* * *
Danny dreamed of walking in a forest. In contrast to the dense green jungle of Vietnam, this forest was less overgrown and filled with trees that had a bluish cast. He wandered alone for some time, and then was startled to hear a man’s voice calling him. The dream faded into darkness.
It was a smell that finally brought him out of his deep unconsciousness. A fishy smell, with a hint of something dead and rotting. He opened his eyes and saw an old woman staring at his face from two inches away. The smell was coming from her. She had a mole on her nose the size and color of a large blueberry. Danny cried out in terror and tried to move away from her, but he was lying on a mat on the ground and there was nowhere to go. The woman began screaming too, and ran away.
This gave him a few minutes to examine his surroundings. He was in a small hut with a thatched roof. The interior was only large enough to hold two mats for sleeping, one of which he was lying on, a wooden crate that served as a table, a pile of wood, and a large stoneware crock pot. He took a quick inventory of the items in the hut, but did not find any green monkeys.
That was all he had time to take in before the old woman came back. This time she came with reinforcements: another old lady entered the hut right behind her, with thinning hair and a mean look to her. The second woman carried a big metal spoon that she held in both hands like a cudgel. Both women eyed Danny suspiciously.
The one with the blueberry on her nose spoke to him in Vietnamese. He tugged on his earlobe and shook his head, the way he’d done with the men at the truck. Blueberry repeated herself, louder this time, and Danny replied with a shrug. She waved a hand at him in frustration and said something to her balding friend, who shook the spoon at him menacingly and then left the hut.
All this activity was too much for Danny. His head was spinning again and he was dripping sweat. The inside of the hut had to be a hundred degrees. He sat up and suffered a coughing fit that nearly made his head explode. Blueberry hurried over and made him lie back down again. Either she was exceptionally strong, or he was unusually weak. She overpowered him easily, forcing him back down onto the mat and covering him with a ragged old blanket.
It was nearly dark inside the hut the next time he awoke. Whether it was dusk or dawn he couldn’t tell. This time he was ravenously hungry. The woman wasn’t around, so he got up and went over to the door to have a look around. He peeked out of the hut and, finding no one around, walked outside to find a spot to relieve himself. He had to go quite badly, so he found an overgrown garden near the house and started taking care of business.
He was only halfway done when the other woman, the one who was losing her hair, came around the corner of a nearby hut and stood there in shock at seeing him urinating in the garden. She shouted something at him and then turned and hurried off, probably in search of the blueberry woman so they could gang up on him. He finished as quickly as he could and went back inside.
Blueberry returned a few minutes later and gave him a piece of her mind. He didn’t understand a word of it, but the meaning was clear enough. The garden was not to be used for such purposes again.
This time she gave him a large cup of water, which he accepted gratefully. It smelled and tasted dirty, but he was too thirsty to be picky. She went out to refill the cup, and he drank the second one down as well. Then he lay back again and listened to his stomach gurgling ominously.
The diarrhea started a few hours later, along with some nausea for good measure. There were no toilet facilities in the village, just an area downhill from the huts where everyone went when they had to go. Danny spent a lot of time there over the next several days. His troubles subsided after a week or so, as Blueberry fed him hot rice porridge and nursed him back to health. Along with the porridge, she gave him a cup of coffee that was more delicious than any coffee he had ever tasted.
There were only fourteen people living in the village. There were the two old women he’d already seen, three old men, two young women who seemed to be a few years older than Danny, and a whole mess of children ranging from perhaps five to twelve years of age. One of the old men had a hand that looked like it had been severely injured; the fingers curled uselessly and he couldn’t move them. That one didn’t seem very friendly. Another of the men looked constantly like he had just swallowed something too large; his mouth had a twist to it and his Adam’s apple looked very large against his skinny neck. The third man seemed more personable than the other two, even going so far as to smile now and then. He treated Danny kindly.
There were no younger men in the village. Danny assumed they had all gone off to fight for one side or the other in the war. He couldn’t tell if the people in this village sympathized with the Communists or the Americans. He thought it was the former, but it probably didn’t matter anyway. The old men mostly kept to themselves, and the young women seemed afraid to talk to him. But the children thought Danny was a riot. They came around to play with him constantly, usually pointing sticks at him and yelling, “Pap-pap-pap!” as they pretended to shoot him with imaginary Kalashnikovs. He obliged them by pretending to fall down dead each time, which pleased them to no end. His performances became more dramatic with each passing day. The two old women gave him disapproving looks and swatted the children away, but they always came back to kill him again and again.
The old women fed him as best they could, but there wasn’t much to go around. Food seemed scarce here. They gave him a larger share than they took for themselves, but it still wasn’t much and he felt guilty for eating as much as he did. They ate rice they had raised and harvested themselves, with eggs from a few scrawny chickens and vegetables that they grew in their gardens. They did not eat any meat. There was no livestock other than the chickens and one hungry-looking ox, which was too valuable to eat, and the men were too old to hunt.
