A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain: Stories

by Robert Olen Butler

  Her name is Bu’ó’m, which means in English “butterfly.” She is certainly that. She would fly here and there, landing on this flower or that, never moving in a straight line. And how do you summon a butterfly? Only show it a pretty thing. It is not her fault, really. It is her nature. But it is a terrible thing to be married to a beautiful woman. We lived in the town of Biên Hòa, very near an air base and two big American camps, Long Binh and one they called Plantation, and when my wife walked down the street of Biên Hòa, she was dressed in black pantaloons and a white blouse like all the other women but it was so clear how different she was. Her sleeves were rolled far up and her top two buttons were undone for the heat and her hair was combed out long and sleek, and the GI jeeps would slam on their brakes and honk and the Vietnamese men would straighten up slowly and flare their nostrils and the Vietnamese boys on their motorbikes would crane their necks going by, even though more than once I saw them run into some automobile or fruit cart or a pile of garbage and fly through the air for trying to look twice at my wife.

  Of all these men and boys it was the Vietnamese I worried about. No American ever tried seriously to go out with my wife. They had their Vietnamese whores at the camps, and it should be said for my wife that she never much liked the looks of the Americans anyway. This is true even today, after we have lived in Gretna, Louisiana, for more than a dozen years. It was the Vietnamese who I feared. They loved my wife, all these men, and it was only to be expected that some of them would try to have her. They would believe that she could be had. Why else, they reasoned, would she be so beautiful and swing her hips in that way and unbutton those two extra buttons on her blouse? How much cooler did she really think that would make her?

  But these men were warned. And some of them never showed up again after they ignored the warnings. I could bring the fire from heaven to keep them away from my wife. I was a spy, after all. I worked with many Americans at Plantation. They came and they went each year and I would always bring them what they needed. They called me an agent handler, because I had two dozen people working for me. My eyes and ears. The schoolgirls and the woodcutters and the old women and the Regional Forces soldiers and boys from the neighborhoods on their bikes and others like these—they brought me information and I took the information to the Americans, signing onto the post as a day laborer. Most of what I brought them was tactical intelligence. A VC squad with a political cadre coming down from Lái Khê and working the widows’ settlement near Biên Hòa. A rocket attack planned on the air base at dawn from a certain place in the woods. Things like that. And when I gave them this information, I was right often enough that the Americans didn’t really question me after a while, especially about rocket attacks. If I said there were going to be rockets at dawn from such and such coordinates, then first thing the next morning the United States Air Force would come in and blow those coordinates away.

  You can see how this might be a great help to a seemingly wimpy man with a beautiful wife. When my people brought me information about my wife and another man, or I used the evidence of my own eyes, I would send a warning to the man. The fire would come from heaven, I told him in a note delivered by one of my agents. I told him that my wife carries this ancient curse with her. The curse of the little man. I would sometimes go into historical detail. Napoleon Bonaparte, for instance, was very small and conquered 720,000 square miles of Europe. Attila, King of the Huns and ruler of an empire of 1,450,000 square miles, was still smaller, thought even to be a dwarf. History teaches, by the way, that not only is the curse I bring upon the would-be lovers ancient, but the problem of the husband is ancient, too. Napoleon had great troubles with his butterfly of a wife and Attila died in the middle of making love, no doubt due to his being foolish enough to have many wives. But, of course, these are observations that I left out of my warning messages, which were clear and forceful. And if they were not heeded, I would find the coordinates of the place where the man cut wood every morning or where he went to eat his lunch or to fish or some other place where the United States Air Force could find him. We are all creatures of habit.

  And how did my wife react when she found some man who was pursuing her suddenly disappear? Perhaps the first time or two she felt that it was something she herself had said or done, or perhaps she thought they did not find her attractive anymore. (This makes me a little sad, to think I made my wife doubt herself. But surely she has always known how beautiful she is and nothing could truly shake that.) Later on she must have known that I was responsible in some dramatic way. But however it was that she felt, I can never say for sure. She would always maintain a face and attitude that revealed nothing. I would speak to her, as I often did, of history or politics or matters of daily life, and she would listen, her face bowed over her sewing, until it was time for us to sleep. Only once did she let on that she knew what had happened to her latest suitor. I believe that this man—a woodcutter with a shack by a stream—never understood what I could do. He was a big man, an arrogant man. One evening soon after this particular reported rocket attack was prevented by the United States Air Force, my wife looked up from her sewing. I had just paused for a few moments in speaking to her due to an itchiness in my throat, so at first I thought she wished me to quickly continue the observations that I had been making on the futility of using our Regional Forces irregulars to guard local government buildings. But instead, she said, “It’s sad, the mistakes made in a war.”

  I knew at once what she was talking about. She had made a terrible mistake in letting this man get too close to her.

  “Very sad,” I said.

  “Do you think someone is actually in control of all these things that happen?” she asked.

  “I am sure of it,” I said, and a clearer reminder than that was unnecessary. My wife is beautiful, but she is also subtle.

