Message from Nam (36 page)

“These are strange times,” she said quietly, wondering if she should ask him to sit down and join her. He looked nervous and wiry. He wasn’t a tall man, but he exuded strength and a quiet force that had always impressed her. And she knew Bill had liked and respected him, although her relationship with him had certainly never been pleasant. “Are you still at Cu Chi?” She didn’t know what else to ask him.

“I re-upped,” he said, looking half proud, half sheepish, as they all did, “for my fourth tour. Bill always said you had to be crazy to be a tunnel rat, and I guess he was right.”

“Or very brave, or both,” she said softly, thinking of Bill again, and as she did, her eyes met Tony’s, and she didn’t say anything, but Tony knew what she was thinking.

“He was something,” he said with admiration, and then, looking awkward again, “I owe you an apology.”

“No, you don’t.” She didn’t want to go back to that again. It was such a terrible time, she didn’t want to think of it … when Bill had died, and Ralph had come to tell her … she knew she could never go through that again, and she looked up at Tony sadly. “I understand. We were both upset.”

“Yeah … but you did something pretty special. I thought about it for a long time, and I always wanted to tell you what I thought. It made me realize why he must have loved you. He did, you know.” She smiled sadly at the memory, and wondered what had impressed him.

“I loved him too. And I guess you did. That’s why we both went a little nuts when …”

“Yeah. But when you came back for the stuff you’d given him, so it didn’t go back to his wife, I was impressed by that. Most women wouldn’t have done that. They would have figured to hell with it, or just let her find out, and figure it didn’t matter anymore anyway. Lots of guys have other women over here, but no woman I’ve ever known has ever come back to get the evidence so his wife didn’t have to get it. He would have liked that. Those kids meant the world to him.” There were tears in his eyes, and she had to fight back her own again. “And that thing you told me about your father that day … you didn’t have to tell me that.” He took a step closer to her as she set down her empty glass. “I just wanted to tell you how sorry I was. I asked the AP guy about you once, but he said you’d gone back to San Francisco.” He stuck his hand out to her. “I’m surprised you’ll even speak to me after the things I said to you.”

“We were all under a lot of pressure. But thank you, Tony.” She shook his hand then, and it was cool and firm and strong, just the way he looked, and his dark eyes bore into hers like bullets. “Thank you.” She was beginning to understand why Bill liked him. He was straightforward and sincere, even if he did have one hell of a temper. “Do you want to sit down?” She motioned to the chair Ralph had vacated earlier, but Tony shook his head, he still felt ill at ease with her.

“No, I’m okay. I have to meet someone in a few minutes.” His eyes seemed to take her in and ask ten thousand questions. “What made you come back to Saigon?”

She smiled at him. “I re-upped. Second tour.” And he laughed.

“You’ve got guts. Most people can’t wait to get the hell out of here.”

“That’s how I felt about San Francisco.”

“Is that where you’re from?” he asked with obvious curiosity. Bill Quinn had told him very little about her.

“That’s where the paper is that I work for, and where I went to school for four years, in Berkeley. But I’m from Savannah before that.”

“Shit,” he said, looking impressed. “I spent a weekend there once years ago, after I did basic training in Georgia. Those people are about as straight as you get. I thought they were going to run my ass out of town for going dancing. I’m from New York. Things are a little livelier up north.” She laughed at his description of Savannah.

“You hit the nail right on the head. That’s why I don’t live in Savannah … more or less … I have a hard time explaining it to my mother.”

“She must really be thrilled you’re in Saigon,” he said, looking wise for his years as she tried to figure out how old he was. In point of fact, Tony was thirty.

“Not exactly,” Paxton admitted, referring to her mother, “but she didn’t have much choice. I just couldn’t take it anymore. I had to get out of San Francisco, and come back to Viet Nam.”

“Why?” In some ways, he couldn’t understand it. She was a pretty girl, she was young, she obviously had a good job and she was smart, she could have gone anywhere other than Viet Nam. What the hell was she here for?

“I don’t know yet,” she answered him honestly. “I haven’t figured it out. Unfinished business, I guess, I just knew I belonged here. I couldn’t stand the trivia at home anymore. The new cars, the old jobs, the new curtains people talk about, while people are being killed by the VC,” as they both knew only too well. “I just couldn’t stand it.”

He touched his forehead in what she thought was a salute. “Where I come from, they call it
pazza.
Crazy. Nuts.” He made a very New York face and she laughed, and then she stood up. She was getting tired. There was a nine-hour time difference for her and all of a sudden she could hardly see straight. “You look bushed,” he said as she got up, almost weaving.

“I am. I just got in.”

He was watching her, as though trying to decide something about her, and she was trying not to let him make her nervous. She kept thinking of when he’d been screaming at her six months before, and how much he’d hated her then, and all the time she went out with Bill, but that was all over now and there was no point thinking about it anymore. And he seemed to want to make some kind of truce with her. There was no point having a vendetta with anyone. And she knew Bill would have liked them to be friends, even if the sergeant was a little strange, she was willing to overlook it. Not strange so much as intense, and occasionally very nervous. But in Saigon, who wasn’t?

“Can I give you a lift to your hotel? I have a stolen jeep outside. I picked it up at the airport,” he said coolly, and she laughed.

“That’s reassuring. Actually, I was going to walk.” But thinking about it now exhausted her. “Would you mind?” He shook his head. “I’m at the Caravelle, just down the street.”

“That’s a nice place,” he said by way of conversation. “I had dinner at the penthouse once. The food is very fresh.” And he laughed when she looked at him strangely after he made the comment. “I know. That sounds ridiculous. My family are wholesale grocers. All my life I’ve been hearing about whether or not the vegetables are fresh, every place we eat. I hated hearing it as a kid, fuck the vegetables, I used to think. Then I discovered when I grew up, it’s a family curse, it becomes an obsession.” She was laughing with him, and she was so tired, she almost wanted to be friends. It was so strange to come back and run into him again, and to be chatting with him after all his hostility and anger the whole time she went out with Bill. Maybe he’d just been jealous. She’d been told that some noncoms got strangely possessive about their captains.

