by Dara Horn
Still, when he arrived at sunrise at the site in the foothills where construction had already begun, he saw the other men with their maps and tools and felt hopeful. But a few days later, as he ate lunch with five of them while sitting on the thick mud near the edge of a cliff, he was asked his very first personal question by a fellow soldier:
“Hey, Ziskind, why don’t you tell us something about your girlfriend’s ass?”
The questioner was Timothy Jackson King, a direct though considerably less illustrious descendant of Stonewall Jackson, the Confederate general who once led his troops to several brilliant yet ultimately meaningless victories in Tim’s home state of Virginia. Tim himself was Daniel’s age and rank—twenty-one, lance corporal—but much taller, and built like the sacks of cement that it was his job to haul off the supply trucks as they built the new road. At the moment he had just finished his can of baked beans and was puffing on a cigarette under an enormous tree, highly amused. “You’ve been here three days and you still haven’t mentioned your girlfriend’s ass,” he added, and smirked. The four other men smirked, too, looked at Daniel, and waited.
Daniel shrugged, trying to be casual. He swallowed a forkful of beans and glanced down at his dog tags, which were hanging outside of his shirt after too many hours of scratching his sweating skin. “I don’t want to talk about my girlfriend’s ass,” he said.
Tim grinned, then blew a ring of smoke. “Because you don’t have a girlfriend, or because she doesn’t have an ass?”
Everyone laughed. Daniel tried to smile, and looked down at his can of beans. “I have a girlfriend,” he said quickly. He still wasn’t used to calling her his fiancée. “I just don’t want to talk about her ass.”
Wayne—eighteen, a private, and bigger than Tim—piped in. “Maybe you’d rather talk about your mom’s ass,” he said.
Daniel fought hard not to wince. His mother wasn’t well enough to write him letters, and if his father didn’t write to him, how would he know how she was? Would his father break his vow and write to him if his mother died? Or would he just come home, thirteen months later, and find her gone?
Rob, a twenty-year-old PFC whose dangling dog tag announced his religious preference as “Evang. Christ.,” added, “Or maybe you’re lying, and you’re really a fag.”
Tim laughed out loud, a sound that alternated cackles and grunts, and then pretended to regain his composure. “Now, come on, gentlemen, let’s not assume,” he said, his face mock-stern. He nodded to the group with a gleam in his eye. “Because remember, when you assume…”
The four others joined in: “You make an ass out of you and me.” They burst out laughing.
Daniel smiled, feeling forgiven. In their easy laughter he heard an echo of something he had almost forgotten: friendship, and trust. Surely there was a way to say something, to be a part of it. He stirred his can of beans, then held one up with his fork. “And when you eat a legume,” he said, “you make a leg out of you and me.”
The men stopped laughing. All five looked at him, their faces blank.
“Legumes,” Daniel fumbled, feeling a bead of sweat sliding down his temple. “Like beans. Beans are legumes.”
They stared at him for a moment longer, silent. Then Tim stood up, looking at the others as if Daniel weren’t there. “Let’s get back to work. We’ve got shitloads to do.”
It had started raining again. The commanding officer had yet to call them back to the road, but the others still stood up, pressing their soles into the soft ground around Daniel’s legs. The beans left a sour taste in his mouth. As he rose from his spot in the mud, he watched as Rob turned his back to him, stepping toward Tim as he dropped his own cigarette in the mud. “Definitely a fag,” Daniel heard him mutter.
Tim dropped his cigarette, too, and leaned toward Rob. “Definitely a Jew.”
After that, Daniel tucked his tags into his sweat-soaked shirt, and time stopped passing.
THERE IS NOTHING lonelier than an unused road, Daniel decided. Particularly a half-built, poorly designed, piece-of-shit road that ran up the side of a mountain at a twenty-percent grade with hairpin switchbacks every hundred feet. As the road began to rise out of the foothills, the mirror-bright rice terraces gave way to pure jungle—tall trees, thick underbrush, clumps of bamboo, curtains of vines, biting red ants, and most of all, sluices of mud that ran in rivers down the dirt track where the road was supposed to lead. Within two weeks, they had finished the more level segments and had reached an elevation where they were actually building the road into the side of a cliff, with a sheer rock face on one side and a hundred-foot drop on the other. The terrain was too rough for real machinery; most of the work had to be done by hand. It rained for several hours a day. Daniel slept in a leaking tent in the thick mud with the others, listening to constant speculation about Rosalie’s existence and that of her genitals. He rarely spoke. In his letters to Rosalie he feigned cheerfulness. Greetings from the ends of the earth! It’s hot here, but not as hot as you! Don’t worry about me, Rosie—I’m going to come home with a serious tan! On the mountain road he started smoking, enjoying breathing in the filth of the world. It felt more honest than real air.
