by David Rabe
Now the moon, round and ragged like a carelessly packed snowball, slides through gray and gray-black mists. The glow off the air and water is the glow from off new snow when Whitaker was a kid. He is in a silver sea headed into a horizon he cannot find. Beyond the bow, the line of the horizon, sweeping in from the right and left, dissolves into smokiness, a dim, glowing haze. The tall rocking spire of their mast with its small constant light rises into a sky so precisely black it feels ghostly. Earlier, when he wandered to the fantail, he strolled among resting troopers and one enchanted sailor staring up into what was then a delicate blue shimmer. Whitaker stands pressed against a slanted, chest-level rail of riveted metal plates. High to his left hangs a lifeboat covered in canvas. Someone begins to play the harmonica. The notes fall one after the other. They cannot shape themselves into music. Whitaker thinks about how he has always meant to learn to play a musical instrument. Perhaps the harmonica, or the guitar. Carefully, thoughtfully, he fits his hands to the rail and leans forward until he is looking down the steep hull to where the ocean thrashes of its own will, it seems to him, because it wants to, rather than in response to the cumbersome advance of the ship. Swells and crests roll up white, slide high, then level; they contain exact diamonds. Areas of snowlike foam appear and then dissolve and there is a constant rushing, washing sound, the dull and distant rasp and thud of the engine.
A figure passes behind him; he straightens; it is one of the merchant marines who run the ship. An older, fuzzy-faced man, his weather-beaten skin is as wrinkled as his clothing, which appears to have been slept in. Whitaker spent much of the afternoon arguing with a pimple-faced merchant marine about who would win if a fight broke out between the soldiers and the merchant marines. They knew the ship, could hide, ambush, the merchant marine said. They could cut the power. The soldiers had flashlights, Whitaker told him, and were trained to fight. The merchant marines had all kinds of weapons stashed away, knives, crossbows. This older man says nothing, floating in the half-light and dropping down a staircase with no sound other than the whisper of his hands on the rail, putting into Whitaker’s mind his father, a poor old ruin of a farmer who never lived in any city. A dark old stalwart stained with tobacco juice, wind, and sun, his life formed him beyond any chance of change until he was felled two years ago by a heart attack that hit like a sledgehammer crashing into the brain of a steer in the slaughterhouse.
It knocked him flat and gasping. His breath shouted inside his swelling neck. To learn that the fine, pumping muscle of his heart could grow defective confounded him. The stubborn, reliable muscle of his willpower crumbled, leaving him outraged and a little lost in the wide, wintry land he had trod through and tilled all his life, like a homeward-bound sailor who finds himself upon an unknown sea. Whitaker, staring down the gunmetal gray of the side of the ship, grieves for his lost father. Though Whitaker is on his way to war, at least he is not old.
“Hello, Whitaker,” says Rasputin. “Can I talk to you a little?”
“I’m lookin’ at the ocean, Rasputin.”
“That okay. I just be here talkin’ to myself, maybe you can listen, maybe you can’t.” Rasputin nods, sagely, then glances skyward.
“How can’t I if you’re standin’ right next to me?”
“People do that all the time, man, don’t you know that? Yeah, that’s the thing I’d like to do, I think, when I get outta this fuckin’ army. Study about people thinkin’ and the funny shit they do, all that psychological stuff, so I can talk shit to people and fuck up their minds, man, fuck ’em up good. I know that shit and they don’t, how they gonna know what I am sayin’? And I can learn all kinds a big words so I can talk shit to people, they just stand there noddin’, lookin’ real puzzled. Yeah, Whitaker, it all come back to reality, and that’s an easy word to say, but a motherfucker to understand.” As if struck by a hand no one sees, he stops; his eyes squint, then widen. “Oh,” he cries with delight. “Did you hear that? Oh, Mr. Whitaker, did you hear the shit your man was sayin’? ‘It all come back to reality, and that an easy word to say, but a mother to understand.’ Ain’t that some shit. You better get outta here, Whitaker, you get all fucked up in the head bad, you stand around listenin’ to me.”
Confused as to whether or not Rasputin is mocking him, Whitaker says, “Don’t you ever take anything serious, Rasputin? I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Sure you do.”
