The Boat

by NAM LE

  "Husbands against wives," he went on. "Children against parents. Your only chance is to denounce everyone, and everything, they tell you to."

  The woman reached them. She made her complaint in a hoarse voice. She was owed water. She had tendered hers to another child who had collapsed, she said, and pointed aft. Anh Phuoc held Mai's eyes for a second, then followed the woman.

  Her father wouldn't have denounced her – she was sure of that. Not in his own heart. But again she understood how necessary it was to stay on the surface of things. Because beneath the surface was either dread or delirium. As more and more bundles were thrown overboard she taught herself not to look – not to think of the bundles as human – she resisted the impulse to identify which families had been depleted. She seized distraction from the immediate things: the weather, the next swallow of water, the ever-forward draw of time.

  "Mai!"

  It was Anh Phuoc. She stood up, hauled herself on weak legs along the gunwale, toward the rear of the boat. Past the hatch she suddenly saw Truong – propped up against the rusty mast of the derrick-crane, his chin drooping onto his chest, arms bony and limp by his sides.

  Mai leapt forward, swiping her elbows and knees from side to side to clear space. The surrounding people watched listlessly.

  "Water!"

  No one reacted. She looked around and spotted an army flask – grabbed it, swiveled the cap open, held it to his mouth. A thin trickle ran over his rubbery lips before the flask was snatched away. She looked up and saw a man's face, twisted in hate the moment he struck her, his knuckles hard as a bottle against her cheek. She fell over and covered Truong's body.

  "She stole water."

  "I'll pay it back," said Anh Phuoc roughly.

  Truong started coughing. Mai sat back, her cheek burning, and mumbled apology in the direction of the man. He was picking the flask up from the ground. People glanced over, disturbed by the waste. There had been a minor outcry the previous evening when a woman – an actress, people said – had used the last of her ration to wash her face.

  Truong squinted up at Mai. Everything about him: the dark sore of his face, his disproportioned, skeletal limbs, seemed to be ceding its sense of solidity. She touched his blistered cheek with her fingers – was reminded of the sting on her own cheek from the man's blow.

  "Ma," he wheezed.

  "It's alright," she said. "Ma is coming. Chi is here." "Where's Quyen?" asked Anh Phuoc. He stood up quickly and walked off.

  Truong said, "Child wanted to count the people."

  He coughed again, the air scraping through his throat. Watching him, a helpless feeling welled up within Mai and started to coalesce at the front of her skull. "Child," she whispered.

  Quyen arrived. She seemed to be moving within a slower state, her face drawn, hair tangled. She saw Truong and bent down to him. "Look," she murmured, "you hurt yourself."

  "He fainted," said Mai.

  "Why didn't Child stay with Ma?"

  "I don't like it down there," he said.

  "Oh, Mai," Quyen exclaimed, turning to her. "Are you all right?"

  "He shouldn't be in the sun. He needs more water."

  "It's too dark to count down there," Truong said. He brought up his arms, dangled them loosely over his knees. An old man's pose. Quyen squatted down and enfolded him, clinching him between her elbows, raking one hand through his hair and cupping his forehead with the other.

  "I was so tired," said Quyen. "Thank you."

  "He needs more water."

  "Does Child know?" She was speaking to Truong. "Does Child know how lucky he is? To have Chi Mai look after him?"

  Anh Phuoc leaned down close to both of them. "Come with me," he muttered. They followed him forward to the pilothouse, everyone watching as they passed. Once inside he closed the door. Carefully, he measured out a capful of water from a plastic carton and administered it into Truong's mouth.

  The sight – even the smell – of the water roused an appalling ache in Mai's stomach, but she said nothing.

  "Good boy," said Anh Phuoc.

  Quyen's eyes followed the carton. "Is that all there is?"

  Holding the tiller with one hand, he reached down and opened the cupboard beneath it. Three plastic white cartons.

  "That's all," he said, "unless it rains."

  "How long will it last?"

  "Another day. Two at the most."

