“What about Americans?” I asked. “Did any of our troops have any reason to want Billy out of the way?”
“Well, he turned adamantly against the war, as you know. He knew a lot of things about a lot of people who were doing the kinds of things he had done. Some of those people may be in vulnerable positions now, politics or what have you. Publicity about their wartime activities could possibly hurt.”
“Or help.”
“Possibly. Also, Billy was once ordered by an American colonel to kill an American artillery captain the colonel believed was undermining the morale of the unit.”
“Did he do it?”
“I believe so.”
“Do you know any names?”
“No.”
I thought about it while the reverend perfected the draw in his pipe. “I saw some Orientals up on the square the other day. Who are they?”
“Boat people, the townspeople call them. This state has taken in many southeast Asian refugees. Thousands of them. Several have ended up here in Chaldea. One family has opened a restaurant just off the square. Some of the others have their own enterprises as well, tailoring and what have you.”
“How many of them are there?”
“Here? About twenty, perhaps. The number seems to fluctuate, especially lately. There’s a lot of movement among these people now, because of the pressures on them.”
“So there may be some new arrivals in town?”
“It’s possible. I don’t really know. I do speak some Vietnamese and have gotten to know the family that owns the restaurant quite well. They’re amazing people. Their daughter is a certified genius.”
“What kinds of pressures are there?”
“Well, locally there have been incidents. When hard times hit the town some people started blaming the refugees for taking jobs that so-called Americans should have. But most of the things the refugees are doing in Chaldea aren’t in conflict with the normal work force in any way.”
“What kind of incidents?”
“Oh, someone, probably kids, painted a swastika on the restaurant door a few weeks ago. And one young man was mugged a few nights later, took a bad beating after a football game. And there’s been some other trouble at the high school, I hear, mostly verbal. On top of the local problems, of course, a lot of tension is developing among the refugees, not just here but everywhere.”
“Why?”
“First are the general things, the move to a strange land, the problem with the customs and language. And of course the government in its wisdom has recently ended financial benefits for Asians who have been in this country for eighteen months or more, which most of them have by now. And then there are undercurrents I’m only dimly aware of.”
“Like what?”
The reverend emptied his pipe into an ashtray shaped like an entreating hand. “There are hundreds of thousands of Southeast Asians in America now. Which means they’ve brought the kinds of problems that will be generated anywhere by a population of that number. In major cities a kind of mafia has developed in the refugee sectors. Extortion flourishes, along with other crimes. Then there are the tribal feuds that have simply been transported from Vietnam and Laos to America. Then recently there’s been a movement afoot to recruit an army to go back to South Vietnam and retake the country from the Communists.”
“You’re kidding.”
“Not at all. It’s much like the anti-Castro force that was active in Florida and Guatemala a while back. My understanding is that some former ARVN officers are right now on the Laotian border trying to put together an army to move into Vietnam and begin guerrilla activities. Somewhat ironic, isn’t it?”
“A bit.”
“So there’s pressure on these people from all sides. The kids become Americanized and shock the parents by their actions. Rumors of threats and dangers flourish. A recent one had it that the government was going to put all the Asians in concentration camps in Alaska. Another was that Viet Cong death squads have come to this country to eliminate everyone who collaborated with America during the war against the north. Perhaps you’ve heard of the sudden-death syndrome that strikes many Asian men. They just drop dead, from no apparent cause. I think it’s stress myself. The strains are tremendous, and this on people who have lived with the stress of war for decades before they came over here. It’s a sad chapter for a nation that already has a lot of sad chapters in its book.”
“Do you know of any connection between the Vietnamese in Chaldea and Billy?”
“No.”
“Do you know anything at all that might be helpful?”
“Only that Billy seemed very fatalistic the last time I saw him. He couched it in religious terms. Day of Judgment. Atonement. Mortal sin. He used these words when we spoke.”
I shifted position and waited while the reverend sucked his pipe again. “Let’s get down to it,” I said. “What’s the worst thing Billy did over there? The very worst.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean there must have been one thing that he thought was more horrible than the others, that messed with his mind more than all the rest. I want to know what it was.”
The reverend smoked his pipe. His eyes were closed.
“Come on, goddamnit.”
“Phuoc Binh,” Vesselton said, and opened his eyes.
“What about Phuoc Binh?”
“That’s a town. Billy went in one night to terminate a VC. When he was in the center of town he was surprised by a group of children. Three of them, about twelve or so, two boys and a girl who were out poking around for some excitement in the middle of the night when they were supposed to be in bed. Billy had no way out, he said. It was them or him.”
“So he killed them.”
The reverend nodded. “They started to run. He had a silenced weapon. He used it reflexively, virtually without thinking. He shot them all and he couldn’t get the picture of it out of his mind—the blood, the choking sounds, the time it took the girl, particularly, to die while Billy held his hand over her mouth to keep her screams from being heard.”
The reverend’s words were agonized, his voice wrenched. I felt the pain myself, but stayed silent. Nothing I could say would deflate the cloud of sadness in the room.
