Authors: Marian Palaia
Something’s got to break. I guess when you get right down to it, something already has.
I
hear that now you can fire Kalashnikov rounds for a dollar a shot out at Củ Chi, and they have widened and deepened the tunnels to accommodate Western bodies. Mick had the perfect build for tunneling, and he liked dark, enclosed places. I still can’t imagine, though, after the stories I’ve heard, how he went into those things. I have tried for years to tell myself it was lucky, in some alternative configuration, that he didn’t have to come home damaged and try somehow to fit in. I’ve known some of his compatriots, here and back in the States, and not a one of them is right in the head. They’re light-shy and twitchy, still startling at certain sounds, still having the bad dreams after so much time. The suicide rate for the tunnel rats is even higher than it is for the guys who got to shoot at other people, and get shot at, out in the open. Sometimes they take other folks with them when they go. Innocent bystanders, as if any of us is truly that.
Meantime, I drink and shoot pool and pretend that I am helping somehow, with the kids and with my students, though it really did not take me long to figure out it is not the Vietnamese who need help here.
When I feel myself approaching critical mass, I burrow in at the Rex with the Aussie, who works with the Vietnam Airlines guys out at Tân Sơn Nhất, training pilots and mechanics about airplanes in peacetime. These guys, he’s told me, know plenty about planes in wartime: their water buffalo drink from bomb craters turned lotus-choked ponds; their kids are born missing limbs, or with their limbs put on lopsided. By God. Every couple of months he gets a ten-day leave and goes off to Norway—to hike, to “veg out,” he says, unwind before he goes
berko
. When he leaves this time, one of his pals finally tells me, in as kind a way as possible, that the Aussie is in Norway because his drop-dead Norwegian model girlfriend has just had his child there, a boy, and he is pulling together the paperwork to get them permanent visas and bring them back to Saigon.
“So,” this pal tells me, “maybe you should forget about him now.”
“Done,” I say, though of course we both know that is a big, fat lie. I have not had time to forget. Give me some time.
“He should have told you.”
“Should have. Maybe he was going to when he got back.”
“Pigs fly,” he says.
I spend twenty precious dollars on a four-minute phone call to San Francisco, to my keeper, my tender, my friend—the one whose heart I took such lousy care of because I still had no business trying to operate mine, and because there was nothing dangerous or particularly fucked up about him. It has been over a year, so clearly he is surprised to hear from me, and he waits for me to tell him why I am calling. I listen to his breathing, watch the seconds go away on the pay phone at the post office. I am standing under a larger-than-life-size portrait of a smiling, radiant Ho Chi Minh, in what is officially, at least in name, his city. I say into the phone, “Do you miss me?” but I have not left enough time for an answer at the pace we are going. I want to be missed. MIA like my brother, but with the prospect of being found. Flags flown and torches carried. APBs out for my arrest. I don’t care how.
Finally, I hear, “I don’t know what—” The line goes bleep, then dead. I do not call back, though I should, to say I am sorry for what I did, for who I am, for calling, for reminding him, for asking for something I don’t deserve: for someone to want me. For a reason to one day, perhaps, in this lifetime even, recross the ocean. Selfish as that reason might be. Crazy as it might be to believe, even for a little while, that it would do.
I think about calling home. My real home. I think about calling.
• • •
My pool-playing buddy Clive gets arrested; it is unclear exactly what for, but suddenly his taxi girls have taken up residence in our bar. The cops beat him up and he spends two weeks in jail with a fractured cheekbone, a badly stitched flap of skin covering it, and a dislocated shoulder. When he gets out, he is wearing filthy bandages, a sling made of an old ammo belt, and shoes. June has already been deported back to Thailand. Their bar is shuttered. Clive has no money—as they have searched and taken what they could find, frozen his bank accounts—so we take up a collection and gather 350 US dollars between us. He has two days; then he’s on the bus to Cambodia.
When we give him the money, he cries—blubbers, really, like they say.
Ian asks first, “What’s the plan, mate?”
“Got none.” One-handed, Clive clenches the edge of the bar like it’s a high window ledge and he is outside, suspended over a very long drop. He bends his elbow and leans in to put his forehead against the wood, in a motion that could be mistaken for prayer. We wait, grouped in a loose semicircle around the pool table, while he gathers himself. He turns and eyes the felt longingly. Then he looks at me. “Learn to snooker, girl. Can you do that? At least the ones who’ve got it coming.”
