On Blood Road

by Steve Watkins

  “What?” My brain isn’t working right. My mouth isn’t working right.

  She points and I see: what’s left of him, which isn’t much. It’s Trang’s blood on me. Trang’s guts. I grab more elephant grass and rub as hard as I can to make it go away. It won’t. Not all of it. Not enough.

  Phuong takes my arm again and shows me what she wants me to do. Back out, retrace our footsteps, don’t step anywhere we didn’t step before on the way in.

  “C’était une mine,” she says. It was a mine.

  I follow her. Her voice sounds very far away though she’s still holding onto my arm. Trang had been right in front of me. Trang stepped on a mine. Trang is dead now, too. I tell myself these things. I think about what would have happened if Phuong had been in the lead. And what Trang would have done to me afterward. Or what if I had been the one in the front?

  We’re back in the jungle, safe but not safe, because nowhere in Vietnam is safe. Death waits around every bend. Death is never more than a footstep away. Death doesn’t even wait. Death hunts you down. Death comes for you in a thousand ways. I could have been killed days ago, not by American bombs or Vietnamese soldiers or Dragon Ships in the night. I could have drowned in the Saigon River. I could have been murdered by a white-lipped viper. I break down, and Phuong, who has hardly changed expression the whole time I’ve been with her, breaks down, too.

  There won’t be any burying Trang. After five minutes, maybe ten, Phuong composes herself, stands up, shoulders her rucksack and rice carrier, grabs her AK-47, and we leave, circling the meadow, keeping inside the tree line, though it’s slow going as we wade through dense thickets or find ourselves blocked by stands of bamboo. Phuong’s machete is useless there, but she keeps it out for hacking through lighter brush.

  We come across a stream, maybe a tributary to the Saigon River, though we haven’t seen it since the day before as we began heading north. Phuong looks at me and looks at herself. We’re both still caked in Trang’s blood. She points to a pool and tells me I can bathe in there, and I should wash out my clothes.

  “What about you?” I ask.

  “I’ll be close by.”

  Phuong disappears around a bend in the stream. Once she’s out of sight, I sink into the pool, sandals and clothes and all, though the water barely covers me when I lie down. I rub on my pants and shirt, and the water turns red, but the stains are still there, so I peel off my clothes and scour away the blood using fistfuls of mud. I rub it in my hair, over my face, down my arms, ducking under the water again and again, like I’m in a washing machine.

  Afterward, I collapse in soft grass with my clothes spread out next to me where the sunlight breaks through the canopy. I feel clean, or something like it, for the first time since Saigon, nearly two weeks before. My ribs stand out like marimba bars, a sign of how little I’ve been eating, and how much weight I’ve lost. I can feel every bone in my body. My stomach is concave.

  But at least I’m no longer wearing another man’s blood.

  I wake up alone. Still daylight, but the sun has shifted. Ants are crawling on my face and arms and chest, but not biting. Maybe there isn’t enough of me left for them to bother. I brush them off and sit up. My clothes are damp—they haven’t dried much at all—but I pull them on anyway. The bloody water has all washed downstream, so I fill the canteen and pick up Vu’s rice pouch.

  I step through trees and brush to find Phuong asleep on her back in her own patch of soft grass around a bend in the stream. She has on a thin undershirt and shorts, and is cradling her weapon. Her black uniform is spread on the ground. I watch her for a while, not sure if I should wake her—or if this is my chance to escape. What if I slip over and grab the AK-47? Her machete is lashed onto her rucksack, and I could get to that, too. I could get to everything.

  But I’m too afraid. Too lost. Too helpless. And besides, it was Vu and Trang who wanted to kill me, not Phuong. She protected me from them. But for what? To take me to the Hanoi Hilton? Or someplace between here and there—someplace even worse?

  She stirs, making the decision for me—not that there was really a decision to make. She rubs her eyes and slowly sits. Her long black hair hangs loose down her back. She sweeps it from her face, combs her fingers through to ease out tangles, and then lets the hair cascade down her back again. Her face is softer than before. Maybe relaxed from sleep. But no. Her expression changes. Tears stream down her cheeks again. She doesn’t bother to wipe them.

