The owner is a woman in her fifties with a round, generous face, white and soft like a steamed pork bun. Swathed in yards of expensive red satin of a peasant cut, she waves a prospective fare aboard, saying in a quacking voice (a tone my mother often condescendingly refers to as that of a fishmonger): No, no we go straight through. This is the fastest bus there is. You can’t get to Chau Doc any faster if you fly like a bird. We’re safe, of course, we’re safe. This here is my brother (pointing at Driver). He has been driving since he was old enough to get a license. His mother delivered him on a bus. It’s natural for him.
I stifle a laugh. Driver plays his poker face. I have heard this line so often I figure the only people driving buses are the ones born on them.
They are a smooth crew, the four of them: the driver, the owner, the mechanic, and the bagman. The owner collects the cash and handles all financial matters, from buying petrol to bribing cops. The mechanic doubles as a relief driver and a baggage handler. The bagman, their barker, leans out the open door when the bus is under way and shouts fares-destinations to prospective passengers standing on the side of the road. Most crew are family members or relatives. Fares are standard. Buses equipped with air-conditioning, televisions, or karaoke machines charge about twenty percent more.
Passengers arrive sporadically, carrying anything from luggage to live chickens. The bus eventually leaves ninety minutes after its scheduled time, filled to seating capacity. Just as we pull out of the gate, two men bang on the door and swing aboard. The bus owner, whom I call Madame, casts a distasteful glance but doesn’t ask them for fares. They stand next to the driver. As the bus lists out onto the street, the crew becomes nervous, craning their necks on the lookout for cops. Even the passengers seem agitated. Along the side of the busy road, a string of seven buses have their engines in idle as traffic cops scan passengers and prod luggage.
Faster, Madame urges Driver. He thumps the accelerator and the crew heaves a big sigh as the bus grunts past the busy traffic cops. Around the next turn a cop steps out from a soda kiosk and points at Driver, who obediently edges the bus to the side of the road. Bagman jumps off and lopes toward the cop, wearing a big friendly grin. He pumps a couple of bills into the cop’s waiting palm with everyone watching. The cop nods Bagman back on the bus, thumbs up to Driver. Again, the bus shudders and farts into motion. Half a mile later, the incident is repeated and this time Madame is pissed, yelling to her passenger witnesses: Oh, my God, what’s going on. The cops got all their relatives out here collecting or what? They can’t peel and gut us twice like this. How are we supposed to eat?
Cops usually collect anywhere from five to thirty percent of the bus’s net income.
No sooner than we clear the city, the duo who boarded the bus at the gate open their satchels. One man pulls a bullhorn on the passengers, the other brandishes long ticker tapes of pills in cellophane. The pitch begins. May I have your attention, ladies and gentlemen. Please quiet down. Quiet, please. QUIET! Thank you, everyone. Hey, sister, you there, make your kid shut up. Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, have you ever had a headache that just won’t go away? One of those that feels like a spike driven from the base of your skull through the top of your head?
I groan, feeling the very pains he is describing. The smoothskinned, sharp-eyed man fires off his singsong pitch in a nasally tenor, the battery-amplified words shot out like bullets from a Gatling gun. My head is three feet away. The drug is positively a miracle of science, he claims. I try turning my head away from the horn. Everything you’ll ever need to cure everything. My eardrums are about to implode. Let me tell you about Doctor Nguyen Le Van Truc, the esteemed doctor of Saigon who invented this miracle drug. Look, look here is a photo of him. I try to politely cover my ears. You. You, uncle in the green shirt. What ails you? Backache, you say? Well, this drug will cure your backache. Make you feel like a kid again.
The dealer’s compatriot works the aisle, shaking people awake, dangling his string of pills in their faces. There are a few takers. After all, a string of ten pills costs less than a bowl of noodles, about as cheap as medicine gets. The tirade of medicinal benefits keeps getting longer. Then I hear the real breakthrough: It cures cancer, all cancers. More buyers. A fair quarter of the passengers have coughed up cash for the miracle medicine, but not enough to please the pair. They go on the aggressive, publicly interrogating passengers individually to see why each failed to jump on this spectacular one-time offer. Thirty minutes into the intimidation program, they have extricated money from three-quarters of the passengers. The peasant woman next to me explains in my ear that the pair are part of large gangs that prey on buses throughout southern Vietnam. If the bus owners don’t let them aboard, they’ll slash the bus tires. Buses have been known to be put to the torch by gangsters. She has seen them slash a girl’s face.
