The Price of Blood

by Chuck Logan

  “Yeah,” said Trin. He barked to Trung Si, who barked back, and they had a heated discussion that Broker couldn’t understand. In the end, the old man, bitching, and refusing Broker’s offer of help, stalked off one-legged with a tool box, a battery, and a five-gallon tin of gasoline piled in a small wagon that he insisted on pulling all alone. His loud alien profanity carried up from the beach as he thumped down the dock. In a few minutes the engine coughed under a cloud of smoke. One by one the cylinders kicked in like firecrackers. Trung Si threw off the lines and reversed the old boat into the cove. He piloted the tub in a circle.

  “That thing won’t take the sea,” said Broker.

  “No, it’s a river boat,” said Trin.

  Trung Si made a dock landing, secured the boat, killed the engine, and jerked back up the beach, still swearing.

  “What’d he say?” asked Broker.

  “He says why fish when we have meat.” Trin pointed to an old bolt action hunting rifle hanging from a peg on the wall. “They took the truck up north yesterday and got a deer in the hills. So we’ll have venison tonight. Right now we should try to get some sleep. It’s going to be a long night.”

  Broker didn’t want to sleep. He wanted to keep busy. His eyes wandered up the beach, into the dunes. He’d never felt desolation like this. He didn’t know what to call it. Nina’s earlobe was a dry lump in the napkin in his pocket. Morbid. Didn’t know what to do with it. Hang on to it until he saw her again.

  “I know,” said Trin gently. “You’re worried about her. And you’re worried about me. You’re afraid to go to sleep because Trung Si and I might brain you with a skillet and take your map. There’s a lot to worry about. Always.”

  “Don’t like being this helpless,” said Broker.

  “We’re not helpless. And she’s tough. It doesn’t do any good to dwell on it. We have what they want. Tonight we’ll go find it.” Trin paused and bit his lip. He cleared his throat. “I should have a look at that map, Phil.”

  Broker unzipped his security pouch and unfolded the worn laminated sheet. Trin placed it on a table on the porch and secured the edges with sea shells. “We’re here,” he pointed.

  Broker tapped the grid square that he’d memorized. “We look for three old graves, with the curved walls.”

  “That puts it about four klics up the beach.” Trin smiled. “That close. All these years. There’s a road we can take most of the way that ends at an abandoned hamlet. Here.” He pointed.

  “We need a compass,” said Broker.

  “No problem,” said Trin. “I’ll line up the tools. You try to rest.”

  Broker looked up. Trung Si hovered over him. “You better let him look at your thumb,” said Trin.

  The old cripple untaped the slightly swollen, infected finger, rinsed it in rice whiskey and went back to his cook shack. He returned and applied a foul-smelling poultice and bandaged it tightly with adhesive.

  “What is it?” Broker asked.

  Trin shrugged. “I’m a city guy. Who knows what they do out here.”

  The home had one long room with a cook shack built off the back. A dozen sleeping platforms lined the walls, partitioned off for privacy. Broker lay on a hard plank platform across from the silent brooding amputee and couldn’t sleep. At least the steady sea breeze fended off most of the flies. Nothing could dilute the rancid odor of years of accumulated nuoc mam sauce that smelled like dirty pussy. The dressing on his thumb itched and tingled.

  Trung Si puttered and hummed in the kitchen. Trin swayed in a hammock on the porch—twelve-stepping it after his explosion in Dong Ha—drinking Pepsi-Cola from a can.

  Sleep wouldn’t come. Broker couldn’t stop imagining, in great detail, all ways in which Nina could be dead, injured, debased, violated, and tortured. He had fifteen years of crime scenes to draw from. He didn’t think restraint was part of Cyrus LaPorte’s method of operation. Not with Bevode Fret for the hired help.

  Mercy was not an option.

  Basic desperation was a new sensation that he explored like a wild animal inspects its cage. He was stuck on this foreign spit of sand in the middle of nowhere with flies crawling over his skin. In the graveyard of the fucking iron elephants. He had lost initiative: now he was controlled by events. Cripples and barely trained kids for backup. A shipwreck named Trin for company.

  The fixed eyes of the double amputee stared past him, through him, a brown study in dead ends. Broker fell asleep to escape the man’s presence.