“We’re on our way to a war, Rasputin.”
“That’s right. We on a journey. Life is a journey.”
“Good night.”
“See you soon then.”
“I think so.”
The night before they docked in Cam Ranh Bay, Captain Bell gathered them to explain that he didn’t know whether or not they’d be leaving the ship in the morning, but all troops needed to be prepared to disembark on fifteen minutes’ notice. They had to be ready, even though he was pretty sure they would be staying aboard; he was pretty sure their destination was somewhere nearer Saigon and the Bien Hoa area. They would probably get off at the mouth of the Saigon River and proceed by LCM or truck or fixed-wing plane—he didn’t know how—to their destination—he didn’t know where.
And now they were on their way. Dozing but uneasy, Whitaker wakes up. Rasputin is climbing into his bunk, stacked directly across the narrow aisle. Kenkel, who sleeps above Whitaker, lurches, his stocky body changing the dents in the canvas of his bunk, as he dreams, barely a foot from Whitaker’s nose. They are piled on top of one another like bodies on stretchers. Rasputin lies back. His green boxer shorts and T-shirt highlight his dark legs and tufted hair. He arranges his hissing, buzzing radio on his belly and fiddles with the dials for a long time before looking over to Whitaker and nodding. “We way down in the water, Whitaker. No sounds, man.”
“You can listen to the fish,” says Whitaker.
“Dig it.”
15
Lan presses her hand against the corrugated tin wall while frowning. Her life is so difficult. Anger mixes with sadness, an abrasiveness that rubs the bottom of her brain. They are stealing from her. At work and in her sleep at home. Babysan and ghosts. She wonders if she dare go near the water. Are there water ghosts seeking to infect her with the desire to drown, sneaking and whispering to infect her with the desire to press her face down in water? It is cruel of them, knowing as they do the horror of drowning. Unable to rest because their sunken, irretrievable bodies rot without burial, they are seen sometimes to hover as black clouds above the well or river or pond that took them, murmuring, “It’s cold, so cold… .” In her home this morning, she awoke with a shock that had her sitting up, a cry bubbling from her lips before she even knew who she was—Quach Ngoc Lan in An Duc To—rising out of sleep in fear of a bad dream of drowning. Goddamn people kicking in her door. They knew her name. She yelled she was somebody else and the person they wanted was not home. They said they didn’t care, calling her by name, breaking the door. Callused hands seized her, closed her eyes, and dropped her into water in which she sank, believing desperately that if she did not open her mouth to scream or in any way release the air possessed within her, it would sustain her no matter how deep she sank. Lips compressed, an aching pressure growing within, she went down and down through darkening rings and into, finally, a panic of real suffocation. It sprang her awake, hoping to scream.
And now at work in Tan Mai, she has found a small amount of money gone from her purse. Finishing a thin, blond GI, and wanting to purchase a snack from an approaching peddler, she went to her purse and found forty piastres missing. Babysan, she thinks, glaring, looking about, remembering how those who died in water could have no rest until they drew another victim to their grave to replace them. She wonders, Is the water hungry or lonely that it needs the bodies of people? Is the spirit of drowning in her head? And what of her money? She sees it floating down a well and she falls after it.
Children are always standing about in the shanties. She frowns at the nearest dirt-scabbe
d urchin; he wears a ragged brown shirt and shorts. Her hatred, though it blazes from her, affects not even the air. She wants to feel his stupid filthy little face break under her punch.
“You numba fuckin’ ten,” she tells him.
“I can run,” he says. “I can run.”
“Stupid.”
“What do you want, Lan?”
“Get outta here.”
“I go, I come back.” He shrugs.
“You steal my money.”
“No.”
“Somebody numba fuckin’ ten steal my money.”
“I don’t know.”
“Bulls’it.”
“Shine GIs’ shoes. Get money. Maybe you don’t know your money.”
“I know my money. You buy me beer.”
A jeep veers into the yard, the dust of its wake continuing to billow and drift down the road, while the driver, an American in colorful civilian clothes, leaps to the ground and trots into the shanty.
“You wanta beer,” calls the babysan. “You wanta shine?”
