A River in May

by Edward Wilson

  Jethroe’s trump card was the fact that Lopez hadn’t actually read the Bible. He was sure that if he did read it he would see the light. There wasn’t much else to do, so Lopez offered him a deal. ‘OK, if I read the f–…’ he stopped himself from saying, “the fucking thing,” because the pain in Jethroe’s watery blue eyes behind his pale translucent lashes seemed so acute. ‘If I read it, will you stop trying to convert me?’ Jethroe agreed. So Lopez read the Bible, Jethroe’s personal Bible, his own nicely bound King James Version written in the same Elizabethan English that Jethroe and his family still spoke. It took Lopez a week to finish it. He found much of the language beautiful, but also made notes of divine contradictions and injustices for taunting Jethroe. ‘Hey, Jethroe, do you love your mother?’

  ‘Course ah do.’

  ‘God doesn’t. God hates women.’

  Lopez started to quote from the Bible’s rich feast of misogyny, but got no further than Leviticus before Jethroe put his hands over his ears and shouted, ‘You talkin’ about Jezebels and whores of Babylon. My mama ain’t no Jezebel or whore of Babylon.’

  Lopez could see that he was really upset and suddenly felt ashamed of himself. He put his arm around Jethroe and said that he was sorry. He could see that Jethroe was fighting hard to hold back the tears.

  When Lopez was sent out to find the missing marine reconnaissance team, he kept thinking about the Old Testament miracles he had read about in Jethroe’s Bible. The mission was a useless exercise; there had been no contact for three days, and the recon team were, barring a miracle, dead meat. Lopez’s search party was on the verge of turning back when an aerial recon reported a mirror signal. It was highly suspicious since there was still no radio contact, so Lopez was asked to check it out. No one wanted to take responsibility for sending a helicopter rescue team into a fiery death trap.

  When they were within a hundred meters of the location of the mirror signal, Lopez sent Ho Cuc and Phong forward as scouts to see if it really was the marines. A few minutes later Phong came back smiling. ‘It’s the Americans,’ he said. Lopez could almost hear Jethroe’s voice, triumphant – ‘Though ah walk through the valley of the shadow of death ah will fear no evil…’ But it wasn’t God that saved the marines, it was their smell. The lactose-intolerant Vietnamese never eat dairy products; to them, Americans and most other Westerners have a smell like babies, a sort of sour-milk cheesy smell. Phong and Ho Cuc found the lost marines by following their noses.

  The marines were hiding in a poorly camouflaged shelter in a bomb crater. The team had, literally, been struck by lightning. The radio operator had been using a long whip antenna during a tropical storm. The lightning bolt might have been hurled by Zeus himself: it was two miles long and carried a punch of over 200,000 amps. It killed the radio operator and roasted the radio. The lightning lit up the whole jungle and made their hair stand up on end.

  It was soon dark. It was going to be a long night before the evacuation helicopter arrived at first light. They were surrounded by North Vietnamese, but had lots of air support on call if things got rough. As the night wore on it started raining; the loud patter muffled voices. Lopez found out that the recon team was a lieutenant named Quentin Grey, a Virginian with a soft gentle voice who had majored in French at the University of Virginia, and who had also done a year at the Sorbonne. ‘How bizarre can this war get?’ said Quentin. ‘I mean, how likely are you to meet in Vietnam – in the middle of God-only-knows-where, in a bomb crater – another guy who had an exchange year in Paris? When I write my dad about this, he’ll think I’ve been smoking grass.’

  ‘Shhh.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I heard someone cough.’

  ‘Maybe it was an animal.’

  ‘There are no animals in these mountains. No birds either. They’ve all been poisoned by defoliant. Don’t worry – let’s talk about France instead.’

  They talked. They talked about Stendhal and de Maupassant, about Simone de Beauvoir and Jacques Brel, about getting drunk on pastis and eating moules et frîtes after midnight, about standing at a zinc bar on a cold morning and ordering un p’tit crème, watching the steam escaping from the coffee machine. And the faces of the regulars, like animated paintings, who talked about Paris St. Germain or the horses at Auteuil. And the buttery aroma of warm croissants.

