A River in May

by Edward Wilson

  After the war Carson got married and tried to earn a living cleaning carpets in his wife’s hometown – Raleigh, North Carolina – but it was too poorly paid to support his growing family. He re-enlisted, this time in the Marines, just in time to get sent to Korea. This time the Red Chinese captured him when his company was overrun at the Chosin Reservoir. Most of his colleagues had already been killed, so Carson had tried to hide under a pile of their bodies in a trench, hoping that he would be overlooked. The Chinese dug him out anyway and used him as a propaganda exhibit. They carted him around North Korean villages in a cage as an example of a depraved American. Carson unwittingly played the intended role: he made orangutan noises, dragged his knuckles across the floor of the cage and flung his own excrement at the gawking villagers. After being repatriated, he left the Marines and returned to the army. He reckoned that the army was ‘more friendly and easy going.’

  It seemed to Lopez that Carson was the only American who got on with his Vietnamese counterpart. The partnership between Carson and Sergeant-major Dieu was like a marriage based on mutual love and respect, while the other counterpart relationships were like blind dates that soon turned to loathing. For Carson, however, there was another factor: Dieu was his friend. They often got drunk together, but never said much. They were like a pair of lovers who had met in late middle age – they didn’t need to talk about the past; history was written all over their faces. Carson knew there was a dilemma. He was just as certain as Redhorn that Dieu was an enemy agent. When the time came, Lopez wondered, would Carson betray his country or would he betray his friend? One night, Lopez overheard Carson saying a bedtime prayer: ‘Please, Lord; please, sweet Jesus; let this cup pass away from my lips.’ He walked away on tiptoe through the dark of the bunker corridor. He didn’t want Carson to know that anyone had heard something so revealing, so tender.

  Lopez was certain that, for Dieu, there was no such dilemma. Although Carson was the only American he had ever respected – and the only foreigner to whom he had given friendship – when the time came he would have no scruples about killing him too. Vietnam was his country and Carson was the foreign invader: no dilemma at all. And there was no need to explain this to Carson – he knew it already.

  The ambush patrol had shot four rice carriers in the middle of the night. When they examined the bodies at first light they found that two of the porters, one of them a young woman, were still alive although shot through the abdomen. Lopez watched Carson’s hand grip and ungrip the beer can as he described how Dieu had drawn his pistol to finish the victims off. ‘The young woman was real pretty. I remember she had this little wisp of hair across her mouth. And Dieu just shot her: no regret, no mercy, just – just like he was doing her a favor. The way she was shot up anyway, I guess maybe he was.’

  Afterwards they carried the dead to Xuan Hoa and left the bodies in the village square for their relatives to collect. ‘I didn’t like that,’ said Carson. ‘I know it’s a dirty job, but just dumping them like sacks of rubbish … I said somethin’ to Dieu about it, he said it didn’t matter because the dead people had “bad luck” – what’s that supposed to mean?’

  The thing that annoyed Lopez most about Dieu was his smile – what Redhorn called that ‘fucking sardonic smile grinning out of Judas’ asshole’. Dieu’s smile seemed to say, ‘I watched the Japanese come and go, and then the French come back again and go again – and now, you have come, but not for long, for you will soon be going too. If one waits long enough, you all go – one way or another.’

  Lopez found the Dead House eerie at night and unnaturally cold, as if icy draughts were rising from subterranean wells. The building, formerly the camp infirmary, was a squat windowless stone structure that proved more suitable as a morgue. The CIDG dead were wrapped in gray blankets and stacked on a long table until the coffin maker finished his task. There was always the sweet smell of incense sticks and the sound of wailing. The night after Ngo Van Linh stepped on a landmine, there was quite a lot wailing. Linh came from a large family: he was the youngest of three brothers, and had a twin sister, Co Lan, who was a camp cook. That afternoon Lan was laughing and joking with Hamchunk, the head cook, as she washed the pots. Then, for no apparent reason, she turned pale and ran for the door. Lopez watched her collapse on the doorstep and vomit up great lumps of green bile – her retching was so violent that he thought her insides were going to rupture. A minute later there was a radio message from the patrol saying that her twin had just been killed by a mine. Afterwards, one of Lan’s brothers had to hold her arms to stop her from tearing out huge handfuls of her hair. That evening Linh’s mother led the mourning with a keening so loud and piercing that Lopez could hear her in the depths of his bunker.

