by Paul Yoon
They walked around a bomb crater in the mountain path, then past a man breaking down the wreckage of a hut to use for fire. He nodded to them, and they kept going, heading toward the clearing where they had put up the family. Out of habit, Auntie and Touby kept in the shade. The trees flanking them were no longer as verdant as they once were, but they provided shelter and, in case there were more airplanes, they were thick enough for the people here to be difficult to spot.
They relocated often, or as often as they could, but they had been situated in this abandoned village for a few months now. They ran way stations for refugees and defectors heading into Thailand. There were six of them living in the remaining huts and they took turns heading down, meeting whoever had come with enough money, which they split with the boatman, and brought them here to spend the night. Then they guided them to the river, to a bend where they had figured out the minutes between the boat patrols, just long enough for a crossing.
Their station wasn’t the only one. There were several different ones scattered about, though she didn’t know where; it was better that way. The separate teams communicated through couriers like Touby, who trekked across the maze of old mountain passages to send and receive a message or trade in supplies.
Auntie and Touby had been walking in silence toward the clearing, Auntie tracking the call of a bird, when she turned to him and said, “Tell me where they are now.”
“Northeast,” Touby said. “Close to Vietnam.”
“Are they alive?”
“Yes.”
“In a prison?”
“It looks like an old factory,” Touby said. “They built cells inside. Fifty, perhaps. More.”
“Have they been there this whole time?”
“We think so. Yes.”
“What is happening to them?”
When Touby didn’t respond, Auntie stopped. They were on the side of the path, near a hut in front of which two Hmong women were unpacking and sorting the food and supplies Touby had brought with him. Auntie didn’t look at them, but kept her eyes fixed on Touby, who wouldn’t look back at her. This man who was almost ten years older than she was suddenly, briefly, looked like a child clutching the strap of a toy gun, unsure of where to place his hands.
“Tell me,” she said.
“Every day, they are brought to a room. Separately.”
“Describe the room. Can you?”
“It is in the northwest corner. Ground floor. There is one high window near the ceiling. A table at the center. Steel. Two chairs on either side. Steel as well. Cuffs chained to the table. Below the table, on the floor, is a drain.”
“A drain?”
“Yes.”
She paused, considering everything Touby had said. “Who is in the room?”
“The interrogator. Two other men. Always behind the prisoner. Three total.”
“Tell me about the interrogator.”
“He served in Vietnam for a while. He came over and joined the Pathet Lao.”
“So he’s…”
“Yes, Auntie. He’s good at this.”
The interrogator would first be asking Prany and Vang about the CIA, she thought. Then, when they didn’t know the answer—and they didn’t—he would ask them about where the Hmong were. And then from there he would move on to her, and people like her. Which was what the interrogator and the Pathet Lao wanted to know all along. Vang and Prany wouldn’t know that either. But that would be how she would have done it, Auntie thought, if she were interrogating them.
Four years. They had been in there already for four years.
“What has this man done to them so far?”
Touby shook his head. He didn’t know, or he didn’t know anyone who was sure. He said the younger one had lost the use of one of his hands. That was all he had heard.
“Prany.”
“Yes. Him. It’s because of the way he is working in the fields, using only one hand. They are making all of them farm and grow food. Food they aren’t allowed to eat.”
“Prany already knows how to farm,” Auntie said. “Do you remember him?”
“I remember. Quick on the trails.”
“Yes. He is very quick. Light-footed. I bet he still is. I love his smile. The only moment when his face is open. Look. I wrinkled the shirt. You never told me whether you like it.”
She lifted it up for him.
“Auntie.”
She had lost the thread of what she was going to say next. She shut her eyes and leaned up slightly to enter a slim path of sun. She heard that bird again, then the voices of boxes and women, and she thought of Vang’s arms reaching over the wall toward her, the street noises below, and the call of Vang’s father telling him to come down and study.
“Are they together?” Auntie said.
“Yes,” Touby said. “They share a cell.”
At least there was that. She went on, her eyes still shut: “In that room. The northwest room. Can we get to them through the drain? Or the window?”
“No. Too small. Too narrow.”
“What is the material of the walls?”
“Concrete. Everywhere.”
She opened her eyes. “Can we get to them?”
There wasn’t time for Touby to answer. They heard a commotion coming from the clearing. Touby lifted the rifle off his shoulder and passed Auntie the pistol. The two women who had been unpacking the food fell in line with them and they headed down the path.
The family they had picked up was all standing in the clearing. The father was pulling his child toward the start of the woods while the boy’s mother—the man’s wife—was pulling the same boy in the opposite direction back toward the hut where Auntie had put them. Any harder and one of the parents was going to pop the child’s shoulder.
The father was yelling. He said his brother was right, that this was a trick, that they weren’t going anywhere but a prison, and that they were leaving now. Auntie quickly scanned the grounds. They had come with the father’s brother, but he was nowhere to be seen. The mother was pulling her son and yelling at her husband to stop.
