by Quan Barry
And even now on the trail east to the highway that will take them south, the baby sits in the lap of the old honey seller, the woman like a second grandmother to her. On Rabbit’s face is a smattering of freckles across the bridge of her nose and cheeks as if someone has dusted her with flecks of cinnamon. From time to time across the highlands she will rub her ears as if trying to clear them of something. She can hear the old honey seller’s heart beating, the sound filling her small head though no one else hears it, not even the heart itself.
By mid-afternoon they reached the Song Cai. It wasn’t as glorious as the Serepok, but it would take them to where they were going. They could feel the earth beginning to descend. Three times Qui took the cleaver to the brush before giving up. They were less than thirty miles from the coast. The forests this side of the mountains hadn’t been sprayed with defoliant, but the landscape was rapidly changing, the greenness giving way to aridness. When the wind was right, you could smell the salt. Sometimes Qui thought she could hear the sound of voices carrying on the wind—the sound high and raw like lamentation.
For the past few years they had been working their way down the coast. Shortly after Rabbit’s birth, the Americans began withdrawing from the country. Even with the Americans leaving, the war dragged on, the rice harvests left rotting in the paddies or never planted in the first place. In Cong Heo the people ate rats and frogs, whatever the countryside had to offer. When the rats and frogs ran out, Bà with her turbid eyes led the four of them down to Lak Lake in the central highlands, the highlands once the stronghold of the ethnic tribes who had sided with the Americans. They lived beside the lake for two years while the Americans slowly exited. Now that the tribes had been abandoned, everyone was left to fight for themselves, the mountains steeped in blood. It was all a mystery no one could explain. Why a foreign power would come all this way and then just disappear.
Overhead the scavengers were circling on the currents. Despite her cloudy eyes, Bà could feel the vultures’ cold gaze. The birds were in their season. For them it was a time of plenty. All outcomes were possible. How many hours had Bà spent trying to calculate what might happen? Tu’s years working the Ho Chi Minh Trail as a foot soldier for the VC should be enough. Theirs was a family of heroes—Bà with a burn between her breasts where the Frenchman had stubbed out his cigarette. But she couldn’t be sure their years of service would save them in the eyes of the new government. There was talk of an impending bloodbath. Some said if your family hadn’t left for the north during the Great Partitioning of ’54, you were an enemy of the people. Bà didn’t know what to believe. Only one thing was certain. A great unknown was bearing down on them. Overhead the scavengers circling like a storm.
Baby, sleep well, so Mother can go to the market to buy you a spoonful of honey. If she goes to the east, she will bring you the lychee soft as an eye. If she goes to the western market on the edge of everything, she will buy you the sleep from which one never awakens, fingers sticky sweet. Baby, sleep well, so Mother can go to the market.
THERE WAS AN HOUR’S WORTH OF DAYLIGHT LEFT. THE EMPTY sky was washed of color. The scavengers had landed somewhere long ago to clean some poor creature of its flesh. Finally it was time. There was no moon, the sky overcast. Huyen took out an old flashlight. She hit it a few times before the weak light winked on. In the darkness Bà took charge despite her crookedness, her unblinking scar guiding her through the shadows. With her one good hand she took out their mats and the iron kettle with the remaining rice in it. They had just enough left for two more days. They had cooked the rest of it the day before, figuring it would keep until the end. They were all too tired to look for stray brush to build a fire. They lay down right in the middle of the trail. Qui took Rabbit up in her arms and sat down on a mat, opened her shirt. Bà handed her a rice bowl. It was the bowl from the grave of Little Mother, the bowl light blue and chipped along the edge. Sometimes when Rabbit held it, she would move her lips and prattle on as if talking to someone.
Qui jostled Rabbit on her thigh, but the child kept squirming. She forced Rabbit’s mouth onto her breast, but the child turned her head away. Qui sighed. She put Rabbit down on the mat and rubbed her hands together until they were warm. Then she leaned forward and began massaging one of her breasts with her bare hands, moving from the base of the breast all the way to the tip. After a while she began to squeeze the area around the nipple with her thumb and index finger. At first the milk came hissing out. After a few more squeezes it shot out in a thin stream, dribbling uselessly into the dirt. When she finished, she switched breasts, milking the other one until it was bearable. Slowly the last light drained from the sky.
