The American Pearl

by Peter Gilboy

“Thirteen degrees north,” Alec says, “one hundred and one degrees east.”

  I punch more buttons and the satellite shifts, then refocuses. We’re over one of the darkest of the green areas. There’s an opening in the jungle.

  “There,” Alec says.

  “Where?” I ask.

  “Right there.”

  The terrain is similar to what was in the photos. The river looks the same too. But no ROWBEC.

  “I’m not convinced,” I tell him.

  “Overlay the letters, Towers,” Alec says.

  He does.

  No mistake about it. The same spot. Exactly.

  “Damn,” I say.

  “Yep,” Alec says. “What’s that river, Quintyn?”

  “Probably the Sesan,” I tell him.

  “Those letters seemed to be glowing,” Alec says. “How could that be?”

  Towers speaks up. “Could be a plant in the genera Celmisia pinnatum, sir.”

  “Explain,” Alec says.

  “The saps from those plants contain ellisiophyllum, and in the drying process, the leaves turn iridescent.”

  Alec and I stare at him.

  “I mean, it could be that, sir.”

  “You’re a genius,” I tell him.

  “Photographic memory, sir.”

  Alec looks at me. “Scan the area, Quintyn. Let’s see what else is there. Maybe a village or something else that can help us.”

  I zoom out to one thousand feet. Then two thousand feet.

  “Hills and valleys,” I say.

  “What else?”

  “Well, look at it,” I say. “It’s more hills and valleys.”

  “There must be something else around there.”

  “Further north, yeah. Cashew country, and sugarcane and tobacco. It’s not totally remote up there. Hill people too.”

  I hear Eddie in my ear: Don’t call them “hill people.”

  “I mean, Montagnards,” I say. “What do you think, Towers?”

  “I don’t know, sir. It seems too remote and too far inland to be a tourist, sir.”

  Alec clears his throat. “That was just a working hypothesis,” he says. “You got to admit, it’s a touristy country these days. Everyone wants to see where the war was. See the leftover bomb craters, the tunnels at Cu Chi, the war museums. Tourists do a lot of hiking there now. Snorkeling and scuba diving. You were over there, weren’t you, Ames?”

  “Yeah,” I say sarcastically. “Did a lot of snorkeling and scuba diving over there.”

  “But you did do some hiking.”

  “That I did,” I say.

  “Then who else could it be, sir?” Towers asks. “If it’s not a tourist?”

  Alec doesn’t want to tell him the truth. Instead, he nods reassuringly. “It’s most likely a tourist,” he tells him.

  “Depends on the letters,” I say. “Depends on what ROWBEC means.”

  There’s a hard knock on the screening room door.

  “That’ll be Norcross,” Alec says.

  “Thought you’d never use him again,” I say.

  “It’s his attitude. But if anyone can tell us what ROWBEC means, it’s Norcross. Let’s get him in and then get him right out again. No mention of how we got the photos. No mention of Magellan. We clear?”

  I nod.

  “Yes, sir,” Towers says. “But what’s Magellan?”

  18

  A VILLAGE IN SOUTH VIETNAM

  DAY 51

  SHE TRIED TO KEEP count of the days. When she got to seven days, she scratched a mark on the wall. Now there were six marks. Six weeks. Or maybe she had missed one and it was the seventh. She wasn’t sure. Her only diversions were the short visits from Vang. More than diversions, he was her only link to someone who seemed to be a caring human being. She was elated each time he came, and she feared he might stop. He came around noon each day, entering silently and squatting quietly in front of her. She knew that the sour odor of her body pervaded the room, and that’s why Viet Cong guards entered only when necessary. But Vang didn’t seem to notice the smell. Now he squatted in front of her again, unmoving, hardly perspiring. With immense patience he listened to her speak in a language that was incomprehensible to him.

  “The pig limped right in,” she said to him, pointing to the doorway. They were in the far corner of the hut, away from the window hole. Patricia sat with her knees pulled up close to her. “It walked in like a wounded soldier.” She laughed at the image. “It was as scrawny and dirty as I am.” She pointed again to the spot between the doorway and the mat. Vang didn’t turn to look. He only nodded. “I named the pig Uncle Ho.” She laughed again, maybe at the pig’s name or maybe because she was just happy to be speaking. “It had one eye, and the other socket squirmed with red muscles. God, nothing survives here, does it, Vang.”

