People of the Whale

by Linda Hogan

  Thomas didn’t ask where the beer came from. It was American. Coors. Bud. Or the cigarettes. Where these things might have been scared him. But he did lift his head one day and say to one of the kids, “Where the hell do you get the ice?”

  “Out there.”

  Later he saw that they went to the river to get it. It was delivered by a brown boat with a sail the color of a tobacco leaf. The beer, too. He watched the young boys walking down with skinny legs and returning later, carrying things back, him all the time thinking where they went was unsafe, that there were sure to be mines, and thinking also, how could he trust them, even though they were the people he’d saved, but he did, he trusted them, the ones who reminded him of his own world.

  “Still,” said the man, sitting, putting his straw hat beside guava fruits and flies, “it’s been a sad place and life’s been hard for us. Out there.”

  Thomas lived day by day, one after the other, aware that he was missing. There were mists from the water and it was cold at night, but the daytime sun was sometimes fierce except during monsoon season when blue-black clouds and thunderstorms moved across the world, casting shadows and shafts of darkness. It was like his dreams without the sound of roaring jets and fire, just black smoke.

  A guava tree was near the bridge that had been bombed and no longer crossed the river, and next to the village was a bamboo stand, a forest of them, green with light. They bent in the strong winds, but even then he heard the frogs and sometimes he saw ghosts in there, but he never mentioned them because everyone there saw ghosts. The land was peopled by them. These were silent ghosts, merely standing. One wiped his forehead as if he were tired, weary, as if a ghost could not ever lie down and die.

  When the river flooded, it shone with light and he thought of home. The houses on stilts were up to their thighs in water. The river at night shone with the lights on it. If the flood was unusually high, people left their doors by rafts, some painted in beautiful colors, blues and pinks with designs on them and words written for safety. When he looked, he wished for the spray of whales. “Where I lived we had whales,” he told the man.

  “How terrible. I’ve heard of them.”

  He saw the river at night with all the lights on it. People passing.

  The river flowed by. So did time.

  It would have been impossible to name the place, if it had a name. Most places didn’t, being new settlements. Besides, all the names ran together. He’d been in too many places. The airborne dropped men here and there. The maps changed with every bomb and battle and raid. Forests were gone. Towns were lost, corpses taken away, towns were renamed and the names would stick.

  When he tried to decipher his vicinity, the closest he could come finally was that he was in the South, somewhere on a river that ran into the Delta of the halved country. Much of it had been occupied by troops, infiltrated, destroyed, and deserted. When his major had looked at the maps and charts and said they weren’t that far south, Thomas finally went by feeling, like you could when the enemy was near. After a while, you could feel their presence, the silence of them. Something spooky, and it was nearby and you didn’t want to breathe.

  He had been afraid. Some soldier, he thought. On the ground, using a flashlight allowed him to see, but it also allowed him to be seen so he became still and waited, trying not to move, to breathe, to itch. He wanted to die at first and get it over with. To just be gone, to shoot himself. But then why not wait and take someone with him? Maybe someone evil or trying to kill a child or a friend. The smell of this war was not right. He remembers it still, of human flesh, chemical, smoke, cordite, napalm, fear. Cordite and rich, oily orange. It remained in his nostrils for years in San Francisco.

  At first they never saw the consequences of their actions except fire, streaks of light, holes in the ground like craters of the moon. Then they were on the ground and after a while they even stopped complaining about it because there was so much fatigue Thomas could barely drag himself until he heard a sound in the leaves. Then the energy came, adrenaline. His heart beat faster. Over time he’d seen the advantages the enemy had over them: They didn’t need gear, they didn’t need anything but what they could glean from the dead and fallen, the trees, the strips of bamboo, even a tossed-away can. With those things they devised weapons and traps and they fought the war. They, who had won every war with almost nothing but cunning and the knowledge of their own land, the Chinese boats they tempted up a river at high tide only to leave them stuck on posts in the water, to sink when the tide went out. They had beat the French, also, with patience and fortitude, pulling and pushing their weapons up hills that the French believed impossible to climb. Thomas tried to think like Them. Finally Thomas needed, like Them, to be light in order to survive. He put a knife in his pocket, one in another pocket, his rifle ready. Two grenades. He kept a tin of food and other items in his pockets. By leaving other things behind he walked easily, he could have hidden away in the forest or jungle, soundless, from where they walked. But the Sergeant above him said, “Carry it or we’ll shoot you now before you die later on your own.” They were wrong. On the ground, in the sky, anything would kill you. It didn’t matter what you wore. The water was the enemy. The trees were Cong. The earth was a bomb. The rain was dangerous. And you had to be prepared to kill anything faster than it killed you. So he picked it all up and then left a little along the way when no one watched him. It was a trail here and there that could have led straight to them, but he’d already thought of that and tossed items to the sides. He knew the enemy always watched. They were there when his men walked by. He saw a face appear now and then from the leaves, then disappear. It was eerie. It was crazy as hell, he thought. Really, it was hell. Then he’d heard an owl in a tree and it reminded him that somewhere there was a normal world. If anyone shot it he would kill them. He also thought maybe later people would fish from the bomb craters. Or swim in them. In places that now looked like the moon. Maybe things would become almost normal again one day, except for the bodies, the graves, the grief, the calculations and manipulations that had to be made for survival.