  ‘What was that?’

  ‘Only artillery.’

  ‘No, that crackling sound.

  ‘The wind? A broken tree falling into a bomb crater? Maybe a rat taking a bite out of your RTO?’

  ‘My room was in a garret in the rue St. Paul. Freezing in winter. But remember those old Paris houses with steep pitched roofs and mansard windows – all the different chimney shapes? I liked the way the roof tiles gleamed on a frosty morning, the shady roofs still sleepy with white frost or light snow, others gleaming and steaming in the sun.’

  ‘Remember how in the spring the Seine flooded the quais and lower promenades, and how the trees shook in the current? And when the water was too high for the boats carrying gravel and coal to pass under the bridges, how the crews just sat around reading newspapers, playing cards or staring at the river? I’d have liked to work on a Seine barge.’

  Quentin told Lopez about the sweet sadness of coming back to the Gare d’ Austerlitz on a Sunday evening, for he had fallen in love with a girl from the Auvergne – he and she still wrote letters to each other almost every day – and how it was important to the Auvergne girl that their parents met. But it was difficult, for Quentin’s father was old and seldom traveled. He was a widowed judge who used to do the gardening in a panama hat and a white linen suit. After Quentin’s mother died, he took on a woman named Florence to look after the boy, a tall black woman with high cheekbones who looked like the Queen of the Nile. ‘When I was a little kid, I used to be really afraid of thunderstorms. I used to run to Florence and bury my face in her apron. She always smelt of oak, seasoned oak. But during these thunderstorms her aprons and skirts seemed to have the odor of oak smoke. That first night here I buried my face in the jungle floor, in that dank mold, trying to smell oak, trying to find that strong oak scent that would take me back to Florence. Because as long as she was there nothing could harm me: no Viet Cong, no atom bomb!’ And there was no one else in the family except him and Florence and his old dad.

  The night grew colder and colder and eventually they had to stop talking because they could hear NVA soldiers who seemed to be searching for them. The NVA were so close that they hear them stumbling about and cursing in the total dark of the rain forest night. It was nerve racking, and Lopez wondered how acute was their sense of smell. They were lucky: the NVA soon get fed up and moved on.

  At first light the surrounding jungle was thumped and pummeled by bombs and helicopter rockets in preparation for the arrival of the extraction helicopters. As soon as the smoke cleared a huge marine Chinook hovered into position over the teams. There was a ladder hanging from the belly of the helicopter: Quentin hooked the dead Marine to the bottom rung and then clambered up. Lopez and the others followed him. It was impossible to winch them in: the teams that were extracted this way simply attached themselves to the ladder by snap-links and swayed in the breeze until they got back to base.

  They ascended through a swirling maelstrom of throbbing noise, whipped dust, earth, leaf and wood. Everything, thought Lopez, seemed to be working to plan. The down blast of the rotors had blown away the poncho that the marines had wrapped around the corpse. The seat of the dead marine’s trousers had been burned away when the lightning bolt had passed through his body into the damp earth, Lopez could see the burn marks on his buttocks.

  For the first time Lopez started to relax and feel how wonderful it was, what a relief it was, to get out of that place. Just as he was getting use to the idea of being safe and alive, he heard something go ‘pop’ – and saw a stream of yellow smoke billowing in the wake of the helicopter. He looked up. The smoke appeared to be coming out of Quentin’s chest. H
e was wildly flailing about with his arms and legs in every direction, attached to the ladder only by his shoulder harness and snap-link. The pin of a smoke grenade had snagged on something and pulled out. There wasn’t any explosive in the grenade, but there was a phosphorous element that was emitting a scorching scalding white flame. Lopez could see that Quentin was going wild, his face distorted with pain and his mouth screaming, but the cries were lost in the wind. Lopez unhooked his snap-link and started to climb up to help him. He ducked when Quentin’s rifle slipped off his shoulder and fell into the jungle. There wasn’t enough time. The flame burnt through the rest of Quentin’s harness webbing. Lopez watched him fall – it seemed to take such a long time – still trailing a plume of yellow smoke, into the green sea of vegetation. Meanwhile the radio operator’s corpse was twisting in the wind like a rag doll; it was attached to the ladder by its feet, and the arms seemed to be waving a grotesque farewell. Smoke continued to billow from under the trees. One of the gunships made a low pass over the spot, then flew on.

