by Peter May
‘Why are we in Vietnam?’
McCue breathed a lungful of smoke into the darkness. ‘She reckons we can make Long Xuyen in a couple of days. I know a guy there, or did, if he’s still alive. Ethnic Chinese. Hated the Viets. I was stationed there for a couple of months. He and I played a lot of cards together, drank a lot of whisky, lost a lot of money. It’s not so far from there to Rach Gia, on the coast. I thought maybe he could help.’
Elliot laughed. The easy laugh of one who will never have to face the problem, of one suddenly free to no longer care. ‘What are you going to do, Billy? Just waltz into town, say “Hi, remember me?” Five years since the Yanks pulled out. Not many white faces around these days, I’ll bet.’
‘A few Russians, though.’ Elliot heard him grin in the dark. ‘That’d be some irony.’
‘Know any Russian?’
‘Da svedanya.’ He paused. ‘You?’
‘Skajitay pojalsta gdyeh astanavlivayetsya avtobus numer adin.’
‘Shit, I’m impressed. What the fuck does that mean?’
‘Excuse me, please, where does the number one bus stop?’’
It was the first time Elliot could remember hearing McCue laugh. ‘Hey, Elliot, I never knew you had a sense of humour.’
Elliot let his eyes close. The mere act of talking had tired him.
He was not sure if he had slept for any length of time, or merely dozed for a moment, before he next heard McCue’s voice. But it came to him as if in a dream and he had to force his eyes open. There was the faintest grey light around them, and McCue was smoking another cigarette. ‘What? What did you say?’
‘I said quit snoring. I can’t get to sleep, and they can hear you in Chau Doc.’
‘Give me a cigarette.’
McCue lit him one and Elliot took it in his right hand. There was a foul taste in his mouth again. He said, ‘Who’s on watch?’
‘The boy. I done my stint. It’ll be dawn soon, then we’ll start the motor and get moving.’ He shifted to straighten a cramped knee.
Elliot took several draws on his cigarette. ‘I suppose I should thank you.’
‘What for?’
‘My life.’
‘Nothing to do with me. It was the girl. Changed your blankets when they was wet with you sweating, laying cold cloth on your forehead to stop you burning up, cleaning and changing your dressings. You’d think she really cared for you. Can’t think why.’
‘I dreamed I slept with her.’
‘No dream, pal. When you was shivering your life away, she just stripped off, and wrapped herself up in the blankets with you, to stop you freezing to death. I can’t believe these people. You treat them like shit, and they return it with kindness.’
Elliot was pricked by irritation. ‘I don’t need their kindness!’
‘Why? Afraid you might feel you owe ’em something? ’Cause you do. Your life.’
‘Who needs it?’
‘You, presumably. I mean, you was busy thanking me for it just a minute ago.’
‘I was being polite,’ Elliot said. He felt McCue’s eyes on him without having to turn to see them.
‘How come you never told me Mikey had cancer?’ There was no change of tone, yet the question was laden with accusation.
‘He didn’t want me to. I only found out by chance. He didn’t want anyone’s pity.’
‘I mean after you’d shot him.’ There was an edge there now.
‘There didn’t seem any point. Would it have made a difference?’
‘To me, yes.’
They heard, from the distant bank, the first cawing of tropical birds as the sky lightened.
‘You know, I can’t figure you, Elliot. It’s like you want to be hated.’
‘Maybe I deserve to be.’ He saw that his cigarette had burned down to the filter. ‘Get rid of that for me, would you.’ McCue took it and stubbed it out in the bottom of the sampan.
‘What are you talking about?’
Elliot turned his head and their eyes made contact. ‘You know what I’m talking about, Billy. People like you and me, we do what we do because we know something about ourselves that most people never do.’ McCue’s eyes flickered away in discomfort. ‘We’ve all been face to face with the other side, the dark side. Of ourselves. You know it, don’t you? The place you keep all the nasty things you’ve done or thought, that little seed of evil that’s in us all. Only we let it grow, didn’t we? Till it choked all the good in us, all the love. I mean, all that shit about duty and honour. You stop believing in that pretty quick when it’s kill or be killed. They know that, the ones who send you out there. They know that war is fuelled by evil, and they reward it with medals and citations. Christ, I mean how else are they going to persuade kids to go on killing each other day after day? And when the dark side takes over, how else are any of us going to excuse it?’
