On Blood Road

by Steve Watkins

  I try yet again: “Please let me go. I promise I won’t try to escape.”

  Then I remember some Vietnamese people speak French, since France ran their country for, like, sixty years. Maybe Phuong does, too. Or one of the other soldiers. Mom made sure I learned French practically from the minute I was born when we lived in Paris.

  So I ask Phuong again: “S’il vous plaît, laissez-moi partir. Je promets que je n’essaierai pas de m’échapper.” Please let me go. I promise I won’t try to escape.

  She stops. The others stop. I stop. And the next thing I know, my hands are untied and the noose is off.

  “Je vous remercie,” I say, rubbing the feeling back into my wrists. I don’t want to touch the raw skin around my throat. Thank you.

  Phuong hands me her canteen, and I drink as much as I think I can get away with. The others drink from their canteens, too.

  She shrugs and says, “Si vous courez, nous vous tirerons dessus.” If you run, we will shoot you.

  We keep going until dusk. The hours in between we spend skirting the edges of more rice paddies, ducking into leafy tunnels that wind through more jungle so thick I can’t see any of the animals I think I hear snuffling off in the brush. We finally stop to rest, and I lean against the trunk of a tall tree with low branches. A snake slides off one of the branches and onto my shoulder. I freeze. It’s small and green and has what look like white lips. Phuong sees it and she freezes, too. The others don’t notice. They’re busy rolling and then sharing a cigarette.

  The snake sits on my shoulder for what feels like an hour, but is probably not even a full minute, then winds its way down my torso and my leg and onto the ground. It slithers into the brush. I don’t breathe from the second I feel it until well after it’s gone.

  A faint smile of relief crosses Phuong’s face, just for an instant, and then she goes back to the stoic mask she’s been wearing.

  In French I ask her what kind of snake it was. She answers in Vietnamese, then, switching languages, saying she doesn’t know the right name for it in French. “Vipère, peut-être.”

  I understand viper all right.

  “Is it poisonous?” I ask.

  “Un peu,” she says. A little.

  I think we’ll stop here for the night, much as I don’t want to after just having a viper crawl all over me. But Phuong insists that we push on farther, which is crazy. It grows darker and darker, especially as we descend under another thick canopy of overhanging trees. With no flashlight or torch or even a match to light the path, Phuong seems to be feeling her way forward. Our progress slows to a crawl. I’m bone weary and don’t mind the shuffling pace, though all I want to do is sleep.

  When we finally stop, we all collapse on the ground. Phuong lets me drink again from her canteen. From somewhere in his pack, one of the soldiers produces cold sticky rice and peppers, which he shares with Phuong and the other soldier. Phuong places half of hers in my hands, though the soldiers give her disapproving looks. I eat as slowly as I can once again, trying to make it last as long as possible to trick my stomach or my brain into thinking it’s a bigger meal. I sit beside a tree but keep a safe snake-distance from the trunk. We’re in the middle of a small copse a few meters from the trail. Phuong positions one of the men in a sentry position a short way from us, closer to the path, then comes back over and settles on the ground to eat. All they carry are their weapons, ammunition belts, canteens, trenching tools, small packs slung over their shoulders, and what appear to be US Army–issued ponchos.

  Phuong and the other soldier wrap themselves in their ponchos, tuck their AK-47s and gear in with them, and fall asleep. I lie on my side and curl up the way I’ve been wanting to all afternoon, but sleep eludes me. As tired as I am, the sights and sounds and smells of the past two days come crashing back down. I go spinning off into a terrified place where I can’t stop thinking about all the blood on me. What if there are more snakes here, more vipers, and they can smell it?

  After what must be hours, there’s a soft rustling as the soldier next to Phuong rouses himself and gathers his poncho and equipment and goes off for his turn keeping watch. Phuong mutters something in her sleep. The other soldier comes back. Finally, distracted from my paranoia about the snakes and the blood, I melt to the hard ground, pull the remnants of my suit coat over my head, and sleep.

  We stop at midmorning the next day. Phuong seems to be puzzling over our location. She leaves the trail for a while, maybe half an hour, leaving me with the other soldiers. I’ve figured out their names: Trang, the tall, dour one, and Vu, who is several inches shorter and wears a perpetual grin, as if anticipating somebody saying something funny just so he can laugh, though I haven’t heard him laugh even once so far.

