“No can do, babysan. You break my back,” I told him.
He screwed up his face as if he was going to cry. “No way. You carry me before.”
“Yeah, and I may have to again, but only in an emergency. I’m afraid I’m not strong like your own mama, babysan. No can carry water buffalo on each shoulder and a water jug on my head.”
He smiled a little and patted my butt. “No sweat, mamasan. Ahn take care of you.”
“Right. We’re a great team.”
William swung around on us with a look of such truculence that I feared for a moment he’d lost it again. “You people em di,” he said, and whirled back around to take a step. Ahn was staring a little ahead of William with his eyes almost as round as mine.
“Dung lai, William,” he yelped. “Stop!”
“What the fu—” William began, then abruptly stepped back and knelt down, feeling along a line in front of him.
“What is it?” I asked.
He didn’t answer for a moment or two as he traced the thing back into the trees, made some sort of adjustment, and let out a deep sigh. “Thanks, kid. Mamasan, you better take a look at this.”
“William, I wish you wouldn’t call me mamasan,” I complained as I clawed my way through the leaves and vines that kept smacking me in the face. “Or Lieutenant for that matter. What’s the good of me cutting off my bars if you go announcing it all over the place? My name’s Kitty.”
“Yes, ma’am, Lieutenant Kitty, ma’am,” he said snottily. “Now the private wishes to request, Lieutenant Kitty, ma’am, that you kindly take a look at this here trip wire so’s you be able to spot a booby trap next time you be seein’ one.”
“Don’t be a pain in the ass,” I grumbled, but I took a look. It was a nasty apparatus—a dead log with a lot of pungi sticks set at angles that would make a porcupine out of anyone who tripped its mechanism. The whittled bamboo sticks with the excrement on the tips were more chillingly malicious than a grenade would have been. I had already seen the infections and damage they could cause—a man could lose his limb or life as surely to this sort of trap as to high explosives or gunfire.
“Right there is how these people be lookin’ out for themselves,” he told me. There was no anger in his voice. In fact, it was becoming increasingly remote and flat. The old wine color crept back into his aura, along with a grieving umber, and I knew he was seeing himself impaled on that device, feeling that maybe he should have been.
We climbed for two more days, through knots of gnarled root and twisted undergrowth that surely was usually handled with machetes. We were constantly climbing, tripping, trying to thread our way through it like darning needles through finely meshed silk. I feared I was going to grab hold sometime of a fat snake instead of a fat vine, and the thought of that slowed me down even more as I double-checked the aura of the growth in front of me to make sure the long things were uniformly plant-green. A little watery daylight filtered through from those towering top trees, splashing onto the broad flat leaves of the trees that grew to about half their height, and down through the undergrowth bristling above our heads, to sluice down the backs of our necks or splat into our faces. By that time the rain was no longer cool and refreshing but warm as sweat. As it evaporated, shivers ran down my spine without relieving the sensation of being slowly steamed.
Ahn started sneezing that afternoon, and his stump seeped pus and trickled smears of blood through the rough bandages I tried to keep over it. I was one big ache. My head throbbed from the constant glow of the jungle and my muscles burned. Every one of them, when asked to lift a body part over another clump of roots cannibalizing another giant log, felt as if heated lead slabs had been specially implanted in it. I had to think about how to position my fingers every time I grabbed another sticky, bug-infested vine, I was that exhausted.
In the dense forest we rarely saw the birds or monkeys. We heard them, like ghosts in old houses scuttling through the upper stories of the jungle, but they were almost always just out of sight, except for the flash of bright feathers or the suggestion of a tail. So much greenery lay above us that I saw animal auras only occasionally, like slightly bigger Christmas lights among the tiny glows of insects and reptiles. Much of the time all I could see of William was a glimmer of his aura, a flicker of wine or blue bobbing like a will-o’-the-wisp in the sea of green surrounding us. Except for the help of the amulet, there were several times when we might have become separated because Ahn and I slowed more as the day wore on.
Toward evening the watery green light diffused even more, until you got the feeling of being deep under the sea, surrounded by seaweed, a feeling enhanced by being continually soaked and with the smell of wet greenery always in our nostrils.
Ground fog swirled up from the forest floor, and soon all I could see of Ahn was a grimy teal pool of light. William doubled back for us, his legs lost in the fog. He’d put on his fatigue shirt, but now and then he shook his shoulders like a dog having a bad dream and the goose bumps rose on my own arms. Ahn had a sneezing fit that wouldn’t stop, and William glared at us and disappeared into the jungle again.
We couldn’t even hear each other well because the sound of the rain blotted out everything but the shrillest cries from the creatures in the treetops. The beat of the rain thudded and splatted but was never regular, so that you couldn’t get used to it or discount it. I was glad for it in some ways. It kept me from being hypnotized by the monotony of struggling through the shrubbery. Since I couldn’t be sure I was following exactly in William’s footsteps, I was constantly scanning the growth at shin level, looking for more booby traps. Once I nearly ran into trouble looking too low. I started to pass a tree vine, and a spade-shaped face surrounded by a tomato-red glow met me almost nose to nose. I fell backward so quickly I knocked Ahn into a fan-shaped fern. The snake slithered away until the last flick of red was obscured by the jungle’s green glow. Mom always claimed snakes were more afraid of people than vice versa, and I was glad she was right.
