by Alfredo Vea
A startled look came over Calvin’s face. Despite the fact that he had just cried in his cell, he did not consider himself a crier. He did not cry. Calvin opened his mouth to protest, but Jesse quickly folded his arms.
“You’ll cry when I tell you to cry, Calvin. Piss on your damned pride! Otherwise we’ll both be crying when they sentence you. Do you know what a sentence of life without possibility of parole means, Biscuit Boy? I’ll tell you what it means. A long, long time from now in a prison that has yet to be built, a young prison guard will rap on your cell door to see if you’ve taken your medications. By then you’ll be on heart medicines and kidney dialysis and you’ll have an artificial liver. You won’t move, so he’ll unlock your cell door and discover that you’ve died of old age. Well, Calvin, that young prison guard’s grandfather hasn’t been born yet.”
Eddy winced at the story. He looked into Calvin’s eyes and knew that the boy had not really understood the story. Jesse had seen it, too.
“Now, there’s one final sign. When I stand up, it means you’re volunteering information. It means you’re not listening to the question. You need to listen to the question and answer just the question that was asked and nothing more. Five simple signs, do you think you can remember them?”
Calvin nodded.
“Good,” said Jesse with a tired voice. “You’re gonna get a lot of practice and I’m gonna jump on your ass every time you fuck up.”
Jesse leaned forward, toward his client. It was clear to him that the boy was months away from even the most basic understanding of the true danger of his situation. He would keep trying to find an example that would hit home.
“The courtroom is like an orphanage, Calvin, and the jurors are there to pore over all of the children and choose one to adopt… which witness to believe. Do you know who it is that people adopt?”
Calvin shook his head, no.
“They adopt a child that looks like themselves. People want a child who matches their own skin color and eye color. If they can’t have that, they take a child that they can mold in their own image. Everyone takes the infants and the toddlers and passes over the older children, who already have fixed tendencies and personalities. In the end, the most needy kids are always the least likely to be chosen.
“There will be twelve white people on the jury, Calvin, and they will all be looking right past you, right past a person who doesn’t look a thing like themselves. They’ll adopt that nice boy-next-door prosecutor or that handsome cop, but not you. Even if you speak the truth, they won’t hear it if it has an accent or comes from thick, black lips. They certainly won’t hear it if it’s filled with sidewalk jargon and street slang.”
Jesse was silent for a moment as he pondered his own words.
“Don’t worry, Calvin. They don’t listen to poetry either. Listen,” said Jesse in a calmer voice, “don’t talk to the police. You probably don’t know it yet, but that police inspector on that tape had you for lunch. He made that confession for you. Never talk to anyone in your cellblock about your case. Above all, don’t talk to that Little Reggie if he or one of his boys comes to visit you.” Both Jesse and Eddy noticed the fear in Biscuit Boy’s face at the mention of Little Reggie’s name.
“In a couple of weeks I’ll let you speak. Then you can tell me why they call you Biscuit Boy.”
A small smile crossed Calvin’s face, but disappeared just as quickly as it had arrived. Jesse yawned, then nodded toward his sleepy investigator, who immediately began packing his briefcase to leave. The two men stood up and stretched, then Jesse signaled to the deputy at post eight that the interview was over. As Calvin was being led back to his cell, Jesse turned toward his investigator and whispered, “Little Reggie Harp sure has that boy scared to death.”
“He probably threatened to kill someone in Calvin’s family,” answered Eddy. “The cops can’t find him. He’s just disappeared.”
“You’ll find him,” said Jesse. “Just make sure he doesn’t know you’re looking for him. Everyone says he’s cold-blooded.”
Eddy nodded, then asked his friend a question.
“What do you think the jury is going to do tomorrow in the Vung case?” He was referring to a case that had gone to the jury for deliberations just two days before.