  Not that there’s been anything to laugh about. The jets. The bombs. Their friends in the underground hospital, or driving transport vehicles …

  Phuong emerges quietly from the brush and motions for us to follow, so we plunge in behind her, Trang, then me, then Vu, who is practically riding on my back and keeps stepping on my heels, which are blistered and sore and hurt even when I’m not walking. I finally stop suddenly and he rams into my back. I snarl at him, which is a stupid thing to do to a guy holding a fully loaded AK-47. He takes a step back and mutters what I take to be an apology. He keeps his grin the whole time.

  Phuong pauses in a small clearing not long after that. She looks around in a way somebody might if they’re about to share a big secret; Vu and Trang do the same. They confer with one another, and then Phuong bends over and lifts a small door, a hatch, that’s just lying there flat on the jungle floor, right in front of us, covered with dirt and leaves. I could have walked over it a hundred times and not noticed it was there, just like before. Only something tells me it’s not going to be a hospital we’ll be climbing down into.

  Then, as if on cue, several heavily camouflaged NVA soldiers materialize out of the forest, weapons drawn. Phuong speaks to one of them, who nods. The camouflaged soldiers then retreat into the brush.

  “Follow me,” Phuong says in French as she eases herself down, feeling her way to the invisible rungs of a ladder. Vu steps aside and points for me to go next, but the last thing in the world I want to do is follow Phuong into that hole. I think of the French word—oubliette—which means dungeon, only a special kind of dungeon where you’re thrown in from an opening in the ceiling, or from a hanging staircase that goes partway down but stops. One way in, no way out.

  Vu cuffs me on the side of my head. Trang jabs me in the small of my back with his gun. I go down.

  The rickety ladder is just rough wood—sticks, really—lashed together with hemp and feels as if it might fall apart at any second. The hole grows lighter near the bottom as we descend, though there is no visible light source. An NVA soldier stands guard at the bottom, his weapon pointed straight at my face when I finally reach the ground. Phuong plunges off into a narrow tunnel and I follow. My shoulders scrape the walls and if I don’t lean forward, my head hits the ceiling.

  There are dim lanterns. More guards. More branches off the tunnel. Rooms over to the side with soldiers studying maps on a small table, others quietly eating their meager rations of sticky rice, men squatting in a circle, doing nothing, women, maybe nurses, tending to the wounded lying on thin pallets on the stone floor, their eyes pressed shut, their faces glistening with sweat—Phuong says from malaria or infection—though it’s cold so far underground. Cold and close.

  As my eyes adjust and we trek deeper into the bowels of the tunnel complex, I see ventilation tubes protruding from the walls and ceiling, small cookstoves in corners, an operating room with bloody sheets littering the floor. A body. Another body.

  Phuong pulls me into one of the side tunnels, down another long wood-and-hemp ladder, through a dank section where brown water leeches from the walls and puddles on the floor, running off in tiny rivulets that remind me how thirsty I am. If only they had a drinking fountain …

  We stop at another room wi
th another small table, where a man with rimless glasses making him look like an owl is sitting on a crate, smoking a cigarette. He seems to be inhaling every molecule of smoke. There’s none hanging in the room, and virtually no smell.

  “Hello, young man,” the man says in perfect English. “Welcome.”

  “Thank you,” I say, remembering my manners.

  “Perhaps you thought you were entering Dante’s Inferno, yes?” he says. “You have read this in school?”

  I’ve heard of it but haven’t read it yet. Maybe they’re saving Dante for next year. “No,” I say. “Sir.”

  He smiles. “Perhaps one day.” He inhales his cigarette again, which is now hardly more than the ember. If it’s burning his fingers, he doesn’t show it.

  “We have been waiting for you.” He nods at Phuong. “To ask you some questions, that is all.”

  “Questions about what?” I ask, my mouth so dry I can barely get the words out.

  The man picks a canteen off the floor and puts it on the table, signaling for me to drink. I don’t wait for a second invitation.

  “Sorenson,” he says. “Your father. Tell us about him.”

  “We came here to visit him,” I say. “But I don’t know what he does or anything. Really. Just, well, that he works at the embassy.”

  “And what else?”

  “That’s all,” I say. “That’s all I know. He doesn’t talk about what he does. Not to me.”

