Fire Summer

by Thuy Da Lam

  When she embraced the collective dream of the exiles, she felt she had made the right decision: to help the Coalition contact her great-aunt, a former military commander the expatriates trusted was capable of instigating insurgency in the Central Highlands. Maia had not met her maternal grandmother’s sister, but her face had been etched indelibly on her mind. From an old newspaper clip, Great-Aunt Tien gazed out—an open smile, wild long hair, and skin the color of her black clothes. Recently released from reeducation camp, E. Tien was the diasporic hope for a democratic government and repatriation. Whereabouts unknown. Locate her. Update her on the news from the Little Saigon headquarters and its alliance with those along the border of Vietnam and Cambodia. Contact made, Maia’s mission would be complete.

  A Glorious Return

  WEST OF VIETNAM’S Central Highlands, somewhere between the Ratanakiri and Mondulkiri provinces, the early monsoon flooded the hilly terrain. Between the Sesan and Srepok rivers, red soil surged in streams, washing out the trails of men who now huddled in a thatched-roof makeshift on bamboo stilts. Through the breaks in the green canopy, they could glimpse the sky and imagine a glorious return.

  “Eh, Vinnie!” Lee called from the hut. “Come eat.” Lee stepped out on the veranda as rain sluiced off the peaked roof onto the flowing land. The aroma of charred kouprey and manioc diffused into the rain-soaked jungle. Lee removed his narrow-framed glasses and wiped the lenses on his peasant pajamas, a size too small and ill fit for his husky build. When he returned the glasses to his eyes, he peered again into the vaporous night.

  Vinnie Huynh, outstretched on an old frayed hammock knotted from parachute nylon and strung from tree branches, chanted a bastardized “Katyusha” deliriously. The rain splashed on his pale ghostly face, drenched his ripped Levi’s and Ranchero Stars and Stripes boots, tapped and bounced off the M-16 on his chest.

  “Thằng ngu dại,” Lee muttered and limped into the downpour in blackened US Army boots. Vinnie’s naiveté reminded Lee of his own youth before the draft more than two decades ago. Dead of pneumonia before you make good with karma, Lee’s old tutu would have said. He made a futile effort to wring the cold rain from his overgrown hair.

  Lee kept a hand on Vinnie’s shoulder as they felt their way across the flooded campground. They stepped around bomb craters that overflowed like giant goblets of burgundy toasting the pouring sky. A Russian Minsk leaned against the crater’s edge where Vinnie had crashed and bathed the morning of his arrival.

  “Wait! My wheels.” Vinnie broke free from his companion’s grip and waded toward the motorcycle, tugging the M-16 through the red muddy water.

  “Leave it. And return the rifle to the cave.”

  The men had never remained at one spot for long, but when they discovered a womb-like tunnel in the belly of the Annamite Range, they decided to camp there for the monsoon season. They buried the bones they found in the cave and made offerings, asking permission of the old dead to use the area as an ammunition depot. Outside the cave, they erected their shelters on bamboo stilts.

  “Let me carry this,” Vinnie said, clutching the rifle close to his chest. “I’ll guard us against spies, VCs, wild beasts—” He stopped and then whispered, “Did you just see that?” He slowly aimed the M-16 at the shadow beyond the bamboo thicket. Before Lee could stop him, Vinnie squeezed the trigger.

  The gunshots shattered the lulling pitter-patter of rain. Men bolted from the thatched hut with weapons in hand. Some fled to the ammunition depot while others dove into the jungle.

  “Bravo! Bravo!” A pair of crippled hands clapped from the window where yellow lantern light illuminated the drizzling night. The paralyzed cook was the only one of twelve who did not participate in drills or emergencies. “Another kouprey?” Cook Cu asked. “Snakes, lizards, geckos—delicacies for my moonshine?”

  A voice came from the cave. “What did he hit?”

  “Nothing,” answered a man in a bush.

  “The kid’s trigger-happy,” concluded another behind a rock.

  Near the bamboo thicket, they found Kai, a darkskinned waif, who was foraging for wild berries and mushrooms. He seemed unrattled. The youngest of the group, Kai carried at his side a long machete he used to clear paths and mark trails through the dense jungle.

