A River in May

by Edward Wilson

  He looked in the teamhouse, the comm bunker, in the captain’s own quarters, but Boca just seemed to have disappeared. He started to search the CIDG positions, the ammo bunkers, all the trenches, everywhere. No one said anything, but Lopez attracted a crowd of Vietnamese who followed him around though keeping their distance. Finally, he heard a voice behind him, put his finger on the trigger and turned around.

  ‘Lieutenant Lopez, what the fuck are you doing?’ It was Dusty.

  ‘Where’s Boca?’

  ‘Gone. Left on the mail chopper. Didn’t he tell you? He’s got a week’s R&R with his family in Hawaii.’

  The next day they brought Xuan Huong and her newly-born baby to the Nui Hoa Den infirmary. She had gone into labor when the napalm exploded and the liquid fire poured into the bunker where she had gone for cover. She had suffered third degree burns over most of her body. The baby was fine. But it was a baby who would never suck milk from her mother’s breasts, because those breasts had been burnt off, a baby who would never bring joy to her mother’s eyes because the jellies of those eyes were melted. Nor would that mother ever caress her baby, because the hands that would have held and caressed were so ruined by American napalm they had to be amputated.

  At first Lopez was ashamed to be back on the morphine. He had progressed from tablets to injecting the syrettes intended for battlefield wounded. He had managed to steal a whole box from the infirmary. He felt ashamed because his pain was so much less than the pain of others, less than the wretched blinded Xuan Huong’s, less than poor naïve Bobby’s, or that of the human beings they used as mine detectors. He thought about all the limbless kids. The eyes were the worst things about those kids. No accusation, no hate, just bottomless black pools of acceptance and pain. Lopez would have preferred anger, a flailing attack with a crutch. Anything would have been better than those hollow-eternity eyes. Was it Nietzsche who said something about staring into the abyss, and the abyss staring back? Lopez couldn’t take it; he didn’t even want to try to comprehend it – the endlessness of that pain, the eternity of that acceptance. Was this all that most of humanity would ever own? He didn’t need more knowledge of this: he needed a drug.

  Lopez pulled the plastic top off a morphine syrette. He looked at the needle that glistened gold in the candlelight and remembered the first time he had used one, not on himself, but on a Vietnamese casualty. The CIDG soldier, so slightly built, had looked like a child of fifteen. A mine had blown off his leg to just above the knee. The meat of his thigh was flayed and shredded, ragged flaps of skin hanging like ribbons, the bone sticking out splintered and charred like someone had taken a blowtorch to it. Lopez radioed the team medic for advice. ‘Don’t let him go into shock,’ said the medic, ‘or he’s a goner. If he’s still conscious, give him a morphine jab.’ Lopez injected the drug into the good thigh, then radioed back for more advice. The medic said, ‘You didn’t give him the whole syrette did you?’ ‘Sure I did.’ ‘Uh-oh…’ The dosage was designed for beefy Americans, not diminutive Vietnamese. Lopez regretted that he hadn’t stayed with him till he died, wished that he’d held him in his arms, had whispered, ‘I’m sorry.’

  There were other evasions too. He knew that he had to stop saying ‘they’. It wasn’t they – it was he. He had been in command and it was his responsibility that those awful hills had been strewn with body parts. Lopez stared at the needle: he still had two legs and was big enough for a full American dose. He hated to remember that he held a position of authority. Lopez didn’t want to be reminded that, compared to a CIDG soldier, in the tiny world of Nui Hoa Den he had all the power of a Medici prince. But then, as the sweet numbness crawled up his body from the intra-muscular syrette that he had squeezed into his thigh like a tiny tube of toothpaste, it no longer mattered. He poured a whiskey and lay back on his bunk. A paperback copy of Rimbaud’s poems that Rosie had sent him jabbed into his back – he tossed it on the earth floor and watched the candle light flicker on the cover. The cover design was a chaos of broken lines and splattered paint reproduced from a Jackson Pollock. ‘Why the fuck?’ he thought. Why the fuck indeed?

