by Tim O'Brien
The fog rose.
The quiet was in his head now. It was swollen there, pushing out. It was all in his head.
Morning came and the men climbed from their holes, had breakfast, rolled up their ponchos.
Buff kept shaking his head. Stink Harris grinned, and Cacciato packed away the basketball, and Frenchie Tucker complained about his blood pressure. Paul Berlin felt it in his head.
They doused the breakfast fires.
When the gear was packed, Lieutenant Sidney Martin raised a hand and led them across the river. The water was warm. It warmed the legs and belly.
Then they were out of the water, regrouping, moving up the clay path into Trinh Son 2. Paul Berlin’s head roared with quiet. Splitting—but he moved into the dark village. When Rudy Chassler hit the mine, the noise was muffled, almost fragile, but it was a relief for all of them.
Seventeen
Light at the End of the Tunnel to Paris
So, yes, Sarkin Aung Wan led them through the westward tunnels. And then they were wading in sewage, through deepening sludge, and the tunnels gradually inclined upward, and they marched faster, pinching their noses, breathing through their mouths. The walls expanded and turned to cement, the ceilings rose. They waded past pipe terminals and pumping machinery and clogged filters and slime.
And at last they came upon a steel-runged ladder bolted to stone.
Sarkin Aung Wan led them up. They climbed fast, coming soon to an iron lid. Sarkin Aung Wan heaved up on it. There was the sound of grating iron; the manhole cover opened to show a deep night sky. They climbed out into the streets of Mandalay.
Three deft syllables trilling on the tip of his brain as he hurried after Sarkin Aung Wan. Mandalay, even the name was musical. He imagined it clearly: museums and golden statues, hansoms drawn by white stallions in braid, white-coated waiters serving fancy food, flowers everywhere, and a clean soft bed.
Mandalay, he thought, and almost said.
They walked fast along a dirt road that wound through city smells, past rows of mud shanties that soon gave way to concrete tenements. No people yet, but all the signs. Cats and chickens battling in alleyways, gutters wet with matted trash, a faint hum, the sound of traffic. The road was lined with palmyra and toddy palms. Dogs roamed everywhere: lean and hungry dogs rummaging through garbage, chewing their tails, howling.
“Detroit,” Oscar whispered. “Leave it to Cacciato. He’ll take a body home.”
They passed through an arcade that opened into a market square. The place was deserted. They crossed the bazaar and turned down a cobbled street winding past shops fronted by steel slide-guards. Paul Berlin kept hearing a hum. He couldn’t place it but he knew it. No single name, no single sound. A hum.
The streets widened. The garbage smells turned to spice smells. The humming sound suddenly exploded, and he knew its name.
The street became a wide boulevard.
Yellow gas lamps. Fountains spraying colored water. Children romping on trimmed grass, old men on park benches and lovers hand in hand, women pushing baby carriages, people lingering, people chatting and laughing, bikes and Hondas and carts and buses and donkeys, date trees in neat rows, hedges trimmed and cut square.
“Civilization,” Paul Berlin said.
The trolley rattled toward center city. Crowded with Burmese and their dogs and children and chickens, no handholds, the car lurched and jiggled and pressed them together. Sealed windows, blinking lights, no air conditioning. Paul Berlin could not stop smiling. He smiled and watched old women fanning themselves with bits of cardboard, men singing, men cheering and shaking hands, men drinking rice wine from goatskins. The trolley rounded a curve into the bright city, jerked to a stop, doors sweeping open, fresh city air, honking horns and traffic and motion. Outside, the night was silky under a huge red moon.
They were directed to the Hotel Minneapolis.
“Not the Hilton,” Oscar grumbled. “The Hotel Minneapolis.”
It was a teetering three-story clapboard building, leaning leeward, locked and dark. Oscar hammered until the doors were opened by a woman in leather sandals and a greasy brown robe and a moustache. The woman led them in. “Cheap-cheap,” she said. “Number-One cheap-cheap hotel.” A dozen children sat naked on the stairs and desk and floors. One, a brave little boy, touched Oscar’s weapon. Then he touched Oscar’s hand. Oscar knelt, and the boy touched his face. “Nigger,” Oscar said. The boy lit up. “Nigger!” said the boy. The other children giggled and the woman shushed them. She lit candles and beckoned the lieutenant to follow. Her face was bubbly with carbuncles. “Number One,” she said, and led them up the stairs and down a winding corridor to their rooms. “Hotel Minneapolis, Number-One sleepy.”
