On Blood Road

by Steve Watkins

  For Janet

  Title Page

  Dedication

  January 22

  January 28

  January 29

  January 30, almost midnight

  January 31, after midnight

  January 31, morning

  January 31, afternoon

  January 31, evening

  February 1

  February 1, late afternoon

  February 2

  February 3

  February 8, morning

  February 8, afternoon

  February 9, evening

  February 10

  February 11

  February 13

  February 15

  February 16

  February 18

  February 21

  February 22

  February 24

  February 28

  March 3

  March 4

  March 11

  March 13

  March 14

  March 15

  March 16

  March 24

  March 25

  March 25, evening

  April 22

  May 20

  December 24

  Author’s Note

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Copyright

  My mom is waiting up when I come in—so late after midnight that I don’t even bother looking at my watch. Our apartment is on the Upper West Side, on the nineteenth floor with a view of Central Park. Mom sleeps with earplugs and an eye mask, and her bedroom is a mile away from the elevator, so I don’t know how she heard me.

  But here she is, her usually perfect hair all frizzy, no makeup, standing right inside the front door with her arms crossed, tapping her foot. The ash on her cigarette is so long I think it will fall onto the plush carpet that she just had installed. Like she’s been waiting for me for who knows how long. The whole scene catches me off guard.

  “Where have you been?” she demands, as I peel off my coat and scarf and this Russian winter army hat with fur-lined flaps that I wear all the time. “And don’t even think about lying to me, Taylor, because I will find out. I will call every one of your friends’ parents, and be assured that someone will know something.”

  I spent the past few hours at a music club called Max’s Kansas City with my best friend, Geoff, and two girls from our French class, and a couple hundred other people, all of us packed in so tight that nobody could dance, just sway in rhythm. A psychedelic West Coast band called Moby Grape had been playing.

  “Concert,” I say. “In the Village. So what?”

  Mom looks for an ashtray, finds one, stubs out her cigarette, and glares at me.

  “Don’t you ‘So what’ me, young man. You know you’re not allowed out at night without permission and an escort. We are in New York City. You could be hurt, or mugged, or killed. And it’s a school night!”

  I know I should just apologize and get it over with and blah, blah, blah. But since when did she start caring what I do? I feel a flare of resentment at this sudden show of concern. Normally I’m invisible while she’s off planning charity events and silent auctions and whatever else she does as an excuse to dress up and hang out with other rich moms and brag about their lives.

  “Isn’t it kind of late for you to be up?” I retort. “Isn’t this, like, when you get your beauty sleep? Put cold cream all over your face? Talk to Dad?”

  My dad is a Special Attaché for Something or Other at the US embassy—in Vietnam of all places, which is why when he calls it’s at all kinds of weird hours. He isn’t home much. Too busy working on the war, or pumping up the South Vietnamese economy, or making his own business deals on the side, or whatever. It’s 1968, and President Johnson keeps assuring us that we’re winning the war, that there’s light at the end of the tunnel, that the American troops—half a million and counting—will be home soon from Southeast Asia. It’s all over the nightly news.

  “As a matter of fact, I already spoke with your father,” Mom snaps. “And when he wanted to talk to you and you had snuck out, well, that was it. He agrees with me that you have been out of control lately, and it’s time we did something about it.”

  Wanted to talk to me? Yeah, right. Ever since my dad left for Vietnam, I haven’t exactly been of high interest to him. More like my mom asked if he wanted to talk to me and he felt obligated to say yes.

  “Did something like what?” I ask, but then I interrupt her before she can even get started. “You know what? Never mind. You can tell me in the morning. I’m tired. I’m going to bed. Got school tomorrow, remember?”

  I try to step past her, but she blocks me. “Oh no you don’t,” she says. “You’re going to hear me out. This isn’t the first time your so-called friends have talked you into sneaking out of the apartment and going to hippie clubs in the Village. Especially that boy Geoffrey you’re always hanging out with.”

