by David Rabe
Lan wears many rings. She is thin and her hair is the blackness of the bottom of the sea piled high in plumes. Wind slightly stirs the palm fronds near her; they whisper and she is motionless. Now she is no longer thinking of the level blue acres of ocean at Vung Tau. Down the road that runs in from the fields before her a laboring, ponderous silhouette approaches, the thick-horned heads of water buffalo yoked together in wood. High on top of the wagon sits the farmer. Light yet lingers at the tip of the conical straw hat he wears. Low oblong shadows of pigs follow, while the shape of someone thin and short trails all, lifting now the length of the wooden staff. Lan’s breathing falters with an alien, unwanted ache that makes her shake her head, touch two fingers to her brow; yet it continues within her, changing the expression of her eyes. Having ridden in such carts, she wants to be in one again. Her brother, now a Saigon taxi driver, had followed while her father drove. Their two pigs were bound to the wagon by wire attached to their right front feet; they rarely squealed; they struggled on their stubby legs to keep pace. Her brother, Linh, prodded their flabby flanks with a bamboo stick, which he sometimes flourished above his head as if it were a sword. In the daylight it flashed yellow; under the moon it seemed white. Brandished swiftly, a whistling sound sprang from it into the air. And all along the dike walls were flowers that she sometimes picked and took with her father to the family altar covered with pictures of ancestors and strange holy men from other countries. There were drawings and symbols of her many dead relatives. And then one day a picture of her father was placed among them, along with the shirt he had worn on the day of his death. Still it lies there, she knows, seeing the slack cloth, as black as soil. Do his eyes see her now? she wonders. Waking one morning, sweating and dizzy, illness clearly in his eyes, he went out into the fields to work. Sometime in the afternoon, with no one watching, he toppled sideways into a few feet of water and the buffalo halted beside him. Probably he struggled once or twice to his knees, where he rested and then fell again. In the end he lay there drowning, too weak to call out or lift himself, while the animals stood as they had been trained, awaiting further commands.
She brought no flowers to the shirt. The shirt was not there when she brought the flowers. She was a child bringing flowers, and a girl when the drowning of her father left the shirt to lie useless upon the altar. She studied it lying there once each day for a week before she finally wept, though she had pretended weeping at the funeral.
Her breathing is slow. Her mind and breath repeat the rhythms of her blood and pulses. Down a final streak of daylight a bat falls steeply, wings poised. It seems to strike something hidden in the air and then, turning sideways and upward, it flees for the forest where the night is already deep. As if those cool wings have brushed against her, she shudders, but only once, beginning to smile, still staring and thinking, repeating again the memory of it all: a mother, a father, a brother, three sisters, and a farm. What of the rumored generations of her ancestors, the watching dead of her blood? The line of her smile lengthens. To think of them makes the air seem alive with eyes all fixed on her. No, she is too small for such concern. Nearly invisible, she is too faint to ever be so exactly known and observed. Monthly she sends money to her mother and sisters. She hopes this is her only meaning to the dead. She has turned and begun to walk, her head moving from side to side. Little, she thinks, can be demanded from little. She feels comforted.
The car wash is empty now. For a moment, from the doorway, she examines the emptiness, a space of air like smoke bound by the dull stone of the walls. Why the GIs ever come, she doesn’t know, but they do: with hungers and money and noise and an eagerness to have her that, when they are not cruel, bewilders her and puts her into fits of helpless laughter. They think her of such enormous value.
She prowls the room, the dirt-stained tile of the floor. A gecko darts and stops. Her feet are small in her worn-out slippers, and reaching the front doorway, her eyes seek into the night, the road before her thudding with a huge green truck caked with wrinkled dust, loaded with crates. The sink and surge of the pavement comes through the earth to her feet. Then the cab and trailer vanish with a rush and before her the glowing fields wave across the road. With nearly no sound at all, an ancient, rust-colored man drifts past on his whispering bicycle, his head bowed under his conical hat, as if he rides in his sleep. Children appear at the edge of the field. Lan’s nose wrinkles with the start of a sneeze, and she goes out and heads back past Madame Lieu’s house and the other shanties, some of tin, others of wood and straw. From the deep stone hollowness and glitter of a well, she hauls up water. She sheds her yellow, silky pajamas. The water flickers and slaps as she pours the bucket into a dented gray pan. Alone and unthinking under the bright stare of the moon, she splashes and scrubs her skin, which seems to her aglow. Only the black of her hair would be invisible, a piece of the night. And she is singing, brief starts and stops of a song that frolics, possessing both sadness and gaiety, and she is back in the wilds again, younger, returned to the forest streams.