  So finally history caught up with my country. I could see it coming for a long time. I stopped enough rockets from hitting the air base at Biên Hòa that in repayment my wife and I, along with our two children, flew from there a week before the place was overrun by the communists. I was not so very sorry to go, for I was coming to a country full of men that my wife would not look at twice. And it’s true that in America, things have been much calmer, though this Gretna, Louisiana, is an area with many Vietnamese. But it seems as if somehow the men of Vietnam have lost their nerve in America, even with a beautiful Vietnamese woman. I sometimes receive a respectful compliment about my wife, but these men are beaten down; they are taller than me and even younger than me but wimpier by far.

  We live near the Mississippi River and just over the bridge is New Orleans. My wife has seemed happy simply to live in an apartment where she can sit in the living room whenever she wishes and she and her women friends can go out together and shop and get their hair fixed. I work for the telephone company and we have a television set which makes me more interesting to my wife because she does not have to listen in the evenings to the thoughts I have on polities and history and such. I understand her limitations, and a wise man does not try to change the things that can’t be changed. It’s just that I’d begun to hope that things had changed on their own. For a long time she seemed utterly uninterested in allowing me to be tormented in the ways I was in Vietnam. There was no town street to walk down with the eyes of everyone on the open throat of her blouse or the movement of her hips. The hairdos she liked here seemed intended to impress the other women rather than any man. Things have been very good, very calm. That is, until two months ago.

  It was, of course, a Vietnamese. He is a former airborne ranger, a tall man, nearly as tall as an American. And he owns a restaurant in a shopping plaza. The restaurant is called Bún Bò Xào, a name obviously chosen to attract the American diners out for some exotic treat that they can’t even distinguish from Chinese. I know this because Bún Bò Xào means Sauteed Beef with Noodles. What if an American restaurant was named Grilled Hamburger with French Fries or Baked Chicken and Mashed Potatoes? Do you see th
e point? To call a restaurant a name that a whole people will understand as Sauteed Beef with Noodles is an insult to that people. And the bún bò they make there is second-rate anyway, and the nu’ó’c mm, the fish sauce, is even worse. This sauce is very special to the tongue of the Vietnamese. I do not expect to taste true Vietnamese nu’ó’c mm in America. The nu’ó’c mm from Phú Quc Island was the best of all, clear and with an astonishingly subtle taste for a substance that a fish will give up only after a prolonged process lasting several days. But the sauce in this restaurant is from the Philippines, very bad, not from Thailand, which at least is a pale second-best.

  I do not criticize this man’s taste and sincerity idly. These were my first clues. My wife and this man forgot that I am a spy. They may have known that I can no longer command the United States Air Force, but they forgot that I know how to read clues. You see, in spite of the bad bún bò and the worse nu’ó’c mm, this suddenly became my wife’s favorite restaurant. We did not know where to go one Friday night, which is the night we usually go to a restaurant, and she said, oh so lightly, so offhandedly, that she’d heard that this Vietnamese place was quite good. She quoted one of her hairdo companions, a woman who would be plucking chickens and getting high on betel nuts in some Saigon alley if we had won the war. I have tried to avoid Vietnamese restaurants in the United States, but Bu’ó’m seemed so set on this, yet in such a casual way, that I indulged her. She is, after all, still a very beautiful woman.

  We pulled into the little shopping center and found the place just a few doors down from Ngon Qúa Po-Boys and the Good Luck Bowling Alley. I noticed how my wife’s hand casually slipped off my arm as we stepped into the Bún Bò Xào Restaurant and I only had time to make a quick note of the Chinatown lanterns on the ceiling and the lacquer paintings on the wall, mass-produced in Hong Kong, when this tall Vietnamese man in a tuxedo was suddenly bowing before us and shooting little knowing glances at my wife. The owner. Trn Vn Ha. He was so glad to see us and I felt a chill going up and down me from my scalp to my toes.

  So we ate this second-rate food and the owner visited our table twice to make sure everything was all right. I explained carefully to him how it was not, how the food was falling short of this or that standard of excellence. He listened to me with his temples throbbing and I could hear my wife peeping in repressed contradiction to me. It was all so clear that I almost laughed at them then and there and said, Do you take me for a fool? Have you forgotten how severely I deal with matters such as this?

  But the fact was that I no longer had access to the fire. I did not even have my eyes and ears who could go out and gather more information for me and deliver the necessary warnings. So I held my tongue about all but the food. Nor did I speak of these things on the way home nor that evening nor even, a week later, when my little butterfly said she had a craving for Vietnamese food and suggested the Bún Bò Xào Restaurant. I simply said no to the restaurant and with my spy experience kept a cool exterior, a calm and placid exterior. Inside, however, I was a whirlwind of feelings and plans. At no time in the past dozen years had I such a strong sense that I was in a foreign country, behind enemy lines, as it were, without any resources but my own. But soon my head cleared enough to understand that no matter where you are in the world, the forces of history and culture have been at work, and these forces create solutions to problems for the man who knows how to find them.