  “What has your mother told you about him?” My inquisitor isn’t smiling anymore. He’s all business, leaning into the table. Phuong hasn’t moved since we came in. She stands by the entrance but still in my peripheral vision.

  “Nothing,” I say. “He travels a lot. He’s been in Vietnam for, like, I don’t know, three years or something. Off and on for maybe four years. We see him sometimes, and then we don’t see him a lot of the time.”

  The inquisitor nods. “What has he said to you about his work with SOG?”

  “I don’t know,” I say. “What’s that?”

  He’s frowning now. I hope he isn’t losing patience with me.

  “Studies and Observation Group,” he says, coming down hard on each word, as if to impress on me their importance. But I have no idea what he’s talking about.

  “I’m sorry,” I say. “I really don’t—”

  “Your father,” he interrupts. “His job is disruption.”

  “Disruption of what?” I ask, growing more freaked out by the second, hoping if he keeps talking he won’t demand answers from me that I don’t have.

  “Our people call it the Reunification Trail,” he says. “Your people have other names for it.”

  “You mean the Ho Chi Minh Trail?” I ask.

  The man lights another cigarette and inhales. I don’t know how he does it, but even when he exhales there isn’t any smoke.

  He says something to Phuong in Vietnamese, and she steps forward and takes hold of one of my arms.

  To me he says, in English, “Perhaps you have nothing to say. Perhaps, as you have said, you don’t know anything. Perhaps you can be of help to us, and perhaps not. We will give you time and opportunity to reflect.”

  He nods to Phuong and she leads me away, out of the room and farther down the same tunnel we traveled to get there. That’s what I think, anyway. It’s hard to say for sure, easy to get lost in this endless maze. It’s like playing Chutes and Ladders, only without the board to guide you, and no wheel to spin, and everybody has guns.

  We go down another ladder into another dark hole, and through yet another tunnel so dimly lit that we have to feel our way along. Phuong stops, finally, and ushers me inside a small room carved into the rock off to one side. Or maybe we’re at the end of the tunnel, the end of everything. My heart races. I’m sweating, trembling, so scared I could probably pee myself again if I wasn’t so dehydrated.

  Two men follow us in. I don’t know what happened to Vu and Trang, but it isn’t them. These men pull me over to two lengths of hemp fastened to a bar bolted shoulder high to the rock wall. Phuong tells me to turn around so they can pull my arms behind me and tie my wrists to the dangling ends of the ropes, which are only long enough to allow me to stand. One of the soldiers unsheathes a combat knife. I cry out, beg him—“No! Please! Don’t!”—but he only means to cut off my clothes. The shredded suit coat, slacks, paisley tie, blood-soaked dress shirt, Dad’s wing tips. They even start to cut off my underwear, but Phuong says something that makes them stop.

  The men step back to admire their handiwork, then they leave. Phuong leaves, too.

  For a long, long time.

  I don’t know if you can call what happens over the next few days torture.

  They don’t hammer slivers of bamboo under my fingernails, or pull them off with pliers, or force me into a squatting position for hours on end, or hang me by my bound hands behind my back until my shoulders are dislocated, or scream at me, or hit me, not even with their bamboo staffs the way the guards have done on the trail when I fall and don’t get up quickly, or stumble off a path, or don’t move fast enough, or don’t follow an order I can’t understand.

  They just leave me to stand, bound to the wall. I can’t sit or lie down, so there’s no way to rest, no way to sleep. They bring in bright lanterns and keep them blazing all the time. They bang on metal plates when my head droops and my eyes wilt shut. They shake me, throw water in my face, poke me in the ribs with their bamboo staffs, but not violently, more as if—and the very idea of it seems crazy—they’re trying to tickle me into staying awake. It works.

  For long periods, especially early on, they leave me to my own thoughts, which run all over the place. You can only be frightened for so long, and then something like boredom takes over when nothing happens, when it’s just you by yourself and nothing to do, and no way to go anywhere or get away or get comfortable, and you’re cold and getting colder unless you stomp your feet, shift from side to side, do half squats, as far as the ropes will let you, clench and unclench your fists, pull against ropes that won’t give. My feet leave bloody patterns from weeping blisters, but after a while they become so caked with dirt that it looks like I’m wearing socks. I worry about infection and hypothermia and about running out of air. I worry that there might be underground snakes that will crawl on me like that white-lipped viper, that they will forget I’m here, and when they come back I’ll be a cartoon skeleton, no flesh left on my bones, no organs, no tissue, no face or hair or skin, just bones, arms still bound to the wall, still standing, frozen in death.

