The Man from Saigon

by Marti Leimbach

  “She took a lot of pictures,” Enright says. “The other one, too. The Viet. He took a lot of pictures.”

  Marc recalls how once, on a convoy much the same, Susan and he had passed an old man with a water buffalo standing in a rice paddy. She had leaned over Marc, lifting his camera from the lace of leather that looped his neck, and taken a photograph. They had passed a temple and she took a picture of that, too, using his camera as her own was out of film. He imagines the same scenario now, her head just in front of Son’s chest, the camera at her eye, her fingers turning the lens to focus.

  Enright smiles. “It was kind of cool having a woman on board. You don’t get many of those.” He chews gum, poking it with his tongue, setting it in his jaw as if it is tobacco when he speaks or takes a swig from the beer. His face could go completely from one mood to another, Marc notices, like light passing through a tunnel. Now he smiles, his teeth stubby pieces of chalk. “We were all trying to get her to ride with us. I had my eye on her.”

  I bet, Marc thinks.

  “We were talking about my fish.”

  “Fish?”

  “Some fish I used to keep back in the world.”

  “Pet fish?”

  “Fighting fish.”

  Marc finishes his beer. He thinks he’d better get another one and that if he plans to spend any more time in the camp, he’d better find a whole case and install it right here. Enright is explaining about the fish now, how they had to be kept separately in small bowls or they’d kill each other. Some kind of specialty bullshit fish. Marc really has no interest. “Okay, and then what happened?” he says.

  “Well, nothing. Not if you keep ’em apart. They can’t fight through glass!”

  “I meant the day of the ambush.”

  “I’ve told all that.”

  “Well, tell it again.” He wants to smile; he tries to smile, but nothing. He reaches for a cigarette, his hand touching the foil pack of valium. He takes out a Camel, trying to remember when he last had a pill. Enright goes quiet, turning away so Marc can see he’s got chewing gum lodged in his cheek. “She was a nice girl.”

  “She’s missing!” The words come out differently from how he wants. He needs to keep his annoyance in check. He blames the heat, the stifling heat that makes him feel bound and gagged, makes him feel as though somebody he didn’t know is sitting behind his eyes.

  Enright shrugs. “We lost men on that ambush, too,” he says. “Lots of wounded, three KIAs. It’s bad, losing a girl. They shouldn’t be out here anyway.”

  There is a silence between them. Enright slowly drinks his beer, seeming almost to have tuned out entirely, revealing nothing. He breathes through his mouth, a rasp of breath that is the only noise other than the fan that sweeps across the empty space of the tent. A minute goes by and still Enright isn’t talking.

  “Tell me about the fish,” Marc says.

  Enright nods. “The fish,” he repeats. “I kept them in my bedroom, one next to another, so that if you bent over you could see a kaleidoscope of fins, just like a kaleidoscope, too.”

  “Really?”

  “Yup, just like that.”

  Another silence. Marc waits, timing it. Three minutes go by. He begins to think talking to the kid was a mistake, one of many. His first was believing the colonel who promised him help in finding Susan. It looks as though Locke was right. This is a dead end, a decoy, a way of ensnarling him and using up all his time so that the Loc Ninh story would die a death and be forgotten. They should have come to his hotel room and sealed the door with him inside. It would have been kinder. At least he’d have had air conditioning.

  Enright begins to speak again, his voice sounding as if he’s dredged it up out of the mud. He says, “She was nice to me, that girl. She asked me if the fish watched each other. ‘Maybe they spent their lives wishing they could escape the glass walls and have a battle,’ she said.”

  He stops talking again, puts his finger in the air as though to speak, then doesn’t. His hands shake. Marc notices a behavioral tic: every so often he touches the end of his ear. He’d thought at first it was sunburn there, but he sees now the kid has dug a little sore, picking at it the way he does. He’s so inside himself that Marc wonders what on earth he’s still doing in the field, why nobody has noticed. He wonders if the kid’s odd movements are just because of the heat. He’s seen that before, how men start acting crazy just before they dry up. But though the kid looks sunburnt, he does not look dehydrated.