After the snake, I slowed down even more, which was a good thing. We were barely moving when, a short distance ahead, a clay-colored triangular glow popped up from the ground and into the milky, roiling fog. It wavered for a moment and bent toward the ground, then with a scrabbling noise that sounded no louder than a mouse might make gradually elongated into an oval the size of a small person.
Ahn had to sneeze just then, and since he couldn’t see what I saw, he made no effort to muffle the noise. The brown oval bobbed back and forth, searching for us, a metallic gray tingeing its edges, but the forest redirected sound. Although Ahn was standing right beside me, his sneeze could have come from anywhere. I bent low, clapping my hand over Ahn’s mouth. He grew very still and we hunkered in silence, waiting.
The brownish aura floated a few paces away from us, and I heard bare feet on damp ground.
Then abruptly it doubled over and began coughing. I focused on the figure within the light and saw a small woman. She was pale, her skin wrinkled like a prune’s, her hair caked with dirt, her pajamas black. She wore bandoliers draped across her chest and a rifle slung over one shoulder. Her left arm was raised, the wrist daintily covering her mouth, a foot-long dagger held negligently in that hand. She coughed, and melted silently into the green at the side of the trail. Moments later, where she had been, William’s wine-colored aura bobbed slowly in on the fog, looming over a far vaster patch than hers had. It stopped a short distance away on the other side of where she had been, and as it hovered there, it gradually changed, the wine separating into rays of red and black, spurting from him like blood from an arterial wound.
Suddenly a second glow rose up from the ground between us, within it a man not so well equipped as the woman. I froze with my hand over Ahn’s mouth. I had no idea how much I was able to see because of the aura, how visible I was to them, how much of them William could see. But a third, fourth, fifth, and sixth person issued from the hole without seeming to see us, their auras blending with the mist. As
a seventh rose up to follow them and carefully turned to plug the hole behind him, William struck, and the small figure crumpled over the hole. Silently William stripped the body. Relieving the dead Vietcong of a long knife, he slit the throat with the efficiency of the neighborhood meatcutter. He took two more steps before he saw us.
The mist boiled up around him, curling in and out of a black and red radiance pumping from him. His face was hard and his eyes cold and resentful, but he raised one arm and motioned us forward. I hoisted Ahn onto my hip and stepped over the corpse. When we came even with William, he pointed into the mist beyond him, where he had already squashed some of the undergrowth.
I started, expecting that he was going to follow and keep the VC off our tail in case they were inclined to be there, but when I glanced back, the red and black stripes were overlaid with green as he cut into the forest in the direction the other Vietcong had taken.
Ahn clung tightly, silently, but I was making an incredible amount of noise trying to carry him and follow William’s course through the foliage. I hoped if the VC heard us, they’d mistake my noise for their own. Or for William’s, if they discovered him. God, I hoped they wouldn’t. What if they caught him? I prayed to God that wouldn’t happen. I wouldn’t know what to do. I didn’t have a weapon. I couldn’t save him. How could I live with myself if I just let him get caught, tortured maybe? Maybe I wouldn’t have to worry about it. If they caught him, they’d probably get us too.
If we got away this time, maybe we could try to find a village someplace, somewhere where it looked as if there was enough food. Maybe I could pay them to take Ahn in at least until I could find help. If he’d had two legs, he probably would have left me by then, I thought. A lot of Vietnamese kids adopted Americans, but when it looked as if the bases were going to get hit, the kids suddenly became history, along with a lot of other friendlies.
We stopped dead in front of a huge snarl of roots, impassable as the Great Wall of China. Unable to go forward, I sat on the ground and waited. Ahn continued to cling to me, and I thought he might be crying. The wind shivered the grasses and smaller leafy plants, and the fern fronds swayed and danced, the bare trunks creaked, the leaves rattled like Halloween skeletons, while the rain beat its erratic patter and splash all around us, and on top of us. It had the advantage of keeping my own trembling limbs from shaking the shrubbery like a pair of Mexican maracas.
So we huddled there getting stiffer and stiffer, and I tried to distract myself by remembering what it was like to be dry. We were still perilously close to the VC tunnel entrance, which was what that hole had to be. I wondered if a second group would file out of the hole. Maybe I should have moved the dead VC. His body still emitted a faint mustard-colored glow, growing gradually darker, drifting on the wind, separating itself. The version of the Twenty-third Psalm that went “Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I shall fear no evil, for I am the evilest son of a bitch in the whole damn valley,” went through my head and I felt a rather savage rush of pride in William; then, watching the VC’s feeble aura fade like an ember, I felt ashamed and said a generic, universalist prayer, including in the scope of my entreaties the elderly gent with the flowing beard and kindly eyes and the cosmic forces of the universe and my own idea of Buddha, of whom I could conjure up only the image of a statue.
We had had to kill the guy—I felt I’d killed him as much as William. Or would have, if I’d had a means. Anyway, his death no doubt saved my ass, let’s put it that way. But it had been nothing personal, and I wasn’t especially glad he was dead.