  The keening reminded Lopez that he had to see Mr Kim, Linh’s platoon leader, about details he needed to process the death gratuity. Death, even in war, carried documents and paper work in its wake. Lopez pulled on his boots, left his cubicle, went up the stairs and into the dank night torn by lamentation wails. He felt his way around the 81mm mortar pit and found the gap in the inner wire. When he got to Kim’s bunker the keening seemed even louder: it was starting to make Lopez feel queasy. He was perhaps too brisk in asking for Linh’s next of kin details and dates of service. Kim glanced at the photos of his own family and then said, ‘Trung Uy Lopez, khong co’ may dua con – Lieutenant Lopez, you don’t have any children.’

  Lopez didn’t say anything, he couldn’t say anything. He knew there were worlds, whole galaxies, of pain that he still didn’t know – pain that diminished self to less than a pinprick.

  That evening Lopez lay naked on his bunk and thought about the mental telepathy that had passed that afternoon between Co Lan and her twin brother. Linh’s goodbye message must have shot out of his dying brain like a burning arrow. Lopez wondered if his dying would reach anyone like that. Was all closeness gone or was there still somewhere a mental frequency, an open synapse, that would receive his final message?

  Lopez wanted to sleep, but for some reason could only think about Rideout’s Landing. It was the river of his childhood that he missed the most. He loved it especially in the still summer evenings after the heat had died down. He always walked barefoot through the mare’s paddock down to the jetty – past the chestnut tree and the Douglas fir – feeling the dew cool on his feet. Everything was soft and mellow, even the way the mare would sneak up behind him in the dark and nuzzle his back. It was the only time that he didn’t feel an alien, a brown-faced intruder, when he knew that the river belonged to him.

  It was on just such an evening that he heard Ianthe’s news. Lopez had just come back from his exchange year in France. At dinner he had been on the receiving end of a good deal of Rideout’s Landing teasing. Tom insisted on speaking to him in a French full of intentional mistakes and mispronunciations while Rosie stage-whispered to the guests that after his stimulating evenings with Jean-Paul, Simon and Andre ‘he must find us all terribly boorish and unsophisticated.’ After supper they went out on to the screened porch to drink and talk. The conversation turned into a terrible argument about Vietnam between Richard-the-diplomat and Michael-the-academic. It was totally dark, except for a weak yellow oval of light from the insecticide candle. The angry voices – disembodied from face and person – were like quarrelsome spirits hovering in the night. After a year in Paris, Lopez found Richard’s support of US foreign policy hopelessly naïve, but he didn’t get involved because the only thing he could focus on was being alone with Ianthe again. He was bursting with things to tell her, things he could share with no one else. The time he had spent in Paris had made him realize that he could never be as close to anyone as he was to her. His loneliness for her was made worse because all evening she had seemed troubled and detached. While Michael counterattacked with something about how Dulles had reneged on the Geneva agreement, Lopez slipped out into the night and waited for her to follow him.

  Lopez tried to stop remembering, but the past was like a murdere
d corpse and his brain like a dog that kept digging up the body from wherever he buried it. There was the sound of a rat rustling behind the plywood partition, a static broken radio voice, and a distant rumble of eight-inch artillery impacting in the next valley, but he couldn’t stop his memory from hearing those other sounds and other voices: the swish of their legs through the paddock grass, hoofbeats in the dark as the mare spooked and cantered away. They found the mare and whispered to her that it was only they. Ianthe was beside him and he felt the back of her hand brush against his. She placed her hand in his hand beside the musky warmth of the mare’s flank. ‘Listen,’ she said, ‘there’s something, something about me you ought to know.’

