There's a clunk out back in the woodpile. We know that it's only the Woodcutter unstrapping his harness from his back and dropping what sounds like half a ton of cut wood.
We line up in the center of the room, me, Song, and Johnny Be Cool.
The Woodcutter comes in and we bow.
Siletnly, the Woodcutter bows. Then he leans his ax, his rifle, and his bamboo walking stick against the fireplace, sits down, and waits for his supper. The Woodcutter is a funny little old man with a black turban on his head, a white wisp of beard, a twinkle in his eye, and a stainless steel backbone.
"Ong an com chua?" asks the Woodcutter as he does every day--"Have you eaten yet?"
"No, Honorable Uncle," says Song, as she says every day. "Of course not."
Johnny Be Cool is first to the table. Food is his answer to every problem in life.
The Woodcutter and I sit down at the Western-style table of polished bamboo, on bamboo benches.
Song dishes out boiled rice and big red shrimp. She gives me the teapot and I pour hot green tea into bamboo cups.
After Song sits down, the Woodcutter bows his head and says, "Cach mang muon Nam"--
"Long live the revolution."
Song, Johnny Be Cool, and I say in unison: "Cach mang muon Nam."
We wait until the Woodcutter picks up his chopsticks, brings his bowl up close to his mouth, and starts to eat. Only then do Song and Johnny Be Cool pick up their chopsticks. I pick up my white plastic spoon.
The Woodcutter stops chewing, then says, right on cue, "The rice is burned again, niece."
As she does every day, Song says solemnly, "I'm sorry, Uncle. The spirit of the kitchen must be angry."
The Woodcutter grunt and resumes eating. "Yes, that must be what it is."
Song giggles, leans over, hugs the Woodcutter, and kisses him, saying, "Misfortune hones us into jade."
The Woodcutter says to me in Vietnamese, "Bao Chi, did you perform your work at the harvest today with revolutionary enthusiasm?" The Woodcutter speaks English well enough, but has always refused to speak a single word of English to me.
I speak basic Vietnamese now, so I reply in English: "I am trying to improve my revolutionary enthusiasm, most honored sir."
The Woodcutter grunts, says to Johnny Be Cool, "How much did you earn today?"
Johnny Be Cool looks at his food. He's an orphan that the Woodcutter press-ganged into the family by force. He's a shoeshine boy for the Green Berets who operate high in the mountains and he's a Viet Cong spy. He can't sign his name--Song has had no luck at all trying to get him to go to school--but he knows the latest black-market rates down the last dong, frac, and dollar.
On his head Johnny Be Cool wears a torn and faded Marine Corps utility cover with a black eagle, globe, and anchor stenciled on the front. He does not look Vietnamese. The only thing Vietnamese about Johnny Be Cool is his language. All day long he forces American soldiers to submit to shoeshines and questions every black Marine he can find, telling them that his father's name is Lance Corporal John Henry, a steel drivin' man, and asking them if they know how to find his father's village of Chicago.
Johnny Be Cool says to the Woodcutter in English: "Be cool, man. Be loose."
Song says softly, "Newy Bac Viet?"--"Are you Vietnamese?"
Johnny Be Cool shrugs, nods, keeps his eyes on his half-eaten rice. He swats away a black blowfly. Very often children ask Johnny Be Cool why he, a black foreigner, speaks Vietnamese. "Hey, don't sweat it, mama. Be cool. Be cool. What it is."
I say, "Want to play baseball after dinner?"
Johnny Be Cool shrugs. "Later for that. Cut me some slack, Jack. Let's chow down. Be cool."
After the meal the Woodcutter puts a pinch of black opium from Laos into the bowl of his long bamboo water pipe. He rotates the opium over a candle flame until it is a big black bubble. Soon he is puffing away happily, making sucking sounds with the pipe and then exhaling sweet acrid smoke.
Song says to the Woodcutter, "Venerable Uncle, how was your day?"
Without hesitation the Woodcutter begins to complain in detail about how he is forced to climb higher and higher into the Dong Tri Mountains to find trees that are not so full of shrapnel that they ruin his ax.