  Her temple still aching, Mai looked out of the pilothouse windows. From up here she could see the full length and breadth of the boat: every inch of it clogged with rags and black-tufted heads and sunburned flesh. Up here would be the best place to count people. She wrenched her eyes away from the water carton and looked out instead at the sky. Not a cloud in sight. But the sky was full of deceit – it looked the same everywhere. She looked at the horizon, long and pale and eye-level all around them. Whatever direction she looked, it fell away into more water.

  ***

  THE TENTH DAY DAWNED. Engines dead, the boat drifted on. Gray shadows strafing the water behind it. The detachable sail hoisted onto a short mast's yard and men taking turns, croaking directions to each other as they tried to steer the boat, as best they could, to the south.

  Mai watched Truong with renewed intensity. Since Mai's recovery Quyen had kept to herself, remaining huddled, during the day as well as night, underneath the companionway stairs where they all slept. That morning Mai had found her sitting in the slatted light, staring vacantly into the dark hold. Squeezed between two old women.

  "How is Truong?" Quyen asked her quietly.

  Mai said, "I keep telling him to come down."

  "He doesn't like it down here."

  Mai nodded, not knowing what to say.

  Quyen dropped her chin and closed her eyes. Mai looked her over. She didn't look sick.

  "Is Chi alright?"

  Quyen nodded almost impatiently. One of the women beside her spat into her hands. When Quyen looked up her face was distant, drawn in unsparing lines.

  "Look after him, nha? Please."

  Above deck, each hour stretched out its hot minutes. Mai lay on her back under the derrick-crane, her head against someone's shin, limbs interwoven with her neighbors'. Truong wedged beside her. The crane cast a shadow that inched up their bodies. She threw her sleeve over her face to ward off the sweltering sun. At one point a wind blew in and the boat began to sway, lightly, in the water. She was riding her father's shoulders. Her mother watching them happily. Whenever he was home he brought with him some quality that filled her mother so there was enough left, sometimes, for her to be happy.

  Truong started singing. Softly – to himself – so softly she wouldn't have heard him if her ear hadn't been inches from his mouth. She gradually shifted her arm down so she could hear better. He sang the ballad from the third night. She listened, hardly daring to breathe, watching the now-darkening sky knitting together the rigs and cables of the crane above them as though they were the branches of trees.

  When he finished, the silence that surged in afterward was unbearable. Mai reached across her body and gently took hold of his arm.

  "Who taught Child how to sing like that?"

  He didn't answer.

  ***

  THE NEXT MORNING, back below deck, she woke up to find a puddle of vomit next to his curled-up, sleeping body. It gleamed gray in the early light of dawn.

  "The child has the sickness," a voice said without a second thought. It was one of the old women who had camped with them beneath the companionway stairs. The hatch was open and light flowed in like a mist, dimly illumining the three other bodies entangled in their nook. The deeper recess of the hold remained black.

  "No, he doesn't," said Mai.

  "Poor child. He is not the last. Such a pity."

  "Be quiet!" Mai covered her mouth, abashed, but no one reproached her. Several bodies stirred on the other side of the stairs.

  Barely awake, Quyen rolled over to her son and propped herself up on an elbow. She brushed hi
s cheek with her knuckles. For a second, in the half-light, Mai thought she saw an expression of horror move across her friend's face.

  "Child is sorry," Mai murmured to the old woman.

  Truong's eyes were glazed when he opened them. He looked like a burnt ghost. He leaned over, away from his mother, and dry-retched. There was nothing left in him to expel. Another of their neighbors, a man who smelled of stale tobacco, averted his legs casually.

  "What it can do to you," the old woman said, her gums stained crimson from chewing betel leaves, "the ocean."

  "Does Child's stomach hurt?" asked Mai.

  "Yes."

  "What it can steal from you and never give back. My husband, both my daughters." "It's just a stomach-ache," said Quyen, then looked up as though daring the old woman – or anyone – to disagree. A gang of eyes, unmoving, inexpressive, watched them from the shadows.

  That evening, Anh Phuoc ladled out the last rations of water. He shuffled wearily through the boat, repeating the same account to anyone who stopped him, intoning his interlocutors' names as though that were the only consolation left him to offer them. Weak moans and thick silences trailed him.

