“Sorry about that,” says Halliday. He slaps a beer on the table and stands there, looking down on Marc. “Earlier. No need to humiliate you, though you do give us a hard time, Davis. You always give us a hard time.” He shakes his head slowly back and forth as though considering Marc, how awkward he always was when he could have been useful.
“I wasn’t humiliated,” says Marc.
“It’s tough,” Halliday says. He has a match in his fingers that he flicks back and forth, then sticks in his mouth, chewing one end. He isn’t a tall man but he is enjoying feeling tall, with Marc in the chair while he looks down. “When it’s a friend in trouble, it’s tough. But it happens. Any of us can get in trouble over here.”
Marc doesn’t say anything. He is thinking what a waste it was to come to the Delta, what an idiot he has been. He is thinking the only way they might find Susan is by dropping a bomb on her.
“It is hard. My men lose a buddy, that’s hard. We all know what it is like.”
Marc takes a swig from his beer, looks down at the floor, then up at Halliday again. “I don’t need you to lecture me. You can sit, or you can go someplace else.”
Halliday smiles uncomfortably, then nods. “All right then,” he says. “Don’t mind if I do.” He takes a seat, nodding to Murray, who also sits. There is a beat of silence between the three men, then Halliday says, “You’ve been around a while, Davis. How long you been in country?”
“Twenty-three months.”
Halliday says, “That’s a good while.”
Murray says, “We have a kind of joke among us at the bureau that the North Viets will be marching through Saigon and Davis will still be there with Locke at his shoulder filming them!”
Halliday interrupts. “You see, that’s the kind of thing that just pisses me off, you know?” he says. He has an expression on his face as though someone is stepping on his foot. “I mean, thinking the North Vietnamese are going to march through Saigon.”
“It’s just a joke.”
“Damned unfunny one.” He tells Murray. To Marc, he says, “Davis, you’ve been here long enough to know what happens here. That sometimes things don’t go as planned.”
He wonders suddenly if Halliday is going to tell him that Susan is dead. It would make sense that he would approach him in exactly this way, let him have a little to drink—not too much—and then tell him the news. Suddenly, he is sure this is what is about to happen. He sits in his seat rigidly, waiting for what is coming next.
“What do you know? You’ve heard something?” he says. His heart is beating hard; he can feel it against his breastbone.
Halliday says, “We don’t have anything new on the missing reporters, if that’s what you’re asking. I’m just saying that you’ve been around a while and you know the score.”
Marc lets out a breath. He cannot hide what is happening inside him and does not even try. He looks at Murray and Halliday, the two of them sitting next to each other. They look like they could be brothers, but Murray is younger, in his late thirties. Marc will be thirty in two weeks, a fact that comes to mind suddenly, as though someone has said it out loud. “Is this a pep talk?” he asks. His voice is heavy. He is relieved, very relieved, but the ache that has remained inside him since Susan’s disappearance is still there, will not go away, and he does not even want it to go away. As long as he feels this way it is because he believes she is still out there somewhere, that she has the chance of being found, so he does not want it to stop hurting. If it stops, it is because he knows she is dead. “I don’t want a pep talk,” he says now. Every part of him feels heavy, as though he has been asleep for hours, or as if his limbs are not attached to him or that he is drugged.
Halliday coughs, then presses a part of his body that Marc suspects harbors a boil, and says, “You know what, Davis? You need a great deal more than a damned pep talk. A great deal more.”
Marc ignores him. He drinks his beer and looks toward the front of the mess, trying to make out if there is anyone he knows coming in, some other journalists, the guys he hung out with in the hut when he first arrived. Even Enright would do right now. He tries to regulate his breathing, his vision, his muscles. When did the physics of his own body become something he had to actively govern? If he focuses out across the room he feels better, more in control, so he looks there and waits to come back to himself.
Murray says, “There’s a good chance they won’t do much to her. She is a woman, after all.”
Marc says, “In my experience, women blow apart just as easily as men do.”
“I meant they wouldn’t torture her.”
“They wouldn’t even know it was torture. It’s interrogation for them.”
“But they won’t,” Murray says. “They won’t because she’s a reporter. I mean, she could be traded, or…uh…she could write something about how they were kind to her—”
“You are forgetting,” says Halliday, “that we are talking about the enemy. They are cold-blooded murderers. I’m surprised you don’t know that by now, Murray.”
“Even so, I don’t think—”
Halliday interrupted: “You don’t think?. I’ll tell you what, there’s not a lot the VC won’t do!”
“God, go back to the pep talk,” says Marc. He’s finding it difficult now to control himself. He issues himself a set of instructions: remain calm, look normal, sit in the goddamned chair. “How’s your head anyway, Murray?” he says, trying to change the subject.
Murray touches his forehead lightly with his fingers, brushing the loose curls there. “Oh yeah, it’s a lot better. Thanks for that. You and Locke, it was good what you did.”
“Don’t mention it.”
“That was one hell of a day. One hell of a riot. That girl, you know, she died. I heard later.”
Marc thinks of the young girl lying on the street, a college student not yet out of her teens.
“Be glad you didn’t pick up the gun,” he says.