“I think they’ll have a verdict. Tomorrow’s Friday and they’ll want to go home and not have to come back on Monday. More than three days on that kind of evidence is hoping for too much. I’m praying for a manslaughter,” said Jesse, “but, as you know, I’ve got a bad feeling about this one. I only wish that stupid Vung had allowed us to help him. I’ve never done a trial where the defendant has refused to say a single word to me.”
“Or to me,” added Eddy solemnly. “This is the first time I’ve ever had to deal with the Vietnamese community. They’re an insular bunch.”
“If he hadn’t threatened all of the witnesses and their families, we might have been able to find out what really happened at that party. It’s how they handled cases back in the old country: scare the shit out of the witnesses and say nothing to the lawyers. No, I think tomorrow morning we’ll be counting papers.”
A confused look came over his investigator’s face as the two men stepped into the elevator.
“The jury has to work its way from first-degree murder downward, so if the foreman hands the judge three pieces of paper it means we’ve got a voluntary manslaughter, not guilty of first- and second-degree. It could also be an acquittal, but I don’t expect that. If he hands him two sheets, it’s got to be a second-degree murder. They don’t have to fill out the third sheet. In my dreams I’ve been seeing just a single piece of paper. I wake up two or three times a night, covered in sweat.”
Eddy knew what Jesse wasn’t saying about those dreams—that they were mild disturbances compared with the other dreams that tormented him every night of his life. On trips to other juris dictions, when the two had shared a hotel room, Eddy had witnessed the savage impact of those nightmares.
“AyDios mio, that Bao Vung is one hardheaded Vietnamese dude. Cabeza de piedra. He won’t even talk to the interpreter.” Jesse’s voice dropped to a whisper. “He reminds me of someone I met over twenty-five years ago in Vietnam.”
Jesse’s mind flew backward twenty-nine years to one of the two dreams that tortured him each night. Both dreams always left him bathed in sweat, though one was a cacophonous orchestra and the other a quiet duet. One ravaged his sleep, while the other seduced him, made him follow hopefully, before stabbing him from the shadows. One was a counterpoint to the other. Every night of his life there was a man in his dreams.
As he walked from the elevator, Jesse knew that tonight would be no different from any other night. One of the two dreams would seize him in the dark, reach out from the grave and ambush him in the small hours of the morning.
For years it would take him hours to fall asleep afterward. Over time he lost some of his fear of these visits from beyond life. In a perverse sort of way he actually began to look forward to them. Two men who had perished long, long ago had become Jesse’s most intimate acquaintances. He had met one of the men in Dong Ha and the other in a prison camp in Da Nang. The first was an African-American staff sergeant.
The other had been an enemy soldier.
4
french lessons
Aghastly line of bodies had been hastily arranged by the side of the road. Some clean-shaven troops from psychological operations had dumped them there in the burning heat of midday for the edification of the villagers. The word had been put out that they had all been killed in a firefight. A small dog and two war correspondents in tailored combat fatigues, ignoring the swarm of flies, were moving up and down the row of the dead like careful browsers at a weekend garage sale. The skinny, friendless dog would nuzzle here and there for something loose and organic.
Every now and then one of the human shoppers would spot a potential gem and bend down to squint at it, to place it within a frame, to consider it through a zoom
lens. Here was a featureless grimace, gaping and frozen forever by a tide of napalm. There was a gender-less, timeless gray child whose body might have been pulled from the ashes of Pompeii. A small eruption had just opened near the child’s belly and liquid secrets had begun to boil out. The rest were the generic indigenous dead, their bodies twisted and insulted by a variety of high-speed metals and phosphors.
The photographer from the Stars and Stripes finally gave in to the reality of his constituency and backed away to take a long, sterile shot. His newspaper was not interested in photojournalism, only in raw numbers and morale-boosting photos. The slender woman from ParisMatch lingered pensively over the child, the smoke front her cigarette curling up and around the body of her camera and into her face. An ash from her Gaulois fell and melted into the child’s body. Her eyes scanned the charred form for an unburned clearing in the landscape, for a poignant contrast, a mole or a birthmark or a single indication of gender.