However, the expression on the GI’s reddish face is serious and pained; he brushes past the boy, his eyes seeking and holding Lan. “Hello,” he says. Chao co, Lan.
She smiles, her head buzzing in an effort to identify this face and voice, to find a name, for she can sense the powerful feelings of fondness and familiarity he has for her. They come slanting from his eyes, across the air, to hit a blankness in her. She doesn’t know him. “Hello,” she says. “Hello, you-you.” She hates it when they arrive in civilian clothes, because the uniforms all have their names printed neatly on them, and so many of them believe their presence greatly matters to her; it is good, she knows, to call them by their names. She tries, but there is nothing she can see of him in her past.
“Lan,” he is saying, “Lan, Lan,” touching her cheek, bowing until his face is close to hers and she feels a little of the kind of intimacy he wants between them. “Listen,” he is saying, “no … can do … same-same fuck-fuck today. Maybe never again. I don’t know. You ’stand? You listen. Must go my home America. Tonight. This night. Go airplane. Mamasan me, boucoup sick. Boucoup sick. Mamasan me—she numba one. You ’stand? Maybe die. Maybe fini. Army talk me I can go my home America, talk my mamasan, no die, no fini.” In his sadness, his face is flushed and strained; his grief comes off him like heat: “Maybe come back Vietnam,” he says. “Maybe yes, maybe no. Army very crazy. Maybe talk me never come back Vietnam; I never see you. I come today talk you good-bye. Lan numba one.”
“You go America.”
“Yes. So sorry.”
“C’mon. Have Coke.”
“No.”
“Beer.”
“No.” This second denial has more volume and the swing of the head is wider. He mystifies her with his sadness, for now his eyes cloud; he seems to literally expand with some rising internal pressure he can scarcely contain. She feels he will yell or grab her. But his legs haul him backward instead. “Chao co,” he says. “Chao co, Lan.” The roaring jeep takes him, tires spinning from the muddy gravel to the road, and she is left there in the glaring, sweltering sun to care or not to care.
“GI is Lan’s servant,” says Madamne Lieu, speaking in her growling way. “Love of Lan makes the GI a servant of her pussy.”
“I don’t know him.”
“He comes here.”
“Maybe.”
“You lie.”
“No. Some babysan steal my money, Lieu.”
“Who?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know. Nothing.” Unsettled over the gnawing space in her that doesn’t fill with this strange GI’s name, she grunts and goes around the corner to the path that runs along the side of the building and into trees, a slant of dirt. At the bottom there is a plank that rises to the privy built on stilts sunk into cloudy, muddy water. All wood, it stands on its fastidious little legs as if in repugnance of the fetid water. The stilts are black and gnarled. An old woman now occupies the stall. The knob of her head wrapped in a cloth is visible above the gate that gives only slight privacy. She smiles at Lan and says the day is lovely, as her urine dribbles in the air. Hit with light, it glitters, splatters. A turd topples through the space of sky between the floor and water, where a swirling movement occurs as responding fish stir the surface. The old woman rises and descends the plank bridge, moving carefully backward on her hands and knees. “My husband,” she tells Lan, “says there was fighting and many American things that fly were knocked to the ground. The field was full of them. Like they had been thrown away and no one wanted them at all. What holds them in the sky anyway?”
Lan is staring. At the sight of the water she has been brought back to the morning memory of the dream of drowning. Her? Climbing? Slipping? Falling? Who whispers the thoughts in the brain? As if to pierce the mask of air, the fraud of light, and glimpse, truly, the spirit world—presence or absence—she squints, her head jutting forward like a chicken.
A slight breeze crosses her. Two of her four sisters died of disease when touched by an evil wind. Their swollen stomachs were like sacks of water, distended, with the worms devouring them and filling them until they were gagging, at the start of suffocation. Lan’s mother and aunt dragged up wet, squirming worms in fistfuls from the open little mouths. The dead puffy bodies, once beloved, were dropped into holes in the dirt with no ceremony.
She is on the planking now above the water, which is so grimy only faded reflections show upon it. In the hope of hearing her two dead sisters, she had listened quite closely to the air for a long time after their dying. Dark corners intrigued her. When no voices came, she thought of how the infants had said nothing in life, so perhaps their silence was natural enough. Her father’s dying was, however, another matter, for he had been loud and full of opinions and stories and poems that he sang.