With a bright fluff of cloth she rubs herself dry. With a feeling of newness, she fits herself into her scarlet padded bra and scarlet underwear, plain cotton pajamas, and sandals of a pleasant mahogany leather.
Back toward the road in a second stone house lives Madame Lieu, the owner of the car wash. Lan will go there now for her money. The water, dumped from the pan, rushes through a cluster of small stones before collecting finally upon a hard flatness of ground. Calling to Madame Lieu, Lan pivots and enters a room crowded with debris. A chicken squawks and struts from beneath the wreckage of a bicycle stacked against a wall. Madame Lieu is old and the clothing she wears is a shabby brown. She spits, and shows her teeth with their rusty, nearly blackish stain, for she chews incessantly upon the leaves of the betel nut tree. This discoloration of teeth was once thought a mark of beauty in the women of Vietnam. Girls went through a long and uncomfortable process so their teeth would darken and men would think them beautiful. But it is no longer done. Lan, personally, finds it repulsive and old-fashioned. Even though the old women say there is delight in the juices, Lan would never want her teeth to be that ugly color. Almost no young girls do it any longer.
Shoulders bowed, an indentation creasing her shirt down the length of her spine, Madame Lieu has the look of a cripple, though she is not, having endured, Lan knows, nearly fifty years. Lan requests her money. The woman nods, offering a bowl of rice and sauce, bits of dried fish. Gratefully, Lan crosses to the huge steaming kettle scorched black in its bed of simmering coals. The glow touches redness to her mouth, chin, even the tip of her nose, while her eyes glisten like a liquid darker than the shadows the embers cast. Filling the bowl, she settles on a small worn bench and begins to eat, scooping the food with chopsticks, the bowl held close to her mouth. Madame Lieu is slouched on a stool nearby. She strikes a match to light a cigarette. In an unsteady voice, she whispers that she is tired, but her son is doing well in school, though they will come for him soon, the army, the draft. She heard, recently, from a friend who has a brother who is a policeman in Bien Hoa that the police will be coming to Tan Mai soon, next month more than likely. Proceeding from house to house, they will seek out and take the young men.
Lan nods, listening. Madame Lieu is frowning, sitting rigidly and downcast in her worry and silence. Wind, carrying a degree of chill, brushes past them; the embers glow more extremely, the heat increasing, and the shapes of the shadows change. Faint in the distance are the cries of children, the rumble of trucks. The coals crackle, their strength waning. The gloom, mottled with dust, grows deeper. Lan stands up. She sets the white bowl upon the table, then passes softly across the room to Madame Lieu who hands her the crumpled bills of five hundred and fifty piastres. Lan nods, saying nothing more, departing. Madame Lieu calls farewell after her and Lan, stepping lightly along the path between the houses, responds.
When the road is before her, she scurries to the far side where the weeds are thicker, and barbed wire, sprun
g loose from the stakes about which it was bound, juts out at peculiar angles. The immense sky is nearly cloudless. Waiting for a Lambretta taxi to take her home, she stands awhile. The traffic is heavy, headlights and noise bringing American army and air force trucks and jeeps booming past. Some rush toward Bien Hoa while others bounce by in the opposite direction, heading toward Long Binh and the growing army compound there. Labretta taxis sputter and shake along, their rear cabs like big crates stuffed with GIs in fatigues or civilian clothes. They yelp at her in their vulgar, incomprehensible language, gesturing out the sides with their hands about fuck-fuck and suck-suck. Every now and then one of them will call out in clumsy Vietnamese. She practices aloofness before them, surrendering neither look nor sound, thinking to herself how they will believe her innocent and ignorant, a child. She is grinning at this when she hears her name called in a voice that is Vietnamese. Doan Tan Kim, a girl of twelve who lives with her parents next door to Madame Lieu, is running up from her home toward the road. The child’s face is round, eyes eager, as she is asking if Lan will please accompany her to the Bien Hoa cinema; she can go if Lan will take her.