  Lopez thought of Quentin’s father, in his white linen suit, emerging like an apparition from the dahlias and honeysuckle to receive a telegram from hell.

  NUI HOA DEN was cold in the winter monsoon; everyone was wearing field jackets. The morphine made Lopez feel even colder. He had been called from the warmth of his bunk to help interrogate a Viet Cong who had just deserted from the wretched village of Phu Gia. When asked why he had left, the deserter simply shrugged his shoulders and said that he’d ‘had enough’. Lopez found all his answers vague and unconvincing; he seemed shifty and depressed at the same time. To prove his sincerity, the deserter offered to lead them to a secret arms cache near Phu Gia. The fact that he didn’t even bother to ask how much they would pay him for the information made Lopez even more suspicious.

  The next day a patrol led by Mr Truong, the best of the CIDG company commanders, set off with the deserter to find the cache which was supposed to be in a cave near the base of Black Widow Mountain. Truong was just as suspicious as Lopez about the deserter. He sent out flank security to check for ambushes and made his column stay off the main trails, even though it meant slow going through thick brush. When they got near the cave, Truong gave the order to halt and went forward alone with the deserter to investigate the cache. At the mouth of the cave someone tripped a booby trap and both Truong and the deserter were killed instantly. When they finally searched the cave there was nothing other than a few obsolete World War One bolt action rifles and some useless and decayed explosives.

  The two bodies, wrapped in coarse gray blankets, lay unclaimed in the Dead House. Truong had relatives in Da Nang, but no one knew what they intended to do, if anything. As for the dead deserter – if he was a deserter – no one was going to mourn for him. It seemed almost certain that he had blown himself up in order to kill a CIDG company commander. Lopez found it all so predictable, so stupid, so pointless.

  That evening he went to the Dead House to light incense sticks for them. Peace, he thought, and remembered Eliot’s lines, He who was living is now dead / We who were living are now dying … He saw that Truong and the deserter were lying close together, their bodies gently touching, like an old married couple on a stormy night. He listened to the rain drumming on the corrugated iron of the roof and breathed the perfume of the incense smoke. It was pitch dark except for the tiny red dots of the incense sticks glowing like a tiny pair of lizard’s eyes. He felt very at peace, like the resigned damned of Dante’s ninth circle, the ones whose very tears have frozen. Maybe, he thought, this was where he was meant to come and why he was there.

  Later that evening, Boca called Lopez into his cubicle and said they were going to have to do ‘something serious’ about Phu Gia. They’d argued about the village before. Lopez always maintained that airstrikes ought to be used further up the river where supplies were ferried across or on the trails in the mountains. This time Boca told Lopez that he had his head up his ass and that Truong’s death proved that Phu Gia wasn’t an innocent village, but ‘a running sore that needs to be obliterated.’

  Morphine induced lethargy made Lopez disinclined to anger but candid. ‘If you do that, you should get the civilians out first.’

  ‘The dumb fucks want to go on living there, that’s their fault!’

  The following night there was an attack on one of the camp’s outposts. From the relative safety of the .50 cal bunker Lopez found the attack a pretty sight. Rocket flashes followed by green tracer poured into the outpost, and red tracer spat out and ricocheted off the mountain rocks, and then the sky was full of parachute flares. The show only lasted a few minutes, but Sergeant-major Dieu managed to get shot in the leg. He was lucky, in that the bullet struck him in the shin, but managed to pass between the tibia and the fibula without damaging either bone. But there were ugly purple holes both back and front, which soon began to fester.

