The Deep Green Sea

by Robert Olen Butler

  This made her eyes break with me. She looked down, her face dipped, and I thought I’d made a bad mistake. But she came back to me. Only a moment later she came back. Her eyes were on mine again and she said, “Why is that? There are many girls in Ho Chi Minh City for you to look at.”

  I had no answer for that question. She was right, of course. But it had never really been like that for me in my life, always flashing on some woman or other, instantly, though if you believed most of the guys I’ve been around, that’s the way the world works. And there was something there between this woman and me, even as we stood on the sidewalk in front of the noodle shop talking around it. There was something right away, and somehow our eyes knew it while our brains didn’t. Finally I said, “No one else cared about saving me from the dogs.”

  She smiled that sweet half-smile from the day before and she said, “It was my civic duty.”

  “Have you warned many men about the dogs of Saigon?”

  This stopped her. It seemed to me that she was having the same trouble I’d just had in answering. After a moment she said, simply, “No.”

  “Why is that?” I asked. “There are many men in Saigon who could be in peril.”

  “No one else calls to the dogs like they are worth loving.”

  “So there were reasons for both of us.”

  “Yes.”

  I was stuck now. I shuffled around and tried to think of something to suggest. “I’d like to take you somewhere. For noodles, maybe. I know a great place.” I gestured at the shop behind me.

  She laughed briefly, softly, at this, but then her face went suddenly serious. She said, “It is not so easy.”

  “Because you don’t know my name. I’m Benjamin Cole. The short name is Ben.”

  “I am Le Thi Tien. My given name is Tien.” She held out her hand and I took it and she had a firm grip and we shook and let our hands go and I thought we both were happy to have touched in this clear and strong way. Then she said, “But that does not fix the difficult thing. My work for Saigontourist means I should not fraternize in public with someone who looks like a guest of our country.”

  “Then let me hire you.” These words were out of my mouth before I could think about them.

  He looked very concerned suddenly and I was sure it was because of the words he spoke, though I had not heard them at first in the way he feared. And that was an interesting thing. In the next moment, when I thought of him liking me and then hiring me and I finally saw what he was feeling bad about, I still was not hurt. I was not my mother. He was not a GI. Though he was American. Obviously so. And I had my own concern now. I wanted to do this in the way he had first imagined. I wanted to sit in a noodle shop with him in my softest silk dress, with my throat naked and my knees bared, I wanted to speak with him and watch his gentleness reach out to the ragged dogs that went by. This desire surprised me, and it seemed an impossible thing.

  But there was this offer. I said, “I could take you on a tour of the city tomorrow.”

  “Good,” he said. “Yes.”

  And that is what we did. With my driver Mr. Thu we went to the Giac Lam Pagoda, the oldest in Ho Chi Minh City, built in 1744, and to the Reunification Hall, which had been the evil Nguyen Van Thieu’s palace and where our triumphant revolutionary forces first unfurled our flag, and to the Ben Thanh Market, where it is clear how plentiful consumer goods are in our country, and I spoke like a person who had never worn a silk dress in her life and had never shown her knees, and Ben was mostly quiet and he was very respectful of me and our position in public, even when Mr. Thu was waiting in the car and Ben and I were alone walking in the close and steamy aisles of the market full of jackfruit and alligator pears and bitter melons and squash and green peppers and bins of rice and stacks of dried fish and cages of ducks and chickens, or when we were alone in a cloud of incense with the Lady Buddha nearby, a dozen faces piled on her head and a thousand hands surrounding her, each with an eye in its palm, or when we stood on the balcony where our revolutionary flag first flew and no one was there but the two of us. Even in those moments, Ben was quiet and I filled the air with words I knew by heart but suddenly could barely recognize.

  Then we were standing before the War Crimes Mu­seum. It is in an old French colonial compound beneath beautiful tamarind trees and Mr. Thu was once again in the car and Ben and I were standing on the sidewalk. Ben had not spoken in a long time. He waited for me to show him to the ticket kiosk, which was before us, and beyond was the courtyard where American tanks and armored vehicles sat and also a French guillotine, and inside the building were rooms filled with photos of dead women and children, and already my head was swarming with words. I did not listen to them. I could not move.

  Finally he said, very softly, very near my ear, I thought, though I did not turn to see, “I don’t think this is having the same effect as a meal in a noodle shop.”

  “No,” I said. “I have not spoken a word of my own all day.” Now I turned to him. He had pulled back from me and was peering ahead, into the courtyard. I said, “Do you understand that?”

  He looked at me. “Understand?”

  “Do you understand that all these words have not been mine?”

  “That was my point about the noodles.”

  “But I cannot be myself in a restaurant, either. I would worry about the thoughts of those around us.”

  His shoulders lifted and fell, only slightly, quite slowly. He had sighed. I had not heard it, but I knew. A strange alertness had come upon me with him and it was not a pleasant thing, really. But I knew that was because of this public sidewalk and the bow at my throat and the impossibility of my reaching out now and taking his hand.

  With the sigh still lingering in his voice, he said, “What are we going to do, Tien? Should I just go back to my hotel and never bother you again?”