  There was something in her voice that made Lopez freeze and shake all over. Just then Rosie bellowed from the direction of the jetty, ‘Hey, what are you two whispering and plotting about?’

  They ignored her. Lopez gripped her hand and noticed how damp it was. ‘Tell me,’ he whispered.

  ‘I think I might be pregnant.’

  The words hit him like a sledgehammer blow between the eyes. He couldn’t deal with change, not this sort of change.

  Rosie was bellowing again: she had decided that Michael and Richard required a midnight sail to cool them off. ‘I think,’ she shouted, ‘we have to go with them.’

  So they cast off Stormy Petrel without using the motor and tacked down the St. Michael’s River. Lopez and Ianthe were too closely huddled with the others to talk. He found the pain almost physical: his body was vibrating and his brain was burning. As soon as they left the shelter of the river the breeze from the bay made the boat heel and the water purr and gurgle along the hull. Lopez could feel the bump of each wave travel up his spine and explode against his brain. All his senses were humming with a sort of hysterical alertness. They sailed close-hauled to the first bell buoy. In the distance were the running lights of a tug towing an obsolete ship to the breaker’s yard.

  Later that night Lopez crept into her bedroom. ‘Shhh,’ she said. ‘Rosie’s still up.’

  He got under the covers, but was careful not to touch her. Amid all the hurt, there was something absurd and comic. Lopez had thrown on a garish silk dressing gown that Tom’s brother Harold had picked up on China Station in the twenties. The silk and the secrecy made him feel like a character in a pre-war bedroom farce. ‘What really happened?’ Lopez was desperately hoping that she was going to say it was only a tease. He waited. Nothing. ‘Was it Angel?’ he said.

  She nodded and told him the story, so coolly and so factually that she might have been describing a science experiment. For some reason, the fact that she had chosen someone of his own race made him even more sick inside. It was like there was some stupid sub-conscious thing, something that just made it all so complicated. Lopez was deranged by the idea that it was Angel, an over-dressed spoiled rich brat. The thought of that tailor’s dummy driving his Mustang convertible back to his daddy’s embassy and smirking under his pencil-thin pimp’s moustache made Lopez want to kill. The image of Ianthe, her legs sprawled in the back seat, and Angel with his Brylcreemed hair shining like wet coal and his teeth bared in triumph, made him want to vomit.

  When she had finished telling Lopez, she put her arms around him. ‘What should I do?’

  ‘You could marry Angel.’

  Ianthe gently swatted Lopez on the back of the head. ‘Don’t be stupid.’

  ‘There are only two choices: you either have the baby or you kill it.’

  ‘Abortion’s wrong.’

  ‘So is letting a total scumbag put his sperm inside you.’

  ‘I don’t like it when you’re crude. It doesn’t suit you.’

  ‘Yeah, I know, you told me that before – like a million times.’

  ‘What’s wrong, Francis? Are you crying?’

  ‘No, I’m not.’

  ‘Yes, you are. I can feel your tears on my cheek.’

  ‘Ianthe, Ianthe. How could you?’

  ‘I don’t know, things just happen. What should I do?’

  ‘I can’t tell you. It has to be your decision.’

  ‘Please, Francis, tell me.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You still a Catholic?’

  ‘No. I don’t believe any of that nonsense. You know that; we used to argue about it all the time.’

  ‘Will you help me get an abortion?’

  Lopez turned away and buried his head.

  ‘Please, Francis. Please.’

  ‘Are you sure you want to do this?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Promise you won’t blame me afterwards?’

  ‘I promise.’

  ‘I couldn’t stand to lose you; I couldn’t live with you hating me.’

  ‘Don’t be silly, Francis. I’ll always love you.’

  ‘OK, I’ll help you. I’ll find someone.’

  Ianthe curled up like, Lopez thought, the tiny fetus inside her and asked him to hold her. ‘You haven’t been so perfect yourself, you know.’