  She pulls her weapon closer, pushes the stock into the earth between her knees, and presses her forehead against the barrel, as if she’s praying. I retreat to my side of the green wall of brush. Back to my side of the war. Leaving Phuong to hers for a while longer. I feel like a voyeur. I guess I am a voyeur. Not that she was doing anything, or that there was anything to see. Just a girl with a gun, crying.

  That day we walk deep into twilight. After the deathlike silence of the ghost forest and the Ben Suc crater, the chattering of insects and birds and monkeys and other night creatures is deafening. Phuong finds a path for us to follow, but I wonder if it’s the right one, whatever that might be, and wherever it’s supposed to take us.

  She makes me walk in front, and whenever I’m uncertain about direction in those places where the trail is faint, or branches off from itself, or seems to stop altogether, she gives me instructions in her careful French. But those are the only times she speaks the rest of the day. I’m too busy staring at the trail in front of me, desperately looking for signs of another land mine, to think about much of anything else, which is both a mercy and a curse. My stomach is knotted with fear. Once, after I run out of water and don’t hydrate for a couple of sweaty hours, I grab my knees and bend over, dry-heaving.

  It finally gets too dark for even Phuong to continue, so we set up camp—which consists of nothing more than her boiling the last of her water to make sticky rice and cook the remaining tapioca root. I’m so thirsty that I can barely swallow my share.

  Phuong assures me that we’ll have plenty of water the next day. Or perhaps the day after that.

  “When we cross into Cambodia,” she adds, as if that’s an afterthought and no big deal.

  “So we won’t be in Vietnam anymore?” I ask.

  “Not for some time,” she says.

  The forest is quiet, the night black. A faint breeze whispers in the branches overhead.

  “Will you tell me where we’re going?” I ask. “Where you’re taking me?”

  “North,” she says. “That’s all I can say.”

  I press her further. “To North Vietnam? To Hanoi?”

  She doesn’t answer.

  “I was told there’s a prison there, where they put Americans. They call it the Hanoi Hilton. They torture Americans.” My voice is shaky as I say this. I want her to tell me it isn’t true, even if I know I won’t believe her.

  Instead she changes the subject. Sort of. “In the South, there is an island, Con Son Island, just off the coast. It was once a French prison. Now the Americans and the South Vietnam government hold prisoners there in tiger cages.”

  She doesn’t wait for me to ask about the cages before explaining. “They’re under the ground, only half as tall as a person. The floors and walls are stone. The ceilings are iron bars, where guards walk. They feed the prisoners from there. They do other things to the prisoners from there as well—you can probably imagine what. The prisoners can’t stand, or walk, or exercise. If they’re ever released, they can no longer walk. Their muscles in their legs have atrophied, leaving them crippled.” She pauses. “We have heard from many people who have been imprisoned at Con Son that this isn’t all they do there.”

  I think about the days the inquisitor kept me tied to the wall in the tunnels, starved me, broke me.

  “Is that what they do in Hanoi, too?” I ask. “For revenge?”

  “I don’t know,” she says. “In war, it’s not okay to use torture.”

  “But they do,” I respond. “Right? Both sides? It�
�s all terrible, no matter who you’re fighting for, or why you’re fighting?”

  They aren’t really questions.

  “It’s war,” Phuong answers.

  She ties me to a tree that night, even though I promise I won’t go anywhere or try to escape. And even though she left me alone on the bank of that creek after Trang was killed. “There’s no one to keep watch,” she says. “You could try to steal my weapon.”

  “But I wouldn’t,” I say.

  “But you might,” she replies.

  Hours later, something wakes me. Phuong shouting in her sleep. She thrashes on the ground, trying to free herself from the tangle of poncho wrapped around her legs. She sits up suddenly and holds her head in her hands.

  “As-tu eu le cauchemar?” I ask her. Did you have a nightmare?