  One day he stopped still. He was going through the still-remaining jungle without his things and he came to a tree with glasses, cups of china on its branches. Someone lived there, but where would they get the cups and blue bottles? They even had a teapot. It was their kitchen hidden in the jungle where it was easy to disappear and hide a foot away from everything and anyone. He could not wait around to see who lived there, if they were dangerous, if he should shoot them. He was touched by this and his heart hurt, but he disappeared quickly by ducking down and getting away as fast and silent as he could. He became a snake in his movement, a lizard with his eyes, seeing, seeing. He thought like a lynx. He was covered at times in mud and he thought it was good, it kept him unseen, the insects away, and he wandered into mists not knowing what would be there, just feeling with a part of himself he’d never known as he entered darkness. His body had eyes. His back had eyes. His fingers had eyes. But so did the trees, the leaves, the moss and stone.

  Because he was a lynx and snake, the other men began to tease him and call him a “brave.” The sergeant gave up on him and called him the walking dead. He was already decorated and promoted, though god knows he didn’t care. He’d won a medal for saving a man. Now he tried to sleep in trees and pretty soon they thought maybe it was smart, not carrying all that shit. But he also knew when to dig in. Maybe they joked, but they knew in truth he could feel what was there. He could feel what was around and so everyone followed him and if he stopped, they took cover.

  His thirst was constant even though he breathed water. It was hard to see through the smoke of things burning, but there were the skeletons of trees, of homes once with large doors and gardens, of people now in huts somewhere, or dead.

  They made fun of the dead, sitting them up with a canteen and cigarette in mouth, spreading their legs, and he, Thomas, felt nervous about it. Men at home didn’t touch the dead. It wasn’t permit
ted. He felt singled out because they knew he didn’t like it, because they had instincts there they hadn’t felt before and they could read a man’s mind and face. He looked at the plants. Even the roots destroyed. The trees turned over. He thought nothing would grow back in that world. It went against everything that was in him. Thomas, the grandson of Witka, who respected life, grieved.

  His own comrades were leery of him.

  “You’re a sorry excuse for a man,” said someone. And everyone looked at each other and laughed.

  Anyone could see the Americans coming, hear them, even smell them, but they had force on their side, and machines. Fire. Bombs. But not the intelligence of living on that land. If they jumped out of a chopper in daylight, they were targets. If they jumped at night, they had dye so they could be seen by each other, but then they could be seen by anyone else “out there,” and out there was everything, everywhere, the surrounding heat of noon sun, the dark silences of night.

  They traveled in the copters and they set down in many places. He ran into Dwight in Da Nang and Dwight said, casually, almost his first words a lie, “Your father’s sleeping with Ruth, you know.” And then he said, “Hey. Have you heard this isn’t a war? That’s what the president says. Did you know Lenny, my cousin, is here now doing body bags? Counting ’em.”

  Thomas thought of how his father had always wanted Ruth and all around him the men were losing their wives and lovers, getting letters of betrayal and loss.

  Dwight had always been jealous of Thomas, a small part hating him, his buddy, his friend. Thomas never knew it. “Okay, well, see you, bud,” Dwight said, throwing boxes and bags of food into a plane. “Don’t come back in a bag.” Thomas waved down at him as they left, feeling pain, grief, doubt, his body wracked not by the war this time, not by what he saw daily, but by what he imagined from Dwight’s words. They grew like a strangling jungle plant from a seed.

  Then he didn’t know if Dwight was still alive. Dwight had CARPET BOMB written on his helmet. Thomas’s father always had his way with women. Thomas had trusted Ruth. Now he doubted her. But no, she wouldn’t do that. But then, other men’s women were betraying them every day. Dwight’s words lived. Words have their way of living on long after the breath, long after a history, long after.

  At first when Thomas arrived he prayed to the creator with tobacco. Then he believed only evil existed. The Firmament according to Thomas’s new understanding of the world: And god created good and evil. God created jungle law. In the darkness of the void, god created water and it fell from the sky and he created evil and he created fire and it fell from the sky and the earth was full of fire and black mists mingling with black smoke and jungles of beauty and forests in which a man could be trapped. He said, Let there be and it was. Let there be man and there was the enemy standing right before you. Let there be light and it fell from the sky with great beauty and with the power to kill. Let there be daylight and there was morning with bodies all across earth in positions unimaginable. Let there be mountains and let there be weapons that devastate them. Let there be animals that roam earth and the men will kill them. And god created the North Vietnamese and the South Vietnamese, the Americans, and eventually he would create the Khmer Rouge, and the capacity for men to torture others and to laugh about it.

  He had been watching keenly the split in the human heart, including his own. He took to the airfield and with orders to report to one of the worst places in the world. When they arrived he found himself seeing a river of blood and he was sick with it and the smell of gas, napalm with its ceaseless burning. God created it and what kind of a creature was this god, and he was afraid at first, then he hated, and then he was no longer Thomas. Monster. That’s what he was with brother M16 and AK and grenades. What a family he and his weapons were together. There was always a tumble of events and he was too tired to remember them except for the flies which god also created.

