by Tim O'Brien
They marched easily now. The trail widened, turning north toward the river, and soon it became a real road. At noon Oscar found an empty Black Jack wrapper. Ten minutes later Eddie spotted a swirl of smoke just beyond the next line of hills.
“It’s him,” Stink said. His teeth rapped together.
Unslinging his weapon, Stink tapped the magazine to be sure it was engaged. He waved impatiently for the others to follow.
The road kept widening. For a time it ran parallel to the river, then it swung off sharply to the west, weaving through a stand of hunched banyan trees. The smell of smoke was strong now. Up ahead there was a strange new sound, a low groaning, something stamping. Stink dropped his pack and broke into an awkward half-trot, cradling his rifle.
The road made a final violent twist through the trees and emerged into a bright clearing.
It happened instantly.
There was a short, high squeal, then a shout. Stink fired. He dropped to one knee and kept firing. Paul Berlin stumbled, threw himself forward and rolled. Insane, he thought. A pair of old water buffalo stood at the center of the clearing, both yoked up to a large slat-cart.
Stink fired without aiming. It was automatic. It was Quick Kill. Point-blank, rifle jerking. The first shots struck the closest animal in the belly. There was a pause. The next burst caught the buffalo in the head, and it dropped.
That fast. Every time, that fast.
Someone was screaming for a cease-fire but Stink was on full automatic. He was smiling. Gobs of flesh jumped off the beast’s flanks.
Paul Berlin, sprawled now in the center of the road, had the rare courage to peek.
Mad, he kept thinking. Gone to the zoo. No reason, no warning. He heard someone bawling—a woman’s bawling. The clearing shimmied in a hazy white swirl. Chunks of meat and hide kept splattering off the shot-dead water buffalo. It wouldn’t end. Behind him, in the weeds, the lieutenant screamed for a cease-fire, pawing at the sky from flat on his back.
It ended. There was quiet, then a clicking noise as Stink rammed in a second magazine.
The fierce bawling continued. Doc and Eddie were picking themselves up. Oscar was gone.
Grinning, Stink Harris posed on one knee.
“Lash LaRue,” Stink kept chirping. “Lash L. LaRue.”
Whoever was bawling was still bawling. It was like a baby’s wail, high and angry.
“Lash L. LaRue. You see them reactions? You see?”
The clearing gleamed. The dead buffalo was bleeding. The living buffalo kept trying to run. It would get to its feet, stumble, struggle for a moment, and then fall.
“Like lightning, man! Zip, zap!”
It was a woman’s bawling. It came from somewhere near the cart. The cart was splashed with blood.
Stink licked his lips and grinned.
“Stupid,” Doc said. He was shaking his head. “Stupid, stupid.”
The cart was piled high with lamps and rugs and furniture. Three women sat there. The two old women were bawling. The other was a girl. A girl, not a woman: maybe twelve, maybe twenty-one. Her hair and eyes were black. She wore an ao dai and sandals and gold hoops through her ears. Hanging from a chain about her neck was a chrome cross.
“Greased lightning,” Stink said. “Hands like bullwhips.”
“Stupid.”
“Zingo, bingo, bang!”
“Criminal stupid.”
All three women were bawling now. Madhouse sounds. The bawling flickered in and out, sometimes very high, other times seeming to tremble and fade. The dead buffalo kept bleeding.
“Fastest hands in the West,” Stink tittered. He looked at Paul Berlin and flicked his eyebrows. “Zip, splash, totaled!”
They spent the night in the clearing.
Unbuckling the harness, Eddie and Doc dragged the dead buffalo off the road and covered it with branches. Oscar managed to quiet the other animal. Patting its nose, clucking, he led it to a tree and tethered it and brought it water. Stink built a campfire. Afterward, as dark came, the lieutenant began the interrogation.
“Refugees,” said the young woman, the girl. She glanced nervously at Stink Harris. “You know refugees? My aunts, they take me away. But the war chases us.”
As if on signal, the two old women began howling, their noses at the moon. The lieutenant waited. He rubbed his eyes.