“Tan and strong,” Sarkin Aung Wan purred from somewhere below his knees. There was a brittle, snapping sound. “In Paris we shall walk everywhere. Shan’t we? Oh, yes, we shall be tan and strong and walk everywhere. We shall learn the city like home, learn everything there is to learn.”
“Everything,” he said.
“And … and, oh, we shall visit monuments and hold hands and watch the Paris lights, and then walk to the river, walk to all the lovely shops and … and perhaps you will buy me something pretty.” She stopped. “Wouldn’t you buy me something pretty?”
“Everything,” he said.
His feet tickled. Even as a kid he’d hated to have his feet touched.
The room was warm and the bed was soft. He couldn’t get over it—the softness of things. He squirmed. She was holding the big toe on his left foot, pinching it to raise the nail, locking in the clippers, then—snap, snap. Her damp hair felt like seaweed on his legs. Everything so soft.
She worked patiently. Her lips were parted and her tongue would sometimes snake out to moisten them.
“Spec Four—?” she said.
He lay still. It was odd, the way she kept calling him Spec Four.
“Spec Four, are you awake?”
He moved his toes.
“Spec Four, how long must we stay in this place? Before leaving again for Paris?”
He pretended to think about it as she used the blade end of the clipper to clean his toenails. Quiet and cushioned and warm, everything soft.
“Spec Four—?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “As long as it takes.”
“For what?”
“To do the job. To look for Cacciato. However long it takes.”
She stopped scraping.
When she spoke her voice was wistful.
“Is it necessary?”
“What?”
“To—you know—to pursue him so vigorously. Is it necessary?”
He shrugged. “Not necessary, I guess. But it’s the mission. Missions are missions, you can’t back away. We’re still soldiers.”
“And what happens if you find him? If you catch him? What happens then?”
“Back to reality,” he said. “If we catch him, then it’s back to the realms of reality.”
Sarkin Aung Wan moved. It was a light, backing-away movement.
“And what about Paris?” she said. Her voice was very soft. “What about the bistros and adventures and beautiful gardens? Have you forgotten the gardens?”
“No,” he said. “I haven’t forgotten.” He tried to smile. “Paris is still a possibility. It is. It’s still a live possibility.”
But she was moving away now. The long, damp hair slithered over his shins. He watched as she went to the window, her back to him. A blinking blue-and-yellow neon sign lit the room. She was sobbing. So he pushed up and went to her. Mind over matter, he thought, and, awkwardly, letting his hands circle her belly and down, nose in her hair, he made amends and promises: Paris was still possible, Cacciato was too slippery to be caught, don’t worry; insane promises strung on a ribbon winding toward Paris, where he’d buy her those pretty windowed things, take her to lunch at sunny cafés, stroll with her through the Tuileries, take a cab to Versailles, to Nice, to Marseilles to wa
tch poppy products going to sea on sailing ships, all this. Paris was still possible, he said, still fully accessible. It could be done. It could still be done, and might be done: amends and promises. She smiled. She hugged him. Then back to the bed, where she resumed chipping away at the war, using the clipper blade to scrape caked filth from beneath the nails, rubbing him with alcohol. Then to the tub again for a rinsing. Later they almost made love.
In the morning they began to search. With Sarkin Aung Wan on his arm, Paul Berlin went route step through Mandalay, moving along bazaar fronts where men squatted to smoke their pipes, where women haggled with hawkers peddling fruits and colored silks and jewelry. Like practice for Paris. Practice for all the good things to come. No helmet crushing his skull, no rucksack or armored vest, no grenades or flares or weaponry, and he moved lightly through the fine bright city. On the Street of False Confessions, Sarkin Aung Wan helped him pick out new clothes and a pair of hiking boots; on the Street of Sweet Pines she threw bread to the pigeons. They followed the Irrawaddy until they came upon a traveling zoo, where the girl made faces at the peafowl and geese and apes and pythons. She held his hand. She touched him privately, laughed, pointed at old men in their funny hats and baggy pants. He felt happy. There was order in the streets. There was harmony, there was color, there was concord and human commerce and the ordinary pleasantries. So following the river with Sarkin Aung Wan, walking now and not marching, Paul Berlin paid attention to detail. He saw sunlight that lasted until dusk. He saw grain unloaded from small river junks. He saw a monkey dancing at the end of a leather leash. He saw the river darken, the sky turning pink, the city beginning to light itself. And he believed what he saw.
