A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain (37 page)

Frank said, “I’m not a Spec-Five anymore, Major. I make good money.”

“I’m sure you do,” Vinh said. “But it was I who suggested coming down here.”

“We can split it.”

Meanwhile Esteban was smiling at them both and smiling at me and smiling at Eileen and in between he was shooting little glances at the vendors, holding them off until he could finally get his own money and leave.

“I’ll tell you what,” Vinh said. “I’ll pay this time and you pay for the cab going back.”

Frank flipped Vinh a sort of funny half-salute. “Roger that. You pay the man and I’ll secure the beach.” At this he turned, and while Vinh was making change, Frank took Eileen by the arm and they moved past me, Eileen hopping a few steps to take her shoes off as she walked.

Vinh joined me and he held my elbow to guide me through the uneven footing of the sands and Esteban called after us, “It’s to your left. You must wade across the mouth of the river and then follow the seawall to the old dock.”

Vinh turned his face to me. “Did you get that?”

“I’ll find it,” I said.

We all four of us stopped at the water’s edge for a moment and the vendors were orbiting us. Frank and Vinh sort of pulled together near the water and kept their faces out to sea and they flipped their elbows when the silver-plate Indian masks and the VIVA MEXICO throw rugs and the iguana head T-shirts came too close. I myself was tempted by the T-shirts. Why not? They had a large green iguana head, and they made me smile. But then I wondered when Liz and Dick had disappeared from the T-shirts. How many years had it been that the lovers had stopped being an inspiration to the world? I mean “inspiration” in the same way that the late-night television ads would say that Elvis Presley, forever captured on three cassettes or two CDs, is an inspiration. But it was a little sad to me, how things that seem so important can come to an end. Even before Richard Burton was dead, there was no love between these two lovers who had crept over the bridge to each other in Gringo Gulch.

I watched Frank lean near my husband and say, “I wish everybody would just back off.” This was spoken in a lowered voice, as if he was trying not to let someone hear who might be offended. This was a surprise, coming from Frank, and it made me wonder who he was talking about. The vendors? They hardly spoke English and their feelings wouldn’t be hurt by this anyway. He wasn’t talking about Eileen and me, because it would be “they,” not “everybody.”

I looked at Vinh to see if he was puzzled, but he didn’t seem to be. He nodded. It must have been a continuation of some earlier conversation. I suddenly wanted very badly to know what it was all about. I’d been distracted for this whole trip, I realized. These two men had what Sam Donaldson on the news would call their own agenda. I stepped nearer, hoping for more words. Señora, silver. Silver, senora, real silver. I flapped my elbows at this sound and Vinh said something I couldn’t catch, casting the words out to sea, and Frank nodded and then Vinh said, “If only one could find a clear betrayer.”

“The marchers,” Frank said.

“Too many of them. It’s like hating a whole race. And if we were winning, no one would have listened to them.”

I’d come too near. Frank glanced over his shoulder and he smiled and nudged Vinh and said, “It’s time to pull out, Major.”

Vinh turned, too, and he said, very deliberately, being a good husband, “This is nice here, Gabrielle. The sun feels good. I’m ready for a walk and some cinema history.”

“What’s our heading?” Frank said.

Eileen was beside me now and she motioned off to our left, across the narrow river mouth and past a long line of food stands near the shore and down to the end of the beach and then, beyond, along a low seawall running beneath a little hill thick with trees. And in the distance, just before the shore turned, I could see a tall pole in the center of a broken concrete dock and just behind it were two levels of terrace, broad stone walls.

“I see it,” Frank said. “Shall the men walk point?”

“Of course,” I said, and I heard myself sounding a little bit sharp, though I had not meant it that way. I just wanted them in front of me. I wanted to watch them.