  She nods and keeps pressing her hands against her temples, as if to squeeze out the memory of it, or maybe stop the disorientation that always comes after, at least for me.

  I ask if she’s okay. “Est-ce que tu vas bien?”

  She whispers back a faint, “Oui.”

  My hands are bound behind my back, with another rope threaded behind my elbows and tied around the tree—just like that first night outside the underground hospital with the other prisoners.

  I don’t want to feel bad for Phuong, but I can’t help it, either, and if I wasn’t restrained, I would probably go over and sit next to her. I do what I think is the next best thing—offer to stay awake and talk, until she feels like sleeping again. She says she would like that.

  At first it’s twenty questions. I ask Phuong how old she is, where she’s from, how she learned French, if she volunteered to go to Ben Suc.

  “I’m eighteen,” she says, which surprises me. I knew she was young, but not that young. I lie and tell her I’m eighteen, too, but she looks skeptical.

  “I already told you I’m a city girl, from Hanoi,” she says. “My mother and father were both pharmacists. They wanted me to attend pharmacy school as well. But they understood that I was needed in the fight to unify Vietnam. Everyone was needed. Also, my volunteering to travel to the South, to live here and fight, is a way to prove to Communist Party officials that I can be trusted, and that my family can be trusted.”

  “I don’t understand,” I say. “Why wouldn’t they trust you or whatever?”

  “Because we aren’t from the working class, like the peasants, and factory workers, and farmers. So my family—my parents and my four brothers and sisters and myself—were treated with some suspicion. That’s the case with many who were from the professional class when Vietnam was a colony of France, especially if they were trained in Europe and not at schools in Hanoi. My parents had studied in Paris.”

  She pauses, then adds, “But now I’m committed to the resistance, and to the cause of reunification. We all are. My family. Everyone in the North. And many in the South.”

  I like hearing her voice, disembodied as the night grows even darker until we’re no longer ourselves, or no longer our full selves, but just our voices, just our stories.

  “So do you have, like, a boyfriend?” I ask.

  She laughs. “No,” she says. “Not anymore, since I was in school. And do you have a girlfriend?”

  I think about that girl Beth, but she seems so far away, not just in distance, because it must be a lifetime ago that I met her in the Village at that psychedelic concert. I can’t even summon up an image of her face anymore.

  “No,” I say. “Well, kind of, yes. I mean, no, not really.”

  “You sound confused,” she says. “Do you know what a girlfriend is?”

  “Of course,” I say. “It’s just that I haven’t known her very long. And now I’m here. And she probably forgot all about me by now.”

  “I understand,” Phuong says, though I can’t read her tone. “In Vietnam, once you’re no longer a schoolgirl, you would never be alone with a boy, or with a young man. You would have to have your family give permission even for the young man to visit your home—after your parents have met the boy’s family, of course.”

  “What about this?” I ask. “You and me, here. What would they think?”

  “They would understand that you are a prisoner,” Phuong says, “and that I have my orders to follow. And they would understand that I was supposed to have two comrades with me, to escort the prisoner. They would also understand that in war, you or your comrades can be killed in a thousand ways, that they can be with you one minute, and then in the next minute …”

  She doesn’t finish, and I don’t ask her to. I picture her and Trang, covered in dust and blood after the Dragon Ships’ murderous assault in the ghost forest—without Vu. I picture Trang, or what was left of him, in the flattened elephant grass after stepping on the land mine. I wonder if it’s like this for everybody in war: You remember the terrible things nobody should ever have to see, but the longer you’re in it, the more you start to forget everything that was normal and good.

  The night silence creeps back in.

  The next two days we travel hard, keeping to the forest as much as possible but having to venture out under the brutal sun to cross miles of rice paddies with no shelter or shade, except the occasional copse of trees where the dikes converge to make small islands, or when we stumble on tiny hamlets where the children hide once they see strangers approaching, and especially when they realize one of them is an American. We can’t drink the stagnant water in the rice paddies, but we find a couple of dirty streams along the way and make do.

