“As far as you protected that man who stepped on the mine? Or those children?” I asked.
“It was necessary that the village pay in its most valuable currency for its treachery. The soldier would have been no good to us alive. Dead, he made it at least seem a fair trade. I have done many things to your own countrymen you would like even less well,” he said with deliberate menace that failed to frighten me nearly so much as his gentle tone of regret. “You are overly sentimental.”
“I am overly human,” I said bitterly. “What’s your problem?”
He sighed and extended his limbs in a gesture that was more writhing than stretching, then returned to his relaxed pose, the cigarette dangling from his fingers, which dangled between his knees. “I knew I should have killed you back at the village. I hope you don’t think I’m a good example of a dedicated Communist. I’m not even a Party member yet, though perhaps you will help me become one. I’m not really worthy. I haven’t yet purged all of the reactionary Confucian notions from my heart.” He grimaced when he said the last, too. Neither communism nor Confucianism really meant anything to him, his voice and face said. They were constructs that were useful because of how other people used them to define him. Then he looked back up at me, and though his aura had been too slim for me to read it, I could read his eyes. They were like those of a patient who’s had a stroke and has just awakened to find himself paralyzed, his face crooked and his mouth unable to make intelligible sounds. “Damn you, woman,” he said finally. “Do you want to know why I really saved your life?”
I blinked assent.
“At first it was because it would have shamed me to kill you, shamed my daughter, shamed my wife’s memory, shamed the movement in front of my home village. And, of course, I would have had to kill my daughter, to whom I am incorrectly sentimentally attached, before I could have killed you. But later, in the jungle, when I intended to kill you, I did not because when I looked at you, started to question you, for the first time in years I saw another person—a living person. Everyone has been walking corpses to me for years, even my daughter. But I think now I should have killed you at once after all. Life is not meant to return to a dead limb, and now that it does, it burns with the fires of hell.”
Hien crawled out of the hole then, followed by some of the others, and we resumed our march. We were doing most of our traveling in the evening, at night, just as the American troops were making camp and starting to assign patrols.
I think Hien must have heard some of what the colonel said. He stuck very close to me, the blue of his aura all but buried in an avalanche of depressed brown. The night before must have been more horrible for him than it was for me, must have made him relive again the massacre of his own family. Knowing how frightened he was, and how he had acted to save my life, painful as it was, I felt protective of him that last day. And something strange happened. We had to walk close to each other, as the brush was very thick and the machetes slow to cut it clear. Hien held on to my tether and pretended to push me around while actually inspecting the damage he had done to my face and trying to slow the pace so that I could keep up. It was a great effort for him, because he was, as I say, very low. But I noticed that my aura, though very weak and faded to the dirty pink of a tenement baby’s sixth-hand Goodwill Easter dress, gradually engulfed his. It was like what I had seen happen with the colonel and his men, and it confused me.
I did not know what to do, or what to say, about the way he, the village, and the colonel were reacting to me. It was like when the wrong guy falls in love with you for the wrong reasons that have nothing to do with you. These people were assuming that I did the things I did because I was who I was, that I was making the amulet do what it did, instead of simply discovering what it would do as I went along. Even when I totally lost all my ability to use it, back at Hue’s village, and the villagers and Hien had to help me, they thought I was sharing my power, not borrowing theirs.
And yet I couldn’t just take the amulet off. The big reason, of course, was that without it I was just another American invader worthy of no special attention except the kind I could do without. But also, in some strange way, I had become what I can only describe as addicted to the amulet, dependent on it. I drained myself through it into patients, but as long as it was with me, I felt as if I had a way of renewing myself. I realized why old Xe had waited until he was dying to give it up. It was as invested with my life as I was with its power. And of course, so long as I had it, I might be subjected to some unrealistic worship but I was not tortured or summarily executed as I would have been without it.
I think that if I had had Xe’s years of experience and wisdom, I could have done much more with the power while I had it. I wish I had at least been able to do more for Hien.
When the ambush came, he was the one who knocked me down and threw himself on top of me, taking my share of the bullets and frags. Dying, his body twitched on top of me, and I hesitate to say it, but it was as if he were making love to me. And I guess he was, at that.
21
Jesus fucking Christ, you ain’t even going to believe what I found.”
A rifle barrel prodded me, plowed a path through the matted tangles of my hair, rolled my dead guard off me. A man with a blackened face, too much stringy dishwater-blond hair for regulations, and a gap-toothed grin reached down to wipe the grime and blood off my arm as if I were a pile of animal shit he was examining for tracking purposes.
“Yeah?” another voice challenged. “Whass that? Don’t tell me that slant had on an earring you can use for the centerpiece in your necklace.”
“Better. Lookit.”
“Sheeit. Hey, lady. Lady, where the fuck you come from?” This from a pockmarked swarthy-type kid with some kind of a New York accent mixed with the redneck patois most of the grunts used. The auras of both men were flashing, red, brown, black, olive, mustard, orange, a confusion of high emotion that blurred together for me. I sat up feeling as if I’d been in an elevator that had suddenly dropped two floors. We had been wending through the jungle as we had for the last four days when all of a sudden all hell broke loose and there I was, on the ground, with my guard bleeding on top of me and automatic bursts and hand grenades exploding around me and my bound hands pinned down by the body on top of me. A deep groan issued from someone nearby.