One of the women who had come with Auntie came back from inspecting the nearby hut and said into Auntie’s ear that the brother was gone. Then she moved slowly in a circle on Auntie’s left, sideways, right foot past her left. Touby was slowly moving in the opposite direction, rifle raised, away from the man, but also looking for a clear shot if it came to that. Noticing the rifle, the boy, perhaps seven, in the middle of all this, who had been silent the whole time, immobile and confused and in pain from the pulling, began to cry.
Auntie, who had not lifted her pistol, stepped forward. In that moment, the mother’s grip on her son slipped—Good, Auntie thought—and the boy was pulled toward his father. Then the father spun the boy around in front of him and brought his arms, viselike, around the boy’s head and began stepping back.
Auntie had often seen this, a man’s illogical, panic-driven decision, if one were to call it that, to threaten strangers with the remote possibility of harming what he cherished the most. It was an ineffable curiosity. What wasn’t was that the child’s face was now turning a darker color as his ankles dragged along the dirt, backward.
Ten steps before they were in the woods.
“I’m better than some trick,” the father yelled.
“I know it,” Auntie said. Then, with her arms spread, she lowered her pistol onto the ground. She told the others to stop. She kept stepping forward, slowly, and this time the father didn’t step back, but stayed where he was. She could hear the mother weeping somewhere behind her. She wanted to hear that bird one more time.
“We aren’t forcing you to stay,” Auntie said. “You can go. You can go anywhere you’d like. This isn’t a trick. But please. Please. Leave the child alone.”
“I’m better than all of you,” the father said.
“Yes, you are.”
“Better than all of this. What is this exactly? Charity? Does my losing everything make you feel better?
Look at yourselves. You are living like thieves. I’m no coward. I don’t run away.”
Auntie, still stepping closer to him, said, “Look down at what you are doing to your child.”
He had not moved. Auntie was standing in front of him now. With her arms still spread out, she lowered herself onto her knees.
“I’m not a coward,” the father said. “I don’t run away.”
And then he paused and finally looked down. The boy’s face had gone a bright dark. There was snot dripping down his nose onto his father’s forearm. Auntie held her breath. With her middle finger she felt for the needle in her shirt cuff. She exhaled and breathed again. Then she changed her mind, flicked open her pocketknife with her thumb, reached around the man’s legs, and sliced his calf quickly, and deeply.
It happened so fast the man didn’t realize at first if anything had, in fact, happened. He reacted to it as though a bird had passed low against his legs, its wing brushing him, but in that moment, as his expression held that surprise, almost like wonder, he released the boy, and at once Touby and the woman rushed forward and pinned the father down to the ground.
Auntie checked on the boy. She found his pulse as the color of his face returned. She left him to the mother and grabbed the shirt with the new buttons she had dropped and tore it into strips. Then she moved to the man whose leg was bleeding heavily, the pant leg dark and damp, the ground below, too.
“It looks worse than it is,” she said, tying his calf up. “It’s just a flesh wound. You’ll be fine.”
The father, who had remained lying on the ground, had become impossibly quiet. There was nothing in his eyes. Kneeling over him, Auntie reached for his shoulder and held him like this, briefly.
“I promise,” Auntie said. “I will get you across.”
Then she stood and walked away from the clearing. She walked back down the path toward the boxes that were half unpacked and stood among them, catching her breath. She folded her knife, shut her eyes, and leaned into the morning light again.
What was it that she had been thinking of? Something Vang had said years ago. How sometimes it was necessary to distract a patient from their pain with another, smaller, more focused pain.
She stepped into the sun. She was back by the rooftop wall again. The street noises and the poppy flowers. Vang standing up and reaching over. This future doctor who used to say that in another life, if he were an orphan, he would be a concert pianist. That she could be his violinist, which always made her laugh; she knew no instruments.
Just the voice of that young boy as the colors of the broken glass on top of the wall played against his wrists.
* * *
Auntie was startled awake sometime in the middle of the night. She reached for her pistol and then in the silence of the hut recognized that it had been the push of a dream. Her throat was raw; she was starving. When a shadow passed outside the door, she got up to find Touby sitting on one of the bucket steps, still carrying his rifle.
“Aren’t you on shift?” she said.
He was supposed to be making his rounds. They took turns with that, too. She had no idea what time it was, but the moon was full and everything around them was clear. It was cooler, almost cold tonight, and she thought perhaps that was why his hand was trembling, though when she reached for the tin cup he was holding, she saw that he was warm.
“You didn’t have to do that,” he said.
She took the cup and she sat with him.
“Do what?”
“Cut him.”
“Your bullet would have been worse,” she said, but he didn’t go on.
Auntie drank what was left in the cup. It was tea that had come in with the shipment. Warm tea.
“Did I do anything in my sleep?” she said. “Could you hear?”
He didn’t answer. The shadow of some small animal—how lovely it was to see an animal—scurried across the front of the hut into the woods. Otherwise, there was again that silence.
“I always wondered if I did. Whether I move or say something while I dream. My body here and my mind somewhere else. Whether that is what startles me awake. Myself.”