“What gun?”
“The one the CIA planted next to you. You mean you didn’t see it?”
“Planted a what? A gun?”
“This is bullshit,” says Halliday. “I swear you guys make this shit up.”
Marc shakes his head. “I wish.”
“Well, I didn’t see a gun,” says Murray.
“No, you didn’t,” says Halliday.
“It’s on film,” Marc says. He thinks it is, anyway. There was so much confusion that day. Suddenly, he cannot remember what was filmed.
“Bullshit!” says Halliday. “Bullshit it’s on film!”
For a minute nobody speaks. They drink their beer. They have nothing to add to or agree upon, nothing even to argue about. Then Halliday hands Marc a map and a little penlight that shoots a slim beam of white. He indicates a particular quadrant, focusing the beam on a section of territory to the west. “We’re moving out this way, covering this area here. I am asking them to look for her. How much good will that do? How the hell should I know, so don’t ask.”
“They won’t hurt her, I don’t think,” says Murray. “It wouldn’t do them any good to hurt her.”
“Oh, shut up, Murray!” Marc says. He has taken too many of the tablets and his mind isn’t where it should be. He can’t focus on the map and it is bothering him. Everything is bothering him. Murray, for example. He’d like to hit him. He’d like to squash him like a bug under his shoe.
“I’m just trying to help—”
“Well, shut up! That would help.”
Halliday is still talking or has begun talking again; Marc doesn’t know which. He hears Halliday’s voice: “—we’ve got some scout planes. Like you said back there at the briefing, it’s fifteen hundred feet. But I’m trying anyway. Davis? Are you with me, son?”
Yes, he can hear him, but though he can see Halliday’s mouth moving and hear the words, he cannot make the connections he is supposed to make or answer the lieutenant colonel. His thoughts have loosened from him. He is thinking about Susan and abo
ut the likelihood she is hurt or dead. Or dying. Then, all at once, he is thinking about last February when he sat in a chopper watching as the gunner went into an explosion of temper, unable to fire properly on the enemy troops below because they were carrying children over their heads while crossing a river. Children as shelter from American bullets, little trophies that guaranteed the Americans would not fire. It was almost a physical effort for the gunner to turn away from all those moving, targetable Vietcong, dozens of them there, treading through the river. You could see the soldiers’ wet clothes, their boots splashing. The gunner could have taken them out in a matter of seconds, but for the children. All of a sudden, the gunner wheeled the gun and fired, shooting up the river banks. He was screaming and firing, strafing the water’s edge. The children were screaming, the soldiers running through the water. You getting this? Marc had shouted at Locke. The children bounced along on the soldiers’ backs. They were like pieces of equipment, shields of human flesh, crying, terrified. Are you getting this?
“Maybe she’s already been let go,” Murray says. “Could be at a field hospital. Could be—”
“It takes us a little time to get info back here,” says Halliday. “We could hear at any time.”
Marc is suddenly present once more, the images from the helicopter that day receding to the edges of his mind. “She’d get word to me,” he says. “Somehow.” He doesn’t want to think about those children any more. Or about what might be happening to Susan. He doesn’t want to think about Halliday or Murray or about this awful camp. The place was enough to make you crazy. On the way to the mess some brothers of the teenage hookers hounded him for dong, dollars, MPC. They tried to sell him beer, stolen from the base, a trained monkey on a chain. He found it all absurd and depressing. The whole time he’s been in country he’s kept on the move. Up in the sky in a chopper, or out on the flat plains with the open country flanking him, squinting into the brightness. He has always had the distance that a chopper or a fixed wing or even a jeep afforded him. In short, he’d been protected from the squalor and boredom and neediness created by war. He hates it. A siege would be a relief to him. An enemy attack almost welcome. He cannot imagine how the peasants hold up, why they don’t just sink into the mud in which they’ve been dropped and give up. Perhaps they have.
Halliday sits back on his chair. “You don’t have to stay,” he says now. “We will be in touch if anything—and I do mean anything—”
He wants to scream, Then why the hell did you bring me here!
He wants to throw a chair across a room. Instead he says, “I keep hoping that somehow, by some miracle, she’ll be found.” His words are slow and strained. They hardly seem to come from him at all. He thinks he’d better stand up now. Stand up and walk the hell out of here before he says anything more. He reaches into his pocket for a tablet of diazepam and finds the foil empty. The camp, dark except where the ARVN has set up floodlights under which they construct yet more tents, puts him in mind of a prison. He wants out of here. He looks in the general direction of the jungle, which has been scalped back, so it is a good half mile away. He tells himself to stand up, but his legs don’t obey. It is a dreadful time to be coming apart and he wishes it weren’t happening in front of Halliday and Murray.
“They won’t hold on to her,” Murray is saying. “I wouldn’t have thought. A woman, a non-combatant—”
“Stop it!” Marc says.