“Look,” he said softly, “I’m sorry about this. War’s a lousy thing.”
“And now poor Nguyen.”
“Who?”
Sadly, moving only her head, the girl gestured in the direction of the dead water buffalo. “My aunts raised him from a tiny baby. Their own breasts. And now poor Nguyen—”
“Stupid,” Doc Peret said.
Stink looked up. He shrugged, picked up his weapon and began cleaning it.
They were silent. Leaning back against his rucksack, the lieutenant stared for a time into the fire. Then he blinked and looked at the girl.
“Again, I’m sorry. I am. These things—you know—these things happen. But right now, why not just spill the facts? Who are you? Where do you come from?”
“You will pay solace?” the girl said. “For Nguyen, you will pay reparations?”
“Maybe. Just tell the facts.”
She sighed. Her name was Sarkin Aung Wan. Part Chinese, part unknown. For many months now she had been a refugee, traveling west from Saigon with her two aunts. Home was Cholon. Many Chinese in Cholon, she said, many fine restaurants. Her father had once owned a restaurant, but now it was owned by her uncle. Her father had died in childbirth. A very sad thing. As her mother gave birth to twin babies, her father was led out of the waiting room and taken down many corridors and then shot. VC Number Ten, she said. VC, bad news. Her father, a dedicated and honest restaurateur, had been executed against a hospital wall for pilfering chickens from the cadre’s Cholon slaughterhouse. Unjustly, for he had always paid his bills and taxes. Two years later her mother died of grief. The family dispersed, brothers going to live with cousins, sisters spreading out among uncles and aunts, and the war continued, and Cholon became a combat zone, and in the end there was no choice but to leave. So the pair of buffalo were yoked up and harnessed, a few prized belongings were packed, and early one morning the girl and her two aunts began the journey west.
“Those are facts,” she said. “And now my aunts take me to become a refugee.”
Paul Berlin watched: smooth skin, dignity, eyes that were shy and bold, coarse black hair. She was young, though. Much too young. She smelled of soap and joss sticks. The gold hoop earrings sparkled.
“So,” the lieutenant finally said. “It’s a sad story. You have my sympathy. But, look … where exactly are you headed? You bic destination? A place you’re aiming for?”
The girl shrugged. “We go home.”
“I thought you were refugees. Isn’t—?”
“We are refugees to go home,” she said, smiling for the first time. “It is a long road to become a refugee.”
The lieutenant scratched his nose. “Yeah, okay. But what I’m asking is this: I’m asking where you and your aunties are headed. What’s the destination?”
“West,” she said.
“Yes, but where?”
She smiled. “The Far West.”
The old man nodded at this, pausing, licking his lips. “I see. But—” He kept scratching his nose. “But how far? That’s the question. How far into the Far West?”
“Oh,” the girl said, “only as far as refugees go.”
“Ah.”
“To go farther would be stupid.”
“Of course.”
She smiled again. “So now you will lead us, yes? You have shot Nguyen, so now you will lead us to the Far West?”
The lieutenant leaned back wearily. He shook his head, muttered something, then got up and moved into the weeds beyond the fire.
Later they ate dried fish and rice. It was a warm, sweet night. Crickets, a breeze, the velvet sky. For a time the two old aunties moaned for t
heir lost Nguyen, sobbing, rocking miserably on their haunches. Then they slept. A bright half-moon rose over the plain.
Paul Berlin went to the fire. Stoking it, adding a log, he pretended not to watch the girl. She was young. It was hard to tell—fifteen, maybe. Or twelve or twenty. Her eyes curved up like wings. He watched as she spread out her blanket, removed her sandals, brushed her hair, stretched, yawned, lay back. He liked this. He liked it when she smiled at him, nodding slightly, smoothing her robes about her legs.
A possibility. A thing that might have happened on the road to Paris. He looked into the fire for a long time.
In the morning, after burying the dead buffalo, and after waiting while the two old women laid down flowers, they prepared to move out. Eddie and Stink climbed aboard the cart to tie down the rucksacks and sleeping gear. Oscar harnessed up the surviving animal. The lieutenant studied his maps. When they were ready, Paul Berlin climbed up and took a seat next to the pretty young girl. He grinned. Oscar shook the reins, hollered gid’yap, and soon they were riding westward along the rolling plains to Paris.