Eighteen
Prayers on the Road to Paris
Again that evening they searched. They ate fried fish at a high rooftop restaurant, the whole city lighted below, potted palms tinkling with wind chimes. Then they searched.
But first Eddie asked, “What exactly do we look for?”
Shaved, dressed in blue jeans and a striped T-shirt, Eddie looked thoroughly American, his black hair combed up slick and shiny. “I mean,” he said, pausing while a waiter uncorked wine, “I mean, it’s a huge place. We got to have a plan, don’t we?”
Doc sipped the wine and pronounced it suitable. The waiter shuffled into the darkness beyond the potted palms.
“See my point?” Eddie said. “What’s the mission order? Is this a straight recon job, a patrol, an ambush? What?”
“None of the above,” said Oscar Johnson. He wore a silk shirt, the top two buttons open. In his lap was a large felt hat. He held up two fingers. “You want to find Cacciato? Okay, so then you got to concentrate on basics.” He wagged the first finger. “Number one, you go where the booze is.” He wagged the second finger. “Number two, you seek out womanhood. Booze and broads, dig it? That’s where you’ll find Cacciato. No different than any other red-blooded Joe—booze an’ bimbos.”
Eddie puckered his eyebrows. “I don’t know. That don’t sound much like Cacciato.”
“You doubting me?”
“No, man,” Eddie said. “I’m just saying it don’t strike a right note.”
“The basics. Focus on the basic commodities.”
“But he don’t drink.” Oscar shrugged.
“And, look,” Eddie said. “I doubt the guy knows women from french fries.”
“French fries,” Stink Harris sighed. “Jeez, what I’d give for some.”
The waiter appeared with seven thimble-sized glasses of orange liquid. Doc Peret rose, lifted his glass, called for quiet.
“A toast,” he said. “To peace and domestic tranquillity. To companionship and good memories. To Eddie and Oscar and Stink Harris. To Harold Murphy, who deserted us. To all the memories, may they rest in peace.”
They drank, and the waiter refilled the glasses, and Doc toasted the old days, the times of trouble, the bad times. Then he proposed a toast to the lieutenant. “To a man with twenty-five solid years of service. A man now leading his men on a mission of the greatest daring. And … and to the lovely young refugee, and to Oscar Johnson, and to Pederson and Buff and Billy Boy Watkins. To all those fuckers.”
“To Cacciato,” Paul Berlin said.
Doc shrugged. “Why not? Sure—to Cacciato.”
They finished the toast and paid the bill.
“One last question,” Eddie said. “What if we find him? What then?”
The men were quiet. They looked at one another, then finally at the old lieutenant. He sat stiffly. Dark spots carved at the cheekbones. His eyes, which in the old days had always glowed bright blue, were now as dull and dry as two stones.
“What then, sir?” Eddie asked. “What if we find the dude?”
Lieutenant Corson made a vague, dismissive gesture with his hand.
Then they began the search.
It became a routine. Roaming the powdered streets until midnight, then back to the Hotel Minneapolis for sleep, then searching through the hot afternoons.