  The men returned to the shelter. That was the second time Vinnie startled them. Just a week earlier, he roared unexpectedly into camp on the Minsk. His appearance and knowledge of their location made them uneasy, but they believed him when he said he was sent from America. He had come via Thailand, crossing at Poipet into Cambodia, driving eastward nonstop for two days. Now, he opened fire at the slightest shadow.

  After the commotion, the men ate and drank heartily. A bottle of Jack Daniel’s, packs of unfiltered Camels, and news from the Little Saigon headquarters lifted their spirits in welcoming the Year of the Goat. More than two decades in the jungle had blurred their military ranks, national allegiances, and vital statistics. Except for the bald ailing cook and young boy, the men’s features—like those of Lee Hakaku Boyden’s—were buried under shrouds of dark overgrown hair. Sometime during the Second Indochina War, the loose band of twelve had formed. They drifted back and forth across the border of Vietnam and Cambodia, ghostly vagabonds roaming a wasteland, not sure whether they were dead or alive.

  “They sent a girl?” Cook Cu asked, his atrophied legs crossing stiffly on the kouprey hide. Before the rain, he had sprawled out on the mossy jungle floor beneath the burgeoning evergreens where the B-52s had failed to hit. “This is our home now,” he had told Kai, pointing to a spot beneath a creaking pine where they could see the mountain ridge trailing the sky. “When the wind shakes the pine, the roots sway like the rocking of a sampan drifting on the Perfume River of the old imperial city.” The paralyzed cook asked Kai to mark the gravesites beside the tilting pine.

  “They’re sending a girl,” Vinnie said.

  “Girls are good for some things.”

  The men chuckled and sipped their rice whiskey, reveling in the warmth that spread through their bodies. As the night fell, the rain pitter-pattered and the wind gushed through the cracks; they felt their isolation. They thought of their homes and the women from past lives and wondered what had happened.

  Even young Kai looked momentarily lost. After a hamlet on the outskirts of the Central Highlands was burned to the ground, Lee had found a scorched child. He dropped the things he carried, tucked the dark waif into his cut-up duffel bag, and walked westward into the jungle of Cambodia. The child was named Kai for the cool peaceful sea that Lee remembered of his own home on a far-off island in the Pacific. More than any other member, Kai belonged to the wilderness, to the perpetual cycle of destruction and renewal, yet at times, his innocent eyes seemed to long for permanence, a place to call home.

  “Who’s the girl?”

  “A decoy,” Vinnie said.

  The jungle moonshine tasted grainy and bittersweet as he recalled how customs agents had interrogated him and stopped his physical entry at Tan Son Nhat International Airport, denying his return to the land of his origin.

  The Other Side

  THE WOMAN HITCHED the weight of the cripple up on her back. She moved slowly though he was only skin and bones. The straps of the red basket cut into her forearm, and the glass jars and bottles knocked against each other, sloshing water full of debris from the South China Sea.

  I should throw them all away, she said to herself. What does it matter now?

  His spirit seemed heavier than his ashes, which she had placed in a sealed jar before the failed escape. The nuns at Ox Pagoda had warned against crossing the ocean with human remains, but it was so her husband would have his kid brother with him. The woman continued down the sandy footpath with the spirit of her crippled brother-in-law on her back.

  “Put me down,” he wheezed again.

  “And leave you in the middle of the road?”

  “You could have left me on the back beach with those chess players. They
would have given me a drink.”

  “Drink-drink-drink,” she scolded him. “Chết là phải!”

  “Death is contentment.” His eyes closed halfway, his bony chin rode on her shoulder, and his shaved head bobbed as she plodded on. “I was contentedly dead before you brought me along in your jar.”

  “You wanted to see America.”

  “When I was alive!”

  Her thin back curved under his weight, and his twisted feet dragged on the ground, but she kept treading as if they were still at sea. When the currents had returned her to the back beach of Vung Tau, she found her brother-in-law Hai washed ashore beside her. Without a word, she hoisted him onto her back, looped the handles of the basket of what remained around her arm, and trudged off over the sand where beachgoers lounged, oblivious under the sun.

  “Steeped in moonshine, I was,” Hai croaked. “Now an anchovy in brine, a cup of rice wine would be fine, oh fine.”