  “I said, ‘Yeah, that is exactly what the fish are thinking. Fish think so much.’ And she said, ‘You’re just prejudiced, because they have no lungs.’ And then all the shooting began.”

  Enright stops there and Marc waits again. A minute passes; the kid makes a pattern in the air with his finger, touches his earlobe once more. He seems to be sifting through his mind as though through shards of broken glass, connecting the pieces. Marc gives him a cigarette and he brings it unsteadily to his lips, takes a long time to connect a match to the end, a long time to suck in the flame.

  Marc wishes the kid would go now, go back to whatever he was doing, evaporate. He can’t bear to watch him any longer. He can’t remember if he has had three or four doses of the diazepam today. He hopes it is three because he’s about to take another.

  “What’re you looking at?” the kid says.

  “I’m thinking you better go eat something,” Marc says. He waits a minute, again in silence, and then says. “Do you remember anything else?”

  The attack came out of nowhere. One of the artillery loads was hit. Some stayed with the machine guns; everyone else jumped off the vehicles to fight. That is what he can discern anyway, from the confusion of words that come from Enright.

  “And these two reporters, where were they?”

  “How the fuck should I know?”

  A fair enough answer.

  Enright stops talking again. A few minutes go by. “I keep seeing the men, my buddies, tumbling through the air when that ammo log went up in front of us. Like acrobats, like they were flying.”

  Marc nods. He knows what the kid means. Knows exactly.

  “A friend of mine, Tim Ayers, he’s dead now.” I’m sorry.

  “He was hanging off the back of the track and got knocked under it. But he was dead by then. I’m pretty sure he was dead.”

  “Was the woman off the vehicle when Ayers was hit?”

  “I don’t know. Someone said they saw her running. Not me. I was trying to get Tim up, but I couldn’t. And he fell. But he was dead by then, I think. I sure hope he was dead, because we ran over him. Right the flick over, too.”

  “Who saw her running?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t remember.”

  “Running where?”

  “I didn’t see it. I was looking at Ayers.”

  Marc reaches into his pocket, chews off a tablet of Valium from its foil pack. He nods. Someone really ought to talk to the kid’s commanding officer. But it wouldn’t be him. Not today.

  “We had a lot of wounded, a lot of wreckage. It was a bad deal. There was a fire. The woods started going up, too, all this black smoke. I can still see them, flying through the air—”

  Enright angles his body toward the tent entrance, hands between his knees, his back stiff, talking now, faster and faster, so that his big teeth seem to flash in the shadow of the tent. He didn’t see what happened to Susan. He didn’t even know she was a reporter until afterwards. They had that conversation about fish. Are there any more questions? No? No, okay. He better get back to what he was doing. The ambush came. He saw Tim Ayers hit. Maybe she ran for the jungle. They were all over the place. It hadn’t been a bad guess to run like that. He might have done the same. But the jungle was on fire. Maybe she got burned to death. Maybe she’s still alive. He doesn’t know. He was holding on to Ayers, holding on to his arm—but Ayers, he didn’t move at all, not to wrench himself up or look in Enright’s direction.

  “And the track started to move,” the ki
d says, “turning to clear the kill zone. And Ayers was still hanging there; I needed to get to the gun, you know? There was nobody on the M60. I really needed to get to that goddamned gun. I’m sure he was dead.”

  “I’m sure he was.”

  “He wouldn’t hold on.”

  “No.”

  “So I let go.”

  “Same as I’d do,” Marc tells him. “Same as anyone.”

  “Really? Is that true? You’d have let go?”

  Marc breathes out, leaning forward toward the kid. He shakes his head. “I’m sure I would have,” he sighs. “In fact,” he might as well admit this, “I don’t think I would have held on in the first place.”

