Long Hair is a leader. She has seen him squatting on the ground explaining to the other two where they will go now, what they will do—at least she assumes that is what he is saying. He uses his hands in a manner not unlike one of her professors at university, who brought out the gravity of words through gesticulations so concise and well timed they seemed to contain a language of their own. The other two nod, occasionally asking a question. They do not challenge Long Hair, but neither are they afraid of him.
Susan once heard her father explaining how they were able to pick out the soldiers with leadership potential, those who would one day guide and direct the very men with whom they stood shoulder-to-shoulder in lines, with whom they ate and bunked and endured long drills. It was a matter of looking not so much at the individual as the way in which others responded to him. Did he offer practical solutions that made sense to the other men? Did they listen to him? Had her father been present, had Long Hair been one of the thousands of young soldiers that her father must have seen through his years in the military, he’d no doubt have selected the boy for officer training. Of course, for the Vietcong, there would be a much different system. Or so she imagines anyway. Before now, she has only ever seen VC as prisoners or casualties. How the three before her fit into the larger picture is anyone’s guess. Long Hair is not an officer. And there’s nothing about his clothes—plain, washed out, threadbare—to indicate he had any rank at all. Even so, he is a leader.
Long Hair’s true name, she discovers, is Anh. He has not told her this, but in the hours listening to the soldiers’ conversations as they course through the jungle, she has picked out the name Anh associated with him. She has noticed that Son addresses him this way, and that Anh speaks to him more often than to the others. It would be like Son to ingratiate himself to the man who mattered, though not in his usual manner of appearing innocent, harmless, unthreatening, not the same charm with which he had moved so easily among the Americans. He seems to understand that, in this case, such a ruse would be useless, even dangerous, and so instead presents to the leader the opportunity of a right-hand man. She has noticed how Son often walks point with Anh, how he positions himself next to him when they sit down. He is entirely different from how he was when in Saigon, suddenly himself a soldier, an equal, a fighting man. Perhaps in the end, Son will convince his captors in the same way he has been able to persuade everyone else to do what he wants, by assuming whatever traits of personality are required. She thinks that this quality is not one that was ever described by her father when listing the attributes of a leader, and she wishes now she’d asked her father how the American military undertook recruitment of its spies.
She calls to Anh, using his name, and he turns as naturally as if she has always addressed him so. He is holding a water coconut that they will eat later, a thing the size of a pumpkin. His hair, parted down the middle, is less caked with mud than hers, but even so it clings to his scalp, dry now. He looks at her casually. The days of narrowing his eyes at her, baring his teeth that small amount, steadying his hands on his rifle when looking her way, those days are over. She has become so unthreatening she might as well be a mascot, like one of the dogs seen with American units, inevitably named after a fighter plane or perhaps the place where they picked up the dog or where it began to follow them. Anh steps toward her, his shoulders relaxed, flicking a mosquito from his arm. He uncases a cigarette from a box he keeps in his pocket, bending over the flame as he lights it. The cigarettes are not one brand but a mix of different brands and roll-ups, which cast a smell that does not resemble the tobacco of Americans. In the same box as the cigarettes he keeps half-spent butts, and broken wooden matches that she supposes he might use again, though she has no idea why. She has seen him lining up the broken match-sticks on top of the map he studies, which darkens with an encroaching fungus, so that it appears at times the landscape is narrowing into a shadowy fuzz. She has no idea where they are located now in this jumble of wilderness. She must remember to ask Son. He would know, or at least have a fairly accurate guess.