“Look at this thing,” Tim said one afternoon as they laid down guidewires in the mud.
He wasn’t speaking to Daniel, of course. But Daniel was pulling the other end of the guidewire on the edge of the cliff, and he was the closest. They had just come around a bend in the track to a steep mountain face pockmarked with caves. In front of one of the caves was what looked like a little wooden birdhouse, painted bright red—a small, red-roofed painted box perched on a wooden pillar hung with beads, with a clay bowl inside it. Daniel had seen others like it before on the road, and had wondered what they were. Some sort of path markers, he figured. This one stood where the left lane was going to be. “There’s too many of these things,” Tim said. “They ought to send a whole unit just to get rid of them.” He pressed one boot against the wooden pillar and took hold of the red house, pushing and pulling it back and forth until it dislodged from the ground.
“Where are you going to put that?” Daniel asked.
Tim looked up, the birdhouse hanging from one arm. He seemed genuinely surprised to hear Daniel’s voice. “I’m going to put it in a museum and cherish it forever,” he said. Rob, pulling up the guidewire behind him, concealed a laugh under a grunt.
“Seriously, what is it?” Daniel asked. “You can’t just move it around. It probably belongs to someone.”
Tim glanced at the birdhouse, tilting it against the mountain. The bowl inside the little house slid and thunked against its side. “Who gives a shit what it is? It’s in the way.” By now the others had stopped pouring gravel and were watching Tim, who had stepped over to the edge of the cliff next to where Daniel was squatting by the road, until only Daniel separated him from the precipice. Tim looked out at the jungle valley a hundred feet below, grinning. Then, clutching the birdhouse by its pillar, he swung it into the air. Daniel jumped up as the arc of the birdhouse, still gripped tight in Tim’s hands, sailed above Tim’s head like a red-roofed Ferris wheel, gliding toward the abyss.
“STOP IT!” Daniel shouted, and grabbed Tim’s arm.
The birdhouse stopped in midair in Tim’s fist, suspended over their heads like a torch above the precipice. Now everyone was watching. Tim froze, still holding the birdhouse aloft, first startled, then enraged. His eyes focused on Daniel, then narrowed in the shadow of the painted box.
“Do NOT touch me, you fucking faggot,” he growled. “You have three seconds to let go before I push you off this cliff.”
Daniel gulped. He couldn’t back up; he was standing inches from the edge. Instead he let go of Tim’s arm, then tried to move sideways until his foot slipped on a patch of rotten leaves. He landed on his knees at Tim’s feet, his hands pressed into the mud. Tim’s boots grew out of the ground like tree trunks, inches from Daniel’s face. He raised one boot, then set his heel down on Daniel’s knuckl
es and pressed them hard into the mud. Daniel swallowed a howl.
“If you want to go home in one piece, don’t ever touch me again,” Tim said, and released Daniel’s hand.
Daniel pushed himself off the ground, stepping away as Tim lowered the birdhouse down from over his own head. To Daniel’s surprise, Tim then took the birdhouse in both hands and pushed its pillar into the slip of ground beside the road, leaning on it and pounding on its roof until it was standing upright in the mud like before, though on the opposite side of the road. When he was finished, he looked up to find everyone staring at him, including Daniel.
“What do you people think this is, the Easter Parade?” he shouted. “Bank the goddamn curve.” As the men reluctantly turned back to the road, Tim muttered, almost to himself, “Fucking Jewish faggot.”
The day stood still in a haze, hovering over the abyss. Daniel slowed his pace in the heat. He started dumping gravel farther behind where Tim was working, gradually drifting backward until he was bringing up the rear on the road, half a mile behind Tim. He worked in a miasma of sweat and thought. It was all for Rosalie, he reminded himself. Just as he began to drift into memory, he felt someone’s hand on his shoulder. He nearly fell off the cliff.
It was Cuong Thien Minh, the ARVN interpreter assigned to their unit—a thin man, young, with thick black hair and a ready smile. He was very quiet, and Daniel wasn’t sure whether he didn’t talk much because he felt limited by his English or because, like Daniel, he simply didn’t want to talk. Unlike some of the interpreters Daniel had met in Da Nang, many of whom seemed more interested in bumming cigarettes than actually getting things done, this man Cuong was diligent, following the crew step by step along the mountain path, advising them on the best places to set up camp, and negotiating around the occasional mountain village that appeared alongside the road on the plateaus. Now he was standing next to Daniel, unfurling a wide topographical map in front of Daniel’s face.