  Lopez watched the candle flicker on his desk. He was starting to feel good – nothing much mattered. He no longer wanted to kill Boca, no longer wanted to kill anyone. It was a quiet night: no artillery, no keening from the Dead House – even the radio seemed asleep. The drugged silence reminded him of a lieutenant that he had roomed with at Fort Benning. The lieutenant had lost the use of a leg when a white phosphorus grenade had accidentally exploded during a helicopter insertion on the Cambodian border. The phosphorus had melted all the tendons, cartilage and ligaments that made up his knee joint. There was no treatment: the lieutenant was condemned to watch the muscle of his leg slowly wither away until it was nothing but a bony stick. The medical board awarded the lieutenant a big fat disability allowance. His mother said he had to forget the past and think about the future; she pleaded with him to use the disability money to buy a fast food franchise that he could run with his sister – she’d do most of the work. Instead the lieutenant bought a return ticket to Asia. The last Lopez had heard was that he had set up home in an opium den in Taiwan where he was spending every last cent of his disability pension. Lopez could see the point – it was a way out, a way to get rid of the pain. And it wasn’t just the withered leg.

  Lopez felt cold, so he took off his boots and got under the blanket. He looked up. There was a face next to the candle – Dusty Storm. At first he wondered if it was an hallucination. Lopez hoped it was: he wanted there to be a separate universe. There was also a voice – what was Dusty saying? – which seemed to be echoing from the other end of a tunnel – yualola, yualola. Lopez wanted to turn it off: he didn’t like the way Dusty was laughing, mocking. Suddenly the words became loud and clear, as if someone had pulled cotton wool out of his ears. ‘You’re Lolita. All of you, you’re Lolitas.’

  Lopez closed his eyes and opened them again, but Dusty was still there. He leaned forward and showed his teeth, tiny and stained. ‘But I’m not Lolita, I’m Humbert.’ Dusty lifted the edge of the blanket and looked at Lopez’s feet. ‘Hey, Lolita. Want me to paint your toenails, Lolita?’

  The morphine seemed to be wearing off. Lopez wanted to make Dusty disappear. He tried closing his eyes, but when he opened them again the apparition was still there. ‘Why the fuck don’t you leave me alone?’

  ‘Why? Because then you wouldn’t know how disappointed I was to find out who you are. You’ll always be Lolita – American – and I’ll always be Russian. Your brown face and your French education don’t change a thing.’

  ‘You’re an asshole.’

  ‘And you speak the language of the high school locker room. I’m disappointed. I thought you were different. But you’re just a Disneyland fake with the keys to your Daddy’s car in your pocket.’

  ‘Go ‘way.’ Lopez couldn’t begin to imagine what Dusty was on.

  Dusty had been reading Nabokov. Every month or so the Red Cross sent to the camp a crate of second-hand books, all with their front covers removed to prevent their being resold on the black market, as if, in a cratered landscape scented by napalm, this posed a serious moral problem. Part of Lopez, the part that was still a preppy snob, wanted to let Dusty know that he had actually met Nabokov, that the author had been a houseguest at Rideout’s Landing. But he knew that would only prove Dusty’s point: that he really was a Lolita. A spoiled privileged Lolita with car keys and culture too.

  He could see why Dusty liked Nabokov – both were stranded in supercilious adolescence. Lopez remembered, one morning at Rideout’s Landing, finding the author studying a portrait of one of Rosie’s ancestors, a Confederate major who had been killed at Shiloh. Lopez had always found the dead officer fascinating; with his goatee beard and shoulder length hair he looked more like a poet than a soldier. Nabokov, on the other hand, was regarding the sacred portrait with his head cocked to one side and a mocking smile on his lips. At the time Lopez was only fifteen. H
e felt a thrill when the writer looked at him like a fellow conspirator and whispered, ‘C’est drôle, n’est-ce pas?’

  Dusty disappeared as inexplicably and suddenly as he had appeared. Lopez was sweating and feeling sick. He wondered when he had first started hating America. Was it just a snobbish thing – that when he first came back from France he had winced at the huge cars and the loud vulgarity? Or was it deeper? He resented Dusty for reminding him that he was, in essence, American: rich, self-indulgent, shallow. Fuck up a country? Sure, fuck up as many countries as you like. Who’s going to firebomb your Dresdens, your Hamburgs – who’s going to send your leaders, your generals, to the gallows at Nuremberg? Being American meant not having to pay the price.

