Red Flags

by Juris Jurjevics

  "I didn't bring my mess jacket or calling cards anyway," I yelled in his ear, my eyes slits. "And I'm not wearing any skivvies."

  "Me either," Cox shouted.

  Dr. Roberta watched the chase ship rise, her clothes plastered to her body by the wash.

  "Well," Cox yelled, "she's wearing hers."

  Dr. Roberta and I loaded her Land Rover with more rice, a bottle of Lysol, and four large plastic jugs of treated well water. I ran a quick radio check and we set off.

  "Anything I should know about how to behave when we get there?" I said.

  "Yeah. Spirits control everything. Some are good, most bad. The Montagnards spend their lives trying to keep them placated. You can easily violate a taboo. For starters, stand still if you sneeze. No kidding. It's hellishly bad if you don't."

  "Got it," I said. "Okay. What else?"

  "Don't relieve yourself in the village. That's a total no-no for outsiders. If you have to go, go beyond the fences."

  "Right."

  "Only use your right hand to shake with."

  "What?"

  "Why are you smiling?" she said.

  "I—never mind. Go on."

  "When you shake hands, hold your right elbow with your left hand. That way whatever evil spirits are in you will be blocked from entering the other person."

  "I've always done that but I never knew why."

  It was only three kilometers to the village of the expectant mom, but we didn't see a soul on the way. The first sign of a community was a group of Jarai grave houses on a hillside. Dr. Roberta directed me onto a rough track that led us past the cemetery. I slowed the Rover to a crawl. Each tomb had four main posts and a peaked thatch roof over a raised platform, underneath which a dirt mound covered a very shallow grave. The overhead supports were elaborately carved, and the crossbeams bore mystical designs, bursts and sun symbols. Tall jars of wine and personal effects rested on the newer platforms.

  "Comforts for the dead," Roberta said.

  Near the graves stood lone posts with carved tops. A wooden monkey crouched on one, a plane balanced on its nose, its propeller still in the hot air. A French legionnaire braced at attention atop another, facing a bare-breasted Montagnard woman. High overhead, on a mast rising over a tall grave-house roof, two wooden birds perched on opposite ends of a horizontal stick. I pulled to a stop.

  "What do you make of the carvings?" I said.

  "Haven't a clue. They're so strange. Like cargo-cult art, some of it."

  "Cox says they consider stealing water a heinous crime. Have you heard that?"

  "The gods of water and rice are especially powerful. Stealing either is considered a high crime. Pissing off either god means major trouble for the whole village. The offender has to make amends. Not to the victim. To the god."

  "Make amends how?"

  "Sacrifice. Pigs, chickens ... for a really bad offense, a buffalo. Sometimes several. They ring gongs to summon the gods, beat drums, consume whole jars of rice wine. They think gods live in the jars."

  "But they don't sacrifice the offender?"

  "No. No capital punishment. That would be an unnatural death. The worst."

  "Right."

  She took in the cemetery. "Not Western, is it?"

  "You'd be surprised," I said. "About thirty miles north of here, off Road Nineteen, there's a graveyard in the Mang Yang Pass where a Red Montagnard regiment decimated a French column a dozen years ago. The legionnaires who survived buried their dead standing—hundreds of them, facing toward Paris, Mort pour la France on every headstone. We spent part of a morning there."

  "You stopped to pay your respects?"

  "No. For coffee and doughnuts. God, I still dream about those doughnuts. The French-trained cooks made them for the MACV mess at Kontum. Four of us liberated a couple dozen and headed out on a small jeep patrol to try and triangulate an enemy radio transmitter. We stopped at the graveyard, ate all the doughnuts with a thermos of Army coffee, then shot it out with two Charlies we bumped into a few kilometers down the road."

  "Have you been in a lot of firefights?"

  "Some. Usually by accident. Small actions."

  "So where have you served?"

  "Mostly around Saigon these days. My first tour I was sent everywhere."

  "Why? What were you doing?"

  "Our radios were never intended for this climate. They're susceptible to moisture, and the jungle absorbs transmissions. Whenever somebody had problems with them, I'd get sent to fix things."

