The Man from Saigon

by Marti Leimbach

  “You want me to answer that?”

  “You had to know!”

  An awful silence reverberates between them. The words they’ve spoken, made in the sweep of the moment, are too great. It is too much for Christine, who bursts out finally, the emotion rising in her throat, “Good God, don’t look at me like that, Marc! You’ve been here for how long? For practically the whole of our marriage! And it isn’t as though you were drafted—you could have come home! You could have! But you never—” she struggles now “—you never wanted to.”

  “I’m not looking at you like anything,” he says. He doesn’t know what he’s doing. He’s thinking how much he wishes he were that other man, the one who put the baby inside her. Not because he loves her, but because he would like to have been the sort of man who could love her. And who would be a father and a husband, rise each morning and kiss the children and come home to a house of laughter and the mild, pleasant stories of the day. But he has reached some conclusions about himself of late, and he is sure he cannot be any of those things for her or for any other woman. Not even Susan.

  “Does he want to marry you?” he asks.

  She nods. “Yes,” she says. “More than anything.”

  VI

  She searches out a particular tree that produces a heart-shaped fruit that reminds her of a spiny pear. The leaves of the tree are glossy and dark at the top, but yellowing and a different shape altogether at the base, and they smell. The tree stinks so that it is an act of faith to eat anything that comes from it. The first time she ate one of the fruits it was Son who brought it to her, pushing his thumb into a soft end where it had begun to rot, and pulling it apart. The flesh of the fruit tears away like that of fish, and it has a bitter taste so that she grimaced the first time she ate it. But she needed no encouragement. She ate the entire thing, working her way around the dozens of pearly black seeds, the musky smell notwithstanding, the act of chewing itself a mercy.

  The fruit appears on any part of the tree. At the top where they cannot reach are always the best choices, but the thin stalks at the head of the fruit can appear at the tree’s base, too, growing right out of the trunk. It is a difficult thing to extract the fruit without being speared by the unfriendly outer layer, though Minh always manages to do so easily enough. Son, too, has a similar talent for denuding it, but Minh’s hands are like those of a steelworker, the calluses so thick they stand out on the pads of his fingers and palms. Even at rest, Minh’s hands curl at his sides as though he is holding something. In the coolness of this early morning, she sits beside him, studying his palm as he searches it for a splinter from the fruit’s robust exterior. She thinks that his brown fingers, the chafed rigid skin of his palm, the blocky muscles of his thumb make his hand appear like the tool of an ancient civilization. He catches her looking, and they smile at each other. He might be the younger brother of a friend, or a schoolmate from several years below for whom she has some small affection. He thinks she is hungry so he gives her the fruit he’s been peeling, then returns to the splinter. When she cannot manage to extract the rind, he lends her his knife—one of his knives. He is a bastion of weaponry, Minh, a collector of sharp objects. Nobody worries she will use the knife for some other purpose, to kill or wound, to force her way to freedom. The most freedom she could have right now is with the soldiers, which is to say there is nothing but this: the jungle, the vines.

  Everything they do, they do while walking. While walking they look at the map, chat, smoke, eat, even cook, though there is no more coal for the small pot that chars insects as they travel, so they use shaved bamboo that smokes and flies up out of the fire, sometimes into the face of the one carrying it. Hien pokes his finger into the flame now, then licks it, tells the others something she cannot understand, perhaps that they had better shoot a monkey or kill one of the large jungle rats that roam the forest floor, because he is tired of living off bugs.

  “What is this thing called anyway?” she asks Son, meaning the spiny fruit with the mysterious creamy flesh. The fruit is neither sweet nor refreshing, seems always to arrive rotten in places and completely unripe in others, with only a sparse area between that is even vaguely tasty. He answers in Vietnamese and she says, “No, the English word.”

  He shrugs; she has stumped him for the first time.

  “Okay, what did the French call it?”

  “They called it…uh…” He has no idea. “They didn’t call it anything. The French would never have eaten it.”

  She laughs and now Anh wants to know what the joke is, and so Son explains it to him. But Anh is too serious to laugh and he doesn’t know enough about the French to understand their particular enthusiasm when it comes to food. He looks at Susan and repeats the Vietnamese name for the fruit, and she nods.

  “Say it,” Anh instructs her, and she does her best. “You’re among us now.”