The brief burst of passion in him was snuffed out by fatigue. He lay gasping for breath.
McCue was staring down at his hands. He was silent for a long time. When he spoke it was in a monotone. ‘I had a puppy once. In Nam. Inherited it from this kid that got blown away by a frag grenade. I only had the mutt a few days. But I was pretty sore inside. Hurting. Angry. He’d been my buddy, that kid. I never made the same mistake again. That’s why I volunteered for the Rats. Make no friends, lose no friends.
‘So, anyway, they gave me his puppy. And I would take it and just sort of squeeze it till it yelped, or twist its paw till it would try to bite me. Shit, somebody or something had to suffer for all that pain, and it was going to be that fucking puppy.’ He shook his head. ‘I grew up on a farm, Elliot. Never hurt an animal in my life. But I was hurting that dog, and suddenly I knew it was in me. I got scared and gave it away, ’cause I knew I was gonna kill it.’ He paused to light another cigarette. ‘Maybe I should have. Maybe I wouldn’t have done all the other things I done.’ He glanced self-consciously at Elliot. ‘What did you do that was so bad?’ It was more a defence than a question.
‘Killed a lot of women and children.’
‘All that Aden shit? Everybody knows about that. You didn’t know they was there. You were just some kind of scapegoat, right?’
Elliot shook his head. ‘I knew they were there, alright. They were waving a white flag, as if that somehow wiped the slate clean. I had friends cut to pieces all around me. We were supposed to be protecting these people and they were feeding the enemy every damn move. I was mad. I was so mad I just didn’t care any more. I didn’t fire the first shot. But I still pulled the trigger. I was the officer, I could have stopped it. I was more guilty.’
He reached out for another cigarette. McCue lit one and handed it to him.
‘People used to ask, “What’s it like to kill someone? How many people did you kill?” They never asked what it’s like to see your best friend blown to bits by a mine, how it feels to be covered in his blood and hear him screaming in agony with his guts hanging out.’ The pain in Elliot’s shoulder had begun to throb and he felt dizzy and sick. ‘You know what I’m talking about. You said it yourself, you never let yourself get close to anybody ever again, never owe anybody anything. And the guilt . . .’ he closed his eyes. ‘Well, that’s something you’ve just got to live with. The knowledge inside, of who you really are and what you did. Death’s too easy. Life’s much harder. That’s the real punishment.’
He groaned, a long breath rattling in his throat. McCue leaned over him. ‘What’s wrong?’
He felt sleep, like a mist, slowly rolling over his consciousness. ‘Nothing that dying wouldn’t cure.’
McCue laughed. ‘You ain’t gonna die, Elliot. Like you said, that’d be too damned easy.’
*
It was dark. The mist rose up around him. He heard voices. Whispering. But he couldn’t make out what they said. He wanted to call out, but when he opened his mout
h no sound came. A body lay in the swamp beside him, blood running rich and dark in the mud. He was scared. He knew they were all around, and when they found him he would be killed. A shadow loomed out of the mist, a dark figure towering over him. It leaned in and he saw its eyes, eyes without pupils or irises, just whites, shot with red veins. At last he found his voice, as terror dissolved control, and he cried out. An arm reached towards him and he grabbed the wrist.
He opened his eyes wide, the cry still on his lips, and saw Ny’s pain. He let go her arm and lay breathing heavily. Light burned through the chinks all around them. The air was hot and humid and fetid, and he was covered with a fine film of sweat. ‘I’m sorry.’
She rubbed her wrist. ‘You have bad dream.’
‘Yes. Bad dream.’
‘I change your dressing now.’
