by Linda Hogan
They all laughed. “Cocoa, Marco Polo Just?”
The morning Thomas was to return, Ruth braided her hair down her back, undid it, brushed it again, and braided it until it was perfect. She wore jeans and a dark green silk shirt and sat up straight. Marco insisted on wearing a traditional woven men’s skirt over his jeans. He had gifts for his father, a wooden cedar box which held a bald eagle feather and a carved and painted canoe paddle. And he had himself, already with an air of authority. They waited. It was eight and Thomas was not due in until nearly ten, but Ruth was anxious.
He had been found, she was told, quarantined, hospitalized for examination, questioned by the army, and honorably discharged. But she’d heard nothing from him and she was puzzled and concerned. She had been waiting for a century even though Marco was only nine. The war had been over, at least for America, but she had never given up hope.
She and Marco sat in the small airport and looked out the window. Planes arrived and left on currents of heat and air. Light crossed their faces. It reflected off moving things, a woman’s pocketbook clasp, a van outside by the planes, silver on the luggage.
“Here, young man.” A stewardess gave the boy a pin with a pair of wings. He sat with it on his lap and waited. Ruth pulled him toward her and touched his hair. She watched him. He had, for some reason, lost his excitement about his father coming home.
The sun moved past where they now sat.
Ruth looked at her hand, then at her arm. Muscular and lean. It was hard work, the fishing boat. She looked in a mirror at her face, wondering how much she’d changed in these years, if he would recognize her, love her, if she was still beautiful as he’d once thought.
They had warned her that Thomas would be changed. Maybe in ways incomprehensible even to himself. The one witness to the massacre said he’d been hit in the head by something flying, something large. That one witness, the survivor, young Michael, said he’d seen Thomas fall. The last thing he himself recalled was that he panicked and ran to the water, turning toward it in the smoke of burning people and trees and land and then the fog, too, as he reached the water and jumped in so he wouldn’t burn. He was picked up from the water by a navy boat. “What luck!” said the man who found him. “And timing.” The boy was in shock. The words seemed cold after what he’d seen and told them. “Undress, soldier,” they said, and gave him dry clothes. He believed at the time that Thomas had died, or if not, desperately needed medical attention. He had every intention of getting help to him, but he could only cry. He cried when he told them the story and they had to keep moving away. Then he heard on the boat that city after city had fallen to the communists. For the first time he wondered what a communist really was.
The countries fell quickly, easily, to the north. Soon Saigon was invaded. They said the Americans were leaving the country. The army then had used nerve gas wherever they thought soldiers either had defected or were caught by the enemy. To keep them from suffering at the hands of a more cruel enemy, they said. He thought of Thomas. Sarin. Nerve gas. He wondered for years where they had dropped it. It occupied his daily thoughts. So did his guilt, his fractured conscience. He was thinking of it the day they found him and he’d think of it for a long time after, about the man, Thomas, who must have died that day, at least his name was on the Wall in DC along with the others.
Ruth’s mother arrived at the airport just before the plane, her hair in a sheer pink scarf, for it had become windy. She removed the scarf and fluffed up the white hair which framed her dark face with a circle of light. Ruth looked at her mother’s dark, ropy hands, her radiant skin. She carried flowers for “the soldier,” as she called him, and sweet rolls for Marco and Ruth. The flowers were red, white, and blue. Ruth could not look at them, still thinking of the soldiers as America’s dogs not cared for as much as she cared for Hoist. Then came the old friends of Thomas. Ruth did not sit near them or acknowledge them. She knew them. They were the men who wouldn’t stop a rape. Dwight. Dimitri. Cyrus. Dark men, not necessarily in skin color, for two of them were mixed, but of heart and spirit. She could see through them. And they had taken Thomas away. Them and their beer, or whatever it was. Ruth always thought that if there was justice in the world, one of them should have been the one who didn’t come back. Then she disliked herself for thinking it.