  Broker woke with a start and didn’t know where he was. He heard the chug of motors and faint voices. Fishing boats. A battered varnish face—the one-legged, one-eyed man loomed over him. “Nuc,” said Trung Si. He made a scrubbing motion to his face with his hand. “Rua.” His crutch banged a bucket of water at the foot of the platform.

  Broker nodded, rolled off the plank bed, and squatted to the bucket. He stripped off his T-shirt and dashed water on his face. Something missing. The staring double amputee was gone.

  Trung Si jerked energetically into the room with the pogo stick grace of a one-legged stork, both hands free, his crutch wedged in his armpit. He handed Broker a small glass bottle with a glass stopper. Broker opened the bottle and smelled moonshine, home-brewed million-proof rice whiskey. Then the old man pointed at Broker’s trousers and raised his hand to the side of his head and tugged on his ear.

  After several demonstrations Broker understood. Trin must have told him. He removed the napkin from his pocket. Trung Si unpacked the shriveling ear part and earring and cleaned off clinging bits of thread and dirt. Then he dropped the grisly memento into the glass jar, which he plugged tight. He set the bottle on a shelf.

  Then he brought a charcoal brazier from the kitchen shack and set it on the table on the porch. He put a screen over it and laid out strips of meat.

  “Trin?” asked Broker.

  “Yes,” said Trung Si, smiling, and going back to his kitchen. He hopped back with a tall glass of steaming black coffee.

  “Where’s Trin?” asked Broker, blanking out on even the simplest Vietnamese.

  “Yes,” said Trung Si, again smiling politely. He gave Broker the glass and pointed to the porch. Broker went out on the porch and sat down, lit a cigarette, and watched the afternoon shadows lengthen down the beach. A rattle of metal preceded Trin, who came around the corner of the house looking like the Tin Man in The Wizard of Oz, loaded down with a fuel oil lantern, a tin of fuel, two short shovels, a longer-handled shovel, two mattocks, a coil of rope, and two huge banging buckets.

  Trung Si muttered something.

  Trin held up one of the short snub-nosed shovels. An old surplus North Vietnamese army shovel. It was worn from use and the wooden handle had been shined smooth by sweat and callus. He laughed. “Trung Si says this shovel won the war.”

  They sat down to eat, picking strips of meat off the brazier and mixing it with rice and raw vegetables laced with cilantro and chopped chilies and garlic. Flies settled on the table. Trung Si grumbled and shooed them with his chopsticks. The slender sticks flicked; he shot out a hand and plucked a single fly from midair. He flashed a grin at Broker and tossed the crushed insect aside.

  The sound startled Broker. At first, lulled by the surf, he thought it was the call of a loon. Then he located the source and saw the double amputee sitting on a dune up the beach, bent over a bamboo flute. His wide face shone in the muzzy light, fiery with music.

  Trin smiled. “It is a very old song. For us.”

  The notes were a sinuous blend of pastoral and savage and Broker, who came from a place where old didn’t really mean “old,” asked, “How old?”

  “Oh, a thousand years. It’s a village song. A young man takes a wife but then he must go to the mountains to fight the invaders.” The cripple’s breath soared through the wooden flute like adrenaline in a fighting man’s blood.

  “Do you live here?” Broker asked.

  “Sometimes. I have a room in Hue. A bed, a desk, a chair, and some books.” Tr
in squinted in the failing light. “Don’t worry. I’m good.” He held up his Pepsi can as evidence.

  Then it was time to go. Trin handed Broker a bucket packed with a tall Chinese Thermos, two flashlights, six liters of bottled water, and some kind of lunch wrapped in bamboo leaves. Trin picked up a similarly packed bucket. They both grabbed a shovel and a mattock.

  “Compass,” said Broker.

  “In my pocket.”

  Trung Si took the hunting rifle off the peg on the wall and loaded it. Trin said, “We’ll post Trung Si up the trail from the beach. If anybody comes he’ll signal.”

  Trung Si shouldered his ancient rifle. The flute marched them through the long shadows as they walked up the sandy track to the van. Without speaking, Trin guided the van through the dunes keeping to a faint trail. He stopped twice to consult the map. The third time he stopped for good by the skeletons of abandoned houses, foundations, and one wall that framed a solitary window. “Trung Si waits here. Now we walk,” he said. “It should be up there, in the willows.”