As Qui emptied herself, Rabbit lay on her back on the bamboo mat, her legs and arms rigid. She had a way of crying without moving, only her tiny chest expanding as she gulped the air, refilling her lungs, then the silent scream that turned her face red. Even after Qui finished, Rabbit kept crying as she furiously rubbed her ears.
Bà and Huyen ate their rice cold, Bà’s mouth awkwardly hitching up and down like a puppet with a broken string, one side of her face frozen. When Qui was done, Bà came forward with the mosquito net and laid it over the girl and the fussing toddler, the two of them as if trapped. Once long ago on the rubber plantation, Bà had seen a Frenchwoman get married, the young woman the niece of the propriétaire. The way the woman floated from the front door of the villa to the shiny black limousine, her veil trailing on the ground, her whole being as if swaddled in netting.
They lay in the darkness, Bà on a mat by the cart wondering where her pipe was, if her dead hand had dropped it somewhere in the brush. She could feel the cold metal of the cleaver tucked safely under her head. In the early part of the night, she dreamed of a wedding party walking through a minefield. The bride was the first to step on one. The noise of the explosion sent a cloud of white doves rocketing up out of the dead trees. The guests froze in place except for the flower girl, who continued to swing her tin bucket as she skipped along through the elephant grass. The child dipping her fingers in the milky white sap, then flicking the droplets into the air.
Qui woke up after midnight. Her braids lay in coils on the ground. Beside her the child was still awake, Rabbit’s eyes focused on something remote. Qui looked off to where she was staring. After a moment she too could see it, a light dancing in the distance. It quivered like fire but was the wrong color, the flame a steely blue.
Gently Qui put a hand on Rabbit’s face and closed her eyes. After a while they stayed shut. The old women were asleep. Qui was mindful not to wake them. She slipped the cleaver out from beneath Bà’s head, careful not to pull her hair, then moved toward the flame. It was farther off than she’d thought, the little blue light always winking just up ahead.
When she arrived, Qui could smell something cooking. Her stomach rumbled. It smelled like catfish and lemongrass. They looked up. None of them were surprised that she should be coming out of the forest—a young girl carrying a cleaver, her hair snaking down her back, her exquisite face as if carved from moonlight. The man in the group said something she didn’t understand. He tried again in broken Vietnamese. You VC? She shook her head. He pointed to a spot next to where the fish was cooking over a small blue flame. She sat.
There were more than ten of them, a family of Bana. The women wore the traditional skirts, each one long and black with a panel of colorful red embroidery around the middle. The man was shirtless, his loose pants made of the same dark material. They talked in their own language. She couldn’t be sure which ones were his wives, which his sisters.
The fire was starting to wind down. A woman sat shaping a lump of clay into a small gray ball. When it was good enough, she tossed it into the flames and for a moment the fire sparked a pale blue as the ball ignited and began to burn. Qui could feel her mouth watering.
The man said they had crossed a bridge made from the bodies of the dead, corpses strung together to make a way. Two days ago Buon Me Thuot falls, he said in b
roken Vietnamese. Route 7 is a river of despair. Do you know what this means, he asked. Qui nodded, but he said it anyway. It means we are dead.
The front of Qui’s shirt suddenly went wet in the blue light. She could feel the hot milk dribbling down her stomach. One of the women noticed. Without a word she got up from her seat and disappeared into the darkness. The woman came back carrying a sleeping child. His face seemed older than Rabbit’s, almost wizened, but his body was smaller, less than what it should have been.
Qui lifted her shirt. Instinctually the sleeping child took her breast in his mouth. His lips were dry and chafed her nipple. Qui tried to stifle a sigh. The rapture of a foreign mouth on her body, a hunger she could satisfy.
