The Refugees

by Viet Thanh Nguyen

  Becoming stupider was a consequence of age for which he was unprepared. With age was supposed to come wisdom, but he wasn’t certain what wisdom felt like, whereas intelligence he knew to be a constant firing of the synapses, the brain a six-barreled Gatling gun of activity. Now his mind was shooting thoughts through only one or two barrels. He hadn’t been this slow since Claire and William were newborns, their nighttime neediness calling him from his sleep. Now his son was twenty-eight, and Carver dated the beginning of his decline to William’s graduation from the Air Force Academy six years ago, one of the proudest moments in Carver’s life. William had also become a pilot, but he was unhappy flying a KC-135, refueling bombers and fighters patrolling the skies of Iraq and Afghanistan. “It’s boring, Dad,” William had said over the phone during their last conversation. “I’m a truck driver.”

  “Truck driving is good,” Carver said. “Truck driving is honorable.”

  Most important, flying a tanker was safe, unlike Carver’s own job during his military years when he piloted a B-52, an ungainly blue whale of a plane that he loved with an intensity still felt as a lingering hunger. During different tours in the late sixties and early seventies, he launched from Guam, Okinawa, and Thailand, never finding himself freer than in the cockpit’s tight squeeze, entrusted with a majestic machine carrying within its womb thirty tons of iron bombs, and yet for all that vulnerable as a Greek demigod. Two bombers of his wing had collided with each other over the South China Sea, the bodies of the crews lost forever, while another B-52 in his cell was transformed into a flaming cross as it fell in the night sky, tail clipped by a surface-to-air missile, the two survivors spending the next four years in the Hanoi Hilton. Better to be safe, Carver wanted to tell William, but he refrained. William would hear the lie. As an airman, William knew that if his father could live life all over again, Carver wouldn’t hesitate to crawl once more through the narrow breech in the paunch of the B-52’s fuselage, the entry never failing to make him quiver with anticipation.

  The next morning Claire hired a van to take her parents on the two-hour ride to Quang Tri, where she was living and where Legaspi’s demining operation was based. When Claire showed them her studio apartment, Carver was relieved to see only a twin-sized bed, shrouded behind a mosquito net. A window and narrow horizontal slits at the top of the high walls provided ventilation, the air pushed about by a ceiling fan that rotated as slowly as a chicken on a spit. The kitchen consisted of a heat-scarred, two-burner portable gas stove on a countertop with black veins in the grouting, while the bathroom had no separate shower stall, only a drain in the floor next to the toilet, the showerhead on a hose. Posters of rock bands—Dengue Fever, Death Cab for Cutie, Hot Hot Heat—papered the walls above the cinder blocks and wood boards where Claire shelved her clothing.

  “Couldn’t you find a better place, dear?” Michiko fanned herself with her sun hat. “You don’t even have an air conditioner.”

  “This is better than what most people have. Even if people could afford this place, there’d be an entire family in here.”

  “You’re not a native,” Carver said. “You’re an American.”

  “That’s a problem I’m trying to correct.”

  Recalling a lesson from the couples therapy Michiko had persuaded him to attend, Carver counted down from ten. Claire watched with her arms crossed, face as impassive as it was when he spanked her in her childhood, or shouted at her in the teenage years when she repeatedly crossed whatever line he’d drawn.

  “Enough, you two,” Michiko said. “People are always a little cranky without their coffee, aren’t they?”

  Claire’s apartment was situated above a café. Carver sipped black coffee on ice at their sidewalk table, squatting on a plastic stool and watching Michiko spend five dollars buying postcards and lighters from four barefoot children, dark as dust, who bounded up the moment they sat down. After their sales, the quartet retreated a few feet and stood with their backs to a row of parked motorbikes, giggling and staring.

  “Haven’t they seen tourists before?” Carver said.

  “Not like us.” Claire unsealed a pack of cigarettes and lit one. “We’re a mixed bag.”

  “They don’t know what to make of us?” Michiko said.

  “I’m used to it, but you’re not.”

  “Try being a Japanese wife at a Michigan air base in 1973.”

  “Touché,” Claire said.

  “Try being a black man in Japan,” Carver said. “Or Thailand.”