“Can you help?” he asked Daniel, his stilted English slightly tinged with French. “I do not comprehend what this means.” He touched a thin finger to a part of the map a few miles past their current point, a clearly labeled leveled portion on a wide ledge of the cliff.
Daniel smiled to himself. It was the first time since his arrival that someone had asked him for help. “That’s a future loading dock,” he said. “This part of the road is going to be the major supply conduit, see, so it’s going to have more drop-off points, to make it easier to transfer supplies. Refueling, that kind of thing.”
Cuong’s face lit up. Daniel modestly kicked at the mud, grinning. He felt useful. “For truck or tank?” Cuong asked.
“Trucks,” Daniel said. “There’ll be a camp set up there, too. It’s important because they’re going to be enlarging the base up at Phu Bai.”
Cuong nodded sagely, as if everything now made sense. “To bring supplies,” he said. “For Americans to come from Da Nang.”
Daniel watched him. What he said seemed obvious, not worth saying, and Daniel wondered if he had said it just to practice his English. But then he realized that what Cuong said wasn’t quite true. “Actually, I don’t even think they expect us to use this road much in the future,” Daniel said. “It’s really being built for you, for the South Vietnamese. It’s supposed to be a better route to the coast, harder to attack. When we’re done it’ll be that much tougher for the VC to break the line.”
Cuong wrinkled his forehead, looking at the map. It wasn’t clear to Daniel whether what he had said had gotten through. Cuong pointed again at the same spot on the map. “This place,” he said delicately. “It is not good for the camp.”
Daniel squinted at the paper, wondering what he meant. The elevation lines were hard to see, but it seemed flat enough to Daniel. “It’s fine,” he said. “The grade is less than one percent.”
Cuong shook his head. “Flat, but many mudslides from mountains. Bad for the camp. Better close to the village, near Deo Hai Van.”
“Near what?” Daniel asked.
Cuong leaned back from the map, pointing with one finger. “Hai Van Pass,” he clarified. His finger underscored words on the map: Pass of the Ocean Clouds. “Better to make the camp in this place,” Cuong repeated. “Easier to kill VC.”
Daniel flinched. It wasn’t something anyone was supposed to say, not like that, at least. But something about the way Cuong added that last phrase made Daniel like Cuong. There was a brute honesty to him, a sense of purpose. Daniel felt that he had found a friend. “Thanks,” Daniel said. “I’ll tell the CO.”
Cuong twirled the map into a tight scroll and smiled. In the warmth of Cuong’s face, Daniel found an old shred of forgotten courage. “Now I have a question for you,” he said. “What are those?” He pointed to another birdhouse near the road, apparently set far enough back from it to have dodged Tim’s wrath. Tim was right, though—there were a lot of them. In this one, Daniel noticed, someone had taken a stick of incense and lit it in the bowl inside. Thin plumes of incense flew out of it into the air, ascending the mountain like a smoke signal along the road.
Cuong looked at the birdhouse, furrowing his thin eyebrows. If he had seen the incident earlier, he didn’t show it. “I do not know how to say,” he said. “It is a souvenir of dead persons.”
Daniel swallowed. “Like—like a shrine or something?” he asked. He thought of the birdhouse clutched in Tim’s hands, hovering over the abyss, and hoped Cuong hadn’t seen it.
But Cuong smiled. “Yes. A shrine. We worship our ancestors.”
This sounded vaguely familiar to Daniel, echoing out of the dim corners of his memory. Third-grade history class in Newark, a project about China. His mother, not yet ill, helping him build a model of some Chinese tomb out of sugar cubes, laughing at him as he swallowed the cubes meant for the sarcophagi until she started eating them, too. Then they were doubled over on the table, laughing until tears came, high on sugar and laughter. His father came home and saw them and started laughing, too, bellowing jokes about the dentist and swallowing the sugar cubes with them, the three of them laughing until laughing became painful, eating their way through a sweet, sweet death.
Cuong interrupted his thoughts. “These shrines are for persons who die on the road,” he said.
“Oh.” Daniel nodded. “Like in accidents?” It was the logical explanation, but as he gazed up along the dirt path that they were trying to turn into a real road, he couldn’t imagine any accidents happening on it. You couldn’t even ride a bike through the mud. Perhaps people had died falling off the cliff?
