(Now that was a frightening thought; frighteningly plausible. This whole thing was just fucked up enough to be an Army operation. Had I forgotten to fill out a form somewhere down the line?)
I headed back down the trail we’d followed to our deaths, but this time, along with the usual sounds of the jungle—the rustling in the bush that you hoped was only a bamboo viper, or a tiger—I heard the jungle’s other voice. I heard the sounds the choppers, with their souls-in-a-box, only played at.
I heard weeping.
Not moaning; not wailing; none of that Roger Corman, Vincent Price shit. Just the sound of grown men weeping, uncontrollably and inconsolably—coming, it seemed, from everywhere at once. And slowly, I began to see them: VC, blood spattered over their black silk pajamas, crouched in the bush in that funny way the VN sit—squatting, not sitting, on the ground—and crying. I stopped, dumbfounded. I’d never seen a VN cry before. I’d seen them scared, hell, I’d seen them fucking terrified, but I never saw them cry. All that crap you heard about how the VN are different from us, how they don’t feel the way we do, I knew that was bullshit. They felt; they just didn’t show it the way we did. But goddamned if these guys weren’t giving our guys a run for their money. Maybe, if you’re a VC and you’re dead, it’s okay to cry. Maybe it’s expected. I moved on.
And somewhere along the trail, as I followed the Song Cai in its winding path south, I began to consider that I might not, in fact, be among the dead; that I might just be alive, after all.
Maybe, I thought, the rounds that had dropped me had just wounded me; maybe the VC took my body so they could get information out of me, later. The more I thought about it, the more reasonable it sounded. They take me, nurse me back to health, so they can torture me later. (That sounded as logical as anything else in this screwy country.) And somewhere along the way, I split off from my body. Got left behind, like a shadow shaken loose from its owner. I listened to the weeping all around me—Christ, I almost wished they were wailing and moaning; I could’ve borne that a lot easier—and I decided that I wasn’t, couldn’t be dead.
Up ahead, the trail widened briefly into a clearing, in the middle of which stood what looked like a giant birdhouse: a bamboo hut, little more than a box really, perched on the stump of a large tree trunk. There were spirit houses like this scattered all over Nam, small homes erected for the happiness of departed relatives, or for embittered spirits who might otherwise prey on hapless villagers. The Army briefed us on the local customs and superstitions before we even arrived over here—things like, you never pat a VN on the head ’cause the head, to the Vietnamese, is the seat of the soul; and whatever you do, don’t sit with your legs crossed so that your foot is pointing toward the other person’s head, because that’s the grossest kind of insult. Shit like that. Some dinks would even name their male babies after women’s sexual organs to try and fool evil spirits into thinking the kid was a girl, because boys were more valuable and needed to be protected. Jesus.
So I knew about spirit houses, and when we passed this one the other day I remember thinking, hey, that’s kind of neat, even better than the treehouse I built in my grandparents’ yard when I was twelve, and went on walking.
Today, I stopped. Stared at it.
Today, there were people inside the birdhouse.
One was an elderly papa-san, the other a young woman, maybe twenty-eight, twenty-nine. They were burning Joss sticks, the sweet fragrance carried back on the thick wind, and around them I saw candles, tiny hand-made furniture, and a few books. I started walking again, more slowly now, and as I got within a couple of yards of the birdhouse the papa-san looked up at me, blinked once in mild surprise, then smiled and held his hand over his chest in a gassho—a traditional form of greeting and respect. His other arm, I now noticed, was askew beneath its silk sleeve, as though it had been broken, or worse.
“Welcome, traveler,” he said. He was speaking in Vietnamese, but I understood, somehow, despite it.
“Uh . . . hello,” I said, not sure if this worked both ways, but apparently it did; he smiled again, gesturing to his woman companion.
“I am Phan Van Duc. My daughter, Chau.”
The woman turned and glared at me. She was pretty, in the abstract, but it was hard to get past the sneer on her face. So fixed, so unwavering, it looked like it’d been tattooed on. And since I wasn’t sure if her anger was directed at me or not, I decided to ignore it, turned to the old man.