  He indicates to Minh to walk in front. The person who leads must watch most carefully and this job frequently falls to Anh. But Anh wishes to talk now to Son, and she trails behind the two, unable to understand the conversation that flows easily between them. Behind her, she can hear Hien’s footsteps. He no longer seems angry with her, only oddly subdued. He walks with his narrow head nodding like a horse at plow. Every once in a while he wipes his sleeve across his face and squints into the jungle. She suspects he needs eyeglasses and that part of the reason his face is full of unpleasant expressions is that he is forever trying to work out what is in front of him.

  She is prodding a tree for more fruit, Son beside her, Anh waiting impatiently ahead, perhaps wondering why they all had to make so many concessions for the English girl. Minh is stabbing at an ant with his sword; Hien is drinking from a bottle, his long neck tilted back so that it shows the cartilage of his throat. Time is full of these little pockets. The night before, at the well, while washing by the monochrome light of the moon, it seemed she reached her foot only after a whole hour of wringing the swatch of cloth that had once been her shirt. She pushed it down the long planes of her thigh, the round skull shape of her knee, the tight flesh of her calf, while behind her the shadow of her body was like that of a lean Egyptian. How long had she been there? She did not know. She discovered each cave of peeling skin between her toes, the gritty ledges of calluses, the rubbery mounds of blisters, her mind completely given to the act of washing, as now it is given to that of picking fruit.

  The soldiers, though impatient, are watching her now as she stretches the canopy of her clean T-shirt with found fruit. They did not watch her at the well. That had been a time carved out for her alone, a gift from them. They had even offered her the small flashlight, though she had refused it. I’ll see by starlight, she told them. I’ll kick away the rats. She once read that the art of survival is single-mindedness. She thinks now she would agree, though of course there is also luck.

  Suddenly, she hears machine-gun fire. The sound pierces the jungle so abruptly that at first she is unsure what she is hearing. Then Son grabs at her sleeve and pulls her down. She drops the stick she was using to prise the fruit from the tree. What she has already gathered, collected in the belly of her shirt, falls like dice upon the jungle floor. She is frozen as though any movement from her, even a single breath, will break her apart like glass. As chattering bursts of machine-gun fire continue, she manages to turn her head toward Son, who is facing in the direction of the battle, as they all do now.

  She whispers urgently. “Who is it? Who is it?”

  In her mind, she has entertained a great number of rescue scenarios—stumbling upon LLRPS with their ration cans on a starry evening, finding a convoy of supply trucks going along a discovered road, seen by a medevac pilot who plucks her from the floor of the jungle like God’s own hand, or saved by a paratrooper who glides gracefully toward her beneath his vault of silk. She has even entertained the improbable scenario of being found by a few roaming reporters, skirting the edge of a battle. This last way is her favorite fantasy because, of course, she does not
have to figure out how to identify herself before getting fired at. She’s never quite figured out how that would be done. In these scenarios, too, she is always on her own. For some inexplicable reason her daydreams do not include Son or the three soldiers; just herself, finally pulled from danger.

  Now that the real prospect of discovery and rescue are at hand, however, she isn’t sure what to do. The fighting continues. Son takes her hand. The soldiers have their rifles out and have assumed positions behind trees, though they are still far away from the firing. It is instinctive, the way they take cover. At Anh’s signal, they run forward through the jungle. As always she finds the prospect of running toward gunfire appalling. She has to force her body forward toward the sounds and the only thing that makes this possible is the thought of being left behind, which is more frightening than the battle.

  The jungle’s dense network of trees and vines, of wild bamboo and low, shaggy bushes, provides some insulation for sound, but can distort it, too, so that it is difficult to tell exactly where the fighting is taking place. She can hear far in the distance the whump-whump-whump of helicopters. The Americans are flying in from the north, and she wonders if they are undertaking the same sort of operation that resulted in the burnt hamlets. If so, there will be no great battle. The helicopters will move in like an army of bees, each flying in the turbulent stream of the chopper ahead. They will unload their men, then zigzag into the sky once more, rising and rising again in increments as though on a pulley. There will be a loudspeaker from one, circling the hamlet or village with announcements in Vietnamese that the people must not run away or they will be shot. The village will rock with tremendous explosions and all around the periphery chopper patrols will wheel, spraying the terrain with bullets.