“We got a live one here.”
“Well, pull him out. Where the fuck is Bao?” This was from other disembodied voices. I was still trying to focus on the two faces in front of me.
“Jesus, lookit her hands. Lookit her arm. Baby, did they hurt you bad? Hey, Didi, you save that little bastard. They had themselves an American woman, the little fuckers.”
“A whut. Maryjane, what the fuck you smokin’ now—”
“No, man, I found her. Let her alone. Can you get up, baby? Show papa where it hurts,” and he tried to scoop me up and I wanted to collapse in his arms and sob but he was flashing so heavy with all that red and orange and black it seemed he was on fire. I looked around me. Dinh was half-sitting, his arms being wrenched behind him. One leg was covered with blood, the calf lying at a funny angle from the thigh. Maryjane, the dishwater-blond, saw the direction of my stare. “That the fucker who did you, baby? I’ll fix his ass.” He rose and strode over to Dinh.
“No, you don’t, man. We gotta squeeze him first. He’s some high-rankin’ motherfucker,” said the man who was tying him, the one called Didi.
“Yeah? Okay. I won’t kill him, then,” and he reared back and kicked Dinh’s injured knee. The colonel let out a sound like brakes being applied at high speed and fainted. The smell of fresh urine added itself to the stench of death and evacuated bowels from the corpses of my former captors.
“Cut it out,” I said, I thought loudly, but it came out a bare whisper.
“Hey, you asshole. You’re upsettin’ the lady. She been through enough.” The guy with the New York accent helped me to my feet, but I didn’t stay up very long. I took one look around me and dou
bled up again, losing the little rice I had kept down that day and retching long after the last of the bile had poured from me.
After a while I was able to tell them who I was. Someone got on a radio, back to base, and told them about me, about Dinh. There was a long pause, then: “Hold it right there, son. This is General Hennessey, on inspection tour. You say this is an American nurse you found? And she was in the company of these Vietcong guerrillas?”
“That’s affirmative, sir.”
“Give me your coordinates again.”
He did, and the general set up a rendezvous. I thought at the time, I didn’t think generals probably remembered how to do that anymore. I guessed I should feel honored. Maybe he’d want me to attend at party at his mess. I was dressed right for a mess then. My fatigues were in tatters, and I was covered with bites and scratches and that one long bayonet wound.
Someone picked up Dinh like a sack of potatoes and carried him, shattered leg dangling. I don’t think they had a medic. Maybe he’d gotten killed. Maryjane and Zits, the guy from New York, supported me. I don’t know how long it took, how far it was. I wasn’t entirely with it. I kept getting confused, thinking we were still back at the village with the point man walking into the minefield, and that was Dinh. When I looked down at my own hand I couldn’t see any color at all around it. I heard myself giggle. Maryjane grinned at me and wiggled his eyebrows encouragingly. “I’m outa juice,” I explained. It made perfect sense to me, but he drew a spiral by his ear with his finger and Zits nodded. That was pretty funny and I giggled again.
They tied Dinh to a tree. He couldn’t stand, even on his one good leg. He was out of it. They tried to question him, but he didn’t say anything. I thought he was conscious most of the time, but no matter what they asked, how they hit him, what they threatened, he didn’t say anything, except to groan and scream a lot.
Some of the questions were about me. The sergeant who was running the show would ask in broken Vietnamese, then the interpreter would ask, then they’d hit Dinh and he’d scream again.
“Not a fuckin’ thing. What we gonna tell the general?”
“Maybe he don’t know nothin’.”
“He knows what they did to her. Where she’s from.”
“Hell, man, she knows that.”
“Yeah, but she’s dinky dao as shit.”
“Fuck it, man, he ain’t gonna tell you anything. I’m tired of this shit. Let’s play a little ‘guts,’ Sarge, whattaya say? That’s first-class round-eye tail he was fuckin’ with, man. We don’t even get none of that. He’s got some payback comin’.”
“Damn straight.”
“Nah, man, the general’s gonna want to question this dude.”
“You ain’t been listenin’, asshole. He ain’t talkin’. We’ll just loosen him up a little.”
“Lookit him. You’ll kill him before the general gets here, man. He’s gonna be soooo disappointed.”
“Ain’t that a fuckin’ shame. So we’ll save him a piece. A tiny little piece.”
I looked inquiringly at Zits. I was still having trouble talking. It had been only a few days, but it felt like forever since I’d heard English spoken by other Americans. It seemed to be going too fast for me. I still didn’t get what they were up to. I wasn’t tracking very clearly.
“You’ll see, baby. Maybe you wanna play too.”
Oh goody. Vietnam was so wonderful. In school nobody had ever wanted me on their team, and here the boys were, choosing me first.
“Me first, man, I found her,” Maryjane said. He cut off Dinh’s clothes.
“Hey, man, leave him a jock. There’s ladies present.”
“How can I cut off his balls if I leave him a jock? Besides, she’s a nurse. She’s seen it all.”
