Baby was so far away, and there were times she didn’t seem real to him, times he had to look at her picture to really remember her features. Life back home was becoming like a dream that fades as the day wears on. Real, vivid life was the army base and the endless crawl through the tunnels. And Nguyen. He hated to admit it, even to himself, but she was, in a lot of ways, more agreeable than Baby, and she didn’t ask for much in return. Baby always liked to be in charge. He was proud of her, but she made him feel like she was smarter than him. She tried to help him, but he would rather take a D or F in algebra than let her know he didn’t understand it. A man had his pride. He was even afraid that his music, the one thing he was better than anybody at, bored her. She sometimes read a book during rehearsal. There were so many girls who loved bands and would gladly have taken her place, but they were too easy. They bored him. Bean only wanted Baby, who didn’t seem to realize how important he was.
But in Vietnam there was no question of his value. He was the toughest Rat in the pack, and everybody treated him accordingly. On his door, someone had painted a cartoon of a rat smoking a cigarette and wearing a crown, with the words KING RAT underneath. He went down tunnels where nobody else could go, stayed down longer, and made more kills that anyone. He was almost happier underground than above. He felt alive down there, adrenaline feeding him like dope. It was a high like nothing else to come out of the tunnels and breathe sweet air. It got his juices flowing, and the only way he could get release from the rush was with a woman.
Nguyen, graceful in her purple silk ao dai, a garment designed to cover everything and hide nothing, was there to do whatever he wanted and do it gladly, without question or hesitation; and it was good. Not as good as with Baby, at least as Bean remembered it, but if it had been, Bean might have fallen in love with Nguyen, and that would have caused real trouble.
There were always enthusiastic prostitutes smuggled in to service the men, but women of class—no matter how poor or desperate—didn’t mix with the Americans. A girlfriend of Nguyen’s, who worked in the PX, had tried to marry a GI and wound up with her head on a pike outside the main gate of the base. A note pinned to it said, “This is what happens to Vietnamese people who go around with the enemy.” As long as money or espionage was involved, the VC let women fraternize with the Americans—but not for love.
Bean never thought once about marrying Nguyen. She was, after all, a gook and could hardly speak any English. It was her job to make him comfortable, nothing more. But in the middle of the night, when he awakened from his worst recurring nightmare—that the VC had captured Baby and he was underground searching for her, could hear her screaming but kept taking the wrong turn—it was Nguyen who would hold him while he shook and cried and said Baby’s name over and over; Nguyen who would wipe the sweat from his eyes and kiss him until he relaxed and tucked her into the crook of his body; Nguyen whose skin felt like soft cream and was a balm to his spirit; Nguyen whose smile he thought of as he fell asleep again.
Then one day Nguyen didn’t come to work. Days went by. When Bean tried to find out where she was, nobody seemed to know. At first he was angry. How dare she leave without a word? She was young and too pretty to stay for long in such a menial job, he decided. But he was not prepared for how much it hurt to know she had no feelings for him, how much he missed her. Then he worried that something bad had happened. He tried to find her, but realized he knew nothing about her—not where she lived or what she had done before the war or if she had any brothers and sisters. He didn’t even know her last name. She couldn’t speak enough English to tell him these things, and it had been enough that she was there for him, the way she was. She was a fact of his life. But when she was gone, he realized he needed her as much as he needed nourishment. He found himself scanning the crowds, looking into the face of every Vietnamese woman he met, looking for Nguyen.
To forget her, he threw himself into his work with even more passion.
—
Bean was right: Nguyen was more than a washerwoman. She was a classically trained actress who belonged to a troupe of fervent Viet Cong. She sang and danced to keep up the spirits of the underground army in the tunnels, and also passed on information she learned while on the American base.