In the light of day if the little Bana boy could have described his dreams to his mother and aunts, he would have told them fabulous tales of leaf-nosed bats and the long white tongue of the full rabbit moon. He would have told them about a dead woman glowing six feet below ground with a pearl gripped tight in her hands, all through the air the scent of honey. He took as much as he wanted, and still there was more. Soon the milk spilled from the corners of his mouth. In the days and weeks to come, his face shone with a new glory. His form filled out, skin radiant and supple, soft as down. After his midnight suckling at the stranger’s teat, he was never sick a single day for the rest of his natural life.
In the morning the world was dewy and bright. Qui lay on the mat next to Rabbit in the middle of the trail where they had gone to sleep. The cart still stood where they’d left it loaded with their possessions, condensation glistening on the jars. The cleaver was back under Bà’s head.
Qui sat up and stretched. The old women were already awake. They had slept on top of a hill. Through the dead trees she could see down to where the Serepok had run dry. If she turned east she could just make out a wide horizon where the world seemed to come to an end. She picked Rabbit up and walked to the edge of the hill and lifted her shirt, the baby’s face flushed from a restless night. Qui closed her eyes, then the familiar feeling of light issuing out of the body. Water rushing downhill to find itself.
Overhead scavengers were already circling for the scent of rot. Huyen watched the birds sail in rings on the wind. All that was left to do was pack up. They had another long day before them. One by one the old woman picked up their bamboo mats. Under Qui and Rabbit’s there was something in the ground. Huyen brushed back the dirt with her foot. She didn’t blanch when she saw what it was.
It was a face, the eyes still open. For a moment she considered digging further to see if she could find a gun. What is it, said Bà, her heart gone cold, but already Huyen was covering it back up.
They traveled all day over the highlands toward Nha Trang on the coast. Bà lay in the cart with her useless body, the baby nestled in her lap. Huyen hobbled forward on foot. The smell of salt sharpened in the air, the land leveling down. On this side of the mountain the populace lived on the ocean, the people fishermen and their business the business of fishing. Qui thought of the Bana family she had met in the woods. We are dead, the man had said, the man with his stories of crossing the Song Den on the backs of corpses. Like stepping on logs only softer, he’d added. Qui kept walking, the blisters on her hands starting to bleed. One of the women had described how you could feel the soft dents growing on the backs of the dead, like bruises on fruit. Spots where the bodies had been stepped on repeatedly.
Years ago in Cong Heo, Qui had heard stories about the NVA using peasants to ford streams. How the Americans would send fighter jets to bomb an area, houses and roads and animals all destroyed for the sake of a single bridge. Little did they know that by nightfall the rivers were again being crossed. By the light of the moon the peasants would stand shoulder to shoulder in the muddy waters, then bend over, their backs like wooden planks. Entire villages were lined up, even the elderly, each becoming a single stone in the human road. Then the NVA would roll a series of bicycles over the living bridge, bicycles loaded with rice and ammunition and medicine.
For the third day in a row Huyen was chewing the same betel leaves, the leaves long stripped of their punch. She looked up into the blue sky. A white bird floated in the air. It was a seabird. She could tell by the wide yellow feet and the fact that the bird stayed close to earth. In the distance a haze hung over the far horizon, the line indistinct between the sky and the South China Sea. Everywhere flocks of the little white birds with the wide yellow feet swirled in the air.
From the back of the cart Bà grunted and lifted her right hand. By the side of the trail there was a dragon-fruit tree growing in a ditch, each prickly arm green and spidery. They were succulents, a kind of cactus, the fruit itself magenta though the flesh was white and speckled with small black seeds. Huyen walked over and picked one. She peeled back the thick pink petals and bit into it, chewing a little before spitting the mush back out into her hand and offering it to Bà.
Bà turned her head away so Huyen offered her the fruit directly. Painfully Bà lifted her head and took a bite. At the familiar sweetness, the seeds crunching between her teeth, she remembered the first time she’d ever eaten dragon fruit, the tree with its green arms armed with spikes.