Across the road from the spectacle was a group of silent children, orphans dressed in torn and dusty clothing. The face of death was nothing new to them. There were black flies crawling in their living eyes, and their bloodstreams were teeming with malarial beasties. The security of family and village had been torn away from them at just that tender time when their minds would be wholly preoccupied with play. Still possessed by curiosity, they had all come to marvel at the woman’s long blond hair. In an hour or so they would begin again to worry about food.
A third man joined the photographers. He was a soldier, a buck sergeant in the U.S. Army. Without hesitation he moved directly to the end of the line and to the body of a particular young man. He moved with such speed and purpose that the two correspondents took note of it and lowered their lenses to watch him. They both sensed that something unusual was happening. Why would an American NCO be interested in the corpse of a North Vietnamese regular? Was he one of those wild-eyed, catatonic GIs who collected ears?
After staring downward at the corpse for a long moment, the buck sergeant stepped forward. He inspected the pants and the sandals, then knelt down and carefully began to undo the buttons on the man’s tunic. There were two entry holes in the man’s chest but there was no blood, not on his skin or on his shirt. The soldier moved his face to within mere inches of the other’s. He noticed that there were deep wrinkles on the forehead and about the open eyes of the dead man. These signs of severe distress were new.
The sergeant placed his hands on either side of the man’s face and tried to turn the head to the left, but it wouldn’t move; rigor mortis had already set in. So he turned the entire body onto its side, then bent forward to inspect something closely. Their faces were so close that he could smell what had once been the breath of the other. Something he saw there made him shiver and sigh. He exhaled deeply, then let the body drop. He buttoned the shirt, stood up, and walked slowly away.
Could that be sadness in his eyes? C‘était impossible. The dead man was the enemy. Did this soldier kill the other? Could they have known each other? Should they interview him? He had a name tag but neither had caught his name. The photographers watched him as he walked past them, then suddenly, becoming aware of each other and of their own confusion at what they had just witnessed, they clumsily glanced downward to check their shutter speeds. Squinting to consider the fading light, they quickly stooped to adjust and readjust their f-stops until the moment of awkwardness had passed.
“Monsieur sergeant, connaissez-vous le soldat?” the tall, blond woman ventured. Then, remembering herself, she said, “Do you know this soldier?”
Just one week before, the corpse at the end of the line had been alive. Sergeant Jesse Pasadoble had been waiting for a flight up to the compound at Dong Ha. From there he would be going on to some godforsaken outpost near the Laotian border. He had three or four days to kill before the chopper lifted from the tarmac. A close friend of his, a staff sergeant, had chosen him for a special assignment and had talked him into coming along.
“Well, Sergeant Pasadoble, you still hanging around Dong Ha?” the staff sergeant had asked in a chiding tone. “You think you ain’t in the world? You think this is the asshole and the armpit of civilization ? There’s gonna be a special operation soon. If you want to see the real Nam, you best come along. Venez avecmoi, mon ami.You’ve got some in-country R&R coming. Go on down to Da Nang and get yourself some real food, and maybe even catch a movie. After that, come with me. Venez avec moi.”
Sergeant Pasadoble had been wandering around the secured area of Da Nang and had stumbled upon an enclosed and heavily guarded prison yard. Surrounding the enclosure was a twelve-foot Cyclone fence topped with thick loops of razor wire. There were three heavily armed guard towers, and military police everywhere. Sergeant Pasadoble noticed that except for one prisoner, the yard was empty.
He was in the exact center of the yard. The man was sitting shirtless in the boiling sunlight, his brown legs crossed and his unblinking eyes staring straight ahead. The entire contents of a box of c-rations were arrayed in a semicircle that began with his left knee and ended at his right. He was sitting there alone. All his fellow prisoners were gathered in small groups, smoking Kools and Salems in the shaded areas provided for them at each end of the long yard. Now and then, one of them would nod or point toward him and the rest of the men would laugh out loud.