  Sometimes Phuong stops abruptly and listens for the telltale drone of a spotter plane. Twice, when she hears something, we dive into the nasty water and hug the bank until the plane circles and leaves, then we scramble back onto the dike and run for cover in case it comes back, which she says happens a lot—an old trick to coax NVA soldiers out of hiding. I have to fight back the impulse to stand up on the dike and yell and wave and throw off my straw hat and show them my American face.

  But she’s still the one with the AK-47, and I’m still her prisoner. Even if we’re lying facedown in the rice paddies together.

  Sometimes we talk, other times we don’t.

  At one small village, a farmer has just slaughtered a pig. It’s hanging upside down, the blood from its slit throat draining into a bucket. There was a time when I would have been grossed out seeing that, but now I don’t think anything about it at all. Phuong offers to buy some of the meat, but the farmer insists on giving us some, maybe seeing how thin and hungry we both are, or maybe he’s just afraid of Phuong’s gun.

  That night we have a feast—not only the roasted pork, but some bean sprouts and peppers the villagers also share with us. I nearly cry as fat from the pork drips off into the fire while we turn it on a homemade spit. What a waste! We probably don’t wait long enough for it to cook all the way through before we pull the meat off the bone.

  Phuong chews everything slowly, thoughtfully, as if it’s just another meal rather than the first real food she’s had in a week. I shove my mouth into my bowl to lick it clean.

  She cuts me off when I reach for a second helping. “Enough. We save the rest for tomorrow.”

  I know she’s right, that we shouldn’t eat it all at once, but I still would steal every bite if I could get away with it.

  To distract myself I say, “How did the pilots of those Dragon Ships know about the NVA battalion crossing the ghost forest? Like, the exact time and place.”

  “I doubt it was spotter planes,” she says. “But there are other ways they have of finding our troop locations. The Americans have put censors, thousands of them, in places where they think we’ll be traveling. Or it could have been the work of spies. We’ve discovered secret transmitters hidden near the Trail. You remember the questions you were asked about your father. We suspect that he, or others he works with, are behind much of this surveillance.”

  I wish I could ask my dad about it myself. It all sounds so complicated and technical—and sinister. Almost lik
e a game, like if pinball and chess got married and had a kid, and they armed that kid with the most lethal weapons on the planet.

  “Of course there’s also the element of luck. Or bad luck,” Phuong says. “Often the censors don’t work correctly. Once the Americans slaughtered a herd of elephants in a bombing raid in Laos. I’ve heard that sometimes they pick up sounds of the wind in the trees, and the trees swaying. Sometimes they have targeted montagnards, the mountain people who live near the Trail. Many of them have been killed as well.”

  “How do you know so much about the Trail?” I ask.

  “You’re not the first prisoner I’ve been assigned to escort on the trails,” she says. “I’ve been here before, and much farther north as well. I had experienced guides with me the first time, and the second time. Then I became the experienced one.”

  “Have you gone farther north than Cambodia?” I ask, hoping to get her to confirm where we’re going.

  “Only once, into Laos,” she says.

  “What about to Hanoi?” I ask.

  She shakes her head. “No. Any prisoner being taken that far, I was ordered to hand off to others at one of the supply stations in Cambodia or Laos.”

  “What about this time, with me?”

  She hesitates. “We’re never supposed to tell prisoners this information. But …” She hesitates again. She doesn’t finish. But now I’m more convinced than ever that our ultimate destination is Hanoi. And my heart sinks at the thought of it.

  Much later, we’re resting by a shaded stream after hours of walking that started before sunrise. The buzz and whir of insects keeps us company; we haven’t seen another human since yesterday. I ask Phuong about Ben Suc—how she managed to survive when so many others didn’t.

  “We knew that the Americans were coming,” she says. “So in some ways we were able to prepare. But we could only prepare so much. Cadres were sent to Cambodia before the American attack. Teams spread out deep into the countryside. But many of us were still in the village when the bomb and the rocket attacks started. There were helicopters, gunships, and fighter-bombers. We recognized the scream of the jets, dropping bombs and spraying automatic weapons fire on Ben Suc.