  She laughed again, and then stopped. Nothing survives here. She wouldn’t survive either. She understood that.

  “You said I’d go home soon,” she said. “When do I go home? When?”

  Vang shrugged. Maybe he was saying he didn’t understand. Maybe he was saying he didn’t know.

  Patricia pushed back her stringy hair. She clawed at her shoulder. Despite her small attempts to wash with canteen water, her body stung continuously from mosquito bites and layers of dried sweat. A sickly sense of self-disgust had enveloped her mind. Perhaps this was a kind of primitive punishment, part of the indoctrination; her own body would be her worst torturer; her own body causing her to succumb. But succumb to what? What did they want?

  She looked again at the old man, his elbow on his knee and his hand stroking his chin. She had to keep speaking, had to hear her voice, anything to use English and exercise her mind. She continued on about the pig that had entered her tiny world. It didn’t matter that the old man couldn’t understand. Actually, it was better. She could speak in complete confidence, open her mind, say anything to quell the boredom and the awful depression that was pulling her down.

  She told him that she couldn’t clear her head. That she needed more food. She told him that she dreamed of platefuls of food at the Officer’s Club. He nodded. She told him that she still expected to wake up and be in an air-conditioned room with a blanket over her. Wake up to an alarm clock. Wake up to hear Brian’s voice.

  Now Patricia began to cry. She permitted it only because she felt safe in Vang’s presence. She covered her eyes as she sobbed. He reached out and touched her knee. She told him, then, that before coming to Vietnam she had imagined being wounded or even killed. But not this. Never this.

  She pulled herself together and continued speaking, this time about the children coming to the door and staring. She pantomimed for Vang their size and the serious look on their bright faces, the curiosity in their eyes. She told him that she was surprised there were so many children, more children than adults, it seemed.

  Vang nodded. He moved to get up.

  Fearing it was time for him to go, she motioned for him to stay and spoke in flurries of run-on sentences, telling him for the hundredth time about her mother who was the principal of her high school, how Brian had been her first boyfriend, her only boyfriend, really. She closed her eyes and pictured her husband. He was looking for her. He would never stop. She spoke to Vang about T.R., and the beach, and the little Marine in black, and the turquoise shell, and the sudden explosions.

  Vang settled back down. He nodded for her to continue.

  There was no need for her to tell him about the attacks at night. It seemed so long ago that the man had stopped, and it was only because of her smell. She was no longer his prize. Just a prisoner with fleas and lice. The lowest person in the village.

  Patricia leaned toward him as if to share a secret. He leaned forward as if he might understand. In a low voice she told him about the two female guards. She pointed to them by the door and mimicked their stern expressions. Vang seemed to understand and he laughed. Patricia was joyous. She had communicated. She laughed too, and it wasn’t a nervous laugh but a full
one that momentarily breathed relief into her tiny world.

  She told Vang about the small victories. That when the guards entered she would sometimes say, “Welcome, little turds.” And when they led her to the latrine she would bow and say, “Fuck you both.” Vang did not understand, but he smiled with her.

  Vang began to speak then. First in French. Then he switched to Vietnamese. She heard her name, Phatri. She strained to understand the rest. His soft voice was reassuring, and she wondered if he was apologizing for her not being able to bathe, for subjecting her to this prison hut, for her being here at all.

  In the middle of a sentence she caught the words Nguoi My—American. He was not speaking bitterly of the Americans, but evenly, maybe even fondly. He seemed to be asking her questions about America. But she could not understand. She shook her head. He nodded that he understood. But did he?

  “I need to wash,” she told him, in a demanding tone now. “To clean.” She enunciated it clearly, as if that might help.

  The old man stood up.

  “Please!” she said. She made washing motions with her hands. “Please.”

  “Hello,” he said. And left.

  An hour later four of them came and led her toward the canal. She went slowly, one foot unsteadily in front of the other. They pointed.