Seven
Riding the Road to Paris
And there was a long, gleaming time during which the riding was everything, the riding and the road and the grassy plains. The days were sunny. The nights were deep and still. They rode for ten hours a day, stopping only to water the old buffalo. They saw no villages. Curving with the flow of the land, the road was hard and dusty and deserted. The trees were bare. It was parched country, for the rains had not yet come north, and the streams ran nearly empty. In the evenings a cooling breeze would sometimes move in from the mountains. They would rest then, waiting for dark, enjoying the feel of having traveled many miles without once using their legs. Sleep came easy. Paul Berlin rode along quietly during the days. The cart’s gentle rocking motions pushed him against the pretty girl named Sarkin Aung Wan. He liked it when they touched. Accidentally sometimes, and sometimes not quite by accident. He liked her smell, her smile, the way she seemed to be holding things back. She was pretty. That was part of it. In Quang Ngai, where poverty abused beauty, women aged like dogs. So, yes, it was curious to watch this girl, to imagine how it might have happened.
“And you,” said Sarkin Aung Wan near the end of the second day. “You are soldiers, yes?”
“Yes,” he said.
Frowning, the girl looked out over the distant blue hills. “It is a pity,” she said. “I am sad to learn that the fighting has spread so far.”
He shrugged, pretending not to look at her.
“Has it?”
“What?”
“The war. Has it followed us this far?”
Paul Berlin answered truthfully that he wasn’t sure. Opinions varied. According to Doc Peret, no fool, the war was over; if you listened to the lieutenant, the war was still a war. It was hard to be sure.
“Well,” the girl sighed. “We must go on then. We must keep going until you are sure.”
At night, after the fire died, the girl’s two aunts would wail for their lost Nguyen. Rocking, their leathery old faces pointed to the sky, they would start with low moans like an animal’s breathing. The moaning would grow. An hour, perhaps two hours, and the moans would become sobs, and the sobs would go mournful and high, and in the deepest part of the night the sobbing would become wailing. They could not be consoled. Dark and tiny and wrinkled, swaying on their haunches, the old women would howl the whole night long. And in the morning, without speaking, they would climb aboard the overloaded oxcart and take their positions at the rear, facing backward, squatting silently with their eyes always east.
“Paris?” said Sarkin Aung Wan. “You are going to Paris!”
Only a possibility, he said. Only one possibility out of a thousand, just a notion. Anything could happen.
“But Paris!”
The girl’s eyes were bright. She was riding on a pile of blankets, painting her toenails with a tiny brush.
“Paris! Churches and museums! Notre-Dame! Oh, I should dearly like to be a refugee in Paris.”
She dipped the brush into the bottle of polish and began painting the nails on her left foot. The paint sparkled in the sun.
“You will take me along, yes? As a refugee? Paris! Oh, I shall love to see Paris—Pont Neuf and the Seine, all the windows full of pretty things. We shall see it together!”
Careful to choose his words, Paul Berlin tried to explain that it wasn’t what it seemed. He told how Cacciato had walked away in the rain, a dumb kid with maps and candy and an AWOL bag. How they’d taken off after him: a dangerous mission, nothing easy. How already they’d lost one member of the search party, Harold Murphy, and how they had marched many weeks through jungle and rain. A thousand hardships lay ahead.
“But Paris!”
“It’s only a possibility.”
She looked at him, holding the brush to her nose and sniffing it. A dab of red paint gleamed on her cheek. “I am sure of it,” she said. “Together we shall see Paris. Stroll through the gardens, visit all the famous monuments. Perhaps we shall fall in love there. Is that possible?”
The oxcart swayed and pressed them together.
“Paris,” she whispered. Her eyes shifted to the horizon. “Yes, I should dearly love to see Paris.”
The lieutenant shook his head.
“No,” he said.
“But, sir, she speaks French. Terrific French.”