For Paul Berlin, it was a puzzle. Where would Cacciato have hung his big hat? What was he after? What drove him away and what kept him going, and which way, and for how long, and why? Paul Berlin searched for detail. With Sarkin Aung Wan beside him, he searched the tea shops and taverns and a hundred flophouses, tested the restaurants, played the horses under floodlights at a track outside the city. Violet evenings were the best time. He liked watching night flow down from the Shan Plateau, the purply shades growing on one another. He liked moving through crowds, the street-corner talk, the hum of traffic. Yes, the search was for detail. What, in all that passed, was Cacciato interested in, and what would have drawn him here? He searched for clues. He remembered Cacciato fishing in World’s Greatest Lake Country. He remembered how the kid used to carry a tattered photo album at the bottom of his pack. The album was covered by gray plastic. On the front cover, in red, it said VUES OF VIETNAM. And inside, arranged in strict chronological order, were more than a hundred pictures that somehow stuck better to memory than Cacciato himself. On the first page, like a preface, the kid stood with four solemn people identified below as MY FAMILY. Posed before an aluminum Christmas tree. A gray-faced father, a worried man. A salesman of some sort, or maybe an actuary. Twin sisters, both pretty. A pretty mother, too, slim and hipless and well dressed, dressed for XMAS EVE, printed below the snapshots in red ink. Deeper into the album were pictures of a stucco house with yellow trim, a blunt-nosed 1956 Olds, a cat curled in someone’s lap, Cacciato smiling and shoveling snow, Cacciato with his head shaved white, Cacciato in fatigues, Cacciato home on leave, Cacciato and Vaught posing with machine guns, Cacciato and Billy Boy, Cacciato and Oscar, Cacciato squatting beside the corpse of a shot-dead VC in green pajamas, Cacciato holding up the dead boy’s head by a shock of brilliant black hair, Cacciato smiling.
But who was he? Tender-complected, plump, large slanted eyes and flesh like paste. The images were fuzzy. Paul Berlin remembered separate things that refused to blend together. Whistling on ambush. Always chewing gum. The smiling. Fat, slow, going bald, young. Rapt, willing to do the hard stuff. And dumb. Dumb as milk. A case of gross tomfoolery.
Then he spotted Cacciato.
“That’s him,” he said. A bit of pastry clogged his throat. He looked again, swallowed—“That’s him!”
Sarkin Aung Wan smiled. An outdoor café along the Street of Jewels, a calm violet evening. “That’s who?”
“Him.” Paul Berlin pointed. “Right there. That’s him.”
The girl turned, looked about in a puzzled sort of way, then smiled again. Cacciato passed directly behind her. Six feet away. She could have touched him with a cane.
“Where?”
“There. Right there.”
She turned again and squinted and shook her head.
“There!”
He was dressed as a monk. A long brown robe gave him the look of Friar Tuck, the same round-faced piety. His hands were folded. He was smiling. Four other monks s
urrounded him like disciples, all dressed in the same tattered robes, all bald, all smiling Cacciato’s vacuous smile.
Without hurry, they moved off into the dark.
“Him?” Sarkin Aung Wan said.
“No. That one. In the middle—that one.”
“That one?”
“Jesus, no. That one. The dumb one.”
Already Cacciato was nearly out of sight.
Quickly Paul Berlin paid the bill, took the girl’s hand, and hurried off in pursuit. They followed the street until it emptied into a large open park.
Sarkin Aung Wan stopped.
“Cao Dai,” she whispered.
“What?”
“Most sacred. Cao Dai—the evening prayers.” She pointed toward a crowd of monks gathered at the center of the park. Cacciato was just now joining the throng.
“Which one?” Sarkin Aung Wan said.
It was impossible to spot Cacciato in the growing herd. Another group of monks filed in from the east, several bearing lighted candles protected by glass. When the candles had been placed on a stone altar, and after a tramcar rattled by, the monks stopped milling and began to sway in rhythm, chanting softly in the purply light of evening.
More monks joined the crowd, hundreds of them now, and more coming, and the chanting grew fuller and deeper.
“I’m going after him,” Paul Berlin said. “Now, before—”
“No!”
Sarkin Aung Wan reached out but already he was moving.
He paused at the edge of the gathering. For an instant he caught a glimpse of Cacciato, or what might have been Cacciato. He took a breath, ducked his head, and plunged in.
The park was a jumble of bald skulls and empty smiles swaying under a calm seamless sky.
He pushed toward the center of the crowd. There was the smell of incense, the deep chanting, a rocking sensation. He pressed forward, using his elbows, but the crowd seemed to hold him back. He heard muttering and snarls. Someone snatched him by the arm, and the shouting grew louder. The swaying ceased; he was being smothered. He twisted hard but two monks had him by the waist. Another grabbed his knees. As he fell, in the moment before collapse, he saw Cacciato’s round face before him like a lighted jack-o’-lantern.