“I’ll try, Clive.”
“Might learn to like it.”
“Never know.”
Gentleman that he is, he shouts us all a round before he goes. We write our real names on beer coasters so he can send mail to us
poste restante
, knowing it will never happen, knowing in a few months he won’t be able to match but a few of the names to faces, but it is what we do: send a piece of ourselves with him. He leaves, his new shoes somehow broken in already, molded to his feet like black wax. His shoes are what we look at as he ambles away, how they carry him off, ungainly and unbelievably gone.
A couple of nights after Clive leaves, Ian and I get a few beers in us and decide to break into his bar. Luc, the Froggy that Phượng has her eye on for me, comes with us. We’re presumably going just to check it out, and then Ian says he thinks Clive mentioned a stash somewhere, maybe in the storeroom, but he doesn’t know of what or exactly where. Could be money or hash or some other kind of drugs. “Could be girls,” Ian says, not sounding like he’s kidding.
We hail three cyclos. The young drivers race halfheartedly, figuring out quickly that we are not tourists and don’t want anything but a ride. There is no rain tonight and instead just half the moon. The river reflects it, rainbowy with diesel, smelling like exhaustion and fish. We pay the drivers at the corner nearest the bar and wait for them to drive off before we duck into the entryway, where Luc goes to work on the cheap Chinese padlock. It’s big, like the one at the Lotus, but Luc demonstrates his wizardry by picking it in about twenty seconds flat. “Voilà,” he says, a bit theatrically.
Ian makes it through the door without mishap, but Luc and I sort of fall through it, into a snarl of overturned bar stools and sundry wreckage. “Ô la vache, crap, sheet, mer-duh,” he says as we untangle ourselves. I get a bit of elbow in the ribs—deserved retribution, I suppose, for taking him down with me—but when he gets to his feet, he reaches for me, to help me up. It is dark but for a bit of that half-moon filtering in through a high window. I have a small flashlight with me and switch it on. The bar looks like the Ia Drang Valley after the First Cav got done with it. Nothing that should be standing is; all of the pictures have been torn off the walls; June’s collection of porcelain figurines and other knickknacks is smashed and scattered. There is broken glass, like shrapnel, on every horizontal surface. It scrapes beneath our feet as we make our way to the storeroom door. I can’t believe Luc and I didn’t get cut when we went down, but somehow we hit a clear patch.
“Lucky,” I whisper. Neither of them looks at me or asks what on earth I am talking about.
Ian opens the door, and incredibly it appears untouched. It is almost empty, and meticulous, as June would have kept it. There are several bottles, unopened, of the local whiskey; a single case each of 333 and Tiger beer; and, on the top shelf, a few gallon jars of snake wine, complete with snakes, coiled inside as if they are sleeping off a big night. A hammock stretches across the back wall, attached to rebar-fashioned hooks on either side. I picture Clive in here on a hot afternoon, fanning himself with the day’s edition of the
Saigon Times
, a beer on the floor within easy reach of an outstretched arm.
Ian starts palming the walls between the shelves, looking for a secret compartment or a trapdoor. I hold the flashlight for him while Luc sits on the floor, smokes a cigarette, and watches us. “You think you will find some dop?”
Ian laughs. “What ees zees dop?”
“You know,” Luc says. “Dop. Smok. Hashish.”
“Maybe,” Ian says.
After he’s gone over every inch of wall, he borrows my flashlight to inspect the wooden floor planks. He finds a tiny chunk of hash in a crack between two of them, and another one, and another, like a trail of bread crumbs leading out of a forest. We are stunned to find anything at all and wonder how it got, and stayed, here. Luc keeps saying
“Incroyable,”
as if he is saying a prayer. Ian finds maybe two grams total and divides it up among us.
“Let’s get out of here,” he says, and Luc gets up from the floor. They start for the exit, but I hang behind.
“I’ll see you guys later.”
Ian says, “Share what you find?”
“Sure.”
Luc says, “Watch out the gendarmes.”
“The gendarmes got nothing on me,” I say.
My eyes have adjusted to the darkness, so I assemble the few bar stools that are still intact and line them up where they belong. Clear a space around the pool table and find a broom. It is while I am sweeping up the glass that I see a large patch of dried blood on the floor. I figure Clive caught his cheek on the corner of the table somehow in the fray and lay there for a time while it bled, watching his Vietnam life pass before his eyes.