  When Mai poured her ration into Truong's cup, Quyen frowned, and then flinched away. "Thank you," she said at last. For the first time she used the word for "younger sister."

  "It's nothing. I already took a sip."

  "Poor child," repeated the old woman, shaking her head.

  Truong took some water in, then coughed some of it out. People looked over. In the dusk light his face was pallid and shiny.

  He opened his mouth. "Ma," he said.

  "I'm here," said Quyen.

  "Ma."

  Quyen bit her lips, wiped the sweat from Truong's brow with a corner of her shirt. Finally his eyes focused and he seemed to look straight at Mai.

  "It's so hot," he said.

  "Thoi," said Quyen, dabbing above his eyes, around his hairline.

  "I want to go up."

  "Sleep, my beloved. My little prince. Sleep."

  Mai wanted desperately to say something to him-something useful, or comforting-but no words came. She got up to close the hatch door.

  The old woman took out a betel leaf and inserted it into the slit of her toothless mouth.

  ***

  HIS SICKNESS FOLLOWED the usual course. Muscle soreness and nausea in the early stages. That evening his blisters began to rise, some of them bleeding pus. He became too weak to swallow water.

  In the middle of the night, Mai woke to find Truong half draped over her stomach. His weight on her so light as to be almost imperceptible, as though his body were already nothing more than bones and air. "Everything will be fine," she whispered into the darkness, her thoughts, still interlaced with dream, scattered remotely across space and gray sea. Back home she'd slept on the same mat as Loc. Her mother by the opposite wall. She reached down and touched Truong's brow.

  He stirred awake.

  "Is Child alright?"

  "I want to go up."

  The skin on his face was hot and moist. Mai lifted her eyes and noticed Quyen, mashed in the shadow of the companionway steps, staring at both of them.

  "Take him," she said dully.

  Mai found a spot for them by the pilothouse, surrounded by sleeping families. When dawn came, Truong's head slid with a slight thud onto the planking. Half asleep, Mai sought his shoulder, shook it. His body gave no response. She sat up and shook him again. His clothes stiff with dried sweat. Nothing.

  "Truong," whispered Mai, feeling the worry build within her. She poked his cheek. It was still warm – thank heavens! – it was still warm. She checked his forehead: hotter than it had been last night. He was boiling up. His breath shallow and short. With agonizing effort she cradled his slight, inert body and bore him up the stairs into the pilothouse.

  Anh Phuoc was slumped underneath the tiller, sleeping. Three infants were laid out side by side on the floor, swaddled in rags.

  He woke up. "What is it?" He saw Truong in her arms. "Where's Quyen?"

  She laid him down. Then she turned to find Quyen.

  "Wait." Anh Phuoc got up, surveyed the boat through the windows, then retrieved a flask from behind the bank of gauges. He unscrewed the cap and poured a tiny trickle of water into a cup. "This was for them," he said, gesturing at the motionless babies. "How they've lasted twelve days I don't know." He screwed the flask cap back on and then, with tremendous care, handed her the cup. "But they won't make it either." He paused. "Let me find Quyen."

  Truong wouldn't wake up. Mai dipped one finger into the cup, traced it along the inner line of his lips. Once it dried she dipped her finger again, ran it across his lips again. She did this over and over. One time she thought she saw his throat twitch. His face – vthe burnt, blistered skin, its spots and scabs – the deeper she looked, the more his features dissociated from one another until what she looked into, as she tended him, was not a face, but a brown and blasted landscape. Like a slow fire it drew the air from her lungs.

  Commotion on deck. Someone shouting. She jolted awake, checked Truong – he was still unconscious, his fever holding. A weird tension suffusing the air. Another death? Mai opened the pilothouse door and asked a nearby woman what was happening.

  "They saw whales," the woman said.

  "Whales?"

  "And then land birds."

  It was as though she were sick again, her heart shocked out of its usual rhythm. "Land? They saw land?"

  The woman shrugged.

  All at once Quyen burst out of the hold, her hair disheveled and her eyes watery and red. She spotted Mai.

  "Here!" Mai called out excitedly. "Chi Quyen, here!" She stood on tiptoes and scanned all the horizon she could see. Nothing. She looked again. "Someone said they saw land," she announced aloud. Realizing people were scowling at her, she turned toward Quyen. Too late she caught a new, rough aspect in her eyes. Quyen strode up into Mai's face.