“And?”
“And, well, she could sort of help out. Guide us, show us the ropes.”
Again the old man wagged his head. He was stretched out on a rug near the front of the cart. His nose was peeling. “No way. I’ll say it again: We’re still soldiers and this here is still a war.”
“But she’s smart. She is. She could help out with—”
“Negative.” The lieutenant looked away. “Say again, this is no friggin’ party. No party, no civilians. Next ville, we drop them off and that’s the end of it.”
“Just dump them?”
“War’s a nasty thing.”
“Not even—?”
“No.” The old man sighed. “No.”
True, it was no place for women. True, it would be a dangerous journey, full of bad times and bad places, and, true, they could not be burdened by weakness or frailty. All true. But Paul Berlin could not stop toying with the idea: a mix of new possibilities. A whole new range of options. He wanted Sarkin Aung Wan to join the expedition. He wanted it badly, and he wanted it even more when, by the light of a midnight campfire, she showed him her many strengths. “Do you see?” she whispered. “Do you see that I am strong?” And she was. Fragile, delicate like a bird, but still strong. She lifted the robe. Her legs were brown and smooth and muscled. The skin was tight without lines or wrinkles.
“Feel there,” she whispered as the others slept. “Do you feel it? I have endurance like a man. I walk as a man walks and I do not complain.”
He tested her arms and shoulders.
“I shall carry my share. I shall keep pace. I shall show courage and stamina.”
Once more he felt the great strength of her legs, then he folded his hands together and squeezed. The fire made silver in her eyes.
“You can persuade your lieutenant,” she whispered. “Tell him of my strength, so that I may join you to Paris.”
“It’ll be treacherous,” he said. “Nothing easy.”
“I am brave.”
“Deserts and mountains and swamps.”
The girl dismissed this with a wave. “To be a refugee is to know danger. I can guide you. Yes … I shall guide you! You will need me as a guide.”
“Cacciato. He’s our guide.”
“Cacciato?”
“Yes, he’s—you know—he’s out there in front. A scout.”
“No matter,” Sarkin Aung Wan murmured. She smoothed the robe about her legs. “No matter, Spec Four, because you will need me. I am strong, and soon you will need me greatly. And I shall love to see Paris.”
The land
was luminous. Pink coral and ferric reds, great landfalls of wilderness, and they moved through it for twelve days at a buffalo’s pace. No villages, no people. Only the road. The girl’s two old aunties wallowed in their grief. They rode along silently at the rear of the cart, facing backward, showing no interest in the journey or the passing countryside. At night they wailed. Coyotes, Eddie laughed. Stink Harris did not laugh. Dinks, he muttered: Dinks from Dinksville, Damsels from Gooktown. Silent through the sunny days, the old women howled endlessly through the nights.
But the land was rich, the weather warm, and the slat-cart yawed and pitched its way up the widening road west.
Once they spent the night in an abandoned tribal shrine. Once they spotted smoke on a distant hill. Once they found M&Ms scattered along a fork in the road, the M&Ms taking the northwest fork, and they followed the M&Ms. They slept through a fierce tropical storm; they nearly lost the buffalo in fast river waters; they shot quail for a Sunday feast. Many things, once, but mostly they rode the road west.
Then they captured Cacciato.
It happened at night, in the dark of fifth-hour guard. A strange rustling in the brush. A familiar soft whistling.
Smoothly, like a cat, Stink Harris crept away from the fire, staying in shadows, moving in on the intruder from behind. Then he pounced. Screaming, he tackled Cacciato.
“Got him!” Stink yelped. And it was true, he had him.
Eight
The Observation Post
Posted lucid high over the sea and shifting sand, Spec Four Paul Berlin looked out on nighttime Quang Ngai. Nearly one o’clock. Ordinarily it would be time now to rouse the next guard. Time to pick through the sleeping bodies, touch Doc’s shoulder and whisper words of friendship, wait, and then, when Doc was fully awake, hand over the wristwatch and wish him well and curl at last into a warm poncho. Changing of the guard, rules passed down by dead men.
Ordinarily.