Lan waves her hands, crying out, No, no, she cannot go; she hasn’t time. No time, no time. Yet there is laughter in her voice, and pleasure also.
“Please.”
“I have been forbidden, for I have VD. No VD in the movies.”
“No one knows.”
“I don’t even know. Only the GIs know.”
“What?”
“They yell and worry.”
“Please.”
“What is VD? Kim, do you know?”
“Please, please.”
“Only if you take me, Kim. You must take me,” says Lan, bending to the child as if to explain a mysterious, complicated procedure.
“But you are the oldest. You must take me.”
“But I cannot even go unless you take me, and you won’t, so how can I take you? Don’t you see?”
“Oh.”
“Yes.”
“All right, yes,” says Kim.
“So will you take me, Kim, please?”
“If you promise to be good.”
“I promise.”
“No GIs,” Kim says.
“If they talk to me, I will look the other way. I will hide my eyes.”
“That will only make them chase you. You must be ugly.”
“I am ugly.”
“All right.”
“I will tell them I have a fish in my pussy.”
“Yes.”
“I will tell them I have piss in my pussy.”
“A fish to bite them.”
“VD. Shit. What is the movie?”
The Lambretta taxi that finally halts to allow them to squeeze aboard is crammed with scraps of damp, sweet-smelling lumber of a whitish color. Between two fingers, Lan pinches shut her nose and exchanges a delighted grin with Kim. The Lambretta sways into motion, grinding gears, squeaking. Lan closes her eyes. “I think,” she says, “we must try to be luckier in the life we have after this one.”
“I think so, yes,” Kim says.
“We will be men.”
“Yes.”
“Very big.”
“Important.”
“Americans.”
“Americans.”
“And we will come to Vietnam.”
“Yes, yes.” Kim is giggling; she stomps her tiny feet, covering her mouth with her fingers. “I think you are crazy.”
“No, no, I am too pretty to be crazy.”
“But you are ugly, remember?”
“Yes, yes. One minute one thing and then something else.”
The shapes of huts, like wayward shadows not quite ready for the ground, float past them in the dark. There is the steady whirring of the Lambretta motor carrying them along.
Kim says, “I don’t know why you talk so crazy.”
“It is a mystery.”
“Didn’t you say just before that you were ugly?”
“That was before. A joke. Why do you think the GIs want me if I am not pretty?”
“Because they are crazy.”
“You think they are crazy, too?”
“Yes.”
“You think everybody is crazy.”
“Yes.”
“Well, you are half right. They are crazy. But I am pretty.”
Downtown Bien Hoa is a spangling of many lights—beacons, drifting crowds and cries, figures darting—men, women, girls, bikes, and children. Suddenly, the slumbering communities along the road are gone and the city, Bien Hoa, has sprung up on them, huge and dissonant. Lan laughs at the sight of it all. Soldiers of many kinds of armies and races plunge into bar after bar. Here the girls wear wonderful clothing; their hair is done in beauty parlors and they outsmart the GIs. If they are beautiful, they fool and beat the GIs. Drinking tiny glasses of tea, they lie, they promise impossible enchantments; and then the drunken GIs wander off to fuck-fuck with old ugly women while the young girls are free to pick who they want, or to just make money. She wishes fiercely that she had the will, the audacity, and the shamelessness to come here to work, to come to Bien Hoa to work and win.
