She Weeps Each Time You're Born (17 page)

Like a waterfall, the great wave crashed on deck. Boards splintered. The front window in the pilothouse blew out. Duc slammed into the wheel, pulled the rope tighter that lashed him to it. Their one compass and all their maps were washed out to sea. The door to the hold caved in. Water cascaded down the stairs. Phuong grabbed the sack, the last thing she'd removed from her floating house, the one that clattered when she walked, and cradled it in her arms. The engineer slogged his way to the opening, taking his family up above. He yelled they would drown down there, but no one could hear him. People sat dazed in the cold. The other families followed the engineer up into the outer dark, the children in their parents' arms. Qui started to move, but Arun reached out and shook his smiling head. The doctor also sat back down. Later when they left the hold, everyone who had gone up on deck was gone.

Then Arun was holding a piece of wood. He was hammering at a spot in the wall. After a while he managed to make a small hole. No light came pouring in. He crawled on his belly to another spot and made another. He made four in all, each high up in a corner. When they were riding a crest, a man would stand at each hole furiously scooping out water with a pot or bucket. When they were coming down, he would flip whatever he was holding in his hands, using the bottom of it as a shield and with all his might try to keep the water out.

There was nothing left to throw up. They felt themselves being lifted. Huyen threw more dirt over the bloody spot growing between her granddaughter's legs. Somehow they all knew if they could just make it to the other side of the wave. The blood
so thick it gleamed black. It wasn't like anything Huyen had ever seen. Qui whimpered. Rabbit latched on to her body looking for the peace of the world. Huyen assumed it had been flushed out in the first blood, but now it was just coming. She could tell by the way Qui lay panting. Riding the wave all the way to the top, Rabbit sucking on her chest. Then the deep root snapped. A body lay floating in a river. A family was swept overboard out into the open sea. A door blew shut behind them. Huyen peered in the dirt. Something stirring like the silky threads that cling to a yolk, the thing the size of her ear finger, all of it there in miniature. Their ears began to ring. They felt themselves lifting off the floor as the momentum shifted. In the dark, hair floating like a star around each and every head. A tiny golden fish glittered in the blood. Huyen scooped it up in a bowl and swept it into the fire.

Q
UI SKIMMED THE FAT OFF THE BOILING WATER. MOST OF THE
foodstuffs had been ruined. They had enough gas left for three days, maybe enough oil for one. Nobody wanted to say it, but with the other families gone their chances of surviving had increased somewhat. What little rice there was would go further. With less weight the boat rode higher in the water. From the pilothouse Duc and Hai had nothing left to steer by but the sun and the stars. Hai said they could do it, but Duc knew a few cloudy nights and they could get turned around, plus after the storm they couldn't be sure of where they were. The doctor's wife said she hoped the good lord had taken the missing families all together. Rabbit was thankful they were far enough away she couldn't hear them. She didn't want to know if the children had gone first, the parents left searching their empty arms, or if it had been the other way around, the children standing all alone on deck looking up into a wall of water.

The engineer had brought a small wire cage on board with him. In it was a rooster and a hen. On deck there had been a heated argument between Hai and the doctor as to whether or not they should cook the birds now or wait and see if they got an egg. Then Arun had explained that they could use the fat to make oil. Mixed with gasoline it might buy them a day or two. With that, Hai swung the chicken in the air by its neck. The way he swung it, he just missed hitting the doctor. He didn't apologize. He just swung it a few more times before handing it to Qui and storming back to the pilothouse.

Son and Rabbit weren't allowed up on the roof anymore. The structure was too shaky. Inside Hai swept the glass up and threw it overboard. More and more the doctor let his daughter sit with Rabbit and Son in the front of the boat, Minh's foot baking in its black boot. Everyone slowed down as they ate less. The children tried to stay out of the way. From time to time they pretended they were the captains of the ship. They would send
Minh on make-believe errands, telling her to go wash the deck. She would hobble away, eager to please. Below deck the sound of her walking like someone knocking erratically on a door.