  I throw myself down on the sofa, resigning myself to whatever she wants to say. “How do you know I’m not the one who’s the bad influence on Geoff? Huh? Ever thought about that?”

  Mom’s face turns beet red, but she plows on, listing ways I’m the worst kid. “Your grades are atrocious. You’re barely passing classes and you’re on academic probation. I don’t understand what your problem is. Do you know how many kids would kill to go to the Dalton School?”

  I brush my hair out of my face and shrug at her.

  “And your hair! You look homeless with it that long.” She seems like she’s picking up steam, so I tune out, until she says, “We’re taking you out of school. For the next two weeks. Whether we send you back will depend on how you conduct yourself during that time.”

  I laugh. “Sweet! A vacation. And we just had Christmas break!”

  “You’ll be accompanying me to visit your father for his fiftieth birthday, which is next week if you forgot,” she says.

  “No way!” I shout. “Did you forget he’s in Vietnam, and there’s a little something called a war going on over there?”

  “The war is in the North,” Mom says. “In the Central Highlands. Your father explained it all to me. There is guerrilla activity in the South, but it is contained. Most of it was eradicated in military operations last year. So we’ll be safe.”

  I roll my eyes. She sounds like she’s reading one of Dad’s secret briefing papers that he sometimes forgets are supposed to be so secret. He had a stack of them with him when he came home for a week at Christmas. He was so busy poring over his precious documents and talking on the phone and making day trips down to Washington that I barely got to see him. I thought I’d finally get to hang out with him, but guess I’m the idiot. Good thing Geoff found plenty of stuff for us to do.

  I can’t believe this is happening. One minute I’m grooving with Geoff and some girls to Moby Grape, and now this? One of the girls, Beth, just started at our school. Geoff and the other girl, Cassandra, hooked me up with her when we met in the Village. And so far, so good. Beth is sixteen like me, and pretty, with straight brown hair that’s so long she can practically sit on it. She and I stuck together the whole night, dancing, or I guess swaying, at Max’s. When we all split up afterward, Beth gave me a flower she’d been wearing behind her ear and said we should hang out again sometime.

  “Well, I’m not going,” I announce to my mom, sounding like a little kid. “And you can’t make me.”

  She smiles for the first time—an icy smile that makes her look less like her usual Hollywood star and more like Cruella de Vil. “We’ll see about that,” she says. “You are a minor, and as a minor, you don’t get to make these decisions for yourself.”

  “I’ll run away,” I say, knowing I sound even more childish.

  “You’ll do what you’re told,
” she says, and that’s the end of it.

  A week later, on a stone-cold January afternoon, Mom and I take off on a Continental Airlines flight to Saigon—twenty hours sitting side by side, not saying a word, at least not to each other. It’s been a long week of silence in our apartment. We’re in first class so she can talk to the other rich people, and I can stretch out with my portable eight-track tape player and headphones and a new album by the Doors. I listen to the song “Love Me Two Times” over and over, thinking about Beth. We talked on the phone a couple of times since that night at Max’s Kansas City. When I told her my mom was making me go to Vietnam, she went all Romeo and Juliet about it. She made me promise I wouldn’t get killed, as if she thought I was going into the army instead of just getting dragged away for two weeks to visit my dad.

  I told Geoff and he laughed his butt off. “Dude, you get to go to Vietnam, the coolest, most wretched place on the planet. What do you care about some girl? Two weeks of exotic vacation in beautiful, bombed-out Southeast Asia. Wish I could get punished like that.”

  “They might not let me come back to school,” I said.

  “Big deal,” he said. “You’re gonna get drafted anyway when you turn eighteen. Unless you do like I’m planning and go the conscientious objector route.”

  Geoff had dragged me to this big antiwar demonstration last year, a hundred thousand people marching from Central Park to the United Nations in an April downpour, demanding an end to the war, burning draft cards, singing Bob Dylan songs. Martin Luther King Jr. was one of the leaders. Him and the baby doctor, Benjamin Spock.