He watched and winced as she removed the dressing. There was an area of bruising all around, and it was red raw where the dead flesh had been cut away. From the smell and the colour in the centre he knew it was still infected, but it was not as ugly as he’d been expecting. He drew his breath in sharply as she took a small bowl of yellowish liquid and began gently swabbing it clean from the inside out. Even as he wrestled with the urge to yell with pain, he thought how absurd it was that he should feel the need to disguise it. Would she think him any less a man? Should he care? He gasped and tried to speak. A distraction. ‘What are you cleaning it with?’
‘Piss,’ she said.
‘Jesus Christ!’ He tried to jerk himself away.
‘Please stay still, Mistah Elliot. Mistah McCue, he say it . . .’ she searched for the word. ‘Sterile.’
‘Yeah, he would.’ He paused for a moment, then, ‘Whose piss?’ he asked.
She smiled, a coy little smile, keeping her eyes lowered. ‘Mine.’
He lay back and closed his eyes, wondering what further indignities life could heap upon him.
‘Mistah McCue drain wound for couple of days. Lot of pus. Smelled real bad.’
‘Didn’t feel too good, either.’
‘Much better now, but infection still there. We make – poultice.’ She pronounced the word carefully, proud of her new vocabulary. She lifted his arm with great care and washed out the wound in his armpit where the bullet had come out. He clenched his teeth and breathed stertorously through his nose. ‘It hurt bad?’
‘Yeah, it hurt bad. Jesus—!’
The cloth partition was drawn aside and Hau crouched down to enter, carrying a bowl from which steam rose like smoke. He looked anxiously at Elliot for a moment, then grinned.
‘What the hell’s this?’
‘Poultice,’ Ny said.
‘What’s in it?’
‘Rice. We boil rice and mash it and wrap in cloth. Mistah McCue say very good to draw infection.’
‘Seems to me Mr McCue’s been saying a lot of things.’
‘Lot of thing,’ Ny repeated seriously. ‘Very smart man, Mistah McCue.’
‘Yeah, very smart. I’ll bet that’s hot.’
‘Very hot. It hurt, maybe.’
‘No doubt Mister McCue told you that.’
‘No, Mamma say. She know ’bout poultice, too.’ She gently pressed the first steaming bundle into his shoulder, and it hurt like hell.
Later, both wounds freshly dressed, he was able to sit up a little, propped against his backpack, while Ny fed him rice and fish from a bowl. Hau squatted in silence by the partition, watching gravely. Their sampan put-putted through the water, making steady progress. The chinks in the matting gave him a splintered view of the river. It was busy, small boats plying wares up and down between villages in the delta. The wash from a laden ferry boat, sitting very low in the water, rocked their little craft from side to side, the deep throb of its engines receding north.
‘How come we haven’t been stopped?’ he asked.
Ny shrugged. ‘Many Cambodian here. Refugee.’
On the far bank he saw the rusting hulks of American patrol boats blown asunder by the Viet Cong, epitaphs for a high-tech superpower defeated by a people in black pyjamas.
Hau’s voice broke into his thoughts and he turned to find the boy’s eyes on him. He spoke haltingly, with the embarrassed reticence of a child confessing to some dreadful misdemeanour. Elliot looked at Ny. ‘What’s he saying?’
There was the faintest smile on Ny’s lips, as if she were secretly amused. ‘He apologize for what happen to you.’
‘It wasn’t his fault.’
‘You give him your charm. He believe he take your luck.’
Elliot smiled and shook his head. ‘No, no. I gave him my luck. My fault.’
‘He give it back to make you well.’
‘Tell him to keep it. I’m doing alright without it.’
‘No, you no understand. He already give it back. The night you shot.’
His hand reached to his neck and found the familiar St Christopher there, and for some reason he felt tears rise in his eyes. He looked away. ‘Tell him, then, that he saved my life. Tell him – tell him I owe him.’
Ny spoke quickly, softly, to her brother. Elliot watched him as, initially, the boy frowned, before grinning broadly. His eyes blurred, and a large tear rolled down his cheek. Elliot grinned back at him. He turned to Ny. ‘Tell him big boys don’t cry.’
Ny returned a quizzical look. ‘Don’ they?’
Elliot closed his eyes to shut out the world, but found it was still there, in the dark. And he wondered how it was that vice could succumb so easily to virtue.