  Fuck history – and fuck the supercilious Russians too. Why should he pay the price? It wasn’t his problem. He would start over. He had to stop punishing himself for her death. By doing so he had only hurt more people, killed more people. He had to survive and start to live. As soon as he left the army, he’d be back in the loop. The connections were still there, he just had to plug in.

  Lopez wrapped the blanket tighter round himself, sipped the whiskey and wondered what he should wear for his first interview. He knew how to buy smart understated suits that made him look good. He looked good in gray – it complemented his dark skin. Where would he live? New York? Paris? Why not both? He preferred the life in Paris, but found American girls more erotic – fetishized, depilated Lolitas. Maybe he could have the best of both worlds – he could fuck American girls in Paris!

  Lopez realized that he only had to survive eleven more weeks and his Vietnam duty tour would be finished. He already had plans to pick up a new Triumph Bonneville straight from the factory in Birmingham, England for a motorcycle tour of Europe. Then five easy months at NATO HQ in Brussels before leaving the army. Lopez knew that tomorrow belonged to him: sleek offices, nice clothes, fragrant women, laughter and the clink of glasses on the yacht club terrace, freshly pressed tennis whites. He wanted a bedroom with tall open windows and a sea breeze and sheets that smelled of lavender – a bedroom that he didn’t have to share with rats.

  The candle was nearly spent. Lopez knew that he couldn’t live like that. He loved sensual comfort, and wanted to have all those nice things, live in those nice places, but he feared that he never would. There was something inside of him that would always fuck it up.

  The next morning was a day so clear and beautiful that it almost hurt the eyes. The mountains were in sharp focus against the sky, rumpled green blankets so near in the perfect air you wanted to reach out and stroke them. The river, a living thing, writhed through the valley like a ribbon of shining blue foil.

  Boca had set up his ship’s binoculars on a tripod and was scanning the valley for targets. The binoculars, bearing the nameplate of a battleship sunk at Pearl Harbor, were another of those objects that – like the armchair – had found their way to Vietnam. Squatting behind the binoculars, Boca looked like a toad; Lopez wanted to stick a sharp spike through the back of his neck and into the brain stem, the way a Paris chef kills a frog. Boca had the radio beside him and seemed to be in communication with the .155 artillery at An Hoa. Lopez left him to his murderous games; his very presence polluted the place. Later that morning, Lopez heard shells impacting in the valley, but couldn’t imagine that there was much left to destroy.

  An hour later, the first casualties arrived at the Nui Hoa river landing. Among the chaos of shattered limbs and multiple fragmentation wounds was a tiny little bundle – the little water buffalo girl of Phu Gia. She had been hit in the stomach by a single shell fragment and had died in the boat crossing the bright river. Lopez folded her in his arms and held her for a long time. ‘I’m so sorry,’ he told her. ‘Tell them all – I’m so, so sorry.’

  There were no tears when he laid her down again, only a terrible pulsating in his head, which spread from his brain through his entire body. Every cell was screaming as if he had been wired to a lightning bolt, and no amount of morphine would silence that screaming. It went beyond words like ‘justice’ and ‘retribution’. He needed just to kill, and punish, and kill again.

  He was still a soldier – perhaps more of a soldier than he had ever been before – but no longer an American one.

  LOPEZ PRETENDED to Madame Binh that he had come to see her about Sergeant-major Dieu’s death gratuity. As before, the one-eyed girl servant brought the tea. Madame Binh told Lopez that she had received everything to which she was entitled. He thought she seemed nervous and apprehensive, as if she had the impression that he was there for other reasons. Maybe she was wondering if he was interested in drug trafficking or illegal currency transactions, even something to do with sex. If so, she was probably offended that he had come to her, that he might even think she could help. She most likely just wanted him to leave.

  Lopez tried to make small talk about films and the courses on offer at the Institut Français. They had recently shown Jules et Jim; he asked Madame Binh if she had seen it.

  ‘Sadly, no. There has been so much to do recently.’

  Lopez could tell that she was looking for an opportunity to end his visit. ‘Madame Binh, I have not come here to talk about your late husband or the films of François Truffaut.’

  She let out a breath. Her visitor’s directness made her feel ill at ease, but she did not want to seem impolite. She covered her mouth with a smallblue notebook to hideher embarrassment.