Every day, the Woodcutter says, another whole forest dies from the smoke sprayed by American pirate planes. The smoke kills every tree, every vien. Birds fall out of the trees and cover the ground. Fish in the mountain streams float belly up. The future of the profession of woodcutting is very uncertain.
As Song and I clear the table, Song slips Johnny Be Cool some strips of sugar cane and hugs him. He goes outside to feed his water buffalo.
The Woodcutter and I set up the Ping-Pong table and play a few fast games by kerosene light.
As we play, the Woodcutter chain-smokes Salems and tells me, once again, about La Sale guerre--the "dirty war" against the French--about the mountain fighters who never ate in a clean hut in their whole lives, about his landlord who taxed the people even for leaves collected in the forest, about how as a young man he was press-ganged into the Viet Minh.
More and more, the Woodcutter seems to be living in the past; his mind is always back in the old days when he was young and hungry and hunted by the French. "Against the great wealth and firepower of the French we had only our convictions."
When the Americans first came to Hoa Binh the Woodcutter was seventy years old and had never been more than fifty miles from the village. The first time a helicopter landed in the village the people thought it was a big metal bird. They gathered around the chopper and patted it and tried to feed it yams.
But the Woodcutter was afraid of the strange invader and fired a crossbow at it. For this crime, puppet troops bruned the village of Hoa Binh to the ground and the Woodcutter was locked up in prison for six years.
In prison, the Woodcutter heard the word "Communism" for the first time. His puppet jailors talked about Communism so much that, by the time of his release, he was thoroughly converted.
The Woodcutter says, remembering: "Even in prison we were more free than our jailers."
It's the Woodcutter's outstanding war record that has kept me in this village and out of the Hanoi Hilton. It was a very hot day a little over a year ago when the village council, presided over by the Woodcutter as First Notable, met to decide my fate.
Ba Can Bo, the lady Front cadre, a stern by-the-book lifer, demanded that I be sent--in chains--straight to Hanoi. She was seconded by Battle Mouth, her pompous junior cadre.
Battle Mouth called me a Binh Van and a "long-nosed surrenderer" and some other things I didn't understand. He said I should be shot on the spot. Then he drew his revolver, put the barrel against my neck, and volunteered to do the job himself.
The Woodcutter laughed and called Battle Mouth a "red-tape soldier." and a "revolutionary-come- lately" and the village elders laughed.
I stood on front of a long canopy-shaded table, facing the village elders, while Ba Can Bo aimed a finger at my head and proclaimed her authority over my bandaged carcass in the name of the National Liberation Front. She said a lot of stuff about running dog imperialists and said I was one. I couldn't speak much Vietnamese back then, so I probably missed a lot of Ba Can Bo's material. It was easy to see that the village elders were buying her case against me.
As Ba Can Bo continued to rant and rave, the Woodcutter interrupted her by pounding the tabletop with his old Viet Minh hero of the Revolution medal, which looked like a frontier marshal's badge. Ba Can Bo tried to go on with her patriotic speech, but the Woodcutter persisted. The Woodcutter pounded his medal hard on the table like a judge's gavel and when Ba Can Bo tried talking louder he pounded harder.
The Woodcutter insisted that I was his prisoner, his own persoanl prisoner, and he promised the village elders that he would be responsible for me. "To win many battles," he said, "we must see into the hearts of our enemy. Why do the Americans fight? The Amercians are a mystery to us. They are phantoms without faces. Thi
s Black Rifle, this Marine, has secrets that I would know."
When Ba Can Bo objected, the Woodcutter cut her short by saying, not quite shouting, "Phep vua thua le lang." Then, suddenly, the Woodcutter repeated, fiercely, like John Brown at Harper's Ferry or like Moses throwing down the tablets of the Ten Commandments, the ancient Vietnamese proverb, "Phep vua thua le lang"--"The laws of the emperor stop at the village gate!"
The Woodcutter and I play cutthroat Ping-Pong. He slashes at the flying white ball and tries to drive it into my brain. I hack at the incoming ball clumsily, always off balance, always on the defensive.
Once, a long time ago, I jokingly suggested that I might try to escape. The Woodcutter just about did himself an injury, he was laughing so hard. The Woodcutter stands less than five feet tall. His shoulders