  "Couldn't the Army come up with new equipment meant for the tropics?"

  "Sure, but by the time the military gets it right, we'll be fighting in deserts or on ice floes."

  I shifted into first gear and got us rolling again.

  "You married?" she said.

  "Briefly."

  "That's unfortunate."

  "We eloped. Didn't have much time together. The day I came home she announced it was over."

  Roberta nodded. "So you came back."

  We were within sight of the village, passing by fruit trees and a garden. In among the tobacco and vegetables stood waist-high stems topped with darkly ripe knobs. The notched pods oozed white lines of resin that scented the air with a sweet aroma. Roberta saw my interest.

  "The sap turns brown in the air. This goes on for five or six nights running." She pointed at a dark, resin-streaked pod. "In the morning they'll collect the tar in little bamboo pots they hang around their necks."

  "Smells inviting."

  "The village pharmacy," she said.

  "Do the Yards around here ever grow opium to sell? I mean, in large quantities?"

  "Not that I've seen. They're not business-minded. This is for their own use. Drinking is a bigger thing in their culture. But they don't sell their moonshine either."

  Thirty longhouses came into view, built on stilts six feet off the ground, the longest over forty feet. Entries at both ends fronted on raised porches, with notched logs for ladders.

  "They've got fifty people sleeping in those big ones," Roberta said. "They pull the ladders up at night to keep out animals and marauders."

  I wasn't completely unfamiliar with the layout of Yard villages but didn't tell her that. I liked listening to her talk.

  "The elevation helps keep out rodents," she continued, "and the smoky interiors discourage mosquitoes."

  A man sat on his raised veranda, singing something in Jarai.

  "You understand that?" I said.

  "Some." She listened a moment. "It's a courting song. ‘Your skin is soft like a dove's. Your nails like a falcon's. Your breasts are full and beautiful.' Something something."

  She listened a moment.

  "‘You are close in my heart ... but far from my eyes.'"

  In the center of the village we passed a post smeared with blood.

  "This is where they tether the animals when they're sacrificed." Stuck on another post was the bleached skull of a buffalo.

  Though Roberta was eager to get to her patient, protocol demanded we sit with the village chief for a respectable amount of time and receive a formal greeting. Several men offered us tobacco leaves, bowls of cooked rice, and eggs. Roberta instructed me to take a leaf from each man and to touch an egg.

  "You're symbolically accepting the food," she said. "If you're offered rice wine later on, drink. To them, drunkenness is a spiritual state. Makes the gods happy."

  "If I gotta, I gotta."

  "No, it's really important. More than half their rice harvest goes to make rice wine even in the leanest times. It's a huge part of their lives."

  The chief sent two young men to the Rover to fetch Colonel Bennett's gift of rice and wheat, and a bag of candy for the kids. Finally the chief led the way toward the patient's home.

  A small, dark woman drew near. "The shaman," Roberta said, and translated for me as the two of them launched into a discussion of a patient they shared. Roberta listened intently to the description of the steps the shaman had taken and descri
bed to me the sequence of sacrifices, culminating in the draping of trees with the intestines of a buffalo.

  "Big medicine," she said to me, and returned to the conversation. The shaman was clearly pleased by the consultation with her Western colleague and bade us farewell.

  "I'm impressed you've got time for her," I said.

  "A little collegiality goes a long way, Captain. I can help her patients a lot more if she feels we're working together than if she thinks I have no respect for her treatments. She's much more likely to send for me if someone's in real trouble."

  "Like calling in a specialist."

  "Exactly."

  "Smart, Doc."

  Spurred cocks slashed at one another, wings spread. A young woman in front of a longhouse pounded a wooden post into a mortar, mashing grain. Beside her a young child played with a furry toy: a dead rat. The mom-to-be reclined on the ground nearby. She looked exhausted. Squatting around the supine woman, a circle of wizened old women smoked their pipes and waited.