There was a smell of sugar and cinnamon, but the sweet rolls went untouched.
Ruth combed Marco’s hair as the plane arrived. Aurora, still the mother, patted down Ruth’s hair. “Do you remember before he left for the war? Your wedding. It was so beautiful.” She smiled, recalling the wedding on the beach, the firelight that night, almost the entire village there, even old Vince, the fisherman.
Years had passed since he’d been gone and Ruth’s hair still shone blue-black, with only a few gray strands. She still looked like her father. She thought of Thomas’s face. It was wide, and his eyes crinkled when he smiled, even when he was a child, even when confused. He had a sweetness about him, and an Asian look. She had teased him about his ancestors coming from China across the Bering Strait even though the people knew they had come from the caves out in the ocean, come out on strands of seaweed, some carried, with their stories in their arms and on their backs or carried on the fins of the water animals, and the story of the whale, their ancestor, was one of these. All their stories clung like barnacles to the great whale, the whale they loved enough to watch pass by. They were people of the whale. They worshiped the whales. Whalebones had once been the homes of their ancestors who covered the giant ribs with skins and slept inside the shelters. The whales were their lives, their comfort. The swordfish, their friends, sometimes wounded a whale and it would come to shore to die, or arrive already dead. It was an offering to the hungry people by their mother sea and friend, the swordfish.
Ruth thought of the octopus in the cave when Thomas was born. He was to be special. Now he was decorated by the army and coming home.
When the plane landed, Ruth stood up, watching, nervous. One by one, the passengers departed. Then there was no one. She waited. Perhaps his bag was in the back. Finally, an employee went over to them and said, “I’m sorry. Everyone is off the plane. Your passenger was not there.” Thomas’s disappointed buddies said nothing to Ruth. They walked out, their pants too low, their walks too arrogant for almost-poor men who spent their nights at the bar. Knowing she disliked them. Knowing why.
A garbled announcement was made for a town whose name no one could understand.
“There must be a mistake.” But Ruth already had a feeling he would not be there. Still, trying not to cry, she asked, “When does the next plane come in?”
Ruth went to the window and looked at the plane. She noticed the fingerprints on the glass, handprints, and thought of them as the ghosts of people who had been there and gone. In the reflection, she watched families meet, happily. Lovers kissing. People parting, reaching out to touch one last time.
She waited.
At four he didn’t arrive, either. She looked at their son, who had never met his father. He was pinning on the wings. He’d seen the pilots.
She looked at her mother in despair. “Why didn’t he call? He could have let us know. I don’t know why he hasn’t called. I want to hear his voice. I just want to hear him. He could have even called us earlier.” Her face was pale and tired. “What’s happened to him that he’d do this? Treat us this way?”
Aurora, thinking he’d broken Ruth’s heart once again, saw her daughter sway. “Come on. Let’s leave. It’s no good here.”
They drove past water and land, logging trucks.
“You don’t know. Anything could have happened.” But Aurora also knew he would not be coming home.
“Why didn’t he just call?”
Marco watched his mother cry. He knew his father was there, somewhere. He’d return.
Hours. Days. Years. Who knew how long?
BODY LIES
Thomas didn’t call. He was a lie. His cells were all lies and his
being was made up of lies. Lies couldn’t call out the way truth does. They feared discovery. They were constantly confused and had soft edges that overlapped. Thomas was walking, thinking, My body is made of lies. There are lies on my tongue. He no longer knew the truth.
But lies are the first recognition of truth. He wouldn’t think this, he wouldn’t know it for many years. He would think, instead, My ancestors had purity and purpose. They had songs for everything. They were honest, even in their treaties, which in truth they called entreaties.
Had he gone home, he would have been surrounded by human faces that believed the lies about him and he would have had to act as if they were true, so, in his civilian clothes, he walked away from the airport, carrying only one bag. The other had gone along without him.