So the two men went ahead and we all took our shoes off and waded across the river, the rocks smooth underfoot and the water rich and thick with its mountain stew, and I tried to stay close to them. We waded around a little gaggle of boys casting nets in the rushing water and Vinh went on about who to blame. “I tried to make it Mr. Thi
u. He was such a grasping fool. But we didn’t lose the war because our gold was in some Swiss bank.” Frank stumbled a bit and Vinh’s hand went out fast to catch his elbow. “I’m okay,” Frank said, snatching his arm away, and then without a pause, “I still think it’s the goddamn marchers. They hated our guts.”

We came up out of the water and our calves were pasted with leaves. And there was a wonderful smell that I’d smelled when we first got out of the taxi but which only now did I really notice—wood fires, food cooking on wood fires. There were maybe a dozen food stands, permanent-looking ones with frames of timber and tin roofs. A boy came down from one of them with a handful of long pointed sticks, each skewering a whole fish.

Frank was walking on the inside and he recoiled from the boy. “No gracias, kid,” and he was very emphatic, obviously bothered by these fish. And they were a pretty grim sight, if you weren’t used to such things. There were four fish bobbing there in a row and they all looked rather startled to be dead and cooked and stuck and ready to be eaten. And the roasting over the fire made them look crusty, a little like the lepers on the streets of Saigon.

We moved on and Eileen said, “Aren’t you hungry, honey? For something else maybe?”

“Not anymore,” Frank said.

Vinh looked at him with a smile that I’ve seen him use on a particularly stupid customer. “You don’t like to see dead fish?”

“Just a slab of their meat on a plate is the only way.”

“You never fished as a boy?”

“I was a landlocked kid. Too busy building tree houses and stockpiling dirt-clod hand grenades.”

“A boy who does not fish or hunt misses the real life and death,” Vinh said, and I could hear what I took to be the little male thing going on again between them.

“Who said anything about hunting?” Frank said. “I could hunt.”

“The animals you killed had eyes to stare at you, too, didn’t they?”

“I never killed anything slippery. And I always did it with a gun. What’s all this worm-on-a-hook shit? What’s fishing to a born grunt?”

“Grunt?”

“Grunt. An infantryman. You guys didn’t call them that?”

“I heard the word. But I thought you were a mechanic.”

It surprised me that Vinh was starting to be hard on Frank. The things that had passed between them that had made them these little vacation-spot buddies so far—was that over now? Had I missed it all? Then it occurred to me that maybe I was myself the reason for Vinh pulling back from Frank. He had not wanted to say anything to me about Frank last night when I asked him. There was something about the man—that was all Vinh would say. Maybe it was just me. He didn’t want to show
me
what it was that he and Frank had together.

But Frank didn’t seem to pick up on Vinh’s mood. He replied quite calmly, not at all defensive, just explanatory, “Anybody who carried a rifle and shot it in anger was a grunt to us. And I did that plenty.”

Vinh wouldn’t let it drop. “Why were you so anxious to fight, Frank?”

Eileen was probably listening to all of this, too. And it surely bothered her for what were probably some pretty complex reasons. As it was, I had totally forgotten her, I’d become so wrapped up in the men. But now she seemed not to want to hear any more. She said to me, loud, riding over the men’s conversation, “It’s exciting to be going to this movie set, isn’t it? When was the last time you saw ‘The Night of the Iguana’?”

As soon as I heard her voice, my face snapped over to her and I grew flushed with shame. I was very sorry that I’d been ignoring her—I’d contrived this trip with her; it was supposed to be mostly for the two of us; we were the ones to enjoy it.

I told her when I’d last seen the film and Eileen and I lagged a little behind as Vinh and Frank talked on, only a background mumble to me as my mouth and part of my brain did their duty to Eileen. But I was still conscious of the men, the red shirt and the black. And I watched the backs of their legs. They both had really fine, solid calves that clenched and fell, clenched and fell as they walked in the sand.