In fact, most of her friends who worked for the Americans were Viet Cong as well. It was amazing how stupidly lax the Americans were about talking in front of the people who cut their hair and served them drinks. They thought the “gooks” couldn’t understand, but in fact a great many Vietnamese spoke passable English, including Nguyen. It got harder with each day to keep up the charade with Bean of not speaking English. She had come to respect him, even though he had killed several of her friends in the tunnels. Any American who could navigate the tunnels deserved respect. They were soft, the Americans, and if they had had to live for long underground, among snakes and scorpions and bats, on a diet of half-cooked rice and roasted rat, she knew the war would have soon been over and they would all go home.
Bean was not soft, though. She knew he was a worthy adversary. More than an enemy soldier, she was beginning to see him as a man. He played his guitar for her and sang in a voice that stirred something inside her. She looked forward to their lovemaking and did not have to pretend her passion.
But the day Nguyen bicycled to work and stopped, horror-struck, beneath the head of her friend from the PX, she pushed aside any feelings of love she might have had for Bean. He was the enemy. She would pretend to care for him as part of her job, but she hardened her heart. At least she tried. On dark nights, when Bean sang the strange songs to her and kissed her with soft lips, she sometimes forgot it was merely her duty to be with him. At those times, the line between duty and the heart was smudged.
The leader of her troupe could see she was gaining too much regard for the small American, and decided to send her full-time to the theater in the tunnels. Before Nguyen had a chance to let Bean know, she was moved to a village not far from Cu Chi, to spend her days beneath the earth. There, she performed a play about a poor girl who is captured by the Americans but saved in the end by her brave comrades.
After a few weeks, she realized that she had in truth been captured by an American. She was pregnant. Her leader surmised who the father might be but was kind enough to allow her to lighten her workload. Soon, she became too big to navigate the narrow tunnels that led down to the second level, and so was able to remain on the first, where at least the air was a little better.
—
Nguyen was resting in a hammock in her sleeping nook when she heard the rumble of big guns, felt them vibrate the ground. Anxious, she raised herself up, but she couldn’t tell how far away they were. The nook, only two meters high, was carved out beneath many feet of earth, but you could never tell, when a shell hit, if the dirt would protect you or cave in and bury you alive.
She felt the baby move. He was strong, like his father. She could picture him curled inside and was secretly glad for the mix of his blood—American and Vietnamese. He would be a fiery soldier, like both his mother and his father, but perhaps he also would have soft brown eyes and a voice like burnt sugar. With this baby, she would be allowed to keep a part of her American, even if he never knew he had a son. But who could tell? Perhaps she would find a way for them to see each other again. He would be so surprised. She liked to imagine the meeting and his first look at his baby, but tried not to think past it. There could be no future with Bean—not for her, and not for her child.
The baby moved again. A lump appeared, moving across her belly, and Nguyen put her hand on it. She thought it might be a foot, the baby stretching out to make more room for itself. She was happy to feel movement. The baby had been quiet for a few days, and she poked it from to time to time just to make sure it was still alive. The little one was resting for the big ordeal of being born. Nguyen smiled at the thought of the baby working so hard and finally coming out, only to look around and find itself still inside a tunnel. But there was nothing to do for it.
If she surfaced in the middle of a fight, she would surely be killed and give away the position of the tunnel, endangering everyone inside.
A gush of water flooded from her, pooling in the hammock and dripping down onto the earthen floor. The baby was trying to get out now. A dull pain hit in the lower part of her back, and Nguyen knew she had to get to a bigger place soon. The connecting tunnel to the nearest large room—called the cool room, because it was eight meters square and had many airholes—was only half a meter wide, and she was afraid she might not be able to squeeze through, but she had to try. The cool room was draped with parachute silk to screen the ever-falling dirt. There was water there. But even though she had been taught how to deliver the baby herself, she was afraid. She listened but could hear no movement ahead, no voices anywhere. The next sleeping chamber was empty, as was the cooking chamber. Everyone had gone down deeper to get away from the attack.
The blasts were getting closer. Small pieces of earth crumbled onto her face as the ground shook from the bombs. She started through the connecting tunnel to the cool room, squeezing her belly gently. The baby lay still, as though it knew it must be quiet and help her.