As he began to feel better, Danny started helping the old men plant rice in a muddy field about an hour’s walk from the village. The four oldest children came along, and the man with the large Adam’s apple brought the ox as well. They were clearly proud of their ox, which they treated like royalty. They hitched an ancient plow to the animal to work the field, after which they went out with tools to break up and level the soil. This required them to stand ankle-deep in dirty water all day, which appeared to have unpleasant long-term consequences, judging from the state of their feet. The man with the damaged hand accomplished just as much as the rest of them, gripping his tool with his good hand and using his gimpy one to guide it. The kind man showed Danny how to use his tool properly, correcting him gently but firmly when he held it wrong. The work was hard, and it left Danny smelling bad by the end of each day, but it gave him time to think. Mostly he thought about his mother and Alice. There were other faces that swirled around in his memory, but he couldn’t put names to them.
Thinking about family made his stomach hurt, so he eventually stopped that and thought about Lester instead. Who was he? Les knew more about Danny’s surroundings than Danny himself did, and seemed to know what would happen far in advance. Maybe he was God, Danny thought. Maybe his radio was dialed straight in to heaven, and the Big Guy himself was showing Danny the way. A modern sort of divination. Or, more likely, Danny had lost his mind. He had heard of people hearing voices in their heads, or having conversations with imaginary companions, and it didn’t seem like much of a stretch to think that Les might be a creation of his own subconscious.
Exactly once every three days, just before lunchtime, the nice old man would pack some food and lead Danny away from the village to take a walk in the jungle. He assumed it was for exercise, to help his body heal. The walks invariably lasted a large chunk of the day. They would eat lunch along the way and return to the village in the late afternoon. Occasionally, the kind man would stop when he found what appeared to be the feces of a small animal. He sifted through it with his bare hands, extracting small bits of something that looked like beans. Only later did Danny learn that these beans, extracted from animal droppings, we
re used to make the coffee that he had found so delicious.
One morning on a particularly hot day, when the old men decided to take a break from the work, one of the children invited Danny to come and play. He followed the boy out of the village to a hillside where the kids were playing hide-and-seek. Danny was pretty good at hiding—he’d had quite a bit of hide-and-seek practice in the last few weeks—but they always managed to find him easily. It didn’t help that he was still coughing almost constantly, which gave him away every time. And of course, every time they found him, they shot him with their imaginary guns so he’d act out yet another dramatic death scene. It never got old.
When it was Danny’s turn to be the seeker, he did very well at first. The children all thought he was deaf, so they didn’t bother to stay quiet. He simply followed their laughing until he found them. That worked for the first round, but the next time was not so easy. He counted silently to twenty, then opened his eyes and started looking. This time they didn’t give themselves away by laughing. Danny realized, too late, that his cover was likely blown. If the kids chose to tell their elders that he could hear, he would have some explaining to do.
At first he looked for them in the usual places: hiding behind trees, perched on the lower branches, or crouching in the tall grass in the clearing. They weren’t in any of those places. After the first five minutes he was deeply impressed by their ability to hide so well. After the next five, he became convinced that they must have been trained by the top Communist experts in the art of guerilla warfare. Five minutes after that, he was sure they had all gone home and left him there as a joke.
Then he saw one of them waving to him from a small pile of rocks on a nearby hillside. He was sure he’d looked there already. As he watched, two more of the children appeared next to the first. They were all laughing at his confusion. The rocks were not large enough to hide more than one person.
He went closer to investigate. At the base of the rock pile was a hole in the ground, leading beneath the rocks into darkness. Another little boy crawled out of the hole while he was looking down into it. Soon all seven of the children were there, laughing at their ability to outsmart a grown man. Then the smallest one, a boy with long black hair and no front teeth, took Danny’s arm and pointed to the hole. It was a tunnel, he realized, which went deep into the ground. They wanted him to go in.
Danny shook his head. The hole was big enough to admit a child, but he was quite a bit bigger than they were. If he got stuck, the kids would likely all go home and leave him in there to die. Not a chance.
“Di vao trong,” said one of the boys. Danny looked at him dumbly; he couldn’t understand.
Then Lester’s words came back to him. You have to go in.
He didn’t want to. He really, truly would rather do anything but crawl into a dark tunnel in the ground. But Les had been clear about it. Muttering several curse words under his breath, he got down on hands and knees and peered inside. It seemed to go straight into the hill, angling slightly downward. The diameter was large enough that he could fit if he crawled. He took a good, long look in there, nearly built up enough courage to do it, then got up again and shook his head.
The children looked more disappointed than he had ever seen a child look before. You have to go in, Lester’s voice kept telling him. He sighed, took one last look at the sky in case he never saw it again, and crawled into the hole.
It only went about ten feet into the hill before it turned sharply to the left. Danny got stuck at the curve and panicked a little bit. It was completely dark. The children didn’t have anything as sophisticated as flashlights. That meant it had to be easy to navigate, Danny reasoned, so he made himself keep going. He heard the kids behind him, and it helped to know he wasn’t alone.
He crawled along the tunnel for what felt like at least an hour, but was probably closer to five minutes in reality. Then his face ran into a wall.
His chest suddenly felt very tight. It was a dead end. A dead end, and the tunnel was too narrow for him to turn around. He reached out and felt the walls to his left and right. There were no branching tunnels. He had nowhere to go.