  A few days later Lopez went to see Dai Uy Ky about a new directive from Saigon. Ky and all the other Vietnamese commanders had been instructed to give up their extortionate monopolies over camp canteens. At Tien Phouc there had nearly been a mutiny when the Vietnamese CO tried to pay his soldiers in canteen vouchers instead of money. It was common knowledge that the American high command had finally given the Saigon government an ultimatum about blatant corruption in the Vietnamese Army. The American aim was to get the Vietnamese officer corps to spend less time running business rackets and more time being soldiers. Instead, the ultimatum set off a last-chance feeding frenzy of graft.

  Dai Uy Ky was shrewd enough to deduce that the Americans were preparing to leg it. He had already started to collect gold Rolex watches; it was a way around the import controls on gold bullion. And Ky had known, long before Lopez, that he was going to have to turn over the canteen to a civilian entrepreneur. Indeed, he had already made a short list, including a Chinese merchant named Chou. The concession had to be awarded on a competitive tender approved by a US officer, in this case Lopez. In reality, the final decision hinged on who would offer the biggest bribe to Dai Uy Ky.

  The evening began with dominoes in the Dai Uy’s private quarters. It was past midnight and Lopez found it difficult to focus. After a few games, Ky put the dominoes back in their case. ‘You’re not concentrating, Trung Uy. I can’t take your money.’ He tried to give back what he had won, but Lopez refused to accept it. ‘You make me feel guilty.’ Ky took a bottle of cognac out of an inlaid cabinet and poured his guest a large drink. He called his servant and told him to lay the table for supper. The first course was lukewarm rice gruel with pieces of pig intestines. Afterwards there was cold pickled pork wrapped in vine leaves. Ky poured more cognac and asked, ‘Is it true that everyone in America has a car?’

  ‘Many, but not everyone.’

  ‘Not everyone?’ Ky looked doubtful.

  Lopez asked about his daughters and the Dai Uy said they were well and often asked about him. Lopez noticed that Ky was looking at him in a strange way – he wondered if he was being considered as a potential suitor. Ky pinched his arm and said, ‘You have skin like a Vietnamese.’ Then he smiled and picked up a deck of cards. ‘Shall we play poker?’

  Lopez nodded and Ky dealt the cards for seven-card stud with aces and one-eyed jacks wild.

  As they played Lopez asked if there was any news of Sergeant-major Dieu. There wasn’t. Lopez tried to keep the conversation on Dieu; he wanted to see if Ky knew that the Sergeant-major had been a Communist agent. But he couldn’t ask directly: there were categories of intelligence information that neither team would share.

  Ky knew that Lopez was probing him. He didn’t want to appear evasive and impolite so he told him about Dieu’s sex life instead – it was OK to talk about that. Dieu had quite a reputation. Soon after arriving at Nui Hoa Den, he had seduced the cooks, moved on to the camp nurse, and then talent-scouted the surrounding villages. A recurrent nuisance had been shouting matches at the camp gates between the guards and hysterical husbands, weeping women, and homicidal
mothers. ‘Did you know that Dieu is fifty-three years old?’ asked Ky.

  ‘He looks younger.’

  Ky went on to describe Dieu’s wife – ‘a very patient woman’ – and her business interests in Da Nang and their two children. The son was an army officer, Ky said, but didn’t specify which army. It was difficult to gather how much Ky really knew about Dieu’s double life, and about how much it really mattered. Perhaps, for them, thought Lopez, the barriers between friend and foe were permeable membranes rather than iron curtains.

  Dieu wasn’t at all well. Lopez and Carson arrived just before he was carted off for his second amputation. Carson had brought a bottle of Scotch as a present, but knew that it would disappear if he left it on the ward. He held Dieu by the hand – it was dry and feverish, and there was a sickly sweet smell of corruption from the gangrene. Carson told Dieu that he would keep the whiskey in safekeeping until after the operation. He also told Dieu that he was pissed off to see him getting such a rotten deal. They had tried to get him transferred to an American hospital, but it couldn’t be done. Carson’s own wound had been very similar: an uncomplicated puncture wound that had missed bones and organs. He had complained at first when they doubled the diameter of the bullet path by running a drill through his thigh to bore out all the dead and damaged flesh, but he was back on duty in less than a month.