“My name is William Anthony Collins,” I said. I wasn’t sure if having three names was requisite over here, but I figured it couldn’t hurt.
“May we offer you shelter?” Phan asked cordially. His daughter glowered.
There was barely enough room in the birdhouse for two, and I had no desire to be at close quarters with Chau. I declined, but thanked him for the offer.
“Have you been dead long?” the papa-san asked suddenly. I flinched.
“I’m not dead,” I said, stubbornly.
The old man looked at me as though I were crazy. His daughter laughed a brassy, mocking laugh.
I explained what had happened to me, what I thought had happened to me, and how I was heading for the village downriver to see if the Viet Cong had taken my body there. Phan looked at me with sad, wise eyes as I spoke, then, when I’d finished, nodded once—more out of politeness, I suspected, than out of any credence he put in my theory.
“What you say may be true,” he mused, “though I have never heard of such a thing. I would imagine, however, that rather than take a prisoner to a village, where he might easily be discovered, they would take him to one of their tunnel bases.”
The VC had hundreds of tunnels running beneath most of I-Corps: a spiderweb of barracks and underground command posts and subterranean hospitals so vast, so labyrinthine, that we were only just beginning to understand the full scope of them. If I had been taken prisoner in one of them, the odds of finding myself were about equal to winning bets on the Triple Crown, the World Series, and the Super Bowl, all in one year.
“In that case,” I said, not really wanting to think about it, “I’ll just wait for my—body—to die, and when it does, I’m gone.”
Papa-san looked at me with a half-pitying, half-perplexed look, as though I had just told him the sky was green and the moon was made of rice. Hell, come to think of it, maybe the dinks did think the moon was made of rice.
“What about you?” I said, anxious to shift the topic. “Why are you—here?”
Phan showed no trace of pain, or grief, as he replied.
“I was mauled by a tiger and left to bleed to death,” he said simply, as though that should explain everything. Then, at my blank look, he explained patiently, “Having died a violent death, I was denied entry to the next world.”
I blinked. I didn’t see the connection.
“Getting mauled by a tiger, that’s not your fault,” I said, baffled.
He looked as baffled by my words as I was by his. “What difference does fault make? What is, is.” He shrugged.
I opted not to pursue the subject. Phan and Martinez would’ve gotten along just fine. “And your daughter?”
He looked askance at her, she threw me a nasty look, then she scrambled forward into the birdhouse, hands gripping the lip of the floor, spitting the words at me: the hard edges of the Vietnamese consonants as sharp as the bitterness in her words.
“I died childless,” she snapped at me. “Is that what you wanted to hear? Are you happy? I died childless, worthless, and I am condemned because of it.”
“That’s crazy,” I said, despite myself.
She laughed a brittle laugh. “You are the crazy one,” she said, “a ma qui, thinking he is alive. I pity you.”
“No,” the papa-san said gently, “you pity no one but yourself.”
She glared at him, her nostrils flaring, then laughed again, shortly. “You are right,” she said. “I pity no one. I don’t know why I let you keep me here. I can do anything I want. I can bring dise
ase back to the village, kill the children of my former friends. Yes. I think I would like that.” She grinned maliciously, as though taking relish in the wickedness of her thought.
“You will not,” Phan warned. “I am your father, and I forbid it.”
She muttered a curse under her breath and retreated to the rear of the birdhouse. The papa-san turned and looked at me sadly.
“Do not judge my daughter by what she is now,” he said softly. “Death makes of us what it wishes.”
Jesus Christ; these people actually believed that. And so, I guess, that’s just what they got. Well, not me. No fucking way, man. Not me.
I backed away. “I have to go.”
“Wait,” Phan said. I halted, I’m not sure why; he leaned forward, as though to share something important with me. “If you go into the village . . . you must be careful. Do not walk in the front door of a house, because the living keep mirrors by the doorway, to reflect the image of those who enter. If a spirit sees himself in the mirror, he will be frightened off. Also, if red paper lines the entrance, stay away, for you will anger the God of the Doorway. Do you understand?”