As I watched, the dead terrorist’s aura grew clearer, ruddier, within the milkiness of the mist, like fire deep in an opal. The discoloration from hatred, grief, and fear was dissipating with death…sort of like in the werewolf movies where the ravening wolf, after being shot by the hero’s silver bullet, slowly turns back into the innocent human being infected with lycanthropy.
I was glad William had been so thorough, because if he had left the VC alive, I knew I’d feel honor-bound to try to patch the poor SOB up. As it was, I just wondered about the wisdom of leaving him draped across the tunnel entrance. Wouldn’t that announce our presence? But if they didn’t know how many of us there were, maybe that would make them abandon the tunnel.
Which shows you what an incurable optimist I am.
Ahn’s face was next to my ear. “Mamasan, we didi now, huh? VC—”
“No can do,” I mumbled back. “We wait for William.”
“William dinky dao, mamasan, we didi.”
Well, that was one vote in. Ahn, who had taken to William at first, was scared of him. And though I hated to admit it, I was, too. What kind of a nut would go unarmed after seven—well, six—VC? That was movie stuff, not what your practical, I-want-to-go-home-alive grunt would customarily do. The only reason I could imagine him doing such a damn-fool thing was to get supplies and weapons. Personally, when it came to getting supplies that way, my overwhelming hunger became a niggling little sense of peckishness, but nothing I couldn’t handle till I found a particularly tasty-looking rat.
And William’s behavior had been so erratic—the coolness that I at first admired I now saw as what was referred to in psych training as a bland affect, which meant simply that his face was usually expressionless and he didn’t show much feeling. Of course, that figured, considering the trauma of watching his friends killed and being left to make it by himself in the jungle. But the blandness alternated with swings into irritation and I didn’t know enough to be able to tell which was more dangerous: the agitation or the numbness.
The mist blew clear across the trail. I scooted back into the deeper shade of the root canopy, dragging Ahn with me. Normally I would have thought of snakes, but I really didn’t care at that point, because I was convinced I was not going to live much longer anyway. It was just a question of when and how—a bite from one of those little bamboo vipers called two-step snakes because their venom could kill you before you’d taken two steps might be the easy way out under these circumstances.
A curse blew toward us on the breeze. The voice was so muffled the curse could even have been a Vietnamese one, though I didn’t think so. What did it mean? Had they caught William and strangled off his last defiant words? I wished I could see what was happening—not as me, of course, but maybe as a bypassing lizard.
Ahn’s small body shook silently and I thought how different he was from what he had been in the hospital, when he bawled so much the other patients were ready to throttle him. Maybe he’d been saving it up for then, when he thought it was safe, because now he knew without anyone telling him that weeping aloud could be fatal. I considered crying myself, but I was already losing too much water sweating.
The rain intensified, rattling the leaves, misting through the screen of interlocking growth, driving through the occasional opening where collective drops plopped like fat slugs from overburdened meaty green leaves. The jungle floor, steaming with recondensing moisture, reminded me of a cannibal’s boiling kettle, with us in the stew.
An overhanging branch dropped one slow drop at a time on the crown of my head, reminding me of a story I’d read about the Chinese water torture, a procedure that involved letting water drip one drop at a time on the same spot on a victim’s skull until it eroded skin, bone, and sanity. I decided not to think about that. The ground fog once more formed an opaque veil obscuring the faint path between us and the body. I could still see the outlines of the plants and the body, because of the auras. The fog hid Ahn and me from anyone else, however.
Ahn shivered again and emitted a small whimper. When I looked down, his eyes were closed. He’d fallen asleep. His skin felt hot against mine. His rag of a bandage had come off completely and the wound was draining again. Damn. There was nothing I could do about that now.
The glow of the jungle shuddered and wilted to a shade ever so slightly brown moments before blood-red and pitch-black light strobed through like the lights on a police car, si
lently broadcasting death, hatred, fury, malice, and murder.
One of the VC, I thought. They’d caught William, he’d told them about us, and now they were circling back to get us. Before the malignant aura broke onto the trail, I pushed and prodded Ahn up over the root tangle and scrambled over after him. He whimpered once more, but as soon as I reached to cover his mouth he shut up, flipped over the top of the tangled root and decayed log, and cowered on the other side. I landed heavily beside him and lifted my face just far enough to reach a hole in the woven roots.
Like fire and char the aura burned in the clearing, then headed straight for where we had been. In the center of it, his face impassive except for eyes watchful as a jaguar’s, and as impersonal, William stalked toward us, a machete in one hand, a .45 automatic in the other.
I was relieved to see him alive, but on the other hand he looked as if he was searching for us where he knew we ought to be, but did not look as if he was going to be happy to see us. He stepped across the corpse and began stalking up the trail, slashing at impediments. If we had been hiding in the jungle beside the trail we would have been spaghetti before we could say hello. I suppressed an urge to stand up and ask him what the hell he thought he was doing; didn’t he know he could hurt somebody that way? I didn’t because obviously he knew that very well. And it looked as though he no longer cared.
The Healer’s War Page 23