  They reach a line of rubber trees where it is easier to see. She has become deft in her sandals so that she is able to move almost as swiftly as in boots. She fears that they are running directly into the line of fire from the choppers, but when at last they pause she can hear only one or two sets of rotors, not dozens. Ahead, filtering down into the clearing, are the shapes of Vietcong spreading out among the trees. She can see them in dark trousers and shirts, in floppy hats and bandanas, moving so low in the brush they might be pumas.

  Anh and Hien are in a heated argument. Hien points to Susan as he yells at Anh. Anh pushes him, then shouts into his face as though trying to send a message straight up his nostrils. She points in their direction, signaling a question to Son, who shrugs, then listens hard.

  “Why are we going this way?” she says, but he shakes his head for her to be quiet; he is trying to hear what Hien is now saying. The conversation had better be important. She wonders why it has to take place right now.

  Son says, “Because they believe that’s their unit. They think they’ve found them.”

  “Good God, is it?”

  Son gives her a look of confusion. How would he know?

  Hien and Anh may come to blows. Meanwhile, Minh is crouching behind a tree, calling back to the others. Then all at once, Hien storms over to where Susan is hunkered down at the base of a tree, grabbing her by the arm and dragging her forward. She lets out a small cry and tries to jerk away from him. But his grip is fierce, made stronger still by his determination. Son interferes and Hien brings out his dagger from a scabbard on his shoulder so fast it is as though it has jumped into his hand. When Son takes another step forward, he puts the blade to her throat. “Don’t,” she whispers. She thinks she can feel the presence of the blade against the skin of her neck. “Don’t, please,” she says, talking to them both.

  They are interrupted by distant shots and now they are running again, Susan being pulled along by Hien. Son is yelling behind them and Susan repeats what she hears from Son in Vietnamese, though she has no idea what that is, of course. She imagines Son is begging Hien to let her go. If she is unable to take cover it will only be a matter of time before she becomes the recipient of a rifleman’s fire, as however far forward the shooting is, it is inevitable that they will reach the killing zone at this rate.

  But it is clear the soldiers care first about getting to their unit, this more than anything else, and whatever value her life has to them pales next to the opportunity of being back with those they have trained and fought with. They progress even as the company of Vietcong are being pushed back, deeper into the rubber plantation. She can see ahead a dead Vietnamese on the ground, almost in a sitting position, his body bent as though searching for something in the leaves, the exit wound in his back large enough to put your fist through. Another just to his left is doubled over in a stream. Still she stumbles and jogs forward with Hien pulling her. Little Minh, his rifle ahead of him like a probe, slows to a walk and moves with the precision of a cat toward the other men in his unit, calling to them. They’ve come upon a clearing of tall elephant grass ringed by tangles of wild bamboo. The Vietcong are spread out, taking cover where they can. Minh settles among them. She can see his shining hair, the rugged thick shoulders, the sword beside him. He was always so proud of that sword. Somebody calls to him and he answers in a voice like a high school boy shouting to his friends. For one spectacular minute, he enjoys the feeling of having come home again, even if that homecoming arrives with the onslaught of American guns. He is smiling; he calls to another man, who gives him a look of such surprise that Minh bursts out laughing. And then, in a moment that seals itself in her mind, she sees his arms pull out from his sides as though he is beginning a dive, his chest forward, his neck arched. At once, he is thrown up in the air, his spine bent inward, his sword flying from his side, still held by its cord. Nobody expected the shots to come from behind. The Americans have managed to enclose them in a vise, and now are attacking from two sides. She hears screams all around her. She is on the ground, hidden among the elephant grass, the sound of machine guns roaring in her ears. Hien seems to have forgotten all about her and he crawls in the direction of Minh. She would like to go, too; she would like to believe the boy is still alive. But she cannot bear to witness what she is certain to see, his chest blown apart, his face a bowl of blood.