  “Have you seen a shuttle to Saigon?”

  “Why don’t you leave me here?” He lifted his head. “Look, over there.”

  In the distance, they could see a roadside café—a broken glass case of assorted cigarette cartons, beer cans, and Coca-Cola and Orange Cream bottles. A blue-and-yellow striped umbrella shaded a girl lazing in a hammock and two men sitting on low wooden stools.

  The woman stopped to hike Hai up on her back. “Về nhà rồi tính.”

  “Home?” He chuckled dryly. “By now our house’s been confiscated. You’d be thrown back in jail. No, no, no. A drink, I need a drink.”

  When they neared the café, their nostrils were stung by smoke, gasoline, and gunpowder, and their throats tightened. They realized the two men were teenagers in scorched peasant rags. Hai’s knobby fingers dug into her collarbones. “Don’t stop. Walk faster.”

  The woman lowered her head and moved as quickly as she could, the jars and bottles clinking loudly in her basket, water dripping.

  “Set him down and rest,” one of the boys called in a northern voice.

  The woman glanced up and saw eyes squinting at her from a burned face.

  “Nhìn thấy hãi cơ?” the boy asked. His mouth opened wide and eyes squeezed shut as if laughing. “You look creepy, too.”

  “Don’t listen,” Hai whispered. “You’re just a little green and bloated.”

  She stopped before the two boys. “Does the bus to Saigon pass through here?”

  “A jitney comes at nightfall,” the burned face replied. “We’re going to Ho Chi Minh City to catch the train north to be home for Tết.”

  “Is it Tết already?”

  “Four more days ’til the Year of the Rooster,” his friend said. He was missing a right arm and part of his upper torso.

  “It’s February 1981!” Hai croaked, calculating aloud the number of days that they had been at sea. “Twenty in December . . . thirty-one in January . . . Fifty-one. We’ve been gone for almost two months!”

  “Let him rest against here,” the boys said.

  They lifted Hai off her back and propped him up amid a pile of dried coconut husks. The one with the hole in his chest lit a cigarette and tucked it between Hai’s parched lips. The burned face dug two paper coins from his ragged pants pocket, held them up to his squint, and offered to buy them drinks.

  “How far did you get?” the vendor asked. Her thick make-up did not mask her swollen pale skin but made her appear like a character from a cải lương folk opera.

  “Bidon Isle,” Hai said, his gnarled fingers clutching a Bia Saigon. “Everyone dove for it. My sister-in-law jumped in. People swam, swam, and swam.” He stopped mid-story. The xe lam arrived at nightfall, jam-packed with riders and tilting to one side from the unbalanced load on its roof. The three-wheeled jitney skidded to a stop, and the driver hobbled from the cab to the rear to shove the passengers further into the overcrowded compartment, forcing the mass of bodies to bulge through the side openings. He nudged the woman onto a stranger’s lap while pulling at her basket, a momentary tug-of-war until she clasped the basket to her chest and he let go.

  “Strap the cripple to the roof,” he ordered.

  Ignoring the driver, the two boys from the North stuffed Hai into the passengers’ compartment, his bony limbs bending as he folded into the gaps between intertwined bodies. The boys wedged their feet onto the flimsy back step and clung onto the roof’s edge. When the overloaded vehicle sputtered and then accelerated, the boy with one arm was blown off-balance, but he quickly steadied himself. The wind howled through the hole in his chest and filled the woman with emptiness as vast as the sea. The jitney careened through the night toward the lights of Ho Chi Minh City.

  When the jitney stopped at the night market where peddlers lined the alleyway leading to her home, the woman smelled sundried anchovies, crispy fried Chinese crullers, and freshly baked French baguettes. There was something she had not noticed before—the earthen odor of oxen in the humid heat after the afternoon rain. She realized then why the neighborhood was called Ox Alley though they were long gone by the time her husband relocated her family from the Central Highlands to the southern capital one fiery summer.