  Lopez knew that it was rude to be bold and direct. He knew that the Vietnamese regarded time as cyclical, knew that there would always be another day, another season. But he felt that the time for waiting, for subtle suggestion, had passed. ‘Madame Binh, I know that you are associated with the National Liberation Front, although you may not be a cadre at present.’

  She couldn’t stay seated; she got up, her hands shaking. Lopez felt he had violated her. ‘Lieutenant Lopez, you are suggesting things about me which are very dangerous.’

  ‘Madame Binh, I hate this war and what the Americans are doing to your country.’

  ‘All of us hate this war – but there are certain things one must never say.’

  ‘Hating the war is not enough. I want to help the NLF and the Liberation Army in whatever way I can.’

  ‘I cannot help you. I know nothing about them.’

  ‘You wouldn’t be involved, Madame Binh. I do not want you to be involved.’

  ‘Please keep your voice down, my servant may hear.’

  ‘Just tell me how I can make contact. Just a hint would do.’

  ‘I do not know what you’re talking about.’

  Lopez could tell that she was extremely upset; he could almost hear her heart beating. ‘I am sorry to have caused you so much distress.’

  ‘I think you have mistaken me for someone else. Maybe someone has told you lies about me.’

  ‘Good-bye, Madame Binh. I wish you well.’

  Lopez returned to his jeep and began the usual security checks. Perhaps, he thought, Dieu had lied to him; perhaps he had sought some form of posthumous revenge. Lopez was parked next to Madame Binh’s kitchen window. He could hear the servant singing as she went about her chores. She was summoned; a moment later she appeared, hiding her face behind her hair as she walked past Lopez and disappeared into a narrow passage at the back of the bicycle shop. The shop was padlocked shut, and Lopez wondered what had become of all the dangerous looking types who had stared at him the last time he was there. He went over to the shop and peeped through a broken shutter; all the tools, bike parts and bikes were still there. Something felt uncanny – he had the feeling that he was being watched.

  Lopez decided to take a look around before he went back. He left the jeep and walked along the tiny dark passage where the servant had disappeared. There was no sign of her. The passage came out through an unlocked gate on to Doc Lap Street. Lopez turned left to see if he could find her. He saw a soup cafe and a pharmacy, separated by a dark and malodorous alleyway which, it seemed to Lop
ez, must lead to the back of the bicycle shop. It was dark, dank and smelled of fish sauce and kitchen waste. He followed it until he was within ten feet of the bike shop. Suddenly a voice greeted him from the shadows in English. ‘Who are you looking for, Trung Uy?’

  Something inside Lopez – it was just a hunch – made him say, ‘Ho Cue?’

  The voice just said, ‘He isn’t very well.’

  Lopez could just make out a dark figure, more shadow than flesh, leaning on a crutch. He was sure it was Cuc. ‘Chao anh,’ he said.

  ‘Welcome home, Trung Uy.’

  The figure coughed and disappeared into the darkness. Lopez heard the crutch scrape, then a door slide closed, a key turn. He waited for ten minutes, but there was no further communication. He made his way back through the alleys to the jeep. There was a note lying on the driver’s seat. Someone had written, in an elegant hand, ‘Tomorrow, 1300 hours, stone bench near ferry landing.’

  Lopez arrived at the ferry landing rendezvous fifteen minutes early. He didn’t know who or what to expect. It even occurred to him that he might, as a suspected agent provocateur, be shot by a passing assassin riding pillion on a Honda. A languid Vietnamese soldier and his girlfriend were sitting on the next stone bench eating lime ices. Lopez’s presence seemed to make them uneasy. They began to whisper and giggle after he sat down. A minute later they got up and strolled away, laughing, under the flame trees along the river promenade.

  Lopez continued to wait on the stone bench – the ends were carved dragons – and listened to the sound of boats churning against the harbor current. He kept checking his watch: his contact was already five minutes late. A class of lycee girls dressed in billowing white ao dais flung by on bicycles, their silken hair and laughter flowing behind them. They looked like a flock of swans. One of the girls stopped to pump up a bicycle tire. Lopez saw her pull back a braid of hair and look around. The girl was flat-chested and looked incomplete, unfinished, like a fine china vase that an artist had left half painted. Her hair was plaited into pigtails: it made her look so young and vulnerable. Lopez walked over and asked her in Vietnamese if he could help.