“Anh,” she says. “Could we find some water to bathe in?” She imagines he is just as uncomfortable as she is. She has seen him scraping the mud off the backs of his hands with his fingernails. She has noticed, too, how he twiddles locks of his hair between his fingers so that the mud flakes off. The discomfort of the dried mud is such that Susan holds her fingers apart, rubbing the skin between them. She brushes her hands over her clumped hair, wipes her forearm across the cracking mud in the folds of her neck. She knows she has leeches, too, and it occurs to her now, all at once, why Anh has kept his spent matches: to relight as torches in order to burn off the leeches once his cigarettes run out. The matchsticks are a good tool for the job, though not as good as cigarettes, which do not require being relit. She wonders if the careful manner with which he holds on to the matchsticks means that Anh does not believe they will come across the rest of their unit any time soon. She hopes as much as the soldiers do that they find the remainder of their unit. The alternative is being hungry, tired, with no real rest or shelter or end to all the marching. That is what she really wants: to end this now. She indicates the mud on herself, shrugs her shoulders, and says, “Il pourrait nous faire malade.” Anh nods in one swift movement, then carries on walking. He’s gotten used to her schoolgirl French. His response, however, is usually the same. A nod, the command, “Tien.” Sometimes he points with his arm, sometimes his gun.
“The mud is awful,” she says. “And unhealthy.”
But he only tells her to keep walking, nodding in the direction they are going, concentrating on the path ahead.
“Yes, all right,” she says, rolling her eyes. In English she adds, “I have not forgotten I’m your prisoner, Decision Boy.”
Son hears this and gives her an amused glance. Then he looks at Anh and mumbles something, possibly a translation of her comment into Vietnamese, because suddenly Anh looks back at her and, for the first time, she sees him smile.
There is no longer any distinction between inside and outside; she feels part of the jungle and moves through it as though through a roomy mansion, discovering always some new feature. Some details are not important: the way the branches contrive to find space to grow, the way logs disintegrate under the savagery of termites. But just as she has discerned Anh’s name, she has also begun to make out the signs the Vietcong use to signal to each other which trails are safe and which are not, and it is as though she has discovered a new language. The gathering of grass together, knotting it in a particular fashion, the breaking of branches at certain turns of the trail so that it could be followed safely without fear of booby-traps, these are the things that Anh watches for. She wondered—she used to wonder—how it was that the Vietcong didn’t die in the same mines that killed and maimed Americans by the thousands. It was because they set messages for each other in the grasses and trees, reading easily this code of the bush. The language has evolved through decades of war. It seems so remarkable, this discovery, that she wishes to share it. In her mind she taps out the keys of a typewriter. She can picture the keyboard exactly, and so imagines the letters G and H on either side of the central bone of her palate. The P is next to her second molar, the T and Y form her eye teeth. The way she keeps her sanity, one of the ways, is to tap out words in this fashion. With her tongue, she now writes, We think we have been at war a long time. Three years now, depending on where you begin to count, but the Vietnamese have made war against intruders for many decades. There are signs of this everywhere, in the knotted grass, the snapped-off branches, the twisting trails that wind in a manner that seems pointless to an outsider. There is a point to everything. Communication lines coil through every mile of the jungle. The landscape itself is set up for war.
Son looks at her, no doubt noticing the way she is moving her mouth. She shakes her head, indicating there is nothing the matter, and they walk on.
Once the evening has lapsed into darkness, they have to bunch up to stay t
ogether. It is then that she realizes how much they all smell; not that this small matter bothers her. The night is alive with the sounds of insects. They walk in a blur of darkness surrounded by the unseen vibrations of wing tips, of whistles, crackling branches, the wormy glow of fungus on the jungle’s floor, all of them filthy, all of them tired enough they might just lie down at any moment and sleep like enchanted, doomed children. Before now she thought of the Mekong as a place of endless water, and this description is true for the most part. But the jungle is a troublesome tangle, difficult to get through, and not all of it is water, not in the least. It is mud and rot and mist, but not water, not clean water, in any case.
She thinks of Marc, who said that when he first came to Vietnam he memorized all the different names of the trees there, banyan, ironwood, umbrella, rubber, teak, aquilaria, aloeswood, and then forgot them all, deliberately, aggressively. Why, she’d asked him? Because I didn’t want to know any more, he said.