  “But you could always go home,” Claire said. “There was always a place for you somewhere. But there’s never been a place for me.”

  She said it matter-of-factly, without any of the melodrama of her adolescence, when she would come home from school sobbing at a slight from a peer or a stranger, some variation along the line of What are you? Her tears agonized Carver, making him feel guilty for delivering her into a world determined to put everybody in her proper place. He wanted to find the culprit who had hurt his daughter and beat some sense into the kid’s head, but he restrained himself, as he had whenever he encountered the look in people’s eyes that said What are you doing here? In the one-room library of the small town five miles down the road from his hamlet; at Penn State, which he attended on an ROTC scholarship; in flight school at Randolph Air Force Base; in an airman’s uniform; in his B-52 and later his Boeing airliner, he was never where he was supposed to be. He had survived by focusing on his goal, ascending ever higher, refusing to see the sneers and doubt in his peripheral vision.

  But now retired, limping out of his sixties, he no longer knew what his goal should be. He envied Claire her sense of mission, teaching English to people as poor as the dirt farmers and sharecroppers of his childhood, their skin as brown and cracked as the soil they tilled, the desiccated earth of summer’s oppressive months. She exhibited a confidence that pleased him as he watched her hail a taxi, give directions in Vietnamese to the English school, and greet the students clustered in the courtyard under the shade of flame trees. When Claire gestured at Carver and Michiko and said something in the local language, the students greeted them in pitch-perfect English. “Hello!” “How are you!” “Good morning, Mr. and Mrs. Carver!” Carver smiled at them and waved back. Smiling at your relatives never got you very far, but smiling at strangers and acquaintances sometimes did.

  A few doors down the colonnade from the courtyard was Claire’s classroom, her wooden desk confronting several rows of short tables and benches. Acne scars of white plaster were visible, the yellow paint of the walls having peeled away in a multitude of places. On the blackboard behind the desk, someone—it must have been Claire herself—had written “The Passive Voice” in big, bold letters. Underneath was written “my bicycle was stolen” and “mistakes were made.”

  “How many students do you have, dear?” Michiko said.

  “Four classes of thirty each.”

  “That’s too much,” Carver said. “You’re not paid enough to do that.”

  “They really want to learn. And I really want to teach.”

  “So you’ve been here two years.” Carver toed a slab of tile flaking loose from the floor. “How much longer are you planning to stay?”

  “Indefinitely.”

  “What do you mean, indefinitely?”

  “I like it here, Dad.”

  “You like it here,” Carver said. “Look at this place.”

  Claire deliberately swept her gaze over her classroom. “I’m looking.”

  “What your father means is that we want you back home because we love you.”

  “That’s what I mean.”

  “I am home, Mom. It sounds strange, I don’t know how to put it, but I feel like this is where I’m supposed to be. I have a Vietnamese soul.”

  “That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard,” Carver shouted.

  “It’s not stupid,” Cla
ire hissed. “Don’t say that. You always say that.”

  “Name three times I’ve said that.”

  “When I left Maine for school.” Claire held up three fingers of her right hand and slowly curled each one into her palm as she counted the times, ending up with a balled fist. “When I majored in women’s studies. When I told you I was going to Vietnam to teach. And those are just the most recent ones to come to mind.”

  “But those things are stupid.”

  “Oh, God, God, God.” Claire beat her fist on her forehead. “Why do I ever think things will be different with you?”

  “For Chrissakes,” Carver muttered. Whispering drew his attention to the door, where a handful of the students had clustered. Claire wiped tears from her eyes. “Look! Now you’ve made me lose face with them.”

  “Lose face?” Carver said. “You really do think you’re turning into one of them.”

  “Shut up, James.” Michiko pushed by him to offer Claire a tissue. “I think we’ve had just about enough family time together, don’t you?”