“Murray’s got a point—”
“Stop it now! I can’t talk about it!” He is thinking again about the children, how they were held like sacks of rice over the shoulders of the troops, their legs bobbing, their faces turned up to the choppers as the bullets sent the water into a foamy confusion around them. They were close enough for him to see which were girls and which were boys. One had put his hands over his ears. One had crawled almost completely over the back of the soldier who carried him so that his head was partly submerged in the water. There was a girl who clung piggy-back, crying into the soldier’s neck. If you didn’t know what was happening, you might think the troops were saving the children from drowning, or from the menace of the helicopters above, from an invasion or fire or storm or other peril. But they were being used as shields. That was their only function. Later, the children were found dead, shot by the Vietcong, and surrounded by leaflets claiming they’d been killed by Americans.
“You might think about taking a little R&R,” Halliday says now. “You’ve been in some scraps. Now this. It’s a burden. It’s a big thing to carry.”
“No R&R,” Marc says. What he is thinking is that his wife would find out, that she’d come, meeting him in Singapore as they had done in the past, planning the dinners and the sightseeing and the lovemaking. He couldn’t bear it. “I don’t want my wife to know—”
He suddenly finds it difficult to keep himself from talking about it, about all the things that are wrong. About Susan, about the barrage of intrusive thoughts that come daily now, not only when he is dreaming. Even with Halliday, a guy he doesn’t like, a guy who has used him, he is ready to talk about anything the man cares to discuss. This is not how he usually behaves and it feels as though something dangerous has broken free inside him. He opens his mouth to speak. There will be no stopping him once he begins.
“A wife can be a useful thing at time like this,” Murray says. “Heck, we all have wives—”
“I don’t want to see anyone right now.”
“I think it would be a good idea to talk to your wife,” says Halliday. “Spend some time—”
“No!”
Murray looks at Halliday. “What about Locke?” he says.
Locke was the kind of man who stood up to film when everyone else was flat on the ground. No helmet because the rim got in the way of the viewfinder, and because he always claimed it wouldn’t make any difference anyway. He crouched on the backs of trucks and tracks and leaned out of helicopters, balancing thirty pounds of camera on his shoulder. It was with Locke that Marc had been on every killing ground, and nearly every story. They had hidden together behind low walls and the corners of buildings, beneath the overpowering noise, the furious cacophony of bullets and blasts and thunderous explosions that made the earth shake beneath them. They had run in tandem, hearing the fizz and buzz of bullets beside them, dropped as though they were one at the low, hollow sounds of rocket-propelled grenades, climbed over dead bodies getting into Chinooks and once, evacuating a Special Forces camp, they’d carried a dying soldier in a poncho, both of them screaming to the guy to stay with them, not to pass out, not to die. That time filming the children on the backs of Vietcong soldiers, and later when they filmed them all dead—the little bodies like broken flowers on the ground, perfect except for the bullet holes—they had not been able to speak, nor look at one another afterwards. It was as though they had been part of that awful crime just by being there. Or that being in the chopper from which the soldiers had been running made them somehow complicit in what followed. He remembers, too, how once he’d been so badly hit by tear gas he spent a memorable quarter-hour in a taxi, streaming tears and spitting fiercely on to the carpeted floor with Locke pouring water from his bottle over his face. In his frenzy to escape the chemicals, Marc had rubbed his eyes along the upholstery of the back seat. He’d pulled off his shirt, which had been sprayed, and thrown it out the window. A block from the bureau, deciding he couldn’t be stuck in so small a space with Marc, Locke had opened the door, got him out on the street, pushing wads of dollar bills through the taxi man’s window, yelling at Marc they were going to the bureau now and asking him please not to strip off any more clothes.
“Get Locke,” Marc says. Jesus, he needs to talk to someone and it had better not be these two. “If he’ll come.”
He waits for Locke’s plane, wishing he could scrape all the mud off his boots and clothing, his pack and notebooks, but there is too much and anyway it is so hot he doesn’t have the energy. The sky is relentlessly clear and bright, the sun so close it feels tw
ice the size it should be. Locke comes off the plane wearing dark glasses and a hat. He is carrying his pack and camera, but also Marc’s recording equipment, so loaded down he has to walk with a shortened gait. “I don’t know why you’ve been down here, man. There’s no story here,” he says. He has a deeply lined forehead, a dark tan. His eyebrows, once black, have been sunbleached a rust color. He looks like a man who has lived a long time in the desert, as though he’s just stripped off his howli and guerba, and has been put into Western clothes. He doesn’t mention that he’s been asked to come down here by Murray, possibly by others, but pretends it was his idea. “I’m glad I finally ran you to earth,” he says.
He also doesn’t mention how Marc looks in his dirty clothes, the scabs from insects up and down any part of him that has been exposed, the weight loss. More importantly, much to Marc’s relief, there is no mention of Loc Ninh or the last conversation they had, in which Locke shook his fist in Marc’s face, told him he was an imbecile—a fucking moron were his exact words. It is the only time they have argued. Their friendship is drawn in blood. Whole weeks have passed working alongside Locke, talking to him, smoking with him, hitching rides and traveling with him. Once or twice, Marc has had the curious experience of almost forgetting they are not the same person, so that when he looks in a mirror he is surprised by his own face. Perhaps a friendship like this can endure almost anything, but he would not like to test it again, and more than anything he’s glad Locke has come.
The Man from Saigon Page 30