“Billy was sick,” I said finally. “Physically, I mean. Did he talk about it?”
“A little. It was Agent Orange, of course.”
“Did he get treatment?”
“No. I tried to get him to go to the Veterans Hospital in the state capital but he refused. His only concern was that the baby might be damaged, but he knew of nothing that could be done about that save abortion, which he refused to accept.”
“I’d like to talk to the Vietnamese who own the restaurant,” I said. “Will you help me?”
“Of course. Up to a point.”
“What point is that?”
“The point where I think you’re taking the law into your own hands.”
“Hell, Reverend. I’ve been doing that since the minute I hit town.”
Twenty-eight
The restaurant was on North Tenth a half block off the square, the narrow storefront struggling for breath between a cobbler’s shop and an insurance agency. I stopped the car at the end of the block. Vesselton looked at me. “What exactly is it you want to know?”
“Whether any of them knew Billy. Whether any of them felt threatened or wronged by him in any way. If they deny knowing him, I want to know whether any new refugees have arrived in town, men, within the past month or so. If so, I want to know who and where they are.”
“You don’t want much,” Vesselton said, his sarcasm a bit of banter.
“I want what I have to have,” I said, and got out of the car.
I followed Vesselton toward the restaurant. The sign over the door read “Qui Nhon Café—Vietnamese and American Specialties.” The windows seemed glassless and were curtained with checked gingham. The door had a bell above it that made our arrival seem gay and exciting.
<
br /> There was no one in the place except for three Vietnamese sitting at a table in the back, eating something that smelled like boiled fish. Vesselton walked toward them without pausing, smiling like a peddler. I hung back.
Two of the Vietnamese were old, a couple, their sienna skins shrunk tight across the sanded bones of their faces, their blinkless eyes not on the reverend but on me, eyes as hard as nuts from lives spent watching threats approach. The third was a girl, young and svelte, her hair a plank of black enamel, her eyes still liquid, not yet turned to stone by a life of jeopardy.
All of them rose as the reverend approached. He shook the man’s hand and bowed to the woman and the girl. They exchanged some words I couldn’t hear and the girl left through a door in the back that I assumed went to the kitchen. I decided not to approach unless invited.
A minute later Vesselton and the couple were seated at the table, talking rapidly. The girl emerged from the kitchen and served them tea in tiny cups. Then she came toward me. “Would you like a menu, sir?” she asked. Her voice was friendly in a practiced way. Her face was the kind that makes you cry because of what might someday happen to it.
“I’ll just have coffee, if you have it,” I said.
“Of course. Would you care for cream or sugar?”
“Black.”
“Thank you.”
She left me awestruck, her image as strong in my mind as though she were beside me in a bed. When she brought me my coffee I smiled and got friendly. For the first time her shiny features stiffened. She was already used to bullies and to braggarts and was steeling herself for what was to come from me. “I hear you’re an excellent student,” I said cheerily.
“I try to be.”
“What subject do you like best?”
“History. World history.”
“Why do you like it?”
“I want to know what happened,” she said simply. “Do you care for anything else, sir?”
I wanted to pump her about Billy but I didn’t have the heart. I told her I was fine and she left me gladly. I finished my coffee without tasting it, wondering if the Reverend Vesselton was doing my work for me, wondering if I any longer cared.
Ten minutes later Vesselton stood up, shook hands again and bowed, and came to where I was. “We may have something,” he said.
“What?”
“A man came to town last month. A man named Tran Lam Duc. He’d been living in LA, at least that’s what he said.”
“Why did he come here?”
“Looking for relatives, he claimed. Apparently he didn’t find any, so he was working here in the restaurant to earn enough money to move on.”
“Where is he now?”
The reverend shrugged. “They don’t know. They haven’t seen him for three days.”
“Where does he live?”
“No one knows. Or so they say. I pressed as much as I thought I could. I didn’t want to frighten them.”
I doubted that anything the reverend and I were capable of would frighten them. “Did Duc tell anyone he was leaving town?”
“No.”
“Where was he from in Vietnam?”
“I don’t know.”
“Ask,” I said.
Vesselton went back to the table and said some words and had some said to him. Then he came back. “Phuoc Binh,” he said, as though reciting code.
“Let’s find him.”
“Where?”
“I’ve got one guess,” I said, and stood and headed for the door.
The sun had left Chaldea. I shoved my way through the dusty twilight like the invader that I was, my thoughts on death and vengeance. By the time I reached the edge of town I thought I knew what I was going to find, and what I was going to do when I found it. When I stopped the car the reverend asked me where we were.