  While Claire escorted Michiko on a shopping expedition for local textiles, Carver was forced to entertain himself, a problem since there was nothing to recommend Quang Tri to the foreign visitor except its proximity to the old Demilitarized Zone. The city was just a provincial town that had been destroyed in the course of the war and, from all reports, there had not been that much to see before its destruction. Carver passed the time sitting at a bar’s sidewalk patio and watching local boys play soccer on a patch of grass. By the time the monsoon arrived in the afternoon, he had drunk enough 33 Beer to remind himself that nothing had changed since he had drunk it in Thailand over thirty years ago. If you’re going to bomb a country, his roommate in U-Tapao had said, you should at least drink its beer. It was insipid then and it was insipid now. As curtains of rain swept over the road, he ordered a bottle of Hue instead. Watching the water flooding through the gutters, Carver longed for his clapboard cottage on the shore of Basin Cove, autumn waving its metamorphosing wand over the forest’s greenery. That new world of crimson and gold receded even further when the lady who ran the market next to the bar turned up the volume of her radio. Above the relentless hammering of the rain, a woman’s high-pitched voice whined in accompaniment with what sounded like a xylophone, the music pregnant with sorrow, although perhaps it was only Carver who heard a lamentation where there was none.

  The demining site was half an hour from their hotel in Quang Tri the next afternoon, far beyond the outskirts of the city. Legaspi had promised to pick them up in a white buffalo, and when Carver had asked him if he really meant a white buffalo, Legaspi had winked and said, “You’ll see.” The white buffalo turned out to be a white Toyota Land Cruiser speckled with measles of rust, its counter reading over 300,000 kilometers.

  “Locals call these things white buffalo because they’re as plentiful as white buffalo,” Legaspi said from the driver’s seat. “The foreigners and the NGOs and the UN love the Land Cruiser.”

  “Donor money,” Carver said. “All the doughnuts and four-wheel drives you can buy.”

  “Pretty much, Mr. Carver.”

  Michiko and Claire sat in the backseat, Carver in the front. Lining the road outside Quang Tri were one- and two-story homes of faded wood and corrugated tin, a few freshly painted and plastered mini-mansions towering over their primitive neighbors, all of them long and narrow. Occasionally a cemetery or a temple came into view, encrusted with dragonesque architectural filigree, as well as a couple of churches, their ascetic walls plain and whitewashed.

  The flat fields behind the homes were mostly devoid of trees and shade, some of the plots growing rice and the others devoted to crops Carver did not recognize, their color the dull, muted green of an algae bloom, the countryside nowhere near as lush and verdant as the Thai landscape visible from Carver’s cockpit window as his B-52 ascended over the waters of Thale Sap Songkhla, destined for the enemy cities of the north or the Plain of Jars. There was a reason he loved flying. Almost everything looked more beautiful from a distance, the earth becoming ever more perfect as one ascended and came closer to seeing the world from God’s eyes, man’s hovels and palaces disappearing, the peaks and valleys of geography fading to become strokes of a paintbrush on a divine sphere. But seen up close, from this height, the countryside was so poor that the poverty was neither picturesque nor pastoral: tin-roofed shacks with dirt floors, a man pulling up the leg of his shorts to urinate on a wall, laborers wearing slippers as they pushed wheelbarrows full of bricks. When Carver rolled down his window, he discovered that the smell of the countryside was just as unpleasant, the air thick with blasts of soot from passing trucks, the rot of buffalo dung, the fermentation of the local cuisine that he found briny and nauseating. All of the sights, sounds, and smells depressed Carver, along with Claire’s and Michiko’s silent treatment of him, unrelenting since yesterday.

  Only Legaspi was attentive, playing Giant Steps on the stereo, undoubtedly informed by Claire of her father’s love for bebop, the way the music flowed directly from his ear canal into his bloodstream. Of all the lands Carver had encountered, he liked France and Japan the most because of the natives’ enthusiastic appreciation of jazz, an admiration they extended to him. He regarded it as fate that he had met Michiko at a jazz bar in Roppongi, she a teenage waitress and he a decade older, on R & R from Okinawa, wowed by the sight of Japanese musicians sporting porkpie hats and soul patches.

  “How did you sleep, Mr. Carver?”

  “Not so well.” Carver was pleased someone cared enough to inquire. “I kept waking up.”

  “Bad dreams?”

  Carver hesitated. “Just restless. Confusing.”