  It was no more than an irrigation ditch, forty feet wide at this spot. The brown water was unmoving. It was warm to her feet as she stepped in. She felt the muck between her toes. She’d been warned about parasites and waterborne diseases in the streams and wells, but she didn’t care about that. She wanted to be clean. Or at least cleaner. That was all she could think of. She knew that the latrine was close by and that in the rains it probably overflowed into the canal. She didn’t care. Anything had to be better than this crust on her skin. Anything would be better than her awful smell.

  She moved past the reeds along the bank, then a little farther out, past the rotting leaves and the decaying branches. She went to the middle of the canal where there might be a slight current and a chance that the water could be cleaner. Her feet slid over stones and the edges of discarded cans and bottles. The smell was foul. But less foul than she was. She lowered herself to her neck. She felt the thick water caress the bites on her body. It stung the raw flesh on her back where she had continually scratched. She was weak, and for a moment she considered that she might pass out. And they’d let her drown. That thought did not alarm her.

  The four men watched her from the bank. She turned her back and opened her fatigue blouse and rubbed over her breasts and under her arms. She slid off her pants and washed her legs and between her legs. She lay back in the canal then, lowering her head until the water covered her hair and scalp, then her eyes. For a moment the ugly world disappeared, replaced by a liquid cocoon, and silence. She knew this cocoon. How odd that this slimy canal on the other side of the world could remind her of her swimming days, the hours and hours of silent aloneness that came with her training. Now her head emerged slowly, reluctantly, Patricia almost preferring the brown cocoon to the world around her.

  She scratched at her arms and legs, her scalp, trying to loosen the dirt and grime and smears of blood. As she scratched, there were undulating moments, split seconds of remembrance, or maybe hallucinations, where just the feel of the water took her somewhere else, to a pool or a garden sprinkler or a stream or a shower; and she was little Pattie again. Then the moment was gone and she was back here in the thick water and putrid smell.

  She thought about fleeing. Dashing through the reeds along the sides of the canal and swimming in the deeper parts. They’d never catch her. Never. She’d always been fast. But where would she go? One ball of rice a day was barely enough to keep any strength at all. To flee was impossible. She knew that. Escaping was impossible. For now.

  The cadre on the bank of the canal said something. They motioned to her. She stood, pulling up her fatigue pants, hastily buttoning the fatigue blouse, and came toward them. They were holding something. A bamboo cone hat and tattered, black pajamas, like the peasants wore. Suddenly her filthy fatigues were the only thing that was still hers; the only thing from her country that she had left. She pushed the peasant clothes away.

  They spoke loudly then. Still, Patricia refused. She was an American. She would wear the United States uniform. She backed away from them. She looked for a place to run. One of them grabbed her. He threw her down. He threw the clothes on top of her and waited. No choice. She got up, turned away, and unbuttoned her fatigue blouse. She shoved down her pants as they watched every move. She dressed hurriedly, but no matter how she tried to turn away they saw her, almost all of her, the bruises on her arms, the shrunken stomach, the bulging rows of ribs.

  They did not return her to the hut. They led her to the tree where they had chained her before. They forced her down and attached the cuff to her leg. The men walked away then, leaving her there, ignoring her. She looked down at her new clothes, tattered and worn. She picked up the cone hat they had given her. She did not put it on. She waited. She was used to waiting now. She lay back in the dirt.

  At sunset Vang returned and released her. He led her back to the hut. He helped her with the mosquito net.

  “Phatri,” he said with a smile. “Hello.”

  Then he left.

  19

  JANUARY 16, 2006

  SECTION ONE, 10:10 A.M.

  TOWERS OPENS THE SCREENING room door to find a smiling Melvin Norcross in his electric wheelchair.

  He waves to us. “Hey, bros.”

  Alec shakes his head. “Jesus,” he says under his breath. “Let’s make this fast.”

  Norcross is one of our language specialists, our best, really. He has long hair tied with a red headband, a scraggly beard, and sunglasses. A strange sight to be sure. But I like Melvin. He’s thoughtful and perpetually cheerful. He’s interested in satellites and always has a joke about them.

  He puts up a hand. “Hey, what was the first satellite to orbit the earth?” he says.

  We wait.

  “The moon,” he says.

