The Best of Lucius Shepard (65 page)

I
was still sitting there, trying to comprehend whether or not by contracting the
engagement, Vang hoped to provide me with a basis for an informed decision, or
if his interests were purely self-serving, when Tan stepped into the trailer.
She had on a sleeveless plaid smock, the garment she wore whenever she was
cleaning, and it was evident that she’d been crying–the skin beneath her eyes
was puffy and red. But she had regained her composure, and she listened
patiently, perched on the edge of the desk, while I told her all I’d been
thinking about Vang and what he had done to us.

“Maybe
it’s for the best,” she said after I had run down. “This way you’ll be sure
you’ve done what you had to do.”

I
was startled by her reaction. “Are you saying that you think I should kill my
father . . . that I should even entertain the possibility?”

She
shrugged. “That’s for you to decide.”

“I’ve
decided already,” I said.

“Then
there’s not a problem.”

The
studied neutrality of her attitude puzzled me. “You don’t think I’ll stand by
my decision, do you?”

She
put a hand to her brow, hiding her face–a gesture that reminded me of Vang. “I
don’t think you have decided, and I don’t think you should . . . not until you
see your father.” She pinched a fold of skin above the bridge of her nose, then
looked up at me. “Let’s not talk about this now.”

We
sat silently for half a minute or thereabouts, each following the path of our
own thoughts; then she wrinkled up her nose and said, “It smells bad in here.
Do you want to get some air?”

We
climbed onto the roof of the trailer and sat gazing at the shadowy line of the
forest to the west, the main tent bulking up above it, and a sky so thick with
stars that the familiar constellations were assimilated into new and busier
cosmic designs: a Buddha face with a diamond on its brow, a tiger’s head, a
palm tree–constructions of sparkling pinlights against a midnight blue canvas
stretched from horizon to horizon. The wind brought the scent of sweet rot and
the less pervasive odor of someone’s cooking. Somebody switched on a radio in
the main tent; a Chinese orchestra whined and jangled. I felt I was sixteen
again, that Tan and I had just met, and I thought perhaps we had chosen to
occupy this place where we spent so many hours before we were lovers, because
here we could banish the daunting pressures of the present, the threat of the
future, and be children again. But although those days were scarcely two years
removed, we had forever shattered the comforting illusions and frustrating
limitations of childhood. I lay back on the aluminum roof, which still held a
faint warmth of the day, and Tan hitched up her smock about her waist and
mounted me, bracing her hands on my chest as I slipped inside her. Framed by
the crowded stars, features made mysterious by the cowl of her hair, she seemed
as distant and unreal as the imagined creatures of my zodiac; but this
illusion, too, was shattered as she began to rock her hips with an accomplished
passion and lifted her face to the sky, transfigured by a look of exalted,
almost agonized yearning, like one of those Renaissance angels marooned on a
scrap of painted cloud who has just witnessed something amazing pass overhead,
a miracle of glowing promise too perfect to hold in the mind. She shook her
head wildly when she came, her hair flying all to one side so that it resembled
in shape the pennant flying on the main tent, a dark signal of release, and
then collapsed against my chest. I held onto her hips, continuing to thrust
until the knot of heat in my groin shuddered out of me, leaving a residue of
black peace into which the last shreds of my thought were subsumed.

The
sweat dried on our skin, and still we lay there, both–I believed–aware that
once we went down from the roof, the world would close around us, restore us to
its troubled spin. Someone changed stations on the radio, bringing in a
Cambodian program–a cooler, wispier music played. A cough sounded close by the
trailer, and I raised myself to an elbow, wanting to see who it was. The major
was making his way with painful slowness across the cleared ground, leaning on
his staff. In the starlight his grotesque shape was lent a certain anonymity–he
might have been a figure in a fantasy game, an old down-at-heels magician
shrouded in a heavy, ragged cloak, or a beggar on a quest. He shuffled a few
steps more, and then, shaking with effort, sank to his knees. For several
seconds he remained motionless, then he scooped a handful of the red dirt and
held it up to his face. And I recalled that Buon Ma Thuot was near the location
of his fictive–or if not fictive, ill-remembered–firebase. Firebase Ruby. Built
upon the red dirt of a defoliated plantation.

Tan
sat up beside me and whispered, “What’s he doing?”

I
put a finger to my lips, urging her to silence; I was convinced that the major
would not expose himself to the terror of the open sky unless moved by some
equally terrifying inner force, and I hoped he might do something that would illuminate
the underpinnings of his mystery.

He
let the dirt sift through his fingers and struggled to stand. Failed and sagged
onto his haunches. His head fell back, and he held a spread-fingered hand up to
it as if trying to shield himself from the starlight. His quavery voice ran out
of him like a shredded battle flag. “Turn back!” he said. “Oh, God! God! Turn
back!”

During
the next four months, I had little opportunity to brood over the prospect of meeting
my father. Dealing with the minutiae of Green Star’s daily operation took most
of my energy and hours, and whenever I had a few minutes respite, Tan was there
to fill them. So it was that by the time we arrived in Binh Khoi, I had made
scarcely any progress in adjusting to the possibility that I might soon come
face-to-face with the man who had killed my mother.

In
one aspect, Binh Khoi was the perfect venue for us, since the town affected the
same conceit as the circus, being designed to resemble a fragment of another
time. It was situated near the Pass of the Ocean Clouds in the Truong Son
Mountains some forty kilometers north of Danang, and many of the homes there
were afforded a view of green hills declining toward the Coastal Plain. On the morning
we arrived those same hills were half-submerged in thick white fog, the plain
was totally obscured, and a pale mist had infiltrated the narrow streets,
casting an air of ominous enchantment over the place. The oldest of the houses
had been built no more than fifty years before, yet they were all similar to
nineteenth century houses that still existed in certain sections of Hanoi: two
and three stories tall and fashioned of stone, painted dull yellow and gray and
various other sober hues, with sharply sloping roofs of dark green tile and
compounds hidden by high walls and shaded by bougainvillea, papaya, and banana
trees. Except for street lights in the main square and pedestrians in bright
eccentric clothing, we might have been driving through a hill station during
the 1800s; but I knew that hidden behind this antiquated façade were
state-of-the-art security systems that could have vaporized us had we not been
cleared to enter.