She understands now what he meant, that you reach a kind of saturation point. Whenever possible, she tunes out of the jungle, pushes the Delta from her mind, absents herself from her present company and concentrates instead on things in the past. She does not want the giant dark leaves, the gnarled peeling bark, the vines and roots and mysterious, poisonous berries, everything for the moment shrouded in darkness so complete it is as though a cape has been thrown over the whole of the rainforest, to become so familiar that it replaces what she still thinks of as her real life. She struggles to recall as much detail as possible about Saigon, the bend of the roads, the canopy of shade allowed by the plane trees, the clamor of traffic, the silky warm evenings in which she wore dresses with bare shoulders.
She thinks of Marc, of how he waited for her outside the hotel, or rested his hand on her back as they walked, or how he kissed, or talked, his head bobbing slightly as he recalled something important about a story he’d covered. She remembers the sound of the air conditioning in his hotel room, the ornate molding on the ceilings, the olive carpet, the great swags of silk that made up the curtains in his favorite restaurant, how they waited at airports, never sitting together lest she endure the gossip, how they arranged to see each other by cabling:
STAY IN DANANG STOP AM ON THE WAY STOP.
She prefers to think of these things rather than the fact that the bandages on her feet (the torn fabric of Son’s trouser legs) are now caked in mud, the sandals embedded with the same. Her fatigues are loose and she sometimes twists the waistband around her finger to make them tighter because, of course, the soldiers have taken her belt. How much harm could she do them with a belt? She supposes she could try to strangle one of them, but how far would she get before being shot by one of the other two? She considers asking for the belt again, or making one out of dry reeds. Her hipbones stick out, her shape more boyish by the day.
“What’s that one called?” she asks Son, nodding toward Gap Tooth.
“Minh,” he whispers.
The name sounds familiar to her. As soon as she hears it she thinks how she ought to have known this was the case. She imagines (perhaps incorrectly) that it was not Anh who decided to take her boots and make them into explosives but Gap Tooth, Minh, who seems always to be searching the jungle, looking for something to sabotage or kill or scar with his sword, which he no longer plays with quite so much, but which he carries nonetheless, as a boy might carry a toy pirate sword. The Thin One trails behind, somehow deflated by his earlier outburst. She notices that Son walks between the Thin One and herself. She is grateful. She does not trust that soldier; he could attack her again at any time; he could shoot her through the back as she walks and she would never know. In the dim light, she cannot easily see him and anyway she is drained of energy. From the bombing, from what happened in the shelter, from the mud and insects, from being scared and sick, from being attacked and getting up again, from walking through the absurdly dark night, from the whole concentrated, awful effort.
She pulls up her fatigues once more and her hand catches on the plastic edge of her MACV card that Son stole back for her. She thinks of how he held her through all the artillery down in that terrible hole. She could feel anything toward him right now—love, betrayal, gratitude, need. She has felt all these things at different times, but there is no room for emotions now, for the five of them must walk, must keep walking. She cannot imagine getting back to Saigon, being again among the busy lanes, seeing the women gathered in the area outside her hotel, gossiping on the steps. An aging colonial building, the hotel had a grand sweep of stairs, showing signs of decay now, with troughs of rough earth in which silvery stems of weeds and grasses poked through. She cannot imagine climbing those crumbling steps, passing through the heavy, unguarded doors, requesting her key, finding her room, her bed, her clothes. To think she has so many clothes: cotton dresses and collared shirts and blue jeans and summer slacks, clean towels and underwear, a nightgown, coat, belts, scarves. All of them stacked in drawers, set out in a basket by the window, hung up over doors or on the small rail in the cupboard. It seems to her extraordinary, all those clothes. She feels a swell of homesickness; she feels herself wandering like a lonely ghost.
The blackness of the night is solid like a wall. They are hidden from each other and from the world, and the darkness, like darkness everywhere, makes her honest and foolish, makes her bold. Nobody can see as she reaches back, taking Son’s hand. His fingers encase her own so effortlessly. They walk easily together, though they smell of rotting earth and have so much mud on them it is like they have taken a second skin. Even with this, they are comfortable with each other. It is an intimacy she will never know again, and she would do well to notice it, even more than the croaking of frogs, the abrupt, jarring sound of branches overhead, the unbearable darkness, or the fading memories of the city she has left.