  No one asked him what he had dreamed, so he said no more. They reached the demining site ten minutes later, half a kilometer off the main blacktopped road, down an earthen track to a small house and a trio of shacks on the edge of a barren acre fenced with barbed wire. As the Land Cruiser pulled up, two teenage boys leaped from hammocks strung between two jackfruit trees. Carver immediately forgot their names after the introductions. They wore oversize shorts and anomalous T-shirts, one emblazoned with the Edmonton Oilers logo, the other commemorating a 1987 Bryan Adams concert tour. The taller one’s prosthetic arm was joined with the human part at the elbow, while the other’s prosthetic leg extended to mid-thigh. Carver nicknamed the tall one Tom and the shorter one Jerry, the same names he and his U-Tapao roommate, a Swede from Minnesota, had bestowed on their houseboys.

  “They lost them playing with cluster bomblets when they were kids,” Legaspi explained. Tom and Jerry smiled shyly, their prostheses appearing to be borrowed from mannequins, the café au lait color of the plastic not an exact match for their milk chocolate skin. What spooked Carver about the detachable limbs was not just their mismatched color, but their hairlessness. “They guard the site and look after the mongooses.”

  “Not mongeese?” Michiko said.

  “Definitely mongooses, Mrs. Carver.”

  The mongoose Tom fetched from one of the shacks was named Ricky, feline in size but with a more luxuriant coat of fur and the angular, wedge-shaped head of a mouse. “We use a mongoose because it is too light to trip a mine,” Legaspi said. “Meanwhile, its sense of smell is acute enough to detect explosives.”

  Jerry carried out a pair of robots from another shack. Instead of being the sleek, stainless steel machines Carver expected, the robots were cobbled together from what looked like two tin milk shakes, joined mouth-to-mouth, each milk shake sporting a pair of legs made from rubber hose. Like a draft of horses, the two robots were harnessed side-by-side, braced front and back by iron rods. The forward rod was attached to a round blue disc the size of a Frisbee, with Ricky yoked to the blue disc via a rubber vest, the entire robot-and-mongoose affair no more than a meter long and half that in width.

  “I steer the robots with this remote control.” Legaspi
held up a palm-sized black box of the type William had used to fly his model planes. “Ricky sniffs for the mines. The blue disc is the impediment sensor, and when it tells the robots something is blocking the way, the robots steer Ricky away from the obstacle. And when Ricky smells a mine, which he can do from three meters, he sits up.”

  “That’s ingenious,” Michiko exclaimed.

  “My adviser developed it to demine in Sri Lanka. But we’re experimenting with the robot and mongoose here, too.”

  “So what are you still testing?” said Carver.

  “The legs. It’s very difficult to mimic the locomotion of human or animal legs, especially over rough terrain. Having a robot vacuum your living room floor or climb some steps is completely different from having it deal with sand, or grass, or rocks, or any unexpected thing even a five-year-old knows how to get around.”

  The field was planted with defused landmines. At the perimeter of the field Legaspi piloted the robot and mongoose team from under a tent, under which Claire, Michiko, and Carver also stood. Tom and Jerry followed the mongoose as it scuttled over the terrain, Tom with a metal detector strapped to his back, Jerry with a quiver full of red flags. Whenever Ricky stopped and stood up on his hind legs, Tom stepped in with the metal detector to confirm the landmine’s existence, and Jerry marked it with a red flag.

  “A human team would take months to clear out this area,” said Legaspi. The back of his linen shirt was stained with sweat, the air humid even though the sky was gray and overcast. “You could bulldoze, but that tears up the topsoil and ruins it for farming. We can clear this in a couple of weeks for a small fraction of the cost.”

  Carver watched Legaspi and Claire as the humanitarian jargon of cost efficiency, improvement of the land, moral obligation, employment of local technicians, and so on spooled forth. The light and focus in Claire’s eyes as she watched Legaspi were the same in Michiko’s when Carver told her on their first date about driving from State College to New York City to catch Thelonious Monk at the Five Spot Café on St. Mark’s Place, where he stood close enough to see the yellow half-moons of Monk’s cuticles against white ivory. The great man’s genius had rubbed off on him enough to shine and catch hold of Michiko’s gaze. It was the same with Legaspi, borrowing someone else’s ideas, and this was enough for Claire.