The
most unusual thing about Binh Khoi was its silence. I’d never been in a place
where people lived in any considerable quantity that was so hushed, devoid of
the stew of sounds natural to a human environment. No hens squabbling or dogs
yipping, no whining motor scooters or humming cars, no children at play. In
only one area was there anything approximating normal activity and noise: the
marketplace, which occupied an unpaved street leading off the square. Here men
and women in coolie hats hunkered beside baskets of jackfruit, chilies, garlic,
custard apples, durians, geckos, and dried fish; meat and caged puppies and
monkeys and innumerable other foodstuffs were sold in canvas-roofed stalls; and
the shoppers, mostly male couples, haggled with the vendors, occasionally
venting their dismay at the prices . . . this despite the fact that any one of
them could have bought everything in the market without blinking. Though the
troupe shared their immersion in a contrived past, I found the depth of their
pretense alarming and somewhat perverse. As I maneuvered the truck cautiously
through the press, they peered incuriously at me through the windows–faces
rendered exotic and nearly unreadable by tattoos and implants and caps of
silver wire and winking light that appeared to be woven into their hair–and I
thought I could feel their amusement at the shabby counterfeit we offered of
their more elegantly realized illusion. I believe I might have hated them for
the fashionable play they made of arguing over minuscule sums with the poor
vendors, for the triviality of spirit this mockery implied, if I had not
already hated them so completely for being my father’s friends and colleagues.

At
the end of the street, beyond the last building, lay a grassy field bordered by
a low whitewashed wall. Strings of light bulbs linked the banana trees and palms
that grew close to the wall on three sides, and I noticed several paths leading
off into the jungle that were lit in the same fashion. On the fourth side,
beyond the wall, the land dropped off into a notch, now choked with fog, and on
the far side of the notch, perhaps fifty yards away, a massive hill with a
sheer rock face and the ruins of an old temple atop it lifted from the fog,
looming above the field–it was such a dramatic sight and so completely free of
mist, every palm frond articulated, every vine-enlaced crevice and knob of
dark, discolored stone showing clear, that I wondered if it might be a clever
projection, another element of Binh Khoi’s decor.

We
spent the morning and early afternoon setting up, and once I was satisfied that
everything was in readiness, I sought out Tan, thinking we might go for a walk;
but she was engaged in altering Kai’s costume. I wandered into the main tent
and busied myself by making sure the sawdust had been spread evenly. Kai was
swinging high above on a rope suspended from the metal ring at the top of the
tent, and one of our miniature tigers had climbed a second rope and was
clinging to it by its furry hands, batting at her playfully whenever she
swooped near. Tranh and Mei were playing cards in the bleachers, and Kim was
walking hand-in-hand with our talking monkey, chattering away as if the
creature could understand her–now and then it would turn its white face to her
and squeak in response, saying “I love you” and “I’m hungry” and other equally
non-responsive phrases. I stood by the entranceway, feeling rather paternal
toward my little family gathered under the lights, and I was just considering
whether or not I should return to the trailer and see if Tan had finished, when
a baritone voice sounded behind me, saying, “Where can I find Vang Ky?”

My
father was standing with hands in pockets a few feet away, wearing black
trousers and a gray shirt of some shiny material. He looked softer and heavier
than he did in his photographs, and the flying fish tattoo on his cheek was now
surrounded by more than half-a-dozen tiny emblems denoting his business
connections. With his immense head, his shaved skull gleaming in the hot
lights, he himself seemed the emblem of some monumental and soul-less concern.
At his shoulder, over a foot shorter than he, was a striking Vietnamese woman
with long straight hair, dressed in tight black slacks and a matching tunic:
Phuong Ahn Nguyen. She was staring at me intently.

Stunned,
I managed to get out that Vang was no longer with the circus, and my father
said, “How can that be? He’s the owner, isn’t he?”

Shock
was giving way to anger, anger so fulminant I could barely contain it. My hands
trembled. If I’d had one of my knives to hand, I would have plunged it without
a thought into his chest. I did the best I could to conceal my mood and told
him what had become of Vang; but it seemed that as I catalogued each new detail
of his face and body–a frown line, a reddened ear lobe, a crease in his fleshy
neck–a vial of some furious chemical was tipped over and added to the mix of my
blood.

“Goddamn
it!” he said, casting his eyes up to the canvas; he appeared distraught.
“Shit!” He glanced down at me. “Have you got his access code? It’s never the
same once they go to Heaven. I’m not sure they really know what’s going on. But
I guess it’s my only option.”

“I
doubt he’d approve of my giving the code to a stranger,” I told him.

“We’re
not strangers,” he said. “Vang was my father-in-law. We had a falling-out after
my wife died. I hoped having the circus here for a week, I’d be able to
persuade him to sit down and talk. There’s no reason for us to be at odds.”

I
suppose the most astonishing thing he said was that Vang was his father-in-law,
and thus my grandfather. I didn’t know what to make of that; I could think of
no reason he might have for lying, yet it raised a number of troubling
questions. But his last statement, his implicit denial of responsibility for my
mother’s death . . . it had come so easily to his lips! Hatred flowered in me
like a cold star, acting to calm me, allowing me to exert a measure of control
over my anger.