She dropped into the cool room as a contraction seized her and sat breathing hard for a moment, exhausted from the effort. Then she put her candle down and found an oil lamp and a straw mat to lie on as the next pain hit. She bit her lip so as not to cry out in case anyone was near the vent holes. Maybe a friend would come soon. But time passed and no one came. She heard only the sound of the guns and the rumble of the earth.
Hours went by. Her throat became raw with the cries she held in. A long whistle sounded directly overhead, and the cool room shook as part of the exit tunnel filled with earth. Nguyen screamed with the screaming of the bomb. She dug her fingernails into the floor and scratched until fat crescents of dirt were packed under the nails. One more blast that close would cause the ceiling to crumble. A fine dust hung in the air, and the candle flame flickered. Nguyen could feel dust catch in her nose, and it was hard to draw a deep breath.
She steeled her nerves and focused her concentration on breathing, attempting to slow her racing heart as her belly hardened with each contraction and the baby inched toward life. She tried to remember Cu Chi as the lush jungle it had been when she was a little girl, before the Americans came. She tried to hear again the sound the bright birds made as they called from the tops of high green trees, and to see the clear water flow over stones in the stream. She remembered how her orange cat would paw a ball of string in the packed earth of her hut and how the rooster would puff out his chest and strut across the yard, king of the hens, his red cock’s-comb bobbing atop his russet head, his green and black tail feathers shimmering in the sun. She pictured her mother, graceful as she stirred a pot on the stove, then bent to put a piece of wood into the firebox underneath. She saw her father as he came in from the fields and picked up her little brother, lifting him onto his shoulders in one fluid motion, as easily as he lifted baskets of rice. In the distance behind him, the sun glinted off the shrine containing the bodies of her grandparents, a little white stone house in the middle of the watery rice field, there to bless the crop and keep the ancestors near the family. She had thought one day her own parents would have their shrine there, too, but it was all gone now: her house, her field, her parents, her brother, her shrine, her life.
Now Cu Chi was burned and barren. As far as the eye could see, there was no green, only black sticks, broken and sharp, sticking out of the earth like silent hands reaching in supplication to the sky. No animals ran through the charred skeleton of the jungle; no men and women worked the blackened fields. If there was no jungle, reasoned the Americans, there could be no hiding place for the Viet Cong.
But we do not need trees to hide among, Nguyen reminded herself as her belly grew soft, preparing for the next contraction. Mother Earth hides us. She is old and patient. The Americans, with their bombs, their Agent Orange and napalm, will not be here forever. Inside her belly, Mother Earth stores the seeds of a new jungle, a new life: green, shady trees and vines that will cover the ground once again live inside the earth, alongside the people who hide below and wait, beneath the burned-out jungles of Cu Chi.
—
The contractions fused into one long pain, giving Nguyen time only to dig her heels into the ground before the urge to push took her over. She reached between her legs and felt something round and hard and wet. The baby’s head emerged for a moment, then retreated back into its sheath. With each push, the head came out farther, and then a terrible pain seized her like none she had experienced before. It felt like her body was being ripped from bottom to top. She screamed then through her swollen lips, unable to stop herself, and grunted like a beast as she pushed hard and felt the baby, warm and slippery, slide from between her legs. The pain ceased, as though it had never happened, and she reached down to pick up the girl; slipped her up and across her belly and held her tightly. The baby squirmed, making sounds like a mewling kitten, and Nguyen laughed and cried at the same time as she wiped the little one’s eyes and nose free of blood and mucus. She had been so sure it was a boy! The baby’s little arms and legs trembled while with one hand her mother held her tightly and with the other tied the cord with a piece of parachute string, then cut it, using a small knife she had taped to her leg. Another contraction brought out the afterbirth.