I nodded, numbly, thanked him for his advice, and got the hell out of there, fast.
I hurried down the trail, past the weeping guerrillas in black silk, feeling a sudden, black longing for something as violent and mundane as a mortar strike; yearning for the sound of gunships, the bright spark of tracer fire, the crackling of small arms fire or the din of big Chinook choppers circling in for the kill. God damn. This was the dinks’ Hell, not mine; I wasn’t going to be a part of it, I would not buy into their stupid, superstitious horseshit. The weeping around me grew louder. I started running now, phantom limbs passing harmlessly through tripwires and across punji traps, even the elephant grass not so much as tickling my calves as I ran along the banks of the Song Cai—
The weeping changed. Became different: deeper. I knew instantly that it was not the cries of a Vietnamese; knew, suddenly and sickeningly, that it was an American’s cries I was hearing.
I stopped; looked around. I saw no one lying wounded in the bush, but heard, now, too, a voice:
“—Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, help me— ”
Oh, Christ, I thought.
DePaul.
I looked up. He was floating about five feet above the muddy waters of the river, like a tethered balloon, his big, six-foot frame looking almost gaseous, his black skin seeming somehow pale. His hands covered his face as he wept, prayed, swore, and wept again. At first I thought he was moving upstream, but I soon realized that it was the water flowing under him that gave the illusion of movement; he swayed back and forth slightly, but was utterly motionless, completely stationary.
It took me a moment to recover my wits. I shouted his name over the roar of the rapids.
He looked up, startled.
When he saw me—saw me looking at him—his face lit up with a kind of absolution. “Oh, Jesus,” he said, so softly I almost couldn’t hear it. “Collins? Are you real?”
“I sure as shit hope so.”
“Are you alive?”
I dodged the question. “What the hell happened to you, man? Prosser said you went down right next to him, but your body— ”
“Charlie hit me in the back.” I could see the hole torn in his skin at the nape of his neck, and the matching one in front, just below his collarbone, where the bullet had exited. “I couldn’t breathe. Couldn’t think. Got up, somehow, ran—but in the wrong direction. Dumped into the river. Christ, Bill, it was awful. I was choking and drowning, and the next thing I knew— ” His hand had gone, reflexively, to his throat, covering the ragged hole there. “—my body had floated downriver, then got snagged on some rock. Over there.”
I followed his gaze. His body was pinned between two rocks, the waters flowing around it, flanking it in white foam. I turned back to DePaul, floating in place above the river, and I took a step forward.
“Christ, De,” I said softly. “How—I mean, what— ”
“I can’t get down, man,” he said, and for the first time I heard the pain in his voice; “I been here two, three days, and it hurts. Oh Christ, it hurts! It’s not like floating, Jesus, it’s like treading water, every muscle in my body aches—I’m so tired, man, I’m so— ” He broke off into sobs; something I’d never seen him do. He looked away, let the tears come, then looked back at me, his eyes wide. “Help me, Collins,” he said, softly. “Help me.”
“Just tell me how,” I said, feeling helpless, horrified. “Why—why are you like this, man? You have any idea?”
“Yeah. Yeah, I know,” he said, taking a ragged gulp of air. “It’s—it’s ’cause I died in water, see? You die in water, your spirit’s tied to the water till you can find another one to— ”
“What? Jesus Christ, De, where’d you get that shit from?”
“Another spook. VC, half his head blown away, wanderin’ up and down the river. He told me.”
“You bought into this crap?” I yelled at him. “These dinks believe this shit, man, you don’t have to—you’re an American, for Chrissake!”
“Collins— ”
“You believe it, it happens. You stop believing, it stops happening. Just— ”
His eyes were sunken, desperate. “Please, man. Help me?”