  She lies still in the elephant grass, containing the terror within her as one might try to contain an explosive. When Anh rushes past her, crouching low, head down, she can see the determination on his face, the pulsing artery at his neck, the effort of his moving under fire. She cannot help but admire him. He is a leader, a thinker. All those days ago, almost a week now, she wondered who it was that argued for her life. It was Anh, she is now sure of that. He understood that a reporter was a useful bargaining chip, that to deliver her back eventually to the arms of her people may mean that the Vietcong would be favorably described in the press to the people of the country, of the world. He was not simply a plain soldier, unaware of the larger political arena in which he fought; in this way, among so many other ways, he was different from Hien. She would like to think, too, that there was a deeper reason why he would not kill her, why he treated her well: because the war had not sucked out all his humanity, had not emptied him the way it did so many soldiers. He is Anh, not just a man with a gun. And when she hears the sound of Anh’s body dropping into the grass not far from her, she hopes that it is only that he is taking cover. Automatically, she crawls in his direction. Inching along the sharp blades of grass, the motionless air scorching her cheeks, she thinks he is only hiding, he is only doing as she has done. She is almost certain this is the case, that he is not wounded, not dead. She sees first his sandals, his feet, his thread-bare, filthy trousers, the plain collarless shirt he has worn for so long it shines with the oil of his skin. It is all right; he has no obvious injury; he is taking cover as she is.

  “Anh! Anh, are you okay?” she asks. She calls out, too, for Son. But neither man answers. She moves closer to Anh and sees now that something isn’t quite right with his head. The outline seems flattened, with an unnatural shape she does not recognize. Looking now, she can see he has a head wound. Leaking from a hole below his ear are
the frothy rivulets of brain matter mixing with dark blood and shards of skull. She looks away, feeling her breath leave her all at once. She thinks of how he stood in the dim moonlight of the night before and handed her back the shirt she now wears, how he tried not to appear friendly and yet performed the most thoughtful of acts. The contents of his skull spill out on the dry grass. She wishes she could see him again in the moonlight of last night; she would like to say thank you once more. Not just for the shirt but for everything he did for her, that he tried to do, once he found himself saddled with her. She gulps in air, feels a wild rush of panic. His face is distorted, blown outward in a grotesque mask that she cannot recognize, his open eyes covered in dirt. She thinks, not for the first time, that life and death are too close to each other. She begins to cry and move away from him, then freezes because she is afraid even to move.

  There is no sign of Son and, of course, he has no weapon. She has the awful feeling that he has not survived, that none of them will. They have come all this way only to find themselves stopped in an instant. She hears helicopters once again and now the strafing begins. The bullets will land with such density among those hidden in the grass that there is no hope. She will die among the humming insects and the flies that already gather at Anh’s head. She knows she must find some way of protecting herself. She cannot sit and wait to be killed, and so she pulls herself back to where Anh lies, and in one, terrible effort, turns his body over so that he covers her, his chest toward the high white sky, the oozing of his wounds pooling at her neck. She closes her eyes and hopes the shield of his body will protect her from the bullets above.

  The spray of bullets lasts only a short time, only an instant, but during that time she feels the ground being pumped with them, the sound unlike any she’s heard before. Never did she imagine she would come under attack from Americans and she cannot understand how the war has carried on as long as it has, how the communists have lasted this long, if this is the manner of an American assault. By the time she pulls herself out from beneath Anh’s corpse, calling out to Son, hoping by some miracle he is alive, her heart beating so hard she can feel her whole head swelling with its pulse, she thinks she would almost rather die than continue with this level of fear. She feels Anh’s blood on her neck, the gray matter like a slow-moving slug. It has attracted insects which she swats away in a sudden, hysteric frenzy. Then she vomits and spits and pushes her face into the ground. As the sound of choppers recedes and still she cannot hear Son, she thinks he must be dead, and the thought of this causes her to cry out, as though struck by those same bullets that lanced the grass around her, perhaps even entering Anh’s body, though she does not look. She crawls over to the body once more, finding it covered in flies, and takes the rifle she does not know how to reload. Then she wonders who on earth she thinks she is going to shoot. The Americans? Certainly not. The Vietcong? She drops the rifle and sobs, balancing on her hands and knees, moving one way then another, like some blinded, terrorized animal. She has a sudden, unaccountable image in her mind of Minh holding up the plastic bag containing the chicken parts, the beak and skull and feet and bones. He looks so triumphant, standing with the bounty, his sword curved behind him like an eighteenth-century general, his jack o’lantern smile making him so young. He is dead. Anh is dead. She believes Son must be, too. She begins to feel hazy; she is going into shock. The screams and cries of dying men ring out around her, but she cannot hear any more firing.