  Silently, Trung Si hobbled over to a block of cement sticking from an old foundation and sat down with his rifle. With their tools and loaded buckets Trin and Broker headed toward the slosh of breakers rolling on the beach. Except for the bang of tin on steel and the rhythm of the sea it was perfectly still.

  “Are we walking on bombs?” asked Broker.

  “Iron elephants,” grinned Trin. “A whole herd of them sleeping below us.”

  Broker stopped and stared. Just ahead. Hundreds of raised rectangular stone markers slept in the wind-rippled dunes. The low walls of the military cemetery were irregular, slurred in the sand. The central monument was shorter, squatter than the others he’d seen. The sand and salt wind had eaten the color from the pitted stone star. It sparkled, a gritty molten ocher, in the rays of the dying sun.

  He picked his way carefully through the field of stone and sand, and suddenly he stopped and cocked an ear at the vast silence. It occurred to him. He hadn’t heard a single helicopter since he’d arrived in Vietnam.

  They left the boneyard behind and walked up a slight rise, ankle deep in sand. Trin stopped, studied Jimmy Tuna’s map and pointed. “There are your graves.”

  Just like Jimmy said. Three old graves. Gray and embroidered with moss and big around as wrestling rings. A masonry screen blocked the entry to each tomb. Inside the walls, a simple circular cairn of rock.

  “Jimmy chose well,” said Trin. Below the graves the beach tucked in a gentle sloped ravine for two hundred yards down to the waterline. The sea in front of them was quiet, shielded on either side by natural breakwaters.

  You could see how it happened. The encircling arms of the cove would catch the eye from a helicopter, the inviting fold of the ravine, probably with higher walls twenty years ago. Drop the sling into the ravine, set the charges and drop several tons of sand over the load.

  Pirate cove.

  Broker walked around the screen and entered the center grave. Trin tossed him the compass. Broker shot his azimuth and extended his arm down the beach. “Eighty-two paces,” he said. Trin took the long-handled shovel and Broker called out adjustments as he walked it off.

  Trin stopped and thrust the shovel into the sand about fifty yards from the water’s edge. He trudged back up the slope. “Now we wait for dark,” said Trin.

  They sat down in the shadow of the tombs and waited. Broker opened the Thermos from his bucket and poured a cup of coffee. Trin opened his Thermos. Broker steered it under his nose. Sniffed it.

  “Hot tea,” said Trin.

  The desolation was deceptive. The surf breaking on either side of the cove sounded like a Superbowl crowd. He said, “Ray’s down there.”

  “His bones are. They should be returned to his family.” Trin rubbed his chin and looked around. “Do you think she’ll talk?”

  “She’d die first.”

  “Do you love her?”

  “I came here with her. And that’s crazy—”

  “Love is yes or no,” said Trin.

  “I’m afraid to be in love with her,” admitted Broker.

  “I know what you mean. Once I bit into a chili pepper that was really hot. My wife said, ‘But not as hot as me.’”

  “I thought you were divorced?”

  “We are used to long struggles in Vietnam,” said Trin dramatically. “She has been very arrogant the last twenty years. But things are changing and I will come back into fashion.”

  Trin’s grandiose words sounded like more folly. Broker leaned into the warm sand and sifted it through his fingers; dry damn featherbed where hundreds of unknown North Vietnamese soldiers slept with the iron elephants and stood sentinel over a cache of buried gold. Nina’s life…trickling away through his fingers.

  Sunset bronzed the sand dunes one last time and boiled the blue out of the sea. Dark soon. Broker cashed in his single chip of hope.

  “We have one chance,” he said. “Cyrus’s wife.”

  Trin squinted. “Something you didn’t tell me?”

  “She may help us. She’d like to be a rich widow.”

  Trin grinned. “You have an agent in their camp.”

  “Maybe. She’ll swing to whoever wins.”

  “God, this is so crazy.” Trin’s face glowed in the last sputter of sunset. “I’ve wanted to do something like this all my life.”

  He pulled the gold tiger tooth from his pocket and held it in both hands. Shoulders touching, they laughed and leaned forward. Down below, the long shadow of the shovel planted in the sand crept slowly toward the sea.