  “My dad’s head will explode if I don’t register for the draft,” I said. “Better yet, he thinks I should enlist like he did in World War II. And like his dad in World War I. I thought he was going to fly home and strangle me when Mom told him about the protest march.”

  “Yeah, I remember that,” Geoff said. “Too bad you and your dad can’t just, you know, sit down and talk about it. Half the country wants us out of Vietnam already.”

  “Hey, what can I tell you?” I said. “War is the family business.”

  Heat waves rise like wobbly spirits off the black tarmac on the runway at Tan Son Nhat Airport outside Saigon. We flew inland about forty miles from the South China Sea, following the Saigon River—the pilot pointed out all the various landmarks—and now we’re here. But from the looks of things outside the air-conditioned airliner, I’m not sure I want to get off the plane.

  Sure enough, as soon as we step out onto the asphalt, the heat slams into me like I walked into a wall. I’m drenched in sweat by the time we trudge over to the terminal, though Mom seems oblivious. She’s gotten dolled up in a pink dress, but it turns out Dad isn’t here to meet us. He sent his car and driver, a middle-aged Vietnamese guy named Hanh, followed by a jeep with a couple of marines, one of them sitting in the back behind a mounted machine gun.

  “Are we gonna need that?” I ask Hanh, surprised to see such a heavily armed escort. I thought Saigon was supposed to be safe. “Do we have to, like, fight our way to the embassy?”

  “It is only a precaution,” Hanh says, holding the door open for Mom. She stops to stare at the machine gun, too, obviously not pleased.

  The AC is cranked up as high as it will go in the car, a new Ford sedan that Hanh assures us is armor-plated and has bulletproof windows.

  “I guess those are only a precaution, too?” I say.

  “Yes,” Hanh says. “Saigon is well protected. But all of the country is a war zone.”

  The shock back into AC from the one-hundred-degree heat gives me a headache. I press my hands against my temples and wish I’d gotten that haircut Mom has been on me about, since my long hair is now damp with humidity and matted to my forehead and the back of my neck. I think I might have to grab it and twist to ring out all the water.

  Mom, who never seems to sweat no matter what, coolly adjusts her Foster Grant sunglasses and waits like royalty while Hanh retrieves our luggage. Then we’re off to find Dad’s villa, which is near the embassy in the center of Saigon on a street called Thong Nhut Boulevard. We only know the names because Hanh keeps up a running commentary from the front seat like one of those New York tour bus operators.

  Mom nods politely for a while, then orders him to stop at a stand to buy us cold Coca-Colas. “And be sure they haven’t already been opened,” she admonishes him.

  “Of course,” he says.

  To me she adds, “Whatever you do, be sure not to drink the water unless it’s been boiled.”

  We pass through a blur of streets and highways, some so wide they look like parking lots, others so narrow you can almost reach out and push over the tin-roofed houses and stores crowding the edges. There are old, boxy 1950s cars, most of them taxis, fighting their way through intersections and around traffic circles with no signals or police to direct things. That means bicycles and pedestrians and rickshaws and scooters and even horses and wagons are all thrown together in a crazy swirling chaos as one traffic jam bleeds into the next, with just the occasional open block where Hanh can shift into second gear.

  There are kids everywhere, running in and out of traffic, squatting in alleys, standing like zombies, splashing in puddles, or begging for piastres just inches from our window as we nudge our way through—some dressed in rags, some with shirts but no pants, some with nothing on at all.

  Mom tells me not to give them anything. “It will only encourage them to be bolder,” she says. I’m used to seeing panhandlers in New York, but these are just kids.

  Helicopters flash above us, swooping low over the city. “American,” Hanh says. “Routine patrols.”