Cuong chewed his lower lip, scanning the terrain. He shook his head. “There are no accidents,” he said. It wasn’t clear to Daniel, at first, whether Cuong was describing the victims’ deaths or making a fatalistic statement about the universe. But then Cuong added, “Usually tigers.”
Daniel stared at him. “Tigers?”
Cuong nodded. “Yes. Persons are eaten.”
This combination of subject and verb had to be some sort of grammatical error. Daniel searched Cuong’s face, waiting for him to notice the mistake. “‘Eaten,’” Daniel repeated.
But Cuong offered no correction. He shrugged. “Persons are eaten,” he said again. “It happens often on this road.”
Daniel glanced around at the caves, the trees, the vines hanging off the side of the mountain. Man-eating tigers?
Cuong saw his face and laughed. “Americans with M16s should not be afraid of tigers,” he said. Cuong tucked the scrolled map under his arm and took out a box of cigarettes, pulling out two. “With tigers, it is simple. When they want to kill you, kill them first. Just like VC.”
Daniel smiled. Cuong offered him a cigarette, and he accepted. They lit them and watched as the day’s steaming mist lifted. The sky turned pink over the abyss.
“You like Vietnam?” Cuong asked.
Daniel looked out at the valley, into the thin sliver of air between two distant mountains where he could see a blue tongue of ocean reaching in
to the shore. “It’s wonderful,” Daniel answered. And as he watched the sun set over the valley, standing next to the first person who had smiled at him since he saw Rosalie for the last time, he believed that it might not be a lie.
LATE THAT NIGHT, Daniel had the same dream he had been having over and over since he began building the road. Like the other dreams, it took place in the grave. Not in a real grave, but in what Rosalie called “the little grave,” their secret hiding place—the one he had dug in the forest for the two of them, where she first kissed him on the lips.
She was thirteen, and mature for her age. He was sixteen, and in agony. He had already waited four years for her, four years of visiting her backyard through the woods every day, of playing childish games with her, of building snow forts and waging water fights and drawing pictures and reading books together under the tree outside the house just beyond the woods. The books were usually in Yiddish. She had learned English quickly, well enough to be mistaken for an American, but she found the books from school duller than dirt. “The ‘Scarlet Letter’ should have been B for boring,” she would mutter during their afternoons in the backyard. “Today I earned the ‘Red Badge of Boredom.’” She liked stories about worlds supposedly just beyond the one they lived in but really right here on earth, stories that made you realize how different the world was from what everyone thought it was, if only you would look. Together they read all of I. L. Peretz, most of Sholem Aleichem, weird tales by Der Nister from a volume she had found in a box of her father’s old things. Daniel read with her, laughed with her, threw snowballs at her, held her hand like a child. But soon he wasn’t a child anymore. By the time he was sixteen, her mother was warning her about the stringy teenager haunting the backyard. One autumn day in the yard, when they were sitting and laughing together, she brushed her hand against his thigh. It was unspeakable ecstasy, but he backed off, ashamed. For days he didn’t return. When he did, and she did it again—that smooth, soft palm brushing against his leg, then resting on it (there was no mistaking it now), its perfect fingers tracing slow circles on his thigh—he had leaned in toward her face, pressing his hand hard against the weedy ground to keep it from reaching for the curve of her new breast. This time it was she who backed off. But for her it wasn’t shame; it was fear. “Not here,” she whispered. “Somewhere where no one will see us.” But then her mother called her inside and it was too late. Daniel retreated into the woods, releasing his agony on his knees in the mud and then searching, desperate, for a hiding place on the forest floor. But there was nowhere—the woods, once dark and sheltering, now seemed flooded with light. At last he found a spot where three thick trees stood huddled close, with a bit of a hollow between them. He began digging out the space in between, using rocks and branches and his hands like paws, breaking roots until he had dug a deep, narrow pit. The next day he led her into the forest. She saw the pit and laughed. “Who are you planning to bury in it?” she asked. But when he brought her down inside it and spread his jacket between her and the dirt, she surprised him—him, the one for whom she had created all those years for herself to grow up—by kissing him first. It was like molten sky pouring down into his mouth. On their last night together before he left for Vietnam, he had taken her down into the little grave, as always, and huddled close against the dark night. Toward dawn it started raining. In the soft spring rain he licked the raindrops off her skin, one by one, until he was licking away her tears.