  Lopez didn’t say anything. She knew about how he went wild during his last year at school: the parties he used to go to in East Baltimore, the drunken brawls, the trouble with the police, and that Mary-Louise he’d taken to Ocean City. He had no right to condemn Ianthe.

  The bunker was silent except for the sound of breathing in the next cubicle. Rat’s feet … quick scurry … Must be sniffing, must have found the bait… Then the loud crack of spring-coiled metal smacking down on flesh, bone and wood.

  LOPEZ LOVED OTHER WOMEN TOO. Like the woman who hadn’t seemed to realize that her hands couldn’t stop bullets. Her first reaction had been to close her eyes and to raise her hands to fend off the rifle fire. She was struck in the left wrist by an M16 bullet which shattered that fragile complex of bones and left a gaping hole as an exit wound. One of the men escaped into the jungle, but the other two were shot down before they had a chance to surrender or defend themselves. They had been shot in the guts and lay moaning. They were local force Viet Cong who had been eating their midday meal at a supply cache encampment when the CIDG point element surprised them.

  Later, as the CIDG carefully searched the cache, Dusty Storm heard the faint sound of soft breathing coming from beneath an oilcloth tarpaulin. Lopez watched as Dusty carefully lifted an edge with his rifle and said, ‘Chao, Co Dep – Hello, Miss Pretty’. A young girl of about seven or eight was hiding beneath. As the child came out from hiding, Dusty wasn’t able to stop her from seeing what had happened to her parents. He knelt down to comfort her and to wipe her tears away – but there weren’t any tears. The little girl’s eyes were nothing but black empty pools dilated by terror. It made Lopez afraid and queasy all over. This child had just been catapulted out of the normal world of children’s tears to a burning planet where tears were banal understatement. Dusty hugged her, but there was no response, just dull, paralytic shock. Lopez remembered a war widow at Fort Benning who had an autistic son: that boy’s fishlike unresponsiveness frightened him so much he had had to leave the house. ‘Please, not her too,’ he prayed. Dusty knelt down, placed his face close to the little girl’s and took her by the hand. ‘Chao, em,’ he said – Hello, little sister. Dusty stared into her eyes, straining to make contact. Lopez watched a tear form and then saw her tiny hand clutch Dusty’s fingers.

  ‘Chao, anh – Hello, older brother,’ she whispered.

  As they made their way back to Nui Hoa Den, Dusty gave Co Dep a piggyback. The wounded men were carried in ponchos slung from stout bamboo poles. After they had walked a little less than a mile, two shots rang out. No one said a thing; it was as if nothing had happened. Twenty minutes later, when they stopped for a break, Lopez turned to his counterpart Trung Uy Tho and asked, ‘How are the prisoners, Trung Uy?’

  ‘I think, Trung Uy Lopez, they maybe drink too much water.’ This was Tho’s idea of a joke: there was a Vietnamese proverb that drinking too much water brought bad luck, as well as cholera and dysentery.

  ‘Or maybe,’ said Dusty
, using Vietnamese slang, ‘they’ve been eating too much bronze candy.’

  Later that afternoon, back at the camp, Lopez watched Co Dep’s mother being interrogated. She looked forty, but was probably thirty. Her hair wasn’t silken and shiny, but hard and wiry like steel wool; her skin wasn’t soft and smooth, but cracked and brown from living rough. She wasn’t pretty, but Lopez thought she was beautiful. She was wearing loose black trousers and a simple white blouse stained with blood. Lopez couldn’t see her eyes because, like all prisoners, she was blindfolded. But he knew that she was more than beautiful; she was magnificent.

  A Vietnamese medic cleaned her wound while Trung Uy Tho fired questions at her. Lopez looked at the wound and saw that all the bones in the wrist had been pulverized; her hand was attached to her arm only by ligaments and tendons. She showed no pain and seemed oblivious of the medic’s attentions, as if the shattered wrist belonged to someone else.

  ‘What does your husband do?’ barked Tho. It was the fifth time he had repeated the question.

  Finally she answered, but in a voice so low that no one could make out the words.