  63

  WHEN IT WAS DARK THEY RUBBED ON MOSQUITO repellent, picked up their tools, and walked down to the beach. Like the flute player’s march, the night was older here, blacker. Looking up, Broker did not know the stars. A steady breeze came off the sea.

  Trin stamped a circle around the shovel and pulled it from the sand. A lopsided moon delineated their faces. Trin drove the shovel into the sand.

  Broker hefted the mattock and gauged the ache in his taped thumb. He swung into the packed sand and grunted. He’d be all right.

  Besides the sea, the only sounds were the thud of the mattock loosening the sand and the sigh of sand on steel as Trin’s shovel moved it aside. When they had made a hole six feet in diameter they both worked on their knees with the short shovels. Sweat and sand made a sodden paste of Broker’s T-shirt and their breath came in short, regular bursts. Giddy, Broker imagined a grown elephant frozen, tusks extended, in full rampant charge just below his feet. He calculated the circumference of a B-52 crater, about thirty-feet across. Poof. A powder of crimson ash would sprinkle down on the South China Sea.

  “Remember how Jimmy loved booby traps?” said Broker.

  “Dig,” said Trin.

  After a while they passed a slippery water bottle and fell back, resting their dripping backs against the damp sand. Shoulder deep in the pit and bugs had started to find them. Trin reached up into his bucket and jammed a bundle of incense sticks into a shelf of sand. Lit them. The smoke sought them out and curled, tickling their drenched bodies, and seeped into the dark.

  Broker wondered if Mama Pryce was really down there, below his feet, and if he could read smoke after twenty years.

  It was getting impossible for both of them to work in the pit. Trin stayed in the hole. Broker lowered a bucket on a rope and hauled out loads of sand. The hole was now six feet deep, narrower at the bottom. Trin had hacked a place for the lantern and looked like a copper cave dweller toiling in the weak light.

  Exhausted, they took a break and staggered down to the sea and fell in. Back on the beach, they sat, gobbling the rice balls Trung Si had prepared for them as they dried off. Washed them down with bottled water.

  “Beach could have shifted,” said Broker. “It could be anywhere.”

  “Start another hole,” said Trin.

  They were getting slap-happy. But they started a second pit. It was close to midnight. They had been digging for almos
t four hours. An hour into the second site Trin decided to return to the first pit. Broker resumed hauling up the buckets.

  Ludicrous. The waves breaking on the sand chanted, cynical—Yo ho ho and a bottle of rum. Broker dug on the desperate word of a dead man who his whole life had loved to play jokes. The veins had turned to acid wires in his arms, his tendons were yanking out of his joints; fingers were webbed, cramped, fusing together.

  Trin had stopped digging and sprawled back on his haunches, arms dead at his sides. Spent. The pit angled now, back toward the three graves like evidence of slipping focus. The walls kept caving in. The lantern sputtered and died. Trin refilled it. Broker sprawled with his head hanging over the edge.

  “I think we’ve had it,” said Broker deliriously. Below him, Trin giggled. Broker pushed up on his elbows and rolled over and stared up at the stars. Low in the south he thought he saw the Southern Cross.

  He’d always been a working-stiff existentialist. Attuned to the buttons and unbuttonings of the absurd. He and Sisyphus were asshole buddies. Digging up beaches, pushing boulders. Same same. Just keep moving it down the line. He fumbled for a cigarette. His cramped fingers snapped the fragile paper cylinder. Shreds of flying tobacco tickled his nose. His Zippo spun from his grasp and dropped into the pit.

  Trin giggled louder. Broker heard the Zippo click open, heard Trin thumb the wheel. A flicker. Flame danced in the hole.

  Broker hunched his head. Something flew out of the pit. It fell into the sand at his feet with a heavy thud. His hips and lower back protested, but he forced himself up. Carefully. His spine was a balancing act. A precarious stack of rocks. He crawled for the object. An oblong piece of wood. Dense. Intact, with screws in it.

  “Huh?”

  Trin giggled again.

  Broker pawed for a flashlight and switched it on. He saw fragments of stenciled letters under a coating like a transparent tar-like substance, crusted with sand. Numbers: 155.

  “Wha?” he muttered, pawing at the panel of wood.

  “Ammo case. For artillery rounds. The wood looks like it’s been treated with preservative. Creosote maybe,” panted Trin. He giggled hysterically again.