  Seven hours later he watches the bulldozers roll through the ground, sliding into the undergrowth, their scoops angled to uproot trees. The noise from all this work has become a loud, droning constant, mingling with the babbling public address system, the blaring tinny music, the hundreds of people in every direction. He watches concertina wire being thrown out of a truck bed, bouncing on to the ground in thick, lethal coils, from which it gets pushed out and arranged to form an uneven boundary. A blue bus arrives, pouring out clouds of smoke and unleashing a group of teenage girls, beautifully dressed in white ao dzais which flow like water around their legs and make them appear as though from another world. At first, Marc thinks they must be performers of some sort, but in fact they are part of a “nation-building” group. They clasp their clipboards and smile at the refugees, who regard them long enough to determine whether they have any food or clothing or any power to get some. The pretty young girls might as well be performers as they have no other obvious use to the refugees. They bring nothing to eat or wear and so the refugees ignore them. The girls move through the camp in their flowing robes, the white ao dzais that remind Marc of the sails of ships, attracting the children, who they also seem to have no idea how to care for. He cannot imagine why they are here.

  There is not enough rice, not enough food generally. Rumors of some families hoarding, taking more than their share, abound through the camp. There are not enough blankets, or fuel for fires, or water to bathe in. The refugees, like all Vietnamese, wash frequently during the day. One old man, thinking Marc is an official of some kind, does his best to explain that he needs water for a bath. He holds a rusted bucket with holes on either side through which a ragged length of brown twine is threaded to make a handle. The man moves his hand into and out of the empty bucket as though scooping water, bringing his palms over his head, his cheeks, under the folds of his arms.

  “I’m sorry,” Marc says, the old man following him as he walks away. It is the fifth or sixth time he has been asked for something by the Vietnamese, who assume he must be an aid worker. They have no idea what a reporter is, so they tag after him and will not leave him unless he behaves rudely.

  He watches an irate woman lambasting a young ARVN lieutenant and discovers that she is angry that she is not allowed to return to her house to get more of her belongings. Someone else is explaining she has left one of her grandchildren behind. How is it possible to leave a child? he wonders. One of the officials of the province scuttles round in a station wagon with the back open, serving as a kind of taxi. Occasionally, he jumps out and uses a bullhorn to give ad hoc speeches to those around him. An obnoxious little shit, Marc thinks.

  They have run out of tents, but nobody tells the soldiers with the bulldozers, so more bare ground is created and left uncovered, the rutted soil collecting water in the afternoon rains which blow through the camp and then fade away once more as the searing sun takes over. The heat regains its hold on the camp so that the whole place, now swimming in mud, is also steaming like the mouth of a volcano, sending forth the smell of plowed earth and dung. There is no more vaccine—they ran out—but after the rains the line outside the medical tent forms once more, perhaps in hope that more will be brought. He watches the children playing in the puddles, none with an entire set of clothes, their mothers, soaked, miserable, staring down at the wet ground or up, beyond the perimeter and treeline, looking at the sky as though there may be an answer there. Some leave the line and then re-join it. Finally, as the sun discards its most searing whiteness and late afternoon settles over the camp, he checks once more and they are all gone, the medical tents empty. On the ground are plastic wrappers, gauze, some cotton balls with tape across them, little specks of blood at their centers.

  “I’m looking for Lieutenant Colonel Halliday,” he tells an American aide. How many times has he said this today?

  “Yeah, see, I don’t know anybody here,” the aide says.

  Around evening he runs out of water and drinks a sweet-tasting powdered drink called Keen. He finds his driver there, the one who brought him by jeep to the camp, standing next to the large vat of Keen that is protected from insects by mosquito netting. The drink is available only for the soldiers, it would seem. His driver turns out to like Keen, and fills his cup, then downs it all in one go. Marc asks him why the refugees don’t have any.

  “VC say it poisoned,” he says. “The people don’t drink.”

  “But surely they can see you and me drinking it.”

  They stand in silence for a moment. The hours earlier, when the driver brought him bouncing through the dirt roads to the camp, seem as though they took place days ago. The driver says, “You expect someone take you to that girl?”

  Marc laughs out loud, a miserable little laugh. “No, of course not.”