“I don’t think I can do this anymore,” Touby said.
He was staring out at the moonlight on the ground. She thought he was thinking of his son, but she wondered if it was something else entirely. They had been working together for longer, it seemed, than she had lived next door to Vang. She could no longer imagine the days without him, though she knew of course that there would eventually be such days.
“You did well today,” Auntie said. “The food. The supplies. You did really well. Now finish your shift. And leave tomorrow. Go find your son. Tell him whatever it is he needs to hear and whatever it is you need to say. Then come back.”
She gave him the cup and headed down the path they had been on earlier. She passed a stack of firewood and the bomb crater where there was a faint reflection at the bottom of it. And then she walked past the hut where the two Hmong women were staying, where the boxes had been unpacked, the food and the supplies stored away.
In the day’s disturbance, she had forgotten to pick up the rest of the shirt. No one else had either. It was still there in the clearing, near the border to the woods, a pale mound, like moss, on top of the tree stump where she had thrown it. Nearby, the family was asleep in the hut. She almost checked in on them but crossed the clearing instead, leaving the shirt where it was, and entered the woods. She went far enough so that she could see the valley and, in the clear night, the ruin of an abandoned landscape far below.
She scanned the distance, catching the occasional sweep of a patrol light on a far road. When the light went away, she went back to the shirt, unwearable now, and cut off all of its buttons, which she returned to her pouch. Then, using what was left of the shirt, she wiped the surface of the tree stump, remembering the miracle of having a chicken one day, years ago, and how she had beheaded it, plucked its feathers, and gutted it. And how she had found Prany there the next day, sitting on the ground, his head on that same stump, looking up. How much that had stilled her.
She thought of that northwest room again.
He and Vang had arrived together one day at her camp, unexpectedly. She had been certain that they had already fled to France. When she saw Vang, she had rushed to him, fighting, for an instant, the joy that he hadn’t. He and Prany had missed their helicopter. For months at that camp, they didn’t speak. And for months, she didn’t know why. Then she did. Vang waking her in the middle of the night in the hut they shared, his hand pressed over her mouth as he told her to shut up, to stop talking in her sleep. And then, as quickly as a rainstorm, the doctor told her about the accident, about how Prany had turned around, ignoring the pleas of the people already in the helicopter, and gone back for them. Then Vang mentioned Prany’s sister, began to hyperventilate, and wept.
It was sometime after this that he and Prany began to talk again. She didn’t know the reason for it. If there was a reason. Perhaps in their exhaustion and hunger and their constant hiding, they had erased themselves so completely they had become strangers meeting for the first time.
But she found them one day arguing over who could better carry the supplies a courier had smuggled in. For a while, she walked with them on the narrow but bright mountain road that would lead them to the community that had temporarily become theirs. They were alone, the three of them. Perhaps for the first time. The sky was quiet. As she watched the trees above them sway, she almost forgot where they were and what they were doing. Vang’s glasses slipped down his nose, and before she could say something, Prany reached over and used his knuckle to push them back up.
* * *
Before dawn, they guided the family down to the Mekong River. Auntie, one of the Hmong women, and Touby. Auntie was in the back and Touby led. Touby was carrying a rucksack with a half day’s worth of supplies for himself and the family. After the crossing, they would have to hike for two hours to the Thai border, where someone would
be waiting for them.
In that paling dark, it took an hour for them to descend the mountain. When they could hear the current of the river, they stopped. They stayed in the forest off the path until a patrol boat sped by, the light panning the banks. As soon as it rounded the bend, they left the shelter of the trees, hurrying to the water, where an old man was waiting for them behind a wall of branches set up on the bank, cupping his cigarette so that the glow of it wasn’t visible.
“Five minutes,” he said.
They all helped remove the branches to reveal the motorized raft that looked ancient, a portion of it made up of rusty shell casings strapped together.
“Any day this will go,” Auntie said in a whisper to him, and he took a drag and said in a whisper back, “Let’s hope not today, then. Four minutes.”
The family got on first. The father, his leg bandaged, looked back at her once, briefly, and nodded. Then Touby turned to her and smiled.
“Not once,” he said. “Not once have you gone across. And not once, not all this time, have you ever told me your name.”
Auntie tapped her thigh. “You never asked,” she said.
Touby laughed quietly, tracking the current of the dark, wide river. In the predawn, he was a shadow in her periphery.
“Three minutes,” the boatman said.
“I’ll tell you the next time we see each other,” Auntie said.
They had not spoken about the night before and she knew they wouldn’t. They had not spoken further about that northwest corner room either. She watched as Touby climbed down the bank and stepped on. As soon as he did, the boatman pushed the raft away with a pole and started the motor.
Two minutes.
The raft swayed from the weight of the passengers, slow to move, but found its balance and soon they were crossing. It moved more quickly than she expected it to. It always did. Yet she wished in that moment that there was a drain on the bottom of the river. That all that water would go so that they could simply walk. It was a silly thought, a child’s thought, but watching the raft head out farther, she wished it anyway. A drain.