It had happened at Terres Noires. The black earth. Bà’s breasts newly blossomed. She is standing behind the old wooden shed where the tin buckets are stored, each one rinsed out at the end of the day, the old women and children peeling the white residue from the sides and collecting the sticky peelings in a heap, which in turn will be measured and added to the day’s take. Thirty feet off someone is being beaten in the water station again, the sound of the victim’s voice familiar, something almost pleasurable in the man’s cries, though she cannot place it. The way his breath catches in his throat, the man gasping. An inexplicable burning grows in her loins as she listens to his agony.
Then she sees them. A pile of bright pink oblongs gleam on a table underneath a white tent. Everywhere there are acres of plates and silverware. She isn’t supposed to be standing here behind the shed where the tin buckets are stored when not in use. Her mother is out working the twelfth sector, bringing in her thirty pounds a day, which is easy in the twelfth sector because the trees are the ideal age. The white sap pouring out of them like tears.
And where is she now? A long communal building, a barracks. Things cluttered in the corners. Personal effects. Pots for cooking. Mats. It has been a long time since she has set foot in this world. Even with everyone out working in the sectors, the lingering smell of hundreds of unwashed bodies. He is sitting on a stool with his shirt off, a series of fresh welts running the length of his back. Is she still a child or was she ever a child? The man is older than her by whole lifetimes. Yet there is something about him that draws her to him. Perhaps it is the beauty of his hands, the skin of his palms like milk. Where is she and how did she come to this place? A room where she finds herself all alone with a shirtless man and his shredded body. But the man is winking at her. On the floor the sunlight pools in a yellow swatch. He is smiling as he reaches down inside his pants and pulls it out. She moves toward him. Pour vous, he says. Even when they had been beating him, he had managed to keep it tucked between his legs. The stolen fruit bright as a jewel.
Qui and Huyen stood and watched Bà toss in the cart. Together we unpeeled it, says Bà. The hunger of our hands, the black seeds crunching between my teeth. He takes his perfect milky palm and wipes the juice from my chin. Then he kisses me, our mouths full of dragon fruit.
Huyen could feel the headache stalling at the back of her brain. She had spit out the old leaves miles ago. Qui looked at her grandmother. I don’t know what she’s saying, Huyen said. It’s gibberish. They stood watching as the juice rolled down Bà’s chin. Finally she lay still. She’s dying, Huyen added. Qui didn’t even nod. Overhead a few of the small white seabirds floated in the blue, each one like a V in the sky. All right, Huyen said. Let’s go.
From the last hill leading into Nha Trang they could see a mass of boats in the port.
People were in the water holding what looked like bundles over their heads, a small fleet already making their way out to sea. Later, Huyen would hear a rumor about an American battleship ten miles off the coast, and that if you could reach it, it would take you with them.
Late afternoon they came to a neighborhood. The highway was still another few miles east. They walked through deserted streets. Some of the houses had been dismantled, names and markings taken down, signs blacked out. Trash littered the ground. An old dog lay in an alleyway. As they wheeled by, it lifted its head and sniffed but didn’t get up. Something in the eyes—an animal weariness, as if it had seen this all before.
We should make the highway by sundown, said Huyen. She nodded toward the cart. People will help us. Somewhere she had picked up a large stick and was using it to make her way. Qui wondered where her grandmother had come into this newfound hope, this belief in people. Qui knew what would happen. She had seen it in the eyes of one of the Bana women when the man had offered Qui some of the fish. Overnight a thousand-year culture of hospitality had been reduced to every man for himself. The milky hollow in Qui’s chest was on fire. Who would help them? If things were different, she wasn’t even sure if she would help.
They walked on. A car shot past headed toward the highway, a sea of heads visible in the window, furniture and suitcases tied to the roof. As it sped by, Qui saw someone training a gun on them out the passenger-side window. It was a child, a young boy sitting in a woman’s lap, the boy’s face hard, his arm steady. The car continued on its way. Before the car reached wherever its destination was, Qui knew the boy would shoot somebody.