. Most likely working out of New Zealand. After being in the war, this is the only assignment I would even consider; if I hadn’t gotten it, I would have resigned my commission. And that would have been a shock. The only legitimate employer I’ve ever had is the Air Force. When my life blew up on me, the first time, the military gave me enough structure so that I didn’t lose my mind. Now that my life’s blown up on me again—especially in my losing you—I need that same structure more than ever.
One night in Manila when I was dreaming beside you, I was sure you had entered my dreams. As a kind of observer yourself. Was it the dream of Dupont in the burning car at the ravine that you saw? I dreamed it often back then. I rarely do now. Now I dream of waking up in Manila that last morning when you were still asleep. Of needing every ounce of my strength to leave you in bed and dress and drive to Luzon. Of wanting to run away with you. To Malaysia. Or Indonesia. The thousands of islands where no one would ever have found us. Or the chaos of some provincial town. To run away as my mother did. I can still see you lying there just before I woke you. And I still go cold with the fear which filled me at that moment. That I would never see you again. That what has happened would happen.
A Trip to the Stars Page 52