  And Major God said, “Here, give the guys these green hornets.” Amphetamines to keep them going. The arc lights so beautiful, one guy said, “Wow. Would you look at that one?” Then there were the heavy clouds of smoke. “It’s us. Goddamn. And they are firing on us! Where’d they come from?”

  “And I thought I saw Them coming up from the ground. I don’t believe it.”

  Then there was the new boy on the block. Michael the new kid lost his glove and had tender hands and so that hand was sore. They had to wade through water. No one had counted on that. This made their fine boots crack, their feet, too, and they hurt all the time and you’d never really get used to it, but they did. “Shit, man, this hurts like a son of a bitch.”

  “Yeah, that’s to remind you you’re still alive.” Another joke they had, America’s least wanted. “And we’re the airborne, too.”

  Then there was the downpour of the monsoon and flooded trails they slipped from. There was the heaviness of clothing that was wet and the smell of sweat and fungus and infections of men injured and growing more infected. And someone, some fucker, stole morphine from the medical supplies and Thomas pointed his gun and said who did it but no one confessed and what could he do? Maybe the thief needed it more. He made one man search the others. Hey, we don’t have to take orders from you. You’re just a grunt like everyone. But they did because he looked, really looked, like he would shoot them, but it was nowhere. There were only rations, toilet paper, crackers and tins. They hadn’t been to camp in so long they thought they were deserted. No music. No cards. No cooked food or cold beer. No mail planes any longer.

  Then it was nearly over, they were at the end of it all, of what was supposed to be a short-stand recon mission. They were sent there suddenly and never told why. The map. He took it with him. They were in the copters. Dropping down. It looked like they were leaving their bounds, he thought. He yelled something about it to the pilot. “We’re lost or something. Look.” Showing the map. The pilot said, “Shut up. Go back and sit down, soldier.”

  They went now against their will, in silence, the men believing they were in the wrong place. No, feeling it. But Murph was crazy and he said, “It doesn’t matter. I don’t discriminate. I’m going to take out every living thing wherever we are. This is search-and-destroy. They told me.”

  Helicopter had been a good man, but now Thomas was aware of everything all at once and he felt awake like he saw it, really saw it. Only the new boy Mike was still sane, but he was green and new, and he looked afraid and eager both at the same time. Jesus, why’d they send him with them? What were his chances?

  Then they were in the wrong place. There were no men there, just women and children and elders, and no place around there for men to hide except a bamboo stand and down a ways under the bridge. Just rice paddies. “Where are the men?” Thomas asked the people who were there. The others looked around. Their plans of action were never perfect, but this was too far less than perfect. There were no Cong there, not that he could see or feel, and not even any weapons that they could count, and everyone was scared and crying. It was the wrong place. Thomas felt it all along. They’d fixed it as an enemy camp and instead they found scared faces and no northern dialects. He knew the dialects. Now they were gods if they wanted to be. They were deciding gods over all the innocent people, the mothers covering their children, the crying, the ones staring down, waiting for what came next. His men were the ones who decided life or death.

  “Oh yeah!” said Murph. “Look at that girl.” He walked toward a young girl.

  Someone else began to light a fire to the “hootch,” which was really a temporary building the people had made of found items.

  “Stop!” Thomas yelled. “There’s no one here.”

  “Hey, you know you can’t even trust a baby.”

  Everything happened too quickly and then when he fired that day, no one fired back. They just looked at him. He can still see the surprised look in their eyes, Murphy after the girl. He was surprised, too. He didn’t think he could do something that fast, that unable to be changed, restored. Or did
he just think they were surprised because it had all happened and there was no decision to it? Everything there always happened too quick or too slow. There was no normal time in war. And having that finger on a rifle or an automatic—it was all too easy. Then he recalled the dirty faces of the men, the helmet under which he sweated. Sweat. They could smell each other, the fear on each other. He hadn’t believed you could smell fear. You could smell it, a stench strong as anything else created by bodies.

  Thomas pushed Mike to safety, Mike, the fucking new guy, they called him, who watched everything wide-eyed and in shock, but he hadn’t even worn a helmet, just an olive drab scarf of torn cloth like he’d seen some bad war movie and Thomas saw his head hit something. Afterward Thomas never forgot him. Mike disappeared. Thomas saw only the afterimage of his blue eyes, light blue, frightened. Maybe he ran. Probably he died out there because there was fire all down the hill, even the water of the rice paddies seemed to be on fire and the river was burning.

  Then the Americans dropped down and searched for them. They found the bodies, what was left of them, and found Monster’s dog tags with all the rest and found a deserted, burned village.

  At Witka’s, Thomas covers his face with his hands. Then he goes out to the water and drops himself in. Dwight sees him when he’s on the way home.

  “Hey, you’re all wet.”

  “I went for a dip.”

  “Don’t kid me. You fell in. So, are you gonna go to DC and see the Wall? You should come. Where are you staying? Your dad doesn’t answer the door, so we haven’t been able to find you.”