  I must start hallucinating at some point, because I’m sure Mom comes in to scold me for running off to Cholon. She scowls and says she raised me better than that, sent me to the best schools, showed me Paris, took me to all the European capitals, hired French tutors to make sure I was fluent like her, bought me whatever I needed and most of what I wanted, attended all my swim meets despite me always coming in last place, put up with Geoff even though she didn’t like him, and why didn’t I appreciate the sacrifices she’s made and why am I such an ungrateful child and what do I have to say for myself? I shout back at her but can’t understand the words coming out of my own mouth, but then I don’t care because she’s gone and I’m singing—all the hits of 1967: “A Whiter Shade of Pale,” “Somebody to Love,” “Magical Mystery Tour,” “Light My Fire.”

  Phuong comes in, looking sad, averting her eyes from seeing me in my underwear. She lets her hair down so it hangs free around her face, and she wears an ao dai instead of her black uniform. How did I not recognized how pretty she is before? Instead of an AK-47, she carries a guitar and sings Joni Mitchell songs—in English! And here are Vu and Trang singing backup! I cry because they sound so beautiful, and they’re doing it just for me.

  But Dad’s suddenly here in the room with me, too. Phuong and Vu and Trang vanish. They don’t want to have anything to do with him, and I know he doesn’t want them around. “No time for this nonsense!” he barks.

  “How’d you get in
here, Dad?” I ask.

  “Never mind that,” he says. “I’m here and I’m getting you out and you’re going to enlist and we’re going to win this war.”

  “Okay, Dad,” I say. “I’ll do it if you want me to. You were seventeen when you enlisted, weren’t you? And you fought the Germans. You told me all about D-day, and the Battle of the Bulge. Remember your story about how the Germans surrounded the 101st Airborne in Bastogne? They demanded that you surrender or else be wiped out, but General McAulliffe wrote back his famous one-word answer—‘Nuts!’ I loved that story and laughed every time you told it to me. Only it wasn’t just a story, it was real, and you were there, freezing in your foxhole, with trees exploding all around you and your friends under the German artillery barrage. But you didn’t care. You made it sound like a party. Like General McAulliffe saying ‘Nuts!’ to the Germans was the thing that scared them off. So, yeah, Dad. I’ll enlist. And if the North Viets ever have me surrounded and want me to surrender, I’ll already have my answer ready, too: ‘Nuts!’ ”

  Dad fades. I sag, my knees buckling until my shoulders scream in pain and that wakes me. I stand, legs shaking. I lean against the stone wall and it’s freezing, but I don’t care. The shock of it helps keep me awake, which is a good thing, because Geoff and I decide to sneak down inside an abandoned subway tunnel deep under the city, up in the Bronx. There’s a manhole cover that’s come loose. A steel ladder that we climb down for, like, a mile. Water dripping off the walls. Standing puddles as big as lakes. Our flashlights swallowed by the pitch black until we smell the fires and follow the smell and see flames leaping out of barrels and tunnel people crowded around them, warming themselves. Only the tunnel people are just homeless people—sad, ragged, homeless people—mostly old men and old women, but some younger ones, too, faces smeared with underground dirt. We’ve brought bags of bread, jars of peanut butter and jelly. But nothing to spread it with. They snatch it out of our hands, too hungry to thank us, I guess. It’s nice that they share it with one another, though. They spread the PB&J with their fingers, but nobody cares. Geoff and I are glad to see that, and Geoff says maybe this is, like, the perfect place where everybody takes care of everybody else, the way you’re supposed to. The ideal society. Except for the poverty, of course. But then suddenly we’re in the glare of bright flashlights, and a whole platoon of subway cops is there, grabbing the tunnel people, grabbing our backpacks. Geoff and I wriggle free and run as fast as we can to get out of there, panicked when we can’t find the steel ladder again—down to only Geoff’s flashlight, which is really just one of those tiny penlights, because I must have dropped mine or one of the subway cops snatched it—but we finally run into the ladder and climb, first Geoff and then me, worried that the cops’ claw hands will grab hold of my ankles and drag me back down.