Once when they sent her to mend a net, Rabbit said to Son do you think your uncles could kill somebody? In the silvery room inside her head she could still hear the voice in the pilothouse—the voice all breathy and scared, the air hissing out like a hole in a tire. You mean in a war, Son asked. Okay, she said. Yes, said Son. They sat for a while thinking about it. Rabbit could feel the skin of her shoulders starting to burn. The freckles on her face were growing darker in the strong light. You know our fathers killed people in Cambodia, said Son. An didn't, said Rabbit. Of course he did, said Son. She looked down at her arms. My father did too kill people, Son repeated. Rabbit considered her burning skin. The tingling felt strangely good.

Rabbit considered telling Son the story, but she didn't know what exactly she had seen. Her family had all been asleep one night as they lay on the leaky floor of their floating house in Ba Nuoc, Huyen softly snoring on her mat, the moon growing fuller in the window. Tu had only been back a few days. Qui? His voice sounded childish as he whispered. Then Qui rolled over and lifted her head. Rabbit could hear her father exhale. Most nights he tossed and turned, eyes glassy, his words few. Tu began to tell Qui about a place called the Parrot's Beak. How the Vietnamese, with all their years of fighting western forces, had easily crushed the tactically inept Pol Pot, defeating his nineteen divisions in just days before settling in Phnom Penh for the occupation. That's where I met An, he said. The government had let the southern prisoners out of the reeducation camps, telling them they could earn their freedom by fighting the Cambodians. One day after the battle of the Parrot's Beak, An was sitting up against a tree with his eyes closed, said Tu. There was blood and dirt on his face. I thought he was dead. Then he opened his eyes.
The left one blue like a flower. I did what he'd asked me to do a long time ago on the night Rabbit was born when a kindly soldier drove me to the banks of the Song Ma. I remembered him.

Tu talked for hours. He told Qui how he and An had stayed together digging graves. Even during the American war he had never seen so many bodies, the flies thick as thunderheads. He said often the only way you could tell the Vietnamese dead from the Cambodian dead was by their weapons. Most of the Cambodians were armed with just axes or hoes.

Not everyone was dead, Tu said. The man in charge of our unit pointed to a ridge and told us what to do. I don't know why he picked us. He should have picked some of the teenagers, the ones drunk every night who would cut off fingers from corpses the way they'd heard the Americans used to. We were each given a pistol, said Tu. An didn't know how to load his. The man pointed to where a ring of them were sitting on the hillside. Said take the ones who have hoes. Tu laughed at the memory. You could say they came prepared, he said.

We took a dozen of them up over the ridge. I picked a spot, but An said no, there was more shade just a few hundred feet over. Like he was trying to make their last moments on earth more comfortable. I didn't argue. I thought the shadows might be good. Keep their faces in the dark. I could feel my knees trembling. Twelve human hearts beating in my hands. I thought I was going to be sick. Somehow I was on the front lines and I had never killed anyone that I knew of. But I kept going because we all kept going—An, me, the constant flies, even the men marching onward, one of them smiling like he was just out for a walk.

I thought they knew. It made me mad. Every one of us playing his part. When the war with the Americans ended, I thought I'd never have to look at another dead body. Bodies clogging the rivers. Bodies sitting upright in their houses like they were waiting for a visit. We stopped walking and told them to start digging.
One of them started to talk to the others in their language. I thought they were trying to figure out if they could overpower us. Twelve of them and two of us and one of us An, green as a leaf. I put the gun up to one of their faces. The man looked tired. Too tired to even flinch.

It took them three hours to dig a trench. They had no reason to work hard. I thought they just wanted it to be over. We didn't know then what had been happening in Cambodia, everyone starving and a quarter of the population dead. The smiling man crawled out of the trench and surveyed their work. He looked pleased with what they'd accomplished. He went around patting the other men on the back. They didn't just shrug him off, so I knew they somehow valued him.