The boy behind him tapped him on the ankle and said something he couldn’t understand. He didn’t seem concerned—in fact, he sounded amused. Only then did Danny realize that a breeze was blowing, and a little light was coming down from above.
Looking up, he saw a thin, faint line of light. He stood up and hit his head on something that made a hollow noise when he bumped it. Wood. As he pushed upward, the wooden lid lifted up over his head. He found himself in an open courtyard, his head sticking out of the ground like a prairie dog.
Danny climbed up out of the tunnel. The entrance had been hidden by a wooden cover; he set this aside and stood up to take a look around, breathing air that felt wonderfully fresh. For once he didn’t even mind the crushing humidity.
He was in a courtyard in the middle of a village—but it wasn’t the village where he had been staying. The forest was thick all around, with only one narrow path leading away from the cluster of frond huts. Other than the tunnel he’d used, that was the only way in or out. The place seemed to have been abandoned. The huts were in good condition, but the weeds were encroaching and there were no people. This village was larger than the other one, with ten huts scattered around the central courtyard. While the children were climbing out of the tunnel behind him, Danny went over to take a look inside the nearest of the huts. A flock of tiny birds took off from the roof as he approached.
Inside he found rice. Bags and bags of it, piled up almost to the ceiling. The hut was a storehouse. It was a shock to see such an abundance of food. Surely Blueberry and the others knew this rice was here. If the children knew how to find it, he was certain their adults could as well. So why did the people eat so little? There was enough food here to feed an army, yet the villagers were practically starving.
He looked inside the next building and found bags of dried noodles, dried fish, and manioc roots. He was about to take a step inside when the oldest boy grabbed his arm and pulled him back. In response to Danny’s questioning look, the boy pointed to a wire that was strung at ankle-height across the doorway. The wire led to a tin can in the corner. Danny would have been willing to wager that there was a grenade hidden in that can.
After that, the boy stayed close to Danny as he continued to explore. The next hut appeared to be empty except for a sleeping pallet, a table, and some cooking supplies. A pile of firewood sat in the corner. Danny took a careful look for booby-traps before he went inside.
Just as he was about to turn around to leave, something caught his eye. There were gouges in the dirt floor next to the wood pile, as if something had been dragged across the ground. He picked up the pieces of wood and set them aside, revealing a flat wooden panel that seemed to be built into the floor.
The boy was nudging his back. Danny ignored him and pried up the edge of the panel. There was a hole underneath. He didn’t see any traps, so he set the lid aside and leaned forward to look into the opening.
More nudging. He looked at the boy, who was shaking his head vigorously. “Ai dang di toi,” the boy was saying. He looked very worried. One of the others, a girl of about seven, was standing in the doorway watching them.
“Hang on,” Danny said. He reached into the hole in the floor and found more rice. The hole appeared to be a buried crock of some kind—a very large one. But why hide rice in the ground when there were bags of it in the hut next door?
Then his fingers found something else among the grains of rice. A box. He worked this free of the rice grains and pulled it out.
“Dung lai!” the boy said. He pulled at Danny’s arm. Danny shrugged him off and opened the box. It was full of AK-47 rounds. “Toi biet anh nghe toi,” the boy said. He flicked one of Danny’s ears as he said this. They know I can hear, Danny thought.
He reached in again. There were other things hidden among the rice. He felt the barrels of a rifle, and something wrap
ped in cloth that felt like a long blade. A bayonet. He continued searching, pulling items out of the rice as he found them. Some grenades, including two smoke grenades that must have been taken from a fallen American soldier. One magnesium flare, about five inches long. And, at the very bottom, something that felt like an artillery shell. The VC sometimes used unexploded American shells they found, booby-trapping them and setting them out for American GIs to stumble upon.
The boy slammed the box of ammunition shut and shoved all the items back into the rice. Then he dragged the cover back into place. Danny pulled his hand out just in time to keep from losing it. Then the boy hastily piled the wood back where they’d found it. He and the girl took Danny by the arms and pulled him outside.
The kids were all waiting for him. They teamed up and shoved him with surprising force toward the edge of the clearing, where the dense forest began. He stumbled and fell face-first into the deep green underbrush. Only then did he hear the voices of approaching men. The children must have known the men were coming, and had been trying to warn him.
He saw an old man first, the one with the gimpy hand. Behind him came four younger men. Three were dressed in the black pajamas that Danny associated with the Viet Cong. One was in an NVA uniform. It was hard to see them clearly from his hiding place, but they looked very young, like teenagers. They walked with a swagger, just like the gangsters Danny remembered from growing up in Chinatown.
The children ran over to them, shouting and cavorting like goofy little gremlins, probably to distract them from looking in Danny’s direction. The men ignored the kids and went straight to the rice storehouse. A minute or two passed, while Danny assumed they were disabling traps. The children lost interest and started playing a game that involved throwing big rocks at each other as hard as possible. Then the four soldiers emerged one at a time, each carrying a sack of rice on his shoulder. The old man followed after, watching them with suspicion and contempt.
The Music of the Machine (The Book of Terwilliger 2) Page 17