  Take New Orleans, Louisiana, for instance. Napoleon snatched the city from the Spanish, who he defeated in Europe, and then two years later he sold it to the United States. This city was the casual possession of a small man who commanded fire of his own. But the city had a long history even before Napoleon held it. For a hundred years it had been a city with French and Spanish people but with many from the Caribbean, too, the West Indies and elsewhere, black people with fire of a different kind. You can’t live around New Orleans without hearing about voodoo. And one night soon after I learned about Trn Vn Ha, I saw a program on our television where a very thin little black man taught hard lessons to his enemies with voodoo. My wife was sitting there with me and I kept my face very calm, never letting her know that I was listening to the voice of history right there in her presence, and even when the thin little black man made some mistakes that let the lumbering Americans catch him, I knew that I had to grow and learn and command the fire once more.

  So on the very next day I called in sick to the phone company and I went across the bridge and past the great mandarin hat of the Superdome and down into the French Quarter, where the television and the movies all suggested voodoo was practiced. I walked the main streets of this area and there were boutiques and T-shirt shops and pizza parlors and jazz places and places where women danced whose husbands, if they had the power I once had, would have long ago bombed New Orleans into rubble. But the shop I found among all of this was run by white people, large Americans with neat shelves full of books and jars and dolls that I clearly sensed had nothing to do with the real voodoo.

  So I went out of that shop and looked up and down Bourbon Street and I realized that this was all like Trn Vn Ha’s Vietnamese restaurant, a phony thing. I went up to the next comer and turned down a side street, then took another turn and another until I was in a cobbled street of narrow little houses with spindlework porches and I walked along and I smiled at the black people on their stoops and I stopped at several of the stoops and asked if there was a voodoo man in the neighborhood. I have learned the lessons of history and I felt a kinship with these people and I was comfortable asking them for help, even though most of them looked at me very strangely. Finally an old man with a gray film in his eyes and a walking stick leaning on the post next to him said to me, “What you want him for?”

  I said, “I have a beautiful wife who has a wandering eye.”

  The old man nodded and said, “I know that trouble,” and he told me how to find the house of a voodoo man, a Doctor Joseph. He said, “You ax Doctor Joseph what you want. He be a powerful low-down papa.” (I learned later that a papa is what many people call a male voodoo witch. And a “low-down” papa is willing to perform black magic and do evil deeds.)

  I thanked the old man and made my way to another street much like the one I’d just left. I found the house, but I was expecting something different. This was like all the other houses, no strange symbols hung over the door or animal bones dangling on string or anything at all, except I did see a tiny sign by the doorbell. I went up onto the porch and the sign was a three-by-five card, laminated and nailed there, and it said, DOCTOR JOSEPH. HARD PROBLEMS SOLVED. If he had a great power like the old man said, then I liked Doctor Joseph already. This was my own style, of course. Low-key. I rang the bell and waited and then Doctor Joseph himself answered the door. I know this because he said so. As if he already knew me and knew what I wanted, he opened the door and instantly said, “I am Doctor Joseph. Come in.”

  I stepped into a foyer that smelled of mildew and incense and my eyes were slow, straining to open to the darkness, and I couldn’t see a thing, but I followed in Doctor Joseph’s wake and we entered a front sitting room. He waved his hand and I sat in an enormous soft old chair and I could feel the springs of the cushion beneath me. Doctor Joseph sat opposite me in a cane-backed chair and he had seemed from the moment he opened the door like a very large man, bigger even than any American, but now that he was sitting before me, I could see that I was mistaken. It may have been a little spell he’d cast over me. I hoped so. But now he let me see that he was not big. He was as thin as any Vietnamese and he was a younger man than I’d expected, though this, too, may have been a spell. His eyes were very clear, very large, and the tight black curls of his hair had not the slightest touch of gray. His lower lip pushed up into an inverted smile and he was obviously ready for business, so I began.

  I told Doctor Joseph everything about my wife, about the burden I’ve had to bear. I did not tell him that I once used the U.S. Air Force to correct my problems. I am still, at heart, a spy
, even in the presence of a low-down papa, though being the papa that he was, he probably knew all of this anyway. After hearing me out, he tented his fingers before him and looked past me to the window where the filmy curtains let in the morning light that illuminated the room. He kept his eyes outside for a long while and I finally looked away from him, too. The room was very small, and except for the two chairs and a wooden pedestal table beside Doctor Joseph, there were no objects at all in the room. The empty walls were very dark in spite of the light from the window, and when I looked closer, they seemed to be actually painted black. There was a heavy curtain at a doorway which must have led to the rest of the house, and perhaps back there were all the potions and mysterious objects of the voodoo doctor. I don’t know. All that was in this room was the smell of incense and the low-down papa’s gaze, which was traveling beyond me.

  Finally Doctor Joseph’s eyes came back to my face and when they did, I felt a burning in my sinuses and a weakness in my arms and legs. Then he said, “How much is this woman worth to you?”

  I figured he was talking about his fee. I shrugged and he knew what I was thinking because he kind of snorted and said, “You and I will deal with that later. I’m speaking of a different realm. Three times you will have an opportunity to deny her. If you are going to call on the High Heavens, then you best know exactly what you want and exactly how bad you want it.”