  "Where's my son?" She pushed into the pilothouse. Mai stumbled back, tripping over the doorsill.

  Inside, Quyen saw Truong and rushed toward him, lowering her head to his. She emitted a throaty cry and twisted around to face Mai.

  "Stay away," she declared. "You've done enough!" Her voice was strained, on the verge of shrillness.

  "Chi," gasped Mai.

  "I've changed my mind," Quyen went on, the pitch of her words wavering. Her expression was wild, now – cunning. "He's my son! Not yours – mine!"

  "Thoi," a man's voice interjected.

  Mai spun and saw Anh Phuoc in the doorway.

  "What's the matter?"

  Quyen glared at him. He waited for her to speak. Finally, her tone gone sullen, she said, "She took my son."

  He sighed. "Mai was looking after him."

  Quyen stared at him, incredulous, then started laughing. She clamped both hands over her mouth. Then, as though in embarrassment, she dipped her head, nuzzling Truong's chest like an animal. Mai watched it all. The thick dense knot back behind her temple. Quyen's body shuddered in tight bursts awhile, then, slowly, hitchingly, it began to calm. It seemed for a moment as though Quyen might never look up again. When she did, her face was utterly blanched of expression.

  "Mai wouldn't hurt Truong," said Anh Phuoc tiredly. "She loves him."

  Quyen threw him a spent smile. "I know." But she didn't look at Mai. Instead, she turned and again bent over the unconscious shape of her son. That was when she began to cry – silently at first, inside her body, but then, breath by breath, letting out her wail until the whole boat could hear.

  ***

  HE WAS HER SHAME and yet she loved him. What did that make her? She had conceived him when she was young, and passed him off to her aunt in Da Lat to raise, and then she had gotten married. With the war and all its disturbances, she had never gone back to visit him. Worse, she had never told her husband.

  "He would leave me," she told Mai. "He will."

  But she couldn't abandon her only son – not to
the Communists – not if she could find a way out of the country. Even if he didn't want to leave, and even if he didn't know her. Her aunt had balked, and Quyen had been forced to abduct him. She'd been wrong to have him – she knew that – but she'd been even more wrong to give him away. Surely, she thought, she was right to take him with her. Then, when she saw him weakening-then falling sick-she realized that perhaps he was being punished for her shame. Whether he lived or died- perhaps it wasn 't for her to decide.

  She begged Mai to forgive her.

  Mai didn't say anything.

  "He doesn't love his own mother," said Quyen.

  "That's not true."

  Quyen leaned down and unstuck his hair from his forehead, and parted it. They'd moved him back down into the hold, under the companionway stairs, for shade.

  Quyen sniffed. "It's fair. What kind of mother watches that happen to her only son-and does nothing?"

  "You were sick."

  Quyen turned to her with a strange, shy expression, then lowered her gaze.

  "I knew you would take care of him," she said.

  "Of course."

  "No." She looked down at her son's fevered face. "Forgive me. It was more than that. My thoughts were mad." She gave out a noise like a hollow chuckle. "I thought of asking you ..." she said. "I was going to ask you to take him in-to pretend he was your son." She shook her head in wonderment. "He likes you so much. Yes. I thought – just until I could tell my husband the truth."

  Mai remained quiet, her mind turbulent.

  Quyen sniffed again. "Thoi," she declared. "Enough!" Caressing her forearm-still scored with rope marks from the storm six days ago – she smiled into the air. "It's my fault."

  "Chi."

  "Whatever happens to him."

  Mai stared down, unsteadily, at the marred, exposed field of Truong's face.

  "You don't have to answer," Quyen continued in her bright voice. "Whatever happens, I deserve it."

  ***

  HE ENTERED INTO THE WORST of it that afternoon, moving fitfully into and out of sleep. His breath short, irregular. Their neighbors kindly made some space for him to lie down. When some children came to visit, Quyen rebuffed them without even looking. Mai sat silently opposite them, next to the old betel-gummed woman, transfixed by her friend's intensity.