  We pass a Ford dealership that only has junked cars and rusty car parts, splash through open sewers, see a pit filled with chemical-brown water and dozens of kids swimming in it. There are tarpaulin-covered stalls with cases of bottled sodas stacked ten feet high. Women crouching on sidewalks cooking on tiny stoves. More kids sitting on blankets or towels or just sitting in the dirt selling pyramids of Pall Mall cigarettes and cans of sardines. A giant billboard for a Jerry Lewis movie with a rendering of the comedian that makes him look demonic. Women in long dresses with slits on the side that Hanh tells us are called ao dai. Girls in Western miniskirts and halter tops and high heels and heavy makeup. Hanh catches me staring.

  “Those are B-Girls,” he says to my mother. “It is best for the young man to stay away from them.”

  “Thank you,” Mom says, throwing a warning glance at me, but I keep looking at the girls.

  After an hour, we enter the old French business district at the center of Saigon—or so Hanh tells us—where the streets all widen again, shaded by towering tamarind trees and lined with bougainvillea and fire-red poinciana. We pass the Hotel Continental, which Hanh says is the oldest hotel in Saigon. “Built by the French so of course it’s very fancy.”

  What isn’t so fancy is the wall of sandbags blocking the entrance, and more sandbags protecting other government-looking buildings. The architecture changes here. Red-tile roofs, shining white columns. Most of the people we see now are Vietnamese businessmen in dress pants and long-sleeved white shirts, and an increasing number of South Vietnamese Army types and American GIs.

  “For many years, until France gave up Vietnam as a colony, Saigon was called the Paris of the East,” Hanh the Tour Guide says as the Continental and its wall of sandbags disappear behind us.

  Mom asks about shopping and Hanh points out several stores as we pass that he must think are upscale, but judging from the sour expression on her face, my mom doesn’t agree.

  We pass a small forest of dinosaur-size trees, with trunks growing out of trunks growing out of trunks, and branches rising higher than the surrounding buildings, easily over five stories tall, with monkeys and birds crowding the upper reaches and small shrines decorating the ground underneath.

  “Banyan trees,” Hanh says. “They are a species of fig trees. The figs attract the monkeys and birds and fruit bats you se
e in the branches.”

  “What’s with the shrines?” I ask.

  “Those are for ancestor worship,” Hanh says. “Many of the people in South Vietnam follow the Catholic religion, but there are still many Buddhists as well. The Buddhists believe spirits live in banyan trees, so during Tet they leave gifts and sacrifices and say prayers for their ancestors.”

  “What is Tet?” Mom asks. “Is that a local celebration of some kind?”

  Hanh laughs. “Not exactly. Tet is the Vietnamese New Year, which begins in two days, just after midnight. This coming year will be the Year of the Monkey.”

  He doesn’t have time to explain further, because we’re suddenly there, pulling into Dad’s gated villa, a compound with shards of glass embedded in the top of a concrete wall, and a roll of concertina wire behind that—plus a guard house with two armed, scowling Vietnamese soldiers with M16s. The villa itself is two stories, with a veranda running all the way around the second floor. Dad’s basically turned his house into a heavily defended bunker. The Germans he fought in World War II would have loved the place.

  Hanh parks in a circular driveway under tall tamarind trees and ushers us inside. The military jeep with the machine gun stays out on the street. The burst of heat between the car and the villa is a little easier to deal with thanks to the shade, but the humidity is still so thick a machete would come in handy.

  Dad isn’t home. “I’m very sorry,” Hanh says. “It appears Ambassador Sorenson is still at work.”

  “He’s an ambassador now?” I ask. “When did he get a promotion?”

  “It’s just an honorary title, Taylor,” my mom says as she opens her purse. Hanh smiles and nods.

  Mother tries to tip him, but he waves her off. “Though perhaps you will want to leave a gratuity for the staff when you depart,” he says. He sets our suitcases down in the foyer, then summons the housekeeper, the gardener, the cook, and their assistants, so he can introduce them to us and explain their duties. They all nod but mostly look at the floor. None speak.

  “Welcome to Saigon,” Hanh says after the introductions and the help have retreated to their stations or duties or whatever. “Let me know if you need anything.”