  "Not good," Roberta said. "These Montagnard women urinate standing and deliver their babies upright. They used to birth their babies alone, outside the village. These days they hold on to a longhouse post and squat. This mom, the way she's lying on the ground—definitely not good. And there are a lot more ladies in attendance than usual."

  Four beautiful, bare-breasted women smiled at us, displaying their gums, black from the mildly narcotic betel-nut cud they chewed all day. All were missing their front teeth. I smiled back.

  Roberta said, "You might want to stop smiling."

  "Smiling's taboo? They smile so much."

  "They file their front teeth down to the gums because they think those teeth make them look hideous, you see. As in feral, beastly, repugnant."

  My smile collapsed.

  At the back of the longhouse a man chopped at the innards of a tree trunk, scooping them out. A dark knot of tissue under his collarbone marked the track of a through-and-through bullet wound.

  "The dad," she said.

  "Making a trough?"

  Roberta frowned. "No. A casket. If she or the child dies, they won't be interred in the village graveyard. He'll have to bury them, probably alone, and abandon their home. His neighbors will dismantle it."

  "Why?"

  Roberta pushed strands of hair out of her eyes. "Being killed by wild animals, suicide, murder, dying in childbirth—they're all considered unnatural deaths that make for unhappy ghosts who bring bad fortune on the community."

  Roberta asked the chief to tell the pregnant woman I was assisting her. The expectant mother didn't seem embarrassed in the slightest about being examined in front of me, though the midwife and the encircling women deftly preserved her privacy, holding open a sarong like a curtain just as Montagnard women did so elegantly when bathing in the rivers toward evening.

  Roberta spoke to the chief, and the chief to the woman. The chief gave his blessings, and Roberta and the midwife began manipulating the mound that was the child, trying to turn it around manually so the head would lead the way through the birth canal. The woman didn't utter a sound, though she was drenched in sweat from the pain.

  It didn't work. Roberta briefly tried a second time and gave up. She said something else to the chief, who conveyed it to the woman.

  Roberta came back to me. "No go."

  "You going to try again?"

  "We don't dare. It's exhausting her, and the placenta could detach. It's going to be a breech birth."

  The circle of women squatted, waiting. Roberta sent me to retrieve some packing paper from her Rover.

  "This whole country is a petri dish," she said, "I swear." She sat down next to me on a log. The husband kept chopping; the blows carried across the village.

  "All you can do is your best," I said.

  "In one sense they're tough as nails. Have to be to have survived into adulthood. Yet their bodies have been heavily taxed. They haven't much endurance."

  "They look sturdy enough to me."

  She shook her head and indicated the pregnant woman. "She's got leprosy, like so many of them. Suffers from vitamin and iodine deficiencies, and I can hear the effects of TB in her lungs. I don't know if it's active. I treated her earlier with isoniazid, streptomycin, and para-aminosalicylic acid, in case. Probably has malaria too, hopefully not cerebral. And maybe dengue. Worms and parasites ... God, their parasites have parasites. I've never seen a specimen from a Montagnard that didn't have parasites."

  I looked at the woman's husband. "You think she could check out?"

  "She's not in great shape." She stood with hands on her hips. "Fuck."

  "What can you do?"

  "I had her on dapsone last year for the leprosy. She's chronically anemic, like they all are ... luckily, because that actually keeps her malaria suppressed. I can't give her anything for the worms until she delivers. The medicines are too toxic."

  "What doesn't she have?"

  "No tetanus or yaws." Roberta gazed ahead. "Plague either. I haven't detected plague. But if you look over there, you'll see the carriers in those little corrals."

  Caged rats.

  "They raise them," she said.

  "Pets?"

  "Food. Roasted rat. It's not bad."

  "I've had some, caught in the wild. I didn't realize they actually raised them for food."

  "What you're seeing"—she indicated our surroundings—"this is four thousand years old. They've been like this forever. They farm rice without plows or water or tools other than sticks so as not to make the gods mad. Only the men make the holes for seeds, only the women plant them in the holes. Every grain of rice gets harvested by hand to keep their pissy gods happy." Worry lined her face. "In some villages, if the mother dies in childbirth, the baby gets buried with her whether it's alive or dead."