No matter what I thought of this shit, there was only one thing that mattered: he’d saved my life, once; and even if there was no more life in him to save, I could, at least, try to ease his pain. I had to try.
“All right,” I said. “What can I do?”
He hesitated.
“Bring me a kid,” he said, quietly.
“Why?”
He hesitated again; then, working up his nerve, he said, “To release me. A life for a life.”
My eyes went wide. “What?”
“It’s the only way,” he said quickly. “You die in water, the only way to be set free is to—drown—a kid, as an offering.” His eyes clouded over, his gaze became hooded and ashamed even as he said it. For a long minute the only sound was the rushing of water past the dam of DePaul’s corpse, and the distant sounds of weeping carried on the wind.
Finally I said, “I can’t do that, man.”
“Bill— ”
“Even if I believed it’d work—especially if I believed it’d work—I couldn’t— ”
“Not a healthy kid,” DePaul interrupted, desperation and pleading creeping into his tone, “a sick one. One that’s gonna die anyway. Shit, half the gook kids over here die before they’re— ”
“Are you crazy, man?” I snapped. “Gook or not, I can’t— ”
I stopped. Listened to what I was saying.
DePaul’s face was ashen; in torment. “Collins . . . please. I hurt so bad— ”
I was buying into this crap. Just like him. Someone’d filled his head with dink superstition, and now he was living—or dying—by it. That was it, wasn’t it? You die, you get pretty much what you expect: Catholics, heaven or hell; atheist, maybe nothing, nonexistence, loss of consciousness; dinks—this. And we’d been over here so long, wading knee deep in their fucking country, that we were starting to believe what they believed.
But the DePaul I knew would never kill a kid. Not even to save himself. Maybe the only way to shake him loose from this bullshit was to show him that.
I waited a long minute, thinking, devising a plan, and then finally I spoke up.
“A sick kid?” I asked, carefully, as though I actually believed all this.
He looked up, hopefully. “One that’s gonna die anyway. You’ve seen ’em, you know what they look like, you can see it in their eyes— ”
“I won’t bring one that’s gonna live.”
“No no, man, you don’t have to. A sick kid. A real sick kid.” God, he sounded pathetic.
I told him I didn’t know how long it would take, but that I would head into the village we passed through a few days ago and see what I could do. I told him I’d be back as soon as I coul
d.
“Hurry, man. Hurry.” It was the last thing I heard before I headed back into the bush once again. He’d bought the line. Now all I had to do was show him he’d bought another—and, more important, that he could buy out of it.
The village was about two hours up the road. There was no Red Cross Jeep in sight, no Catholic Relief doctor handing out aspirin and antibiotics; just the squalid little huts, the half-naked kids running through muddy puddles probably rife with typhoid, tired-looking women doing laundry in a small stream tributary to the Song Cai. There was a huge crater at the edge of town—the mortar strike that was too late to save me and Dunbar and DePaul. Nearby roofs were scorched, at least two huts had been burned to the ground. Friendly fire. Any more friendly and half the village would be greeting me personally. I walked up the main road, peeking in windows. If I was going to make it look genuine I’d have to bring back a genuinely sickly kid; though exactly how, I still wasn’t sure.
Outside one hut I heard the sound of a mother comforting a squalling baby, and decided to go in and take a look. Sure enough, just as the old Papa-san had predicted, the doorway was lined with red paper to ward off evil spirits. I stepped across the threshold. Big fucking deal. Up yours, God of the Doorway. I turned—
I screamed.
In the mirror positioned just inside, I saw a man with a foot-wide hole blasted in his chest: the torn edges of the wound charred to a crisp, the cavity within raw and red as steak tartare. A pair of lungs dangled uselessly from the slimmest of folds of flesh, swaying as I jumped back, reflexively; beside them, a heart riddled with a half dozen jagged frag wounds throbbed in a stubborn counterfeit of life.
And behind me in the mirror, a glimpse of something else: a shadow, a red shadow, red as the paper above the doorway . . . moving not as I moved but looming up, and quickly, behind me.
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