The sergeant walked toward the Cyclone fence and stopped only when a voice above him called out rudely, “Hey, man, what do you think you’re doing?” He turned to see a flabby, oafish-looking PFC staring down at him from a guard tower, his M-60 machine gun canted downward.
“What do you think I’m doing?”Jesse answered. “I’ve never seen an NVA this close and alive.” North Vietnamese Army regulars did not usually accept capture, or so the story went.
“You can look at the slimy bastard,” the private first class answered, “but pull out your magazine. We can’t have you snuffing out one of our charges, now, can we? Not that any of us would really give a flying shit.” He laughed and winked as he lit a cigarette with his Vietnam edition Zippo. As the guard was speaking, the mute man sitting in the center of the prison yard had stopped gazing at the infinite and had begun to stare at the visitor. He watched as the sergeant walked to the foot of the guard tower and leaned his M-16 against one of its wooden legs. The guard overhead nodded his approval.
“Go ahead, look at gooks all you want, sarge, but don’t touch the wire. Touching the fucking wire is number ten, you bie?”
Before walking back toward the fence Sergeant Pasadoble removed his helmet and flak vest. As he neared the fence, the North Vietnamese regular rose to his feet, then gathered his rations into a pile and placed them on a light shirt that had been spread out on the dirt beneath him. Without taking his eyes from those of the American soldier, he lifted the sleeves and the tails of his shirt and with his makeshift bag began walking directly toward him.
To his right and his left his fellow prisoners suddenly ceased their animated gestures and their conversations and focused all their attention on the two soldiers meeting at the fence. Both men could feel the eyes of the guards staring downward at them. The sergeant could hear the voice of the PFC explaining into the radio that everything was okay, he just wanted to see a gook soldier up close and breathing. What had been a noisy, raucous yard a moment ago was now as silent as a Buddhist monastery.
Jesse stopped just short of the fence and watched in silence as the enemy walked toward him. So this was the man he had glimpsed through the lens of a starlight scope. This was the man who could run full speed in the highland blackness with a rocket launcher on his back. Here was the man who ate next to nothing, who sent no letters home and received none. Here was the man with the better mythology: Americans are sent here to fight against an evil and unde finable thing called Communism; to fight for blue jeans and convertibles and full-color foldouts of big-breasted blondes. This man was sent here to die—to expel the Japanese, the French, the Americans from the soil of his ancesto
rs. His mythology contained less myth.
He was wearing black thongs and had the wide feet of a farmer. He wore the dark-brown pants that were the standard issue in Hanoi. They were threadbare and soaked with sweat. His body was thin and muscular, his face angular and wide. His nostrils had an indignant, almost arrogant flare and the skin around and above his eyes was as smooth as porcelain. His complexion was darker than that of most Vietnamese and his hair was black and curly above a high and almost regal forehead.
When he got within five feet of the fence, one of the ARVN guards screamed something into a bullhorn, and the man froze in his tracks. He raised both arms into the air, took another step forward, then squatted down, indicating that he would go no further. After a long moment of immobile silence on both sides of the wire, the NVA soldier smiled broadly, almost childishly, then reached up to grab a shock of his own hair. With his other hand he pointed at the American sergeant.
“You same-same me,” he said in pidgin. His voice was high-pitched and musical. War had not altered his civilian timbre. He released his hair, then ran his fingers over the brown skin of his cheek, then over his brown, sunburned forearm. “You same-same me,” he repeated.
Having used all of his pidgin language, he asked a question in Vietnamese. Sergeant Pasadoble shrugged, then shook his head. There was a look of intensity mixed with frustration in his face. “No bic,” he said, indicating that he did not understand. Neither man had bothered to learn much of the enemy’s language. Both knew a few cruel and derogatory phrases, a few crude words of command or interrogation, but not much more.
“You,” said the NVA, still trying his pidgin, “không den, không trang, no negro, ni blanco. You Espanol?”
“Habla Usted Español?” said Jesse excitedly.