“I’ll remember that, about the vegetables, if I have dinner there again.” She smiled tiredly at him.

“You do that.” They had pulled up in front of the Caravelle by then, and he helped her get out. “Christ, you’re half asleep.” She could hardly keep her eyes open. “You gonna be alright?”

“As long as I make it to my bed, I’ll be fine. Thanks for the ride, Sergeant.”

“Anytime, Miss Andrews.” He saluted her smartly, and she remembered thinking that she was surprised he remembered her name after all this time. And then she picked her bags up at the desk, walked into her room, and collapsed on the bed with her clothes on, and it was twenty hours later when she woke up with the afternoon sun streaming in through the windows. And she could remember talking to the sergeant on the terrace the night before. And for a minute, as she lay there, she thought she must have been dreaming.

C
HAPTER
20

P
axton stayed awake for two hours, unpacked her things, bathed, went downstairs to eat, and then went back to bed and slept until morning. Ralph had left a note for her at the desk, telling her he’d pick her up downstairs at seven the next morning. And the next day, at six, she smiled as she watched the sun come up. It was beautiful and hot as hell as she put on fatigues and a khaki undershirt and laced up her boots. They were the same ones Ralph had given her when she first arrived in Saigon a year earlier. She didn’t feel afraid to be here this time. Somehow everything felt right now. And as she walked downstairs she looked totally at ease in her own skin, and confident that she knew what she was doing.

As usual, Ralph was on time, and he had Bertie, an old British photographer with him, a terrific guy Paxton had worked with and liked. He cracked bad jokes as they drove out of town, and Paxton smiled as she looked at Ralph and poured herself a cup of coffee from the thermos. The sun was well up by then, and the streets were almost steaming, and there was still the same pervasive smell of fuel and flowers and fruit everywhere, the same smoke that seemed to hang low over them, and the same green on the hills as they left the city, the same red earth that made you want to reach out and press it through your fingers … the same beggars, the same orphans, the same wounded and maimed. The same country she had come to love so much, she could no longer leave it. Ralph had left a message at the hotel the night before that his assignment to Da Nang had been changed, but he wanted to pick her up at the same time the next morning to go to a different location.

“Do you realize I don’t even know where we’re going today?” Paxton said. “Talk about trusting. So what are we doing?” she asked Ralph, as the photographer chatted with their driver.

Ralph had wondered about the wisdom of taking her, and he’d wanted to call it off late the night before, but by then it had been too late to call her. He’d meant to give her a choice before they left, but then in the excitement of going out on a story with her, he’d forgotten to tell her.

“We’re going to Cu Chi today.” He glanced at his watch, nervously. “But listen … it’s no sweat, if you want we’ll turn back. You don’t have to come on this one. The stupid thing is, I haven’t even been here for six months. And now suddenly yesterday, they came up with a hot story.” The last time they had been there had been anything but easy. And if that lunatic was still around … “I feel bad about this, Pax,” he started to explain. “I should have just canceled you out of it, when they switched me from Da Nang to Cu Chi.”

“No, you shouldn’t. Maybe I need to face this.”

“Do you want to go back to town, Pax?” he asked gently.

She shook her head silently and for a long time she stared out the window. Bill had been dead for six months, Peter for fifteen. That was just the way it was here. You couldn’t stay away from the places where they’d gotten hurt or out of the places they’d been. There were too many painful memories. Peter had been killed in Da Nang, Bill at Cu Chi. She couldn’t hide from them forever. You just had to keep on going, go on living.

“I’ll be okay,” she said quietly. She remembered all too clearly the last time they’d been there, to pick up the letters she’d written him, the day before they sent his body back to Debbie in San Francisco. And that reminded her of running into Tony Campobello on the terrace. She took a deep breath and another swig of the black coffee and looked at Ralph again. “You’ll never believe who I ran into yesterday, on the terrace of the Continental Palace after you left.”

“Ho Chi Minh,” he said easily. He was so damn happy that Paxton was back in Saigon and covering a story with him. As much as he had wanted her to leave Saigon for her own sake, he was thrilled she’d chosen to return. And he could see for himself that the time in the States had done her good, and she was ready to do her job again, the job they all loved so passionately and couldn’t leave till the war in Viet Nam was over.

“I saw Tony Campobello,” she filled in for him. “You know, Bill’s first sergeant.” She was able to talk about Bill again. For five months in the States she hadn’t talked about him to anyone, because no one knew him.

“That lunatic? What did he do? Throw his drink in your face?” He remembered all too well their final meeting in Cu Chi, and it had been anything but pleasant, as he shouted at her, and Paxton grieved for Bill, and clutched the small bundle of letters.

“Actually, you won’t believe this,” she said with a look of disbelief herself, “he was almost pleasant. Kind of uptight and nervous, but he …” She hesitated, thinking back to the last time she’d seen him six months before. “… he apologized for the last time we saw him.”

Ralph looked at her long and hard for a moment before he answered. “There’s a change. I thought the son of a bitch was going to try to kill you. I’d have kicked his ass if he tried anything, but for a while there I thought the bastard had slipped his moorings.”

She stared out the window as she thought about it. “I think we all did.” But there had been nothing crazy about her. She had just been heartbroken over losing Bill. It was Campobello who’d been out of order. But they were all like that, the tunnel rats, Ralph commented, they lived too much on edge, with too goddamn much stress and too much danger. And eventually, it happened to all of them. They snapped. And who could blame them?