  “No,” I said, and the word came out sharp and quick, and I thought that finally on this day I had said a word of my own. I said it again. “No.” And then I said, “I am glad we have met. I will arrange something.”

  Then I lied to Mr. Thu, telling him that Ben was thinking of moving to the Metropole. Mr. Thu is a young man with a wife and children of his own, not from the generation who suffered so very much in the war, and I thought perhaps he would understand anyway. But for this day I left it with a lie, and he dropped Ben and me at the Metropole, which is the hotel just across the street from my apartment, and I told him the American would arrange the transfer of his lodging on his own and I would go home for the day, for it was late afternoon.

  Mr. Thu drove off, and in the shadow of the Metro-pole, Ben looked around and across the side street and he realized where we were. “Noodles,” he said.

  “Tea,” I said. “You can go with me and I will make you some very nice tea.”

  “And what about your neighbors?”

  “That is not a public thing,” I said, and though what I said was true in a way, it was also true that I was finally prepared to accept some censure for this man.

  He nodded at this with a soft smile and perhaps he understood, perhaps he had grown very alert about me, as well.

  And so at last I found myself sitting on a straw mat before a lacquer table in Tien’s apartment and she disappeared into her little bathroom. She hadn’t made any gesture toward it, but I knew the place where she’d do her prayers. On the opposite wall from where I sat was a little table. It was spread with a white cloth and there were two narrow brass holders with blue irises drooping in them and a plate of fruit, a couple of mangoes, the yellow of them dark-spotted from ripeness, a bunch of the tiny bananas that are so impossibly sweet, also going dark, and in the center of the table was a glass bowl with sand holding a cluster of incense sticks. I’d seen this kind of thing before. In another little room somewhere not much farther down this back alley. With a woman who was as young as me at the
time. And, I always thought, just about as scared.

  As I waited for Tien to appear again, I tried to see Kim’s face in my mind. Her eyes came, large but cut deep in her face like they were done fast. The eyes of these people in the Nam. It was the one thing about them you never quite stopped noticing. The one thing that kept saying they were from some very different place. Not that I minded Kim’s eyes. They were beautiful, and though I was scared shitless about half the time in Nam, I was also happy to be away from Wabash, I think, which was my home, a little Illinois steel mill town in the bottomland of the Mississippi River across from St. Louis. I was happy she was different. But all these years later, that was all I could see of her easily, the thing that wasn’t like anything else I knew.

  I tried briefly to picture Kim in some particular moment, and since I was staring at this prayer table I thought of her at her own place where she took care of a soul. But she was across the room. I was on the bed and she was far away and there was another face instead. A large photo sat in the middle of the table, an old man with a brimless little mandarin hat. Kim’s grandfather, I think.

  The bathroom door opened and Tien stepped out. She’d gone in wearing that white blouse and long-cut skirt from Saigontourist. Now she was in black silk, a blouse and pants that rippled around her and made me want to touch her already, made me want to forget the things I knew I had to be with her, like careful and slow. Her hair was down now. It was very long and black like the world beyond the push of my headlights. She said, “Just a little while.”

  “Yes,” I said, though I could hardly make a sound.

  She moved to the table and knelt there and her bare feet lay beneath her bottom, her toes in a fine little row, and this was going to be tough, I knew. She lifted her face to the table and I realized now that something was missing. There was no photo. I’d learned enough from Kim to know this was odd.

  But how little there is from Kim. How little that comes easily. She crouched before her grandfather and she prayed and the smoke rose from her hands and filled the room with the smell of something, maybe jasmine. I can’t re-member exactly, but how else would I know this smell? I love the smells of things. The smell of oranges in the San Joaquin Valley. I remember that moment, though it was a time without love, without a woman nearby who would soon come to me and touch me. The smell of the land on the long runs out of St. Louis, the earth turned out there in the dark, ready for seed. Even the smell of the mill. The naphtha and the coke gas. I loved that smell like my father loved it. My own dead. He’d come home from his shift and he’d smell like those mill smells, and also like Lava soap and the starch of his off-work shirt. If his spirit is caught somewhere without the prayers of his kin, like the Vietnamese believe, it’s out there haunting Wabash Steel, out at the blast furnace or maybe the field next to it, where he’d lift me and put me on his shoulders and he’d think for a long time and stay quiet and he’d fill himself with the smell, now and then, his chest lifting and he’d take it all in and I would too. That I remember. He’d take it all in and he’d point to the thin stack rising near the highway and at its top was a vivid, gelatinous flame thrashing there and he’d say, That’s the bleeder valve. Look how beautiful the flame is. And I would look and it was very beautiful.

  And I squeeze hard at these things I still have of Kim. Things come and I don’t know if they are memories or things I’m dreaming, making up from some deep and persuasive place. Her smell. Her hair smelled of the in­cense. She’d come to me from her dead grandfather and she was naked and her body was slick and hard and she’d lay me on my back and crouch over me and when I was inside her she would lean forward and her hair would fall on my face and I would smell the incense, like I was being taken up in her prayer.

  Then her face slid up to mine and she kissed me with loud smacks and she moved on me and she whispered, “You like Kim very many.”