  The trail of pale lantern lights, flickering fireflies in the night, beckoned the northern boys to disembark. They untangled Hai from the ball of knotted bodies and insisted on carrying him home. The cripple, flanked by two teenagers to whom he promised the barrel of rice moonshine he had distilled, and the woman with the basket full of ocean debris, all merged into the market where people spoke an unrecognized language. When the woman strained her ears to listen, she caught distinct phrases she knew, interwoven with other familiar yet incomprehensible tongues. People moved side-by-side, crossing into each other’s path, overlapping like a palimpsest. It occurred to her that now she could see her hairstylist friend. She told Hai and the boys to go ahead home.

  At the entrance to Phoenix Salon, the woman called out to her friend, “Đẹp ghê ta!”

  “Ghê là đúng,” Phuong replied and lifted her long side-swept bangs to reveal a deep gash across her forehead. She rolled up a pants leg to expose another scar on her knee.

  The woman said, “I should’ve taken my own advice and jumped off the train with you.” She eased into a chair and leaned her head back into the basin.

  “What’s the story with you and the warden?” Phuong asked.

  “I should’ve learned how to swim.” The woman sighed, welcoming the cool water on her dry, itchy scalp. “Or at least brought a life jacket.”

  “Bồ kết shampoo?”

  “Who would have thought? You bring pictures of your family, you bring gold leaves sewn in your hems, and you bring ashes—”

  “Your brother-in-law Hai’s ashes?”

  “In an old jar of mắm cá lóc in this shopping basket.” She laughed, remembering Hai’s objection to the smell of fermented snakehead. “We were almost there.”

  “It’s fate.”

  “Is it my fate to be married at sixteen? What would life have been if I were a young girl or an old woman when the North came south? But I was twenty-five. A husband and a daughter one day, and the next, they’re halfway across the world. My happiest years were in prison. Did I tell you?”

  “What’s the story with you and the warden?” Phuong asked again.

  “You just accept. Who would have thought? The currents didn’t even take us to the other side.”

  Winter Night Café

  AS NIGHT FELL over Ho Chi Minh City, the neon pink sign glowed: WINTER NIGHT CAFÉ. The xích lô had left Maia and JP in front of the garden café, where white plastic chairs and round tables were strewn around a stage under a sprawling starfruit tree. A skeletal kitten slinked through the Ochna integerrima hedge. Its mouth opened mutely.

  “Your grandmother lives here?” JP asked.

  Maia checked the address on the envelope and looked for a street number on the entrance. The wooden gate was a familiar sight though freshly painted in a different color. The hoàng mai hedge in su
mmer bloom with bright red sepals and dark glossy berries was as she remembered. On stage, a girl in black tights crooned “Unforgettable” as the patrons smoked and sipped on iced café au lait.

  “Here, Pōpoki,” JP called, and the scrawny orange stray tottered over. When he picked it up and scratched under its chin, it gazed at him fixedly with pale yellow eyes. “Look,” JP said. “The little fella has a protruding belly button.”

  They entered the outdoor café, the kitten tottering behind. They sat at a peripheral table. The kitten clambered up onto JP’s lap and curled into a spiny orange ball.

  The girl in black tights came over and smiled broadly at JP. “Hi, Big Guy! My name is Na. Bia Saigon? Bia Hơi? Bia Ôm?”

  When Na returned with a Saigon beer and càphê sữa đá, JP invited her to join them. Na plopped into the chair beside JP and immediately intrigued him with her stories. Though her oblique black eyes, long wavy hair, and dark skin alluded to her mixed parentage, she did not speak of it.

  Maia observed the waning gibbous moon through the starfruit tree and thought of her mission.

  “Time to visit family and resolve whatever questions you might have.” The Independent Vietnam Coalition had agreed.

  “I just have my grandmother’s last letter,” she had said.

  The address was the only shred of evidence that linked her to the past. A flimsy, inconsequential piece of information she was allowed to carry with her. It was an address of a maternal grandmother she barely knew, an address the Coalition had thought no longer existed.

  “Whatever you do,” the Coalition instructed, “be at the foot of the Vong Phu Mountain on the first night of the full moon.”

  A shooting star flashed across the sky. Maia heard faint laughter and was reminded of her childhood when she had climbed the tree with the neighborhood kids. They would squeeze onto the narrow plank wedged between the V-shaped trunk, scared and exhilarated at the height and closeness to the sweet, tangy starfruit.