There was no cloth to wrap the baby in, so Nguyen ripped off a piece of parachute drape and cleaned her as best she could, then tore another and stuffed it between her legs, to staunch the bleeding. Then she lay back and stared at her daughter. She was beautiful—pale, not red as most new-borns, with dark hair and eyes that looked around the room in wonder, as if to say, “Where have I come to? What is this? Who are you?” Nguyen laughed at the funny little face, so much like Bean’s, and put the rosebud mouth to her breast, engorged already.
—
Time is meaningless underground, but it seemed to Nguyen that hours had passed and still the bombing had not stopped. There was some rice and salt in a pot, and she ate a big bite before realizing it had gone bad. She knew she couldn’t stay here much longer, but there was nowhere to go. The exit tunnel was damaged, and she didn’t have the stamina to crawl through the connecting tunnel with the baby. She would have to rest and regain her strength.
She must have dozed, because she was awakened by a noise, faint, like the swish of fabric against dirt. Someone was coming through the connecting tunnel. It must be a friend, since the tunnel was heavily protected with poisonous bamboo vipers, hidden in tubes set along the way, as well as cleverly concealed mines. Nguyen called out quietly, in a hoarse whisper.
There was no answer, and she realized too late that it must be an American. A flashlight beam flickered and then blinded her as she pushed the baby to the back of the room and lunged with her knife toward the hand emerging cautiously from the tunnel. She cut the arm, deeply, and blood spurted as the flashlight fell to the floor. She picked it up just as the soldier fired his gun at point-blank range. The beam swung wildly before it dropped from her hand.
She never saw the shock on Bean’s face as he recognized who she was.
“Nguyen!” Bean blinked to clear the sweat from his eyes, and looked again. It was her. She was a VC. She had played him for a fool, and left without a word to join those subhumans who took pleasure in torturing and killing his buddies and then hiding in stinking holes.
Just outside this very tunnel, they had nailed an American’s arm to a tree with a skull and crossbones carved on it. It was a miracle that Bean had even seen the entrance. Everyone else was too put off by the grisly sight, but Bean noticed that the charred foliage was a little too perfect over the spot underneath the tree, and sure enough, it hid a trapdoor.
—
Nguyen lay dead, staring. A whimpering came from the corner, and Bean whirled and shot twice into the darkness. He stopped still and listened but heard only his own heavy breathing. He crawled over, lifted a
stained scrap of parachute, and shone his light on a newborn baby girl, still and unmoving.
In a moment of hopeless clarity, he understood that she was his, and something in his soul cracked and shattered. In anguish, he backed out of the tunnel, then tossed a grenade, blowing up the cool room, leaving the pretty Viet Cong actress in a grave she had created for herself and her half-American baby, who never got to see the blue sky.
47.Cherry
Pickups and cars crowded the gravel parking lot at Woody’s. Thank goodness I drive a Bug. I found a little space by the trash barrels out back, and squeezed in.
Woody’s was a low building painted barn-red. A blue-and-red neon sign that shouted BUDWEISER and a green one that said HEINEKEN glowed like Christmas lights in the front window. Bean’s pickup was there, and as my feet crunched the gravel, I could hear him singing “I’m a Long Gone Daddy,” an old Hank Williams song, in a voice that wasn’t all that far off from Williams’s. I was a little surprised, but I should have known that Bean could sing any kind of music. Besides which, the crowd that hung out at Woody’s wasn’t exactly your typical rock ’n’ roll hippie gang.
He was really good—had that little catch in the voice down pat—if you like that kind of music. Mama did, and she played records by Hank Williams, Ernest Tubb, and Bob Wells and the Texas Playboys all the time, so I kind of liked it, too, although I’d never mention it to my friends.
I peeped in at the window and all the good ol’ boys in cowboy boots and their girlfriends with teased-up hair and circle-tail skirts were dancing up a storm. Bean was wearing his leather pants and a tight flower-power shirt, but he had on a black cowboy hat, too. This was a side of him I didn’t know. Come to think of it, I don’t think I really knew a whole lot about Bean at all. Like with Manang and Pilar, I had never had a conversation with Bean where Baby wasn’t there too, and when we were all together, Baby and I mostly talked to each other.
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