And we waded another little stream and then climbed some boulders by a beach bar and we went single file down a rocky path, Eileen’s voice going on about other Taylor and Burton movies that I loved—“Cleopatra” and “The Comedians” and “The Sandpiper” and even “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?,” which I think was really the beginning of the end for Liz and Dick, even though they stayed married for eight years after that. But I was hardly hearing any of this; I was responding over my shoulder and watching the men, Frank out front walking the stones of the path as if they could be booby-trapped and Vinh followed carefully, very quiet, placing his feet, it seemed to me, only where Frank had put his.

And then the path ended and we went even more carefully along the seawall, pretty narrow really, with a shore of boulders just below us on our right and the sharp incline of the weedy bank going up into the trees to our left. Even Eileen stopped talking as we teetered along. The early-afternoon sun was very hot and the sky and water were so bright they hurt my eyes. So when I wanted to glance away from Vinh’s heels, which I was carefully following, I would look up the slope into the thick trees. It all felt familiar, up the hill. I don’t know why, but it reminded me of Vietnam, even though I was really a city girl. My parents would take me for vacations to Nha Trang and even a few times to Qui Nhon, where we had some relatives and where Frank served, though I hadn’t said anything about this to him. But both Nha Trang and Qui Nhon are on the South China Sea, and there must have been some place like this, with the sea so bright and the trees up a slope so thick. Some really special little moment that I’d had as a girl that got buried too deep to remember specifically, but which cleared my eyes and opened me up now to the shine of the water on Banderas Bay off the Pacific Ocean in Puerto Vallarta and to the thick looming of the trees up here near the set of “The Night of the Iguana.”

Then we passed a cut in the trees, a groove down the hill, a place where the water runs off, and I could see a brick building up there, crumbling in the woods. But we passed it by and Frank led us farther until we arrived beneath the pole at the dock, rising up maybe forty feet, and it puzzled me what it once was supposed to do. Maybe it was some sort of crane or something to unload supplies. But it kind of gave me the shivers, standing up there so stiff and alone. The dock itself jutted out over the sea here, but its surface was gone; it was just the frame gaping out over the water and I turned around and there were two levels of balconies built into the hillside, fieldstone walls all jagged and irregular.

They had seemed so imposing from the beach, but up close it was clear that they were just facades, illusions, for as walls they contained nothing but the hillside, and as balconies they didn’t connect to anything at all. Frank had climbed the broad stone steps beside them and he had run into a dead end. I could even see it from where I was standing. The steps went nowhere, just ending in the weeds and the trunks of the slope trees. “Just a real fine collection of small animal turds up here,” Frank declared. Then he glanced down to Eileen at the foot of the stairs and said, “Sorry, honey. At least I didn’t say ‘shit.’ ”

Before I had a chance to react to what would have been a slight surprising prudishness in Eileen, she said, “That’s right, sweetie. At least you didn’t say ‘shit.’ ” And all of a sudden my surprise shifted to this almost tender private joke between them. I was glad for that, but it did take me by surprise.

Frank came down the steps and I looked to Vinh. He was sitting on a pile of stones in the shade and he was watching the sea, I thought to go sit beside him, but Frank passed Eileen by—I was surprised again, expecting the little thing that had happened between them to surely end in an embrace of some sort, or at least a touch, a glancing kiss, something. Frank went past her with his attention already on my husband, and before I could act, it was Frank sitting next to him. This was still all right by me. I wanted to just get close and stay quiet and hope that they would eventually get back in their private mood with each other.

There were more stones piled nearby and I sat down and Eileen came and sat next to me and I was afraid she’d start talking, but she didn’t. We all looked out to sea, looked at the big rocks hulking out there and the jagged line of mountains far across at the other side of the bay. Finally Frank said, “This isn’t so bad. I figured there’d be people all over us out here selling Liz and Dick stuff.”

“Don’t you believe in free enterprise?” Vinh said, and I listened for the sound of combat in his voice again. But it wasn’t there, exactly. I knew he didn’t like all the swarm of vendors either, in spite of his being a businessman. He had too strong a sense of decorum.