  “That’s enough,” Alec says. “We got business, Norcross.”

  Alec doesn’t care much for Melvin. Then again, being military, Alec doesn’t care much for anyone who looks like a sixties hippie, wheelchair or not. I think Melvin knows it and just tries to piss Alec off.

  “You need those sunglasses, Norcross? We’re indoors, if you haven’t noticed.”

  “My disability,” he announces with a shrug and a broad smile.

  Melvin Norcross was a civilian aid worker in the NATO peacekeeping mission in Bosnia. That was in ’96. His job was to translate between Croatian and English. But his vehicle hit a land mine when approaching a checkpoint. Five years of rehab and he was back to work. He’s given his wheelchair a Croatian name—Noge, or “Legs.” What’s remarkable about Melvin is that he’s one of those rare people who can absorb a new language almost immediately. I heard that he mastered Spanish in nine hours. Was conversant in Russian in two weeks. Farsi took him a whole month. Among other things, he can write in Arabic and Fur and can read Sinhalese and even Pawnee. Melvin could probably wheel off a plane in Mongolia to take a piss and come back fluent.

  Now he wheels over to us, his motor purring. He’s got that Melvin grin. “Hey, you know what Copernicus’s mom said to him?”

  “Can’t wait,” I say.

  “When are you going to accept that the world doesn’t revolve around you?”

  “Enough,” Alec says again. He points to Norcross’s tie that is clipped to his pocket. “Put that on, Norcross.”

  “It is on, sir.”

  “No, it’s not.”

  “I’m just supposed to wear it. The regs don’t say where.”

  “Come over here, Melvin,” I say. “Take a look.”

  “Always happy to help Section One,” he says as he navigates past Alec. He faces the screen intently and waits. I press a button, and there’s the jungle landscape with the river to the s
outh.

  “Ah, yes,” Norcross says. “The famous jungles of Saudi Arabia.”

  “Enough!” Alec barks.

  I press another button and overlay the letters again; and there they are, starkly centered:

  We wait, all eyes on Melvin.

  “Well, what’s it mean?” Alec asks.

  “Huh. Looks strange. Very strange.”

  Alec says, “We think it’s a tourist who got off track somewhere. Might be lost and signaling for help.”

  “Huh,” Melvin says again. “R-O-W-B-E-C.”

  “Could it be Vietnamese?” I ask.

  “Vietnamese words don’t start with ‘R.’ And there’s no ‘W’ in their alphabet.”

  “Then what is it?” Alec says. “Take a guess.”

  “I don’t guess.”

  “Jesus, Norcross, tell us what you think, please.”

  “Did you hear about the two spy satellites that got married?”

  “Focus, boy,” Alec says. “Focus!”

  He looks back to the screen. “R-O-W-B-E-C isn’t a word,” Norcross finally replies. “Not in any language I know.”

  “Is any part of it Vietnamese?”

  “Not close. Unless you go phonetically.”

  “What then?”

  “Well, R-O-W means nothing in Vietnamese. Zero. Zilch. But B-E-C could be a variation on the Vietnamese word ngoc.”

  “Which means?”

  “Ngoc means ‘pearl,’” he answers.

  Alec sits back. He glances over at me. “Jesus,” he says. “A pearl.”

  “Is that meaningful?” Norcross asks.

  “Maybe,” I say. “Go on. How does that word you said, what is it—?”

  “Ngoc.”

  “Yeah, if that means ‘pearl,’ how does it end up being B-E-C.”

  “Vietnamese is peppered with French words from colonial days. They use the Vietnamese word for ‘pearl’—ngoc, but also the French word for pearl, which is perl.”

  Alec turns to me. “Are you following?”

  “Not at all.”

  “Let me put it this way,” Melvin says. “The Vietnamese don’t have a hard ‘p’ in their language. So when they try to say the word perl, they have to substitute the ‘p’ in perl with ‘Ph’ or a ‘B.’ And the French pronounce the ‘L’ in perl in an aspirated way, which to the Vietnamese ear sounds kind of like a glottal stop. Like they’re clearing their throat. So, when the Vietnamese try to say the French word perl, it comes out bec. Simple as that.”