“Don’t cut him there yet, man. That’s too much. He’ll die too soon.”
“I don’t give a fuck,” he said. But he stood in front of Dinh, and when he stood away, he was holding a bloody piece of something and there was a long bleeding strip where the colonel’s right nipple had been. Dinh made that braking sound.
“See, baby, that’s how it works. Wanna play?” Zits said. Then, “Hey, she’s next, man.”
“Umm, yeah, I’d like to play guts with her,” someone said lasciviously. I think he was kidding and meant something else, but my whole back convulsed. I stood up slowly and walked over to Dinh. I started to look at the knee. Touched the amulet slowly. But my eyes were drawn back to his face. His eyelids peeled back about a quarter inch from his eyes and he saw me and groaned. I stood up.
“She’s takin’ a long time to decide what she wants. Somebody ought to tell her it’s spontaneous, like. Hey, baby, give somebody else a turn.”
“Shut up. You don’t know what that slant bastard did to her.”
“No, but it’s fun to imagine, huh?”
“You make me sick.” Zits came up beside me. “Hey, baby, you need somethin’ to work with, huh? A field knife maybe?”
I was looking at Dinh. His eyes struggled open a little bit more. Hue’s father, who had blown up all the children in one village, murdered a family, shot one of my patients. I saw with a shock that while his screams might not have been faked, his degree of being out of it was. He was more alert than I was. And his aura, a bare thread, was the gray of a concrete overcoat. He stared at me steadily, challenging at first, and then, in response to whatever he saw in me, imploring, pleading, demanding, calling in a debt. Without even speaking to Zits, I lifted his sidearm from its holster. He didn’t seem to notice, he was watching me so hard. So was everyone. I don’t know what they thought I was going to do. I pulled the gun out and, still watching the colonel’s eyes, which lit with approval, his head nodding imperceptibly, stuck it in his mouth and pulled the trigger.
“Damn!” Maryjane threw his helmet angrily to the ground. “Ya see? Ya see? Women! Jesus! You let them in on something and they spoil everything!”
“Not everything, sweetheart!”
“Aw, come off it, M.J. It’s just ’cause they don’t get taught how to play football and like that.”
I handed Zits’ gun back to him, returned to my rock, and sat there, staring at Dinh’s body and the tree as if the whole thing were part of some abstract work of modern art I was trying to understand. Actually, I wasn’t seeing anything. I was resting my eyes. Resting my mind. Everybody stayed the hell away from me. The yelling died down to angry muttering. That was okay. I didn’t feel like talking to anyone.
Sometime later the chunking of chopper blades drew my attention. A Huey descended to hover in the clearing, blowing the hell out of everything. I just sat there and ate its wind, the rain, watching a fit-looking tanned guy with white hair jump out. Some other guy was there too, but I was watching the general as if I’d never seen one before. He wore a shiny gold buckle at his waist. I thought what a great target it would make. He was clean, pressed, authoritative, and handsome in a steely sort of way. Like the successful older man every secretary yearns to marry. I didn’t much care for the mossy-green aura camouflaging his intentions, but at least it went nicely with his uniform.
In a couple of minutes the chopper lifted up again and swung away from us.
Maryjane and his sergeant, who looked perpetually stone-bored, walked up to the general. The general stalked up to the corpse still hanging from his bonds against the tree, and examined him, his expression growing angrier and tighter with every second, so that I thought pretty soon his skin would split open from the tension. Maryjane pointed at me.
The general strode over and stood above me like a wrathful God.
“You don’t rise when a general officer addresses you, Lieutenant?” he asked.
I just stared at him. I thought about trying to straighten out my knees, stand up again. Nope. Too much effort.
“From what the men here tell me, I have to conclude that you’re a VC sympathizer,” he said as if accusing me of something shocking. I thought it over. It was at least partially correct. I had certainly sy
mpathized with Colonel Dinh in his last moments. But generals weren’t much for such nice distinctions.
“I was performing according to my MOS, sir. One of my primary goals is to relieve suffering.”
“As a member of the United States Army, Lieutenant, your primary goal is to help win this war. Do I make myself clear?” I didn’t ask what war, when did we declare war. I didn’t want to cause the man to have a stroke. “I understand you just executed a valuable enemy prisoner, of your own volition, costing us the opportunity to extract vital information. Do you realize the loss of that information will result in the deaths of thousands of Americans?”
I shrugged.
The moss green in his aura erupted into a study in angry, arrogant reds and oranges, mingled prettily with the mustard of a low order of intelligence, and a swamp of deep blue and teal for fanatical devotion to selfish causes. Like his own career. His face was rapidly growing purple. He grabbed my arm and yanked and I found that I did have a squeak left in me after all. It was my bayoneted arm. It was growing increasingly edematous and inflamed. Might have to amputate that sucker, I thought idly.
He released me and wiped his hand off on his fatigues, swearing.
“Where the hell did you say you found her?” he asked Maryjane.
“I got her off a dead VC, sir,” Maryjane said.
“How do you know she’s one of ours? I don’t see any dog tags.”
The Healer’s War Page 31