An and I decided how we wanted to do it. Then An was miming what we wanted, but none of them would turn around. It was then I realized they didn't know we were going to shoot them. In Cambodia, they killed people with clubs and hoes, smashing them in the back of the head. It never occurred to them we might actually shoot them, that they were worth spending a bullet on.

One of the men started walking back down the hill. I imagined him making it all the way back to camp. The way everyone would laugh at us, saying An was the reason the south lost the war. Then someone would come right back up there and kill all of them. If it was the teenagers, maybe they'd cut up their faces, pull out their teeth even before they were dead.

I could hear a red-vested parakeet singing in the trees, Tu said, its song like a man's whistling. You don't hear them much anymore. Birds just go where they want. Nothing to keep them from flying away. Listening to its song I knew what we had to do. Everything was a mess. Vietnam was a mess. Cambodia was a horror. Ever since reunification, rumors of people just sailing away across the sea for the chance to be free and start all over
again. We could do it. Me and An and these men who had seen the worst. We could do it if we all stayed together. We could be our own army, build ourselves a new home, but the one Cambodian was walking away back to camp as if the day's work were over. He was walking away from what we could become. Stop, I said, but he kept walking.

For the second time I raised my gun. I don't remember what I was aiming for. Suddenly it felt like I'd been punched in the shoulder, my arm jerking back from the recoil. The parakeet went fluttering up out of the tree. I could smell the smoke weaving itself into the fabric of my clothes. The man who was always smiling looked puzzled. He ran to where the man I'd just shot in the back had fallen, but when he turned him over, there was blood on the man's lips. With every lungful there was more of it, the blood coming out with every breath. At the sight of the blood the smiling man's face crumbled.

It took them days to trust us. Even after An helped one of them remove a small burr stuck in his eyelashes. Even after I burned an infected leech off someone's leg. You could still see it floating in their eyes. Like a dog that's been beaten its whole life, the constant suspicion. A few of them could speak Vietnamese but were pretending that they couldn't. I realized it one day as I was talking to An. We were talking about how our families lived in the same spot on the river, how it was fated. I looked over and noticed two of them straining to hear what I'd been saying. You understand me, I said. They just looked at me, but from that point on I talked to them in a normal voice. By the time we reached the river, one of them had started openly translating. We began making better time.

After I shot the man, An and I dragged him into the trench and buried him so that his hand was barely visible. That way it would look like he was one of many. Then we pointed the guns at the others and told them to run. An in the front, me in the back. It
took us sixteen days to reach Ba Nuoc. All we had were our two guns and their hoes. They were used to living off the land. Once we shot a bear. The smiling man, Arun, roasted the kidneys. That night Arun said each of us was infused with the strength of the bear. The only thing that could stop us was steel.

Rabbit heard noises. She realized her father was crying. I still see him sometimes, Tu said. Only in my dreams I shoot him in the face and not in the back. His head comes straight up off his neck, the blood pumping like a fountain. An says we killed one to save them all, but An didn't kill him. He didn't see the blood lacing the man's breath. The feeling as if my arms were bathed in it all the way up to the shoulders.

After a while Qui rolled off her mat and onto Tu's. Rabbit had never seen anything like it. There had never been a man in any of their houses. The way Qui's back arched in the moonlight, hips locked, the muscles tensing in her thighs, her body riding over him, cresting, the long black hair rippling down her back like water, the bloody diamond on the side of Tu's face flushed a darker shade of red, and the way Qui, who never said a word, said many, though Tu put his hand on her mouth to keep them from spilling out.

My father killed a lot of men, repeated Son. Rabbit knew they should move below deck. The tops of her ears were beginning to burn. When the little girl came limping back, they would move downstairs. She wondered why Son needed to believe his father was a killer. Anytime she went near the pilothouse the voice called to her, her ears as if on fire. The voice saying please. Take whatever you want.