“The third is named Hien,” whispers Son. It is a miracle how he can time his words to the exact moment of another sound—this time of Minh coughing—so that their conversation is between them only, contained in the small space between them. She thinks, not for the first time, that it is as though Son possesses a sixth sense, or that he is aware at all times of everything around him. She forgets, or perhaps has never understood, that the jungle is not so foreign to him, that hunger is a condition he has passed through many times and that he treats it as one might an inconvenient virus, like a cold. That he is not truly captive, as any day now they will find the rest of the unit and eventually the officers who will know who he is, or take him to those who do. He is one of their own, not among the enemy, as she reminds herself they must properly be called. If Son is fearful it is only for her sake. He holds her hand with its coating of mud, touching the delicate fingers. She feels for the reassuring pulse in the crook of his thumb. Her fingers are longer than his, though his palm is blocky and wider. They fit together; they have always fitted, always belonged as one. She realizes this now and the thought, arriving in such circumstances, is as unexpected as the call of a nightjar in this dark forest, a sound she knows so well from home.
Weeks earlier she and Son made a trip to a civilian hospital in the Highlands. They flew to Kontum, skirting the blue-green hills, heading for a wide, dusty track that served as a runway between them. She looked down at the houses with their lush gardens, staked with bamboo, ringed now by the same concertina wire that surrounded American bunkers. She thought how once long ago this would have been a pleasant place. They were flying with equipment that was being delivered to the hospital in Dak Nhon, just south of Kontum, some kind of barter with the military. There were always these excursions with equipment or food or blood or mechanical parts. At different times they had traveled with ammunition and crates of grenades, which made her nervous, but it did not seem to bother Son. He’d sit on top of the boxes, resting, relaxed, his eyes closed.
Closer now she could see the goats with their dainty legs and low-slung bellies, ambling among rusting Food-for-Peace cans embedded in the dried mud near the runway. An am
bulance sat near by, a jeep trailer attached to it, empty. She thought how ominous the ambulance looked, parked by the runway, as though anticipating somebody’s disastrous landing, but it turned out the ambulance was their taxi, the trailer a bed for the generator the hospital staff thought they were receiving. There was no generator, of course. Only batteries and a few other parts.
The driver was a thin German wearing a T-shirt and jeans. He had watery blue eyes irritated by the sun, a lot of dark blond hair and the beginnings of a beard. He waved, then pulled his hand back to shield his eyes from the small pebbles and clumps of dried earth sent up from the ground by the windstorm created by the chopper rotors. When the rotors slowed he jogged in their direction, then walked the rest of the way as if the effort to run had defeated him.
Not a smile or a handshake. Welcome, he said, but he didn’t appear at all interested in Susan and Son. He put his head inside the chopper door, looking for the goods he hoped had arrived. The staff believed they had bartered for a new generator, not just parts to fix the old one, which hadn’t worked in months. It was a disappointment to discover this was not the case, and when he saw that there was no generator, only parts, he became agitated. He marched to the pilot, explaining that they were meant to have an entire generator, that they didn’t have a mechanic and though the car batteries might come in useful, could someone at least come out to help them fix the generator, assuming it was not beyond repair?
He sounded impatient; it was not the way Susan was used to hearing civilians speak to military. She and Son hung back, trying to distract themselves from the conversation, which ended with the German shaking his head and turning in a huff toward the ambulance, its dented fenders and fading paint giving it a dry, reptilian appearance, like a crocodile in the sun. This is typical! said the German, as the chopper pilot smoked a cigarette and surveyed the surrounding countryside, the desolate houses, the bushy, low trees, his face registering a lazy indifference which seemed to further annoy the other man.
The Man from Saigon Page 24