  The driver seems satisfied with the answer and turns to go. Suddenly, Marc wants the man to stay with him, at least for another minute or two. “I don’t know when I’ll get Halliday to even talk to me,” he says, rushing the words. “I’m beginning to wonder if Halliday exists—” The driver looks confused so he says, “If he’s real, or not.”

  “What you expect?” says the driver.

  Marc shakes his head. In the center of a large, round tent, someone has tied a bunch of pigs, now all tangled in their ropes and squealing loudly. To his left, just fifty yards away, two old women are trying to get through the wire to a clump of bushes they prefer to the newly erected latrines. Children stand, pant-less, crying, waiting for their mothers, who cannot find them in the crowd. The PA system is now broadcasting some kind of report on the new way in which the government will help these peasants, help them in every way.

  The driver continues. “What you think going happen?” he says. “You see here. Chaos. Even more chaos in the villages. What you want happen?”

  He thinks about how he killed the Loc Ninh story, about how he’d been brought down here for some sort of “help.” Where is Halliday? Not anywhere in the camp, as far as he can tell. Locke and he have worked together now for nine months solid, but he knows without having to ask that there will be no more teaming up with Locke. You don’t kill a story like that, not one that took days to develop.

  “Nothing,” he says. “I don’t expect anything to happen.”

  “Good,” says the driver, as though they’ve agreed on something. He walks away, balancing two paper cups in his hands.

  IV

  In her hotel, that place she has begun to think of as home, are her books, her typewriter, an aluminum coffee mug she uses as a pencil holder, her stacks of notepaper and clippings, her stained coffee cups and the little area they’ve made into a kitchen. There is Son’s tidy collection of chemicals and processing trays, his photographs clipped to a web of gray wire that runs against the wall. The bed is still as she left it the morning of her departure, unmade, the sheets crumpled, gathering dust so that if someone were to sit on it now there would be a cloudy puff noticeable in the broad sunlight of morning. The pillow, sunken with the weight of her head, yellows in that same sun that pours through the glass, unprotected by the blind which she left up. The leaves of the plants that Son bought to purify the air and to bring into the room a scent other than traffic fumes and insecticide are covered in a film of dust so that the leaves no longer shine. Gathering like ash, the
dust also creates a mask of downy white on the desktop, the typewriter, the chair seat, on Son’s things, too, which were left folded in a small corner of the room as he always left them. When he spent the night, he always arranged his clothes perfectly, making a neat small square. He was a man accustomed to small and crowded rooms; he could make anything fit into the tiniest of spaces. He never complained about the water turning rusty, the electricity being cut off. He would work by moonlight and candlelight. His dark profile, the outline of his shaggy hair, his untucked shirt, its sleeves wagging unbuttoned at the wrist, his lean legs shifting silently across the darkened room are as familiar to Susan as her own reflection. If there was no water, which was the case now and again at the hotel, he washed with what was left in his canvas-covered bottle, using a handkerchief or a thin washcloth, a sliver of soap you could see through. He was able to sleep amid any noise—even gunfire—and she has never seen him with a bed fancier than an army cot.

  The plants are dying, their soil cracking in chunks in their pots. The fern’s rumpled leaves fold in at the tips; the bushy ivy yellows, the lilies that had blossomed, have dropped now, the whole plant sagging. Son hung a map of Vietnam on the wall above the bed, not a map like Susan’s own, with the war zones and bases in thin ink, but an illustrated map showing the soft green hills, the wide expansive valleys, the mists that flow up and down the landscape. Tigers were portrayed in the jungle, porpoises along the eastern shore, parrots flying off the edges, the whole thing opening out, inviting, magical. The map was like something you might see in a child’s room, completely useless, except it was not: it has given Susan comfort to look at this map, to see Vietnam not as a place of war, with bases and field hospitals, the Demilitarized Zone, the 17th parallel, but as a magical place with parrots and monkeys, tigers hiding in thickets of bamboo, dolphins rising in arcs along the shore. The map is not old, but the sun is making it seem so, carving fissures in the corners, giving it the texture of drying leaves. She had always closed the blind, opened the window, protected the room from all that bright light, but she is not there now.