  “Much,” I whispered. We’d played this little game be­fore. She’d made the mistake the first night I’d met her at the bar and she’d thought about it when I corrected her and then she let it go, but we played it out to a new con­clusion the first time we made love and every time since. I’d say, “I like Kim very much.”

  “Many,” she’d say. “One hundred times.”

  And I should remember that first time, because Kim was the first woman I ever made love to. There was a girl in a trailer park in Wabash, out past the blast furnace, and she had buck teeth and a squint and a wonderful body and we touched one night in the dark and the smell of the mill was very strong. She said she was a good girl, not to forget that, and I said I wouldn’t, though I avoided her af­ter that night. I was never inside her, though she touched me with her hand and she asked me to touch her and I said, “No, I’m sorry.” I’d heard about a woman’s smell from the other guys and I was afraid of it and I couldn’t look at her after that night. Her name is gone now, but it might have been Jasmine. That might be where the smell of the incense is really from in this thing that comes to me like a memory. And I can’t think of the first time with Kim, exactly. The night was very dark. There was no in­cense. There’s nothing of that night. Just later, when there was the smoke in her hair and the prayers for the dead.

  And even then, what was the big feeling I was sup­posed to have? What was this thing that people say makes you so close, you and a woman? I kept looking for some­thing important from all that and it stumped me. Though I never fit in with the others who lived over the road. I’d hit the truck stops and I’d park my rig off a ways from the others and I’d find a place in the restaurant alone, the last table on the way to the shower stalls or the pinball ma­chines, and I’d stay there out of the traffic. But sometimes when they’d talk about all this and it was just fuck this one and fuck that one and go to this truck stop in Indiana and they sit buck naked on your table and ain’t that the life, I’d wonder if maybe they were basically right. If that’s all it came down to.

  I try not to think like all those guys I spent too many years with in the mills or on the roads. No, I don’t mean all the guys. Just the noisy ones. There were others like me, I think. I try not to let myself sound like the noisy ones. There’s enough of my mama in me to give me an-other way of looking at things. She’s another one of my dead. Her spirit’s probably in the Wabash Public Library with the copper bust of Andrew Carnegie inside the front door and the floors wide and scuffed and the fans going in the corners and the smell of old books. She’d bring me there and she’d get her books and she’d read at night when my dad was working a late shift and she’d weep sometimes and she’d laugh sometimes and I’ve done some reading but not near as much as she’d wanted for me. I still like the smell of a book, though. I’ll find a few old books in some thrift store in some little town somewhere in this last couple of years since I’ve been off the road and just moving around, and I’ll pick one up and put my face in the pages and smell it.

  I wonder sometimes if my mom and dad had a big feeling when they touched. There was a lot of pain with all that, I think. They lost a little girl quite a few years before I was born and it was hard on them, I’m pretty sure. Then they had me late. But I’d also find them touching each other. I have one moment in my head from a night when I woke up from something and it was when my dad was working nights and I got out of bed and the house was quiet but the lights were still on. I expected to find my mama reading. She wasn’t in our little front room and I went on to the kitchen and I stood quiet in the door and my dad was sitting on a kitchen chair with his shirt off. He was just home and he was sitting with his forearms over his thighs and slumped a little bit forward and my mama was standing behind him and touching his back. Not a back rub. Much lighter. Just slowly sweeping his back with her fingertips and his head was bowed and once, when her hand went up to his shoulder, his own hand rose suddenly and their fingertips met.

  Like that, maybe. It’s supposed to happen like that. But I can’t remember a touch like that w
ith Kim. There was some cute talk. There was her hair falling on me. There was the thing that happened for me when I was inside her, a thing that the guys in the stops have some words for. But I can’t quite hear it in those ways. I mean that moment when I run inside her, when I run like it feels when I’m on a good rig and I’m coming out of the hills after a slow climb and I crest and suddenly I think I’m falling. But that’s not really a good moment I’m talking about. Most of the time you feel like you and the truck are pretty much together. But in that sudden run, you feel like you’ve broken away from this thing you’re riding. You have nothing to do with it and sometimes that scares you a little and sometimes it just makes you feel like you’ve flown off to someplace else and you’re not sure where that is.

  The place wasn’t with Kim, though. I went home from the war in February of 1967, and for a few months before that, I didn’t even see her. I went home and that meant Wabash and I went back to my room in the little brick house on Hagemeyer Avenue where I still had baseball cards and my steel-toed shoes and some shirts in a closet that were the color of the deuce-and-a-halfs I’d just driven for a year and were still smelling like the mill. I went there and I slept till noon every day for three months and I went out until I found Mattie from Wabash High who I always liked to look at and she remembered me and she was a waitress at the Woolworth’s and she didn’t ask me any questions at that time and we got married and I lay in another room on the same street, with her, and she was tall, and though she was lanky, there seemed to be so much of her when she was naked, and she seemed soft to the touch, and she had heavy eyebrows and hair she kept rolled tight in a lace net when she was working but she let it down for me long and straight. That should have been what I needed. That should have been what I’d been wait­ing for all along and I should have gotten back on at the mill like my dad wanted me to do now that I was home from a war, but it never quite turned out that way.