“This is the Tanner plot,” I told him. “The family farm. Billy lived out here, about a mile south of us. I was out here myself the other day. There’s an old farmhouse on the other side of this field. A part of it looks lived in. Also, the farmer across the road has seen strangers around lately. I assumed it was probably Zedda or his people, checking up on Billy, but now I think this Tran Lam Duc was living here. I think he tracked Billy down and killed him for what he did in Phuoc Binh. My guess is when Billy turned against the war he told lots of people what he’d been doing, even before he left Vietnam. His name probably got linked to the Phuoc Binh killings. Word eventually got to Tran Lam Duc and he came here to get revenge. There were small hand prints all over Billy’s body. Small, like an American woman or a Vietnamese man.”
I got out of the car and Vesselton joined me on the weedy road into the farm. “The farmhouse is at the back edge of the field,” I said to him. “Let’s take it slow and easy, move along the hedgerow. Be ready to find cover. The guy could be armed. Of course, you don’t have to come with me,” I added.
“I think I do,” Vesselton said. We moved out in the dim light of the reverend’s worried smile.
We seemed to make enough noise to wake the dead, if the dead do sleep, but the wind was in our faces and the sounds were mostly muffled stumblings and bumblings. It took us long enough to work up a sweat, and the night air immediately cooled it to a frigid shawl. When we reached the farmhouse I told Vesselton to wait outside while I went in. He made a silent protest but I ignored it.
“Do you have a gun?” he whispered.
“I don’t even have a flashlight,” I said, then left him in the weeds.
In the next minute I crossed the creaky porch and slipped through the door, trying to see what might be lying in wait in the dim dark corners of the dilapidated rooms. Something small skittered across the floor in front of me, making sounds that scared me. The smell of feces and decay was as present in the house as I was. I closed my eyes to improve my night vision, then moved into the main room as far as I dared, leery of crashing through the remaining floorboards and even more leery of stumbling across something vile or deadly or both.
I stayed in the house for a long time, looking and listening, then went back outside. “Anything?” Vesselton asked.
“I don’t think so,” I said. “I’ll take one more look.”
I reached down and pulled a handful of dried weeds out of the dirt and twisted them into a scraggly rope and went back inside the farmhouse. When I was in the middle of the room I struck a match and lit the weeds. My torch burned briefly but brightly, enough to show me there was nothing human in the house but me. I went back outside and pointed to the barn and started to walk that way. Vesselton followed without encouragement or caution.
The manure-spreader guarded the entrance like a seedy majordomo. Inside the barn the sweet smell of mown hay toyed with my nose, then made me sneeze, to win the game. Cobwebs brushed my face like the fingers of a practiced whore. A score of sparrows played a different game among the rafters. I told the reverend I’d check it out and left him behind me near the door.
The barn had once stalled milk cows, but was no longer used for anything but warehousing. A few broken tools hung from pegs in the walls and a ripped bag of seed spilled its kerneled guts onto the floor. I grabbed a pitchfork to keep me company, but there was light from the moon enough for me to see that there was nothing threatening on the ground level, at least nothing that wasn’t hiding out. A pigeon flapped suddenly away and caused my heart to burp.
I came to a stop beside the ladder to the mow. I didn’t want to go up there, but if what I thought I’d find was anywhere on the farm, that was where it was. I ran my hand across a rung, then flapped my fingers across my thumb like a high roller on the verge of crapping out. When the only thing I felt was flesh, I put a foot on the bottom rung and climbed.
Most of the hay was gone, eaten by beef long butchered and by holsteins long milked dry. At the end of the mow the loading door was open, and the square of sky behind it was the purplish color of gun barrels and festered wounds. The body that hung from the rafters was perfectly framed in the opening, as tho
ugh the event had been staged entirely for my pleasure.
For a moment it looked simply like a branchless tree that rose out of the crumpled bales below it. Then it twisted in the wind and the broken neck threw the image off and it looked like only what it was. When I touched the yellow flesh it was as cold as mine, though not with sweat.
Below the body something glistened in the moonlight like a gem. I picked it up and read the printing pressed into the shiny metal:
TANNER,
WILLIAM L.
US 54928078
O
PROTESTANT
I put the dog tag in my pocket and backed down the listing ladder. When I reached the reverend he asked me what I’d found.
“Tran Lam Duc. Dead. By his own hand.”
“How?”
“Just like Billy.”
“My God.”
“Yours. Mine. His. Billy’s.”
“What are you going to do?”
“Go back to California.”
“I mean about the sheriff.”
I walked out of the barn and toward the car, across a field cobbled with chopped stalks and heavy clods of dirt, lurching like a spastic. Halfway to the road I stopped and turned to face the trailing preacher. “Do you have any doubt about what happened?” I asked him.
“How do you mean?”
“I mean, do you have any doubt that Duc killed Billy for what he did at Phuoc Binh? Or that Billy let him do it? Or that Duc then hung himself?”
“I’m … I’m not sure.”
“Sure you’re sure. So am I.”
“What if I am?”
“Do you think anyone will be better off for knowing what we know?”
“I don’t know. Billy’s parents, surely.”
“Do they know about Phuoc Binh?”
“I don’t know.”
“Come on, Reverend. Billy didn’t tell them and you know it.”
“I suppose not. No. I’m certain they don’t know.”
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