Shaking coins in his pocket now and then, he walked toward the city in the morning, feeling also the bundle of bills from the overdue pay he’d collected in Hawaii. Some of it should have gone to Ruth, he thought. He bore the realization that she had worked all those years. He had given little. The army didn’t know about her.
The distance from the airport was deceptive and by the time he saw buildings, he was tired.
He was cold even as the fog lifted and his feet had new boots on them, the ones they gave him in Hawaii when they questioned him on how he’d been treated. Now he had blisters.
When the officers questioned him, with their gray unyielding authority, he’d said, “Fine, I’m fine,” but his eyes were swollen with uncried tears, his face red. He thought they would want him to go to the brig for years.
The strange men said, “‘Fine’! That word is the typical reaction. Did you know that?”
He didn’t. So, everyone said fine. What else would they have said? The truth?
The war was like an ocean, an ocean where everyone burned or drowned, and only a few could swim it.
He missed the real ocean. He’d never thought of the future in that ocean. Only of swimming and holding his breath.
As he walked, his feet hurt, but he was glad to hurt, glad his tooth hurt, also. He changed his bag to the other shoulder. He felt a pang of missing home. He saw Ruth’s teeth, how small they were when they bit into a piece of fruit, and he missed her. He wanted to touch her, but this was the decent thing, he told himself, the right thing, not to go back. He had two lives. Now they both seemed as if they belonged to another man. He’d been taken away from both of those lives. He was a stolen person. What remained was not him. It was just his body walking, the body of dishonesty. He was a taken-away human being. Right now the only earthly connection he felt to anything was this walking away from everything in his new boots, hurting and stiff. Miles he walked, miles a long way for a man who was a rice-grower, accustomed to standing in water, bending over, a man with a back that showed his labor, too. And a fisherman he had been until he was found. He saw the brown sea grasses as he walked, then the green of the plants on the side of the road. He was in a different world. He was from a different world. It was a long distance between the two. He thought it would never be crossed.
When at last he reached the city it was in warmth. People passed by, foreign to him, pale, everything about them strange. The sun watched him from the sky. He set his bag down on a bench.
Before he began his third life, he lay down on the bench that said THE HARTFORD with an elk on it, loosened his boots, and fell asleep beneath the antlers, dreaming his head was in a woman’s lap, not on his bag of earthly possessions.
After the last plane, after the arrival of buses, after days and sleepless nights, Ruth realized he was not coming, maybe he was never coming, that he had gone somewhere she didn’t know. All her hopes dropped to the ground and deeper, past the soil, deeper than sand and rock. She was afraid to go out on the water even though she lived on the boat and was a fishing woman. She was afraid because she was heavy and sinking and the weight would carry her down even farther than an anchor and she would drown in darkness and loneliness and cold. She would drop to the bottom of the ocean and maybe the boat, too, with its beds and pots and pans all falling, floating, dropping. She had thought this day or this night that she would hold Thomas, touch him, be held in his smooth dark arms. And his son would be there, and now Thomas would not sit with Marco and look at his face so like his own. Finally, she fell into a sleep at her mother’s house on the side of the hill. To the dismay of Hoist, Aurora covered the lovebirds’ cage so they would not wake her.
And so the man whose body was dishonest just by living woke and went into the city and found a place for himself on a turn to the right, not far from a highway, a room with an entrance through a crooked alley. It had a bed, a table, and two chairs. He thought it looked like the painting of Van Gogh’s little room because the floor was painted wood, red in color and scuffed, the bed was wooden and made a sound when he sat on it. The chairs and table were in a corner, the walls were blue. Even though it smelled like an old man, he rented it. Around the corner was a fruit and vegetable stand. He bought apples the next day. For a few days he felt free. But at night when he went to bed, if he fell asleep, they searched him out and found him, the people he’d been forced to leave. Ma. He’d always laughed at her name. Lin, their daughter, his daughter, with the body thin as rice grass, his girl. Maybe they came through the worlds and found him because they were the dead and the dead could travel easily. She could be in the spirit world with her mother. She could be exactly the same as when he left. If she was alive, Lin could be anything now. She could be an enlisted child in the communist army. He saw the old man Song with the goatee weeping at the end before he, Thomas, had been taken away, Lin crying for him, running toward him on her precious skinny legs. He looked back down at her as the helicopter flew him away and he wanted to jump. He should have, he thought.
