The Best of Lucius Shepard (66 page)

Phoung
stepped forward and put a hand on my chest; my heart pounded against the
pressure of her palm. “Is anything wrong?” she asked.

“I’m
. . . surprised,” I said. “That’s all. I didn’t realize Vang had a son-in-law.”

Her
make-up was severe, her lips painted a dark mauve, her eyes shaded by the same
color, but in the fineness of her features and the long oval shape of her face,
she bore a slight resemblance to Tan.

“Why
are you angry?” she asked.

My
father eased her aside. “It’s all right. I came on pretty strong–he’s got every
right to be angry. Why don’t the two of us . . . what’s your name, kid?”

“Dat,”
I said, though I was tempted to tell him the truth.

“Dat
and I will have a talk,” he said to Phuong. “I’ll meet you back at the house.”

We
went outside, and Phuong, displaying more than a little reluctance, headed off
in the general direction of the trailer. It was going on dusk and the fog was
closing in. The many-colored bulbs strung in the trees close to the wall and
lining the paths had been turned on; each bulb was englobed by a fuzzy halo,
and altogether they imbued the encroaching jungle with an eerily festive air,
as if the spirits lost in the dark green tangles were planning a party. We
stood beside the wall, beneath the great hill rising from the shifting fogbank,
and my father tried to convince me to hand over the code. When I refused he offered
money, and when I refused his money he glared at me and said, “Maybe you don’t
get it. I really need the code. What’s it going to take for you to give it to
me?”

“Perhaps
it’s you who doesn’t get it,” I said. “If Vang wanted you to have the code he
would have given it to you. But he gave it to
me,
and to no one else. I
consider that a trust, and I won’t break it unless he signifies that I should.”

He
looked off into the jungle, ran a hand across his scalp, and made a frustrated
noise. I doubted he was experienced at rejection, and though it didn’t satisfy
my anger, it pleased me to have rejected him. Finally he laughed. “Either
you’re a hell of a businessman or an honorable man. Or maybe you’re both.
That’s a scary notion.” He shook his head in what I took for amiable
acceptance. “Why not call Vang? Ask him if he’d mind having a talk with me.”

I
didn’t understand how this was possible.

“What
sort of computer do you own?” he asked.

I
told him and he said, “That won’t do it. Tell you what. Come over to my house
tonight after your show. You can use my computer to contact him. I’ll pay for
your time.”

I
was suddenly suspicious. He seemed to be offering himself to me, making himself
vulnerable, and I did not believe that was in his nature. His desire to contact
Vang might be a charade. What if he had discovered my identity and was luring
me into a trap?

“I
don’t know if I can get away,” I said. “It may have to be in the morning.”

He
looked displeased, but said, “Very well.” He fingered a business card from his
pocket, gave it to me. “My address.” Then he pressed what appeared to be a
crystal button into my hand. “Don’t lose it. Carry it with you whenever you
come. If you don’t, you’ll be picked up on the street and taken somewhere quite
unpleasant.”

As
soon as he was out of sight I hurried over to the trailer, intending to sort
things out with Tan. She was outside, sitting on a folding chair, framed by a
spill of hazy yellow light from the door. Her head was down, and her blouse was
torn, the top two buttons missing. I asked what was wrong; she shook her head
and would not meet my eyes. But when I persisted she said, “That woman . . .
the one who works for your father . . .”

“Phuong?
Did she hurt you?”

She
kept her head down, but I could see her chin quivering. “I was coming to find
you, and I ran into her. She started talking to me. I thought she was just
being friendly, but then she tried to kiss me. And when I resisted”–she displayed
the tear in her blouse–”she did this.” She gathered herself. “She wants me to
be with her tonight. If I refuse, she says she’ll make trouble for us.”

It
would have been impossible for me to hate my father more, but this new insult,
this threat to Tan, perfected it, added a finishing color, like the last brush
stroke applied to a masterpiece. I stood a moment gazing off toward the hill–it
seemed I had inside me an analog to that forbidding shape, something equally
stony and vast. I led Tan into the trailer, sat her down at the desk, and made
her tea; then I repeated all my father had said. “Is it possible,” I asked,
“that Vang is my grandfather?”

She
held the teacup in both hands, blew on the steaming liquid and took a sip. “I don’t
know. My family has always been secretive. All my parents told me was that Vang
was once a wealthy man with a loving family, and that he had lost everything.”

“If
he is my grandfather,” I said, “then we’re cousins.”

She
set down the cup and stared dolefully into it as if she saw in its depths an
inescapable resolution. “I don’t care. If we were brother and sister, I
wouldn’t care.”

I
pulled her up, put my arms around her, and she pressed herself against me. I
felt that I was at the center of an enormously complicated knot, too diminutive
to be able to see all its loops and twists. If Vang was my grandfather, why had
he treated me with such coldness? Perhaps my mother’s death had deadened his
heart, perhaps that explained it. But knowing that Tan and I were cousins,
wouldn’t he have told us the truth when he saw how close we were becoming? Or
was he so old-fashioned that the idea of an intimate union between cousins
didn’t bother him? The most reasonable explanation was that my father had lied.
I saw that now, saw it with absolute clarity. It was the only possibility that
made sense. And if he had lied, it followed that he knew who I was. And if he
knew who I was . . .

“I
have to kill him,” I said. “Tonight . . . it has to be tonight.”

I
was prepared to justify the decision, to explain why a course of inaction would
be a greater risk, to lay out all the potentials of the situation for Tan to
analyze, but she pushed me away, just enough so that she could see my face, and
said, “You can’t do it alone. That woman’s a professional assassin.” She rested
her forehead against mine. “I’ll help you.”