Now she squats in the footrests that are on either side of the hole in the wood over the water. At the sight of his dead body, a new and unexpected longing, as vague and real as wisps of smoke, had come into her child’s mind: she hoped to gain a nearness to him that had been impossible in life; she felt a joyful expectancy. They would be in each other. Free of his labors and worries, would he not float about, hovering often at her ear? Unseen by others, overheard by no one, they would have secrets; his spirit would love her best. She had watched intently as the corpse was washed and dressed in tunic and turban. After rice was slipped in the mouth, the body was lifted to a coffin placed before the family altar. When she bowed with a cup of rice on her palms, she heard him speak, but looked to see her uncle Chie whispering to a neighbor in the corner. Worried now, she frowned and felt a little fear. But the body’s possession of the spirit continued, she knew, until the person was in the grave beneath the dirt, listening for the sound of certain prayers the family murmured in the home to call the spirit back. She looked at the body warmly and with wonder, for her father was still inside. Their praying voices would pierce the air, the dirt, his dead skin and bones, and he would hear them. Impatiently, she asked to start the prayers, a loneliness growing in her for her father. Before the burial, offerings of rice alcohol, tea, and sandalwood were made to the altar of the ancestors, where his photograph, selected and placed by her scrupulous uncle, Quach Van Khiem, stood. Her father’s expression was somber, formal yet sweet. Imitating the ritual procedures of the professional pallbearers, relatives and friends, all under the guidance of Uncle Khiem, formed and conducted the procession to the grave. Clapping sticks of wood signaled the various movements of the cortege. Her uncles Khiem and Chie carried a miniature altar upon which lay the photograph of her father amid flowers, altar tablets, and burning sticks of joss. Paper money blew about their feet like flowers. Upon completion of the ceremony beside the grave, the family hurried home to say the prayers that would help his soul rise from the grave and fly to the candlelit air of the altar, where the photograph waited, inviting him to return. Lan yearned for the prayers to begin and listened with tightly shut eyes once they did. B
ut with her heart sore and her patience worn raw she could not stay; she ran back to the forest grave site. She would be the first to greet her father. Four young men were drinking tea and wine while hauling about the dirt that would fill the hole. Seeing her arrive, one of them said, “Quach Ngoc Lan is happy at her father’s death.” She begged them to hurry with their task and, insolently, they slowed their pace. Weeping, she threatened to tell the village chief they were not doing their job. In response, two of them flopped down to rest, while the second pair mockingly tossed clumps of dirt at her. There was little pain in the blows, but as the boys bumped and stained her, the dread that came into her bones made the tears stop and she turned away. She knew suddenly how she would sit in the moonless dark of that night in silence beside the unmoving dirt of her father’s grave and the only voice in her head or the air would be her own. For hours the dirt would have covered him, and the prayers, like a drumming of rain, would have run in her head. Where was he? Where? Beside her she would see grass, overhead the sky, all around her trees.
Now, squatting in the privy, she wonders if people and their lives are not like the waste of her body falling through the air to the water, disappearing.
And curiously mixing in her mind, an image beneath an image, the apparition of a child drifts out from a watery gray, a boy who steals, the one who robbed from her. As she descends the planking, he swims forward from some faraway place, and with stealth, he creeps on the path beside the shanty. Cunningly, he peeks in the window to discover some unwatched item of value. She is immobile now on the sloping hillside. She will stop him. Yes. A rat of selfishness absorbed only in himself and what he wants, this boy is a devil. On a table inside sits her purse. His arm slowly moves. She will get him; she will trick him. Reaching as he reaches, her hands will close in his hair. Yelling, he will try to run. Screaming, scolding, she will throw him against the wall, punching, slapping, knocking him down. From the dirt, he will cry as she stomps on his hands. No more stealing. No more. Her kicking feet will break him, stomp him, scrape and bruise his heart. She will squeeze his little prick and balls, that funny little sack. What an agony he will feel. What a howling his little voice will make. What a deserved pain.