The faces of the shot men also came to him. Lizards came, and the rubber trees he saw in the shadows that one time, trees the French had wanted. The heat descended on him like a blanket. He saw faces that emerged like ghosts from the canopy of the jungle and then disappeared back into the trees. In his closed eyes men climbed ladders into the red dream night sky as if they were spiders climbing their strands of shining silk. American men slept with limbs of trees for pillows, their guns in their arms like women, or they wrapped themselves around a tree as if it were safer, the nights cold, days hot, telling stupid jokes, fighting with each other, then stopping to fight an enemy and trying like hell to help one another live. Mikey, as he had called the blue-eyed boy whose life he tried to save; he came toward him.
In Hawaii the hospital had been filled with men who had vacant eyes or worse, mean ones, or the ones with gentle smiles and silence as if they’d been through nothing. At that hospital the doctor asked Thomas questions in a room with a mirror that was a window. Thomas said to the mirror, “Why don’t you just come in and sit with us?” because there were faces behind everything. He was ignored.
“Do you remember how long you were unconscious?”
“I wasn’t unconscious that I know of,” he said, then paused. “Sir.” He hadn’t said it in a long time. Sir. It was foreign to him now, years later.
“Did you have anything to do with the communists? Did they hold you or question you or wound you in any way?”
“No, I only worked. They didn’t think I was an American. The way I look, you know, being who I am. I mean, what I am. I never talked. I kept quiet like I was mute or had been shot in the mouth or throat. I grew rice.” There had been times, too, when he had hidden in dark tunnels forgotten then by those who had tried to build them too close to the water and so they’d mostly collapsed except for the reinforced entrances. Or he’d hidden in food containers. “I just grew rice.”
“Did they try to indoctrinate you in any way?”
“Sometimes I fished, too.”
He couldn’t explain to those who thought everyone an enemy how he’d been hidden all those years, but even so he wasn’t against the communists. They were for their own people. They would ha
ve killed him, though, and strange as it was, he would have understood. Of course there had been no Khmer, not yet, and he had no idea that later it had all come to an end.
“I never even knew where I was.”
This was almost true in the man made of lies because he was a map lover. It was in the South, he thought. They’d been sent on a special ops mission. There was the tea-colored river. He thought it must flow into the Delta. They were rice-growers. They were treated well. There was a shortage in Saigon. People, even the army, were hungry. Ma, it was a Thai name, it was so unusual, packed rice in baskets and helped haul it to the road where the Others would pick the baskets up, always kind to her and leaving her with special treats—ginger, lemongrass, or cloth.
He could still hear the sound of rice flowing into baskets like strong rain. He still saw her bending, filling the baskets with grain, the lines of her neck and shoulders, the concaves of skin and veins, the line of jawbone, small and delicate.
“How long were you unconscious?” the doctor asked.
“I don’t know.” He thought he was unconscious now, on his bed.
The faces of the alive haunted him, too, Ruth and the ghost child, Marco, the son. He had loved Ruth all his life. But then, in his second life, he loved Ma and Lin. He was two men. He told himself love had no limits. For him there was divinity in both his worlds. It was made stronger by knowing he was a doomed man and sooner or later he would be killed by one army or another. That’s what he had told himself until now. He was alive, or something like it. Maybe he’d go to prison.
He didn’t say to the doctors—because his body was a lie—that he’d lived with a tribe there and he wanted to stay and his only fear had been of the Americans. Even now. Instead he cried. For one of very few times.