The cinema lies ahead. Lights are brilliant there. The square before it is a marketplace of teeming shops and stalls. A billiard hall stands adjacent to it with its big windows full of men and boys moving through a gray mix of cigar, pipe, and cigarette smoke in the bright yellow shimmer spilling onto the street. The Lambretta bounces to a halt. After paying the driver, Lan and Kim scamper hand in hand over a path that winds among the shops. Springing up the final steps, pausing only for tickets, they enter the theater, a sudden crackling gloom through which they move stealthily. Lan’s face reflects light from the radiant screen showing a valley of rolling green beyond which towers a range of mountains peaked in whiteness. Kim’s hand within Lan’s own seems exquisite. Down from the high hills leap horsemen, who, because of the oiled blackness of their hair and the texture of their skin, seem Vietnamese, though they whoop and holler in French, and the audience shouts, “VC! VC!” while across the base of the screen come the printed words of what they are saying.
5
Whitaker is in a bar where he drinks and mopes, unable to lift himself from the dark mood into which he has fallen. Rage keeps him in danger of telephoning Sharon for nearly an hour, his throat tight with hatred of her and the words he would shout. But he doesn’t do it, because finally an idea comes along that’s smart enough to stop him: he asks himself if it’s really Sharon he wants or is “Sharon” merely the only name he knows in Washington for what he wants? With this thought, he understands at last, and the sensation frees him to smile and decide to return to the mall and the flower children there. She has chosen another, married another—let it be, let it be—though to mess up their marriage as his last stateside act would be a real pleasure.
In his right-hip pocket, he carries a newly purchased pint flask of whiskey, silver and insulated, and the cap, when removed, is precisely the measure of a shot glass. Eagerly, he journeys by bus and on foot back to the mall. He hastens along, certain he will find a girl among the thousands here; maybe the one with pigtails will reappear, or the woman in blue—there are so many—or just one who notices him as he is noticing her.
Sauntering along, eyeing this one and that one, he passes a parked bus and comes upon a gigantic swastika. Black and red and as huge as a billboard, the draped flag covers the side of a semitruck trailer illuminated in the failing afternoon by floodlights. He realizes that for the past few minutes he has been ignoring an electronically amplified voice disjointed by static. Loudspeakers stand at either end of the roof of the trailer. In barks and spurts they broadcast a garbled version of whatever the slim man positioned at a microphone is saying. Like the sturdy guards on either side of him, the man is dressed in a Nazi Brownshirt uniform. Similar figures occupy the rooftop or stand in a line on the grass in front of the trailer. Many hold upraised placards that proclaim support for the boys in Viet
nam. Everyone has a swastika armband. The generator powering the lights gives off an uncertain motorized grumble. The man raps on the microphone, sounding annoyed and suspicious as he declares, “Testing, one two three.”
A slim young man in a navy pea coat and two leggy girls in cowgirl-style coats with beaded satchels slung over their shoulders are departing as he approaches. One of the girls tilts her head at Whitaker, and he turns to watch her go, but she pays no further attention. When he looks back, he is surprised by the troop of policemen in black, hip-length leather coats hurrying up. They form a line along the front of the trailer. They are amazing. He has a sudden vision of the cops and Nazis fighting. They pound and shoot one another. He cheers them on. Six of the police wear soft hats; two have helmets. One is a black, a captain with thick legs stuffed into knee-high boots.
Whitaker lights a cigarette and puffs away, excitedly, his hands in his pockets, shoulders hunched. The mechanical problem with the loudspeakers must have been solved because he’s able to hear the man cough and then, as if easy-going and friendly, say, “If you can argue with me, argue. If you can tell me that I’m wrong, I’ll listen, but you just mill about like cows.”
There is the bellow of a human imitating a cow.
“. . . You offer no response but sarcasm. Having no intelligence, you defend yourselves with sarcasm. Nonsense.” Stomping his foot, the man pivots. His blond-haired thin body disappears down a trapdoor in the roof of the trailer. His replacement, popping up almost immediately, is dark and thickly built, with narrow eyes set in deep sockets that hold him back from the world at a remote and careful distance. Yet he is young; there is about him the animal vitality of a good high school athlete, a hard-nosed football player, maybe a guard, grown only a few years older.