It was night when he woke, startled to discover that he had slept at all. Time had passed, with the shutting and opening of his eyes, in a dreamless slumber. He felt the gentle sway of the sampan as it lay in some secret mooring. The air was filled with the sawing of the cicadas. He was still propped, semi-seated, against his backpack. His legs felt stiff and sore. He tried to move them to ease the ache and felt the pain revive in his shoulder.
A match flared in the dark, and he made out McCue’s face behind it. The American lit two cigarettes and passed one to Elliot. ‘Funny the things you hear in the night,’ he said. ‘A fish jumping to catch flies, something moving through the rushes, some goddam insect whining away in the dark aiming to suck your blood. In the daylight you might not even notice – there’s a rational explanation for everything. But in the dark, well, your imagination gets its turn. Comes up with some damn strange answers.’ He paused. ‘You alright?’
‘Sure.’
‘I used to love the dark. Kinda freed you from thinking about things the way they really are. Then you find yourself crawling along some goddam tunnel. It’s black like pitch. And whatever your imagination comes up with ain’t half as bad as what the gooks got waiting. After that, if you survive, you never trust the dark again – or your imagination.’
Elliot gazed up into the blackness and thought he could see stars through the chinks in the matting. ‘What’s brought this on?’
‘Dunno. Fear, I guess. In the dark you can believe you ain’t never gonna see nothing again. In the daylight it’s hard to believe you’re ever gonna die.’ He cleared his throat. ‘Funny thing is, I never used to be afraid of dying. Didn’t seem to matter much one way or another. But when you got a kid, it’s their life, too. You got responsibilities. You only get scared of dying when there’s some point to living. And what makes it worse is, you know it was always the ones who was scared that got it first.’ He stood on the butt of his cigarette. There was irony in his chuckle. ‘One thing that’s easier in the dark, though.’
‘What’s that?’
‘Baring your soul. I mean, you can’t see my face and I can’t see yours. In the daylight I’d be scared I could see you laughing.’
‘I’m not laughing at you, Billy.’
‘Maybe in the dark you understand a little.’
‘A little.’
‘Ny told me you got a kid, too. It’s hard to think of bastards like us as having kids – counting as someone’s daddy.’
Elliot watched the glow at the tip of his cigarette dying away. He shook his head. ‘That little girl’s got no daddy. He died sixteen years ago. And even if he was still alive she wouldn’t want to know him.’
‘That’s sad, Elliot.’
‘No. It’s history.’
The curtain was drawn aside, and the faint yellow light of an oil lamp spilled through from the other half of the cabin. Serey’s face looked drawn and pale as she crouched in the half-light, but there was a brightness in her dark eyes that Elliot had not seen before. ‘Time,’ she said.
McCue sighed. ‘My watch.’ But he made no attempt to leave. He lit another cigarette and chucked the packet to Elliot. ‘Not many left.’ He took a long draw on it. ‘Tell you a funny story.’
Elliot glanced at Serey, but she remained impassive, waiting patiently.
‘I spent some time upcountry with my unit in Nam before I was in the Rats. Always used to pull night watch. Used to love it. Me and the dark, you know. So anyway, my bunker was next to this lake, full of lungfish – you know, they got lungs and sound like humans breathing. Well, sometimes, in the dark, they would get stranded in the mud. You couldn’t see them, but you could hear them, like horror-movie monsters breathing right in front of you.’
Elliot managed to extract a cigarette and light it.
McCue went on, ‘So one night I was just lying there, thinking and listening, and I hear very clearly, right in my ear, this voice saying, “Fuck you.” Shit! I knew I was a dead man. I grabbed my rifle and all I could see was this lizard, about eight inches long, just sitting there. I looked at it, and it was looking at me. There was this moment of just nothing, then it blew out its gills and said, “Fuck you,” again. Christ, I’m shaking and waking the other guys. “Hey, man, this lizard just told me to go get fucked!” They’re grabbing their rifles, too, and the three of us – three grown men – have this stand-off with an eight-inch lizard. Finally the little bastard said “Fuck you” for them, too.’