“That’s
ridiculous! If I . . .”

“Listen
to me, Philip! She can read physical signs, she can tell if someone’s angry. If
they’re anxious. Well, she’ll expect me to be angry. And anxious. She’ll think
it’s just resentment . . . nerves. I’ll be able to get close to her.”

“And
kill her? Will you be able to kill her?”

Tan
broke from the embrace and went to stand at the doorway, gazing out at the fog.
Her hair had come unbound, spilling down over her shoulders and back, the
ribbon that had tied it dangling like a bright blue river winding across a
ground of black silk.

“I’ll
ask Mei to give me something. She has herbs that will induce sleep.” She
glanced back at me. “There are things you can do to insure our safety once your
father’s dead. We should discuss them now.”

I
was amazed by her coolness, how easily she had made the transition from being
distraught. “I can’t ask you to do this,” I said.

“You’re
not asking–I’m volunteering.” I detected a note of sad distraction in her
voice. “You’d do as much for me.”

“Of
course, but if it weren’t for me, you wouldn’t be involved in this.”

“If
it weren’t for you,” she said, the sadness even more evident in her tone, “I’d
have no involvements at all.”

The
first part of the show that evening, the entrance of the troupe to march music,
Mei leading the way, wearing a red and white majorette’s uniform, twirling–and
frequently dropping–a baton, the tigers gamboling at her heels; then two comic
skits; then Kai and Kim whirling and spinning aloft in their gold and sequined
costumes, tumbling through the air happy as birds; then another skit and Tranh’s
clownish juggling, pretending to be drunk and making improbable catches as he
tumbled, rolled, and staggered about . . . all this was received by the
predominantly male audience with a degree of ironic detachment. They laughed at
Mei, they whispered and smirked during the skits, they stared dispassionately
at Kim and Kai, and they jeered Tranh. It was plain that they had come to
belittle us, that doing so validated their sense of superiority. I registered
their reactions, but was so absorbed in thinking about what was to happen
later, they seemed unreal, unimportant, and it took all my discipline to focus
on my own act, a performance punctuated by a knife hurled from behind me that
struck home between Tan’s legs. There was a burst of enthusiastic cheers, and I
turned to see Phuong some thirty feet away, taking a bow in the bleachers–it
was she who had thrown the knife. She looked at me and shrugged, with that
gesture dismissing my poor skills, and lifted her arms to receive the building
applause. I searched the area around her for my father, but he was nowhere to
be seen.

The
audience remained abuzz, pleased that one of their own had achieved this
victory, but when the major entered, led in by Mei and Tranh, they fell silent at
the sight of his dark, convulsed figure. Leaning on his staff, he hobbled along
the edge of the bleachers, looking into this and that face as if hoping to find
a familiar one, and then, moving to the center of the ring, he began to tell
the story of Firebase Ruby. I was alarmed at first, but his delivery was
eloquent, lyrical, not the plainspoken style in which he had originally couched
the tale, and the audience was enthralled. When he came to tell of the letter
he had written his wife detailing his hatred of all things Vietnamese, a uneasy
muttering arose from the bleachers and rapt expressions turned to scowls; but
then he was past that point, and as he described the Viet Cong assault, his
listeners settled back and seemed once again riveted by his words.

“In
the phosphor light of the hanging flares,” he said, “I saw the blood-red ground
spread out before me. Beyond the head-high hedgerows of coiled steel wire,
black-clad men and women coursed from the jungle, myriad and quick as ants,
and, inside the wire, emerging from their secret warrens, more sprouted from
the earth like the demon yield of some infernal rain. All around me, my men
were dying, and even in the midst of fear, I felt myself the object of a great
calm observance, as if the tiny necklace-strung images of the Buddha the enemy
held in their mouths when they attacked had been empowered to summon their
ribbed original, and somewhere up above the flares, an enormous face had been
conjured from the dark matter of the sky and was gazing down with serene
approval.

“We
could not hold the position long–that was clear. But I had no intention of
surrendering. Drunk on whiskey and adrenaline, I was consumed by the thought of
death, my own and others’, and though I was afraid, I acted less out of fear
than from the madness of battle and a kind of communion with death, a desire to
make death grow and flourish and triumph. I retreated into the communications
bunker and ordered the corporal in charge to call for an air strike on the
coordinates of Firebase Ruby. When he balked I put a pistol to his head until
he had obeyed. Then I emptied a clip into the radio so no one could countermand
me.”

The
major bowed his head and spread his arms, as though preparing for a supreme
display of magic; then his resonant voice sounded forth again, like the voice
of a beast speaking from a cave, rough from the bones that have torn its
throat. His eyes were chunks of phosphorous burning in the bark of a rotting
log.

“When
the explosions began, I was firing from a sandbagged position atop the
communications bunker. The VC pouring from the jungle slowed their advance,
milled about, and those inside the wire looked up in terror to see the jets
screaming overhead, so low I could make out the stars on their wings. Victory
was stitched across the sky in rocket trails. Gouts of flame gouged the red
dirt, opening the tunnels to the air. The detonations began to blend one into
the other, and the ground shook like a sheet of plywood under the pounding of a
hammer. Clouds of marbled fire and smoke boiled across the earth, rising to
form a dreadful second sky of orange and black, and I came to my feet, fearful
yet delighted, astonished by the enormity of the destruction I had called down.
Then I was knocked flat. Sandbags fell across my legs, a body flung from God
knows where landed on my back, driving the breath from me, and in the instant
before consciousness fled, I caught the rich stink of napalm.