I am taking stock of the pool balls caught in the table’s net pockets, seeing if they are all there in case someone should happen by at three in the morning looking for a game, when the door opens and Luc slides through it. He throws the bolt on the inside and makes his way to me and my broom. “Why you still look? Why you don’t stop looking?” He takes the broom out of my hands and leans it against the wall. “Now,” he says. He sounds exasperated, a little breathless, like maybe he ran here, but that is highly unlikely. Nobody runs in Saigon.
It is not the most eloquent kiss—not what I would expect from a mouth that offers up words like bites of ripe dragonfruit—but it is a kiss. He actually tastes nothing like fruit of any kind but like cigarettes and cognac and, for some inexplicable reason, butterscotch. I don’t know where to put my hands, and after a minute he puts his on the sides of my face and then pulls tenderly away. He has a pipe, and we smoke some hash. It’s strong so it doesn’t take much to get me stoned. We finish clearing space around the pool table and shoot a couple of games in the near darkness. The smack of the balls as we scatter them across the felt and drop them into the pockets is the only sound, except for an occasional lorry or motorcycle or boat motor in the distance. Saigon is sleeping. So rare.
After a few games, Luc looks at his watch. “Time,” he says.
“Time for what?”
He doesn’t answer, but goes to the storeroom to fetch a jug of snake wine. While I lean against the wall and watch, he pours it around the room, over the pool table, the bar stools, and the bar.
“Are we going to burn it down?”
“
Oui,
” he says, as matter-of-fact as that kiss, and empties the last of the snake wine, and the snake, onto the floor.
“I wonder what kind of snake that is.” Despite how stoned I am, I know how stoned I must sound.
“A dead one,” he says. “Let’s do eet.”
Snake wine is basically grain alcohol wrapped around a serpent, and it goes up like gasoline. Luckily, Luc has made sure that we are all but out the door when he lights it. We take off for the river, and smoke begins to pour from the windows. Flames climb from the inside out and up to the roof. We find a small, uninhabited boat tied up to a bigger boat, and huddle together in the bow, breathing hard, watching Clive’s bar disintegrate. The front of the big boat is carved into the shape of a dragon and we are in its shadow. No one comes to put out the fire. A few sleepy cyclos pedal up and sit, backlit by the flames, in a row at the curb. They look like they are watching a movie.
I am reminded, inexplicably, of the Aussie, who will be coming back any day, and I wonder if I will even tell him I know about the girlfriend and the baby, or just go on until they get here as if nothing has changed, seeking refuge in a room that could be anywhere, in any country, at any time. Or maybe I will do the more rational thing and take up with Luc, and we will burn stuff down. I think about Frank and how careless I was, how I never looked back until now, and still don’t know why I didn’t, or why, now, I have.
I try to remember what Clive looked like, how he moved and the way he spoke. Every time he starts to slip away, I bring back that one quick dance, that pirouette, and begin again. I am glad the bar is gone. All those knickknacks.
When the sun comes up, we walk along the quay, stop at a
phở
stand, and sit down on low plastic stools under a mesh awning. There is a small, dirty-blond dog asleep next to the table. He has many small scars around his muzzle, and his ears and stubby tail twitch away the flies. The soup is good and hot; we top it off with basil leaves and chili sauce, stir it all together. My lips burn as I eat, but I can’t drink the water, so I just let them.
Luc asks if I have ever been to Củ Chi. I say no, not yet. He says how can that be? He says he has a motorcycle. A real one. Russian. Not one of those little 50cc jobs. I nod. When we finish eating, Luc pays the bill and kisses me on both cheeks.
“Saturday?” he says. I do not say anything. I do not say no. He waits a minute and says, “Ten o’clock.
Le matin
.” He goes. I finish my soup. The dog watches.
I teach two classes at the business school, and after they are over ride my bicycle to the zoo. Two of the street kids I know are selling postcards and “shwing” gum to dumbfounded visitors they have helped cross the wide boulevard, where the onrush of bicycles, motorbikes, and the occasional car or lorry never pauses or breaks for even a second. The kids acknowledge me with almost imperceptible nods, and they don’t try to sell me anything. In one corner of the zoo, I find a large black bear in a very small cage. He is not moving and his paws are covering his eyes.