Madame acts as though the snake-oil salesmen aren’t raping her passengers. Driver concentrates on the road. Bagman and Mechanic sit dejectedly on crates, putting up with the salesmen without a word.
“What about you?” Snake turns to me. “You’re a Viet-kieu, aren’t you?”
I nod.
“Buy some of this medicine and take it home with you.”
It is an order. I shake my head. “No, thank you, Brother. I don’t need any medicine.”
“DON’T you shake your head at me!” Snake roars. “If you don’t want my medicine, don’t buy it, but don’t you dare shake your head at me!”
Oh, shit. I scramble to my feet, thinking: It’s going down. They’re going to make an example of me. Snake’s partner is moving slowly up from the back of the bus. There is no time to look for the pepper spray I’d tossed into my backpack. I brace myself against the seat, trying to keep an eye on both of them.
“You Viet-kieu think you’re better than everyone else, don’t you!”
“Sorry, Brother. I don’t want any trouble.”
“You don’t have to shake your head at me, you son of a bitch!” Snake is working himself up to a frenzy.
I know his type too well. I’ve dealt with this kind since I was a kid fresh to America. When you cross paths with anyone who doesn’t take kindly to your kind of gook, Chink, nip, you must come at him swinging. It doesn’t matter if he beats the crap out of you, you’ve got to fight back or it will only get worse. The only thing that will save you is the bottomless rage that burns in your deepest pit.
“FUCKING ASSHOLES! You-wanna-fight? Come-on-youmother-fuckers! COME-ON!” I bring up my fist, churning, ready to swing. Burning with fury, I have no idea I am cussing them in English.
They pause. People ogle me as though I am an alien that has just inadvertently dropped its mask.
Before Snake recovers, Madame wedges herself between us. I can’t see her face but I hear the edge in her.
“Brother,” she says, eerily calm, “this is my cousin. I will buy a pill string for myself.” She holds out a fifty-cent bill. Bagman and Mechanic are on their feet, poised to back up their mistress.
A moment of silence inflates the bus. All eyes on our showdown. Snake stares at Madame, murder plain in his eyes. I can see him weighing the odds, calculating.
“Very smart decision, Big Sister,” Snake declares, and takes her money with a flourish. “Smarter than your cousin.” Snake smirks at me.
Snake orders Driver to stop. The pair jump off. As we pull away, they cross the street to hail another bus, heading back into Saigon. Madame pats me on the shoulder and takes her seat, clearly as shaken as I am.
Four hours out, Bagman licks his chops and bellows, “Bridge stop,” which in Vietnamese means rest-room break. Our asthmatic vehicle wheezes into a dirt lot in front of a roadside diner built specifically for bus traffic. Barely large enough to host one busload of diners at a time, it is a corrugated tin roof on wooden poles with picnic tables on packed dirt. “Everybody out!” Bagman bellows. “We’re locking up the bus for your protection. Come in the shade and have lunch.” I accept Madame’s invitation and join the
crew at their table as an honorary guest. “Eat up,” Driver encourages me with a wink. “It’s on the house.” On cue, the proprietor marches food to the table and we dig into it with gusto.
Most of the passengers refuse to dine and squat on their hams in the parking lot, glaring at the crew. Impatient, Bagman gets up and waves them inside. “Come on, have lunch. Get out of the sun everybody. Rice here is good and cheap.” No one budges. Bagman throws up his hands in disgust. “Go ahead, sit in the sun if you like, but we’re not leaving for another hour and a half.”
He goes back to his bowl and starts scarfing down everything in sight, zigzagging across the table and popping morsels into his big mouth. He chopsticks a morsel into my bowl in a gesture of friendship. Madame gives me a stewed egg. Driver picks me a choice piece of fish. Mechanic spoons me some vegetables. We eat a hearty meal. The crew heaps on me the standard questions every Vietnamese asks about the West, and I answer them between mouthfuls, my bowl never empty.
Half an hour later, Driver groans to his feet, rubs his belly, and drags his bones over to a hammock hung from mango trees off to the side of the diner. At the sight of Driver slouching into the hammock like a dead man and draping an arm over his eyes, the crowd, suffering in the noon sun, clearly swindled, moans. By twos and threes, they stagger like captives into the shade of the diner and order peasant lunches of steamed rice with pork chops sautéed in fishsauce and scallions. Even tight-pursed elders eke out a dime-bill for iced tea.
I swing onto a hammock next to Driver, who peeks at me from beneath his arm, apparently feigning a nap. “What’s it like in japan?” he whispers without shifting his reposed position, keeping up the charade for the benefit of his passengers.
I feel funny telling a traveling man about traveling, and, in fact, telling a second party about the culture of a third party, a little like snitching, gossiping. But I oblige anyway, giving him a look at Japan, the jewel of the East, through Western eyes. Perhaps Western eyes have rose-colored lenses particularly suitable for adventurers because my tales of mountains after mountains of skyscrapers and glass and concrete and asphalt and smog, overrun with a bewildering sea of people, excite him.
“Sometimes, I wish I could go,” he says, eyes looking off to someplace devised by his wanderlust. “I just want to rip out the seats on the bus, put in a table and a bed. And ten fifty-gallon drums of diesel. And drive. Drive all the way to Hanoi, then right into China, then up and up and up through Russia until I see snow—you know, I’ve never seen snow—and then just go West. Aim for the sun and drive at it … Drive until I hit Poland and France and right into the end of the world, right into England.” He pauses, perplexed. “You think there’s a road like that, a road over all that land, over all those countries?” I tell him there probably is and if there isn’t, a couple of side trips wouldn’t be bad either. Adventure is but a collection of detours. He asks me how I got the courage to go. I say I’d realized that the surest way forward was to burn all the bridges behind. I am really good at that. He rambles on about all his “crazy notions,” yakking passionately about exploration and adventure. He does all this without moving, so that, to everyone else, he is still napping.
“Fuck, I must sound pretty crazy wanting to take off like this.”
“Don’t worry about it.”
I tell him about Frank, an eighty-five-year-old retired farmer I met while riding through Napa, California. I had stopped on his porch to ask for some water from his garden hose. “Damn. Damn,” Frank said over and over. “I wish I was a young fella again. Bicycle. I used to do that when I was a boy. I’d make me a peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich and I’d ride my bike on down the road and over the bridge outside of town to the edge of the woods. I’d always wished I could keep going. Wondering what I’d see round the next bend.” And he is still wondering, although he is too sick and poor to go far beyond his porch and his oxygen tanks. “What do you like to drink?” he asked me. Water is fine, I said—Frank was proud of his water, a well he’d drilled himself some forty years earlier. “A real drink, I mean. Beer, wine, whiskey?” It was summer so I said I’d fancy a slushy margarita. Frank dug into his high-draped white trousers, pulled out a fiver, then stabbed me with it saying, “Drink one on your trip for me.” I accepted his money, drank a margarita to Frank twenty miles down the road, then fell flat on my ass because in my dehydration, the tequila lambadaed straight to my head.
Driver laughs himself off the hammock. By the time we leave, practically all the passengers have spent money in the diner. I see the proprietor discreetly pressing a rolled bill into Madame’s hand as she comes out of the rest room.
With the passengers barely in their seats, Driver guns the bus down the road and is back humping the horn, never laying off more than a minute. Soon after we take off, a little boy pisses all over himself and the bus reeks. Madame, finger jabbing over the heads of the crowd, vows to charge the mother extra if her kid whizzes again. The whole miserable bus, packed tighter than eels in a bucket, grumbles in agreement. Still, Bagman and Mechanic hang out the doors and scoop up more passengers. They make a game of bagging people on the fly. One little guy, shouldering a heavy bag, flip-flops frantically after the bus like a threelegged dog. Bagman and Mechanic reach down and monkey-yank the man aboard without losing their cigarettes. The poor guy is huffing open-mouthed with either terror or exhaustion, but then he suddenly grins. This and his narrow face and popping jawbreaker eyes make him look like a Chihuahua. Madame sits Chihuahua next to me and tells both of us to lift our legs for Bagman to slide Chihuahua’s luggage, a huge block of wood, into our foot space. Now we are both crouching in our seats. I tell myself it could be worse. We could be sitting on the five-gallon drums of stinking fishsauce sloshing in the aisle like the two new passengers. Chihuahua-man says he used to be a deer and boar hunter, but he hasn’t seen much game in the last five years so he’s turned to cutting rare hardwood and selling it to artisans and carpenters in town, one cord at a time. “Fuck!” he exclaims with his everlasting fat grin. “It’s better than churning mud or busting rocks for two bucks a day.” I present him with a new baseball cap Kim gave me. He puts it on over his moppy jungle of black hair. A couple of sizes too big, it slips down and catches on his ears. He grins, happy. He is such a jovial, naturehappy guy, I feel like giving him a hug and calling him my lost brother, but don’t want to startle him. So I show my teeth and dip my head in a bow of sorts. He returns the courtesy and we perch together, looking out of our rattling cage at naked kids playing in the Mekong tributaries, the color of Dijon mustard. Since Saigon, the land has been a hundred and fifty miles of rustic farms and thatched huts. Brown mud and clayish red earth peek through like stitching in the mat of intense, lush green, almost violent, a hundred shades of green. In the distant rice paddies, plodding water buffalo are moving rocks; white ducks drift like patches of snow. But it is hot and humid and the smell of the land is thick in the air. From certain angles, it is a testament to coffee-table books. I count my weeks in Vietnam: broken roads; children playing hopscotch on the asphalt; peasants drying their pickling vegetables and fans of joss sticks on the side of the road; unbroken strings of shanties fencing both sides of the highway for hundreds of miles. And I see it all equaling a land of abject poverty, the smiles of its people its only hope.
In the late afternoon, the bus groans into Chau Doc. Driver complains that the engine isn’t running well. Mechanic will be tinkering with it all night, so they’ll leave for Rach Gia first thing tomorrow morning. Sleep on the bus, Driver urges me, there’s plenty of room. The combination of diesel fumes, fishsauce, urine, and chicken feathers is making me nauseous. I beg off to look for a room. To get into town, I decide to try a mini-rickshaw hinged to the seat post of a regular bicycle. In the rural south, bicycle rickshaws are more practical. Unlike big-city cyclos designed for short distances, say, under five miles at a snail’s pace, the country bicycle rickshaw easily belts out ten miles a haul over unimproved roads.
The su
n slashes down mercilessly; my skin browns like caramelizing onions. The dead river air smells bloated. Without much debate, I commit the mistake of hopping on a bicycle rickshaw without settling on a definite price. How far to the closest inn? Pretty far in this heat, sir, the skinny man replies around his cigarette. How much? Whatever you think is appropriate, sir. I nod.
He hauls us onto a sandy road that reminds me of some dusty Mexican mining towns. I mention that it is very hot. “White people smell,” he says without preamble, “especially when they sweat. Most of them use cologne and perfume and that chalky stuff they rub in their armpits. But, oh, God, they can really stink.” I laugh and offer that maybe it has a lot to do with their diet. Maybe Vietnamese stink pretty bad as well because we eat so much fishsauce. But we can’t smell each other because we all eat the same thing. He snorts and delivers me to an inn a hundred yards from the station. I feel about as brilliant as a jackass, handing him a fifty-cent bill—several times the going rate. His chummy face sours as though I have wedged him a slice of lemon. “Oh, come on, Big Brother, can’t you be more generous than that?” I explain that I could have just walked the distance. He raises his voice demanding more. People crane their necks in our direction and I feel the flush of embarrassment rising on my cheek. To stem off his tirade, I sheepishly surrender another fifty-cent bill. He pockets it quickly and bawls, “Come on, how about two dollars. Give me two U.S. dollars. You’re a Viet-kieu, be generous to your Vietnamese brother.”
I shake my head and zip into the inn, leaving him cursing me outside. Beat and dizzy with a full day of diesel exhaust, I take a room and order a meal. After a boy delivers the food, the owner invites himself into my room, strolling in with southern informality. I ask him if he would like to join me for an early supper.
Catfish and Mandala Page 16