  "Is this one of those villages?"

  "I don't know."

  "What are you going to do if she doesn't make it?"

  "What I did the last time—try to buy the baby. See the sorcerer sitting under the longhouse?"

  A distinguished-looking man sat by himself next to a tethered dog and a pig, enjoying a huge joint.

  "If she dies, he'll sacrifice those two immediately and purify the village with their blood. Sprinkle the ground everywhere and stamp on it."

  "You got any good news, Doc?"

  She leaned back against a support post, staring at the sky. "Yeah, at least it's not twins on board," she said, her hair a mass of curls from the humidity. She looked back at me, amused. "It gets better."

  "What?"

  "The dad. He's VC."

  Half a dozen kids drilled with bamboo sticks on their shoulders, imitating their elders in the militia at Mai Linh. More women and kids gathered, talking and cavorting. This birth was attracting a lot of attention, perhaps because we were involved.

  "Got anything you can give them as a present?" Roberta asked. I patted my pockets, hoping for some candy or gum. All I had was a pack of cigarettes. Roberta nodded. "Two each."

  I distributed the cigarettes. The old women flashed their black, toothless grins. They stripped off the paper, stuffed the tobacco into their pipes, and puffed away. A swarm of small boys cleaned me out of the rest. They strutted around puffing, obviously experienced smokers though they couldn't have been more than five or six.

  "You're sure about the father?" I said, quietly.

  "Yes."

  The women held up the sarong again so Roberta could check on the labor. The mother was dilated ten centimeters. We sat on the packed earth and waited. The old women waited with us. Roberta put her hair up and tied it in place with her scarf. She produced a cigarette and lit up.

  "Those older ladies are the movers and shakers of the village," she said and exhaled. "Jarai women do most of the work, run everything and own everything, including the men. Mothers get together and buy and sell sons for marriage."

  "What's a guy go for these days?"

  "About two dollars' worth of piasters and a pair
of water buffalo. Maybe a brass gong thrown in. The groom marries into the wife's clan and moves into her family's longhouse, takes her name. So will their kids. The guy has no power; the clan makes all decisions. He's there to service her relatives. He can't buy or sell anything without the wife's approval. If they divorce, she keeps everything."

  "How modern," I said.

  "You see the old one?" Roberta nodded toward the circle of skeletal women.

  "Which one? They all look old."

  "The oldest—really shriveled."

  "Yeah," I said, still not knowing which.

  "She's the guardian of the land. She says who farms it and when, and how much of a harvest goes into the common emergency reserve."

  "Why isn't she the chief?" I said.

  Roberta looked at me with condescension. "This is Asia, Captain. The men only think they're chief."

  "I take it you wouldn't mind being a Montagnard?"

  "I ... no. I wouldn't want to."

  "Why not?"

  She took a long drag. "Can't say." She blew out a stream of smoke. "It's sort of a secret."

  I lit the lamps we'd brought and turned on the one big flashlight. The pregnant woman rose to her feet, slightly hunched, and took hold of one of the posts supporting the longhouse overhead. The women in the circle slid her covering away and she stood naked, flesh glistening with sweat. She looked fevered. Roberta and I rushed forward.

  Roberta spoke to the woman, examined her, and made a quick movement. Water gushed.

  "It's clear," Roberta said, relieved, clicking off her flashlight.

  "Is she going to lie down again?" I said, kneeling behind Roberta.

  Roberta didn't take her eyes off her patient. "Whatever her body tells her to do, we follow her lead. She wants to stand, she stands. But get the packing paper in position on the mats behind her just in case. If I have to do surgery, God forbid, it'll be on the paper. The odds of infection will skyrocket if I have to operate, damn it."

  The woman began grunting. The circle of old women stopped puffing their pipes. I lit two more Coleman lanterns and suspended them from the bottom of the longhouse while Roberta laid out covered metal trays of her obstetric and surgical tools on a low bench. The younger women rose to their feet to peer at them. This wasn't going to be good if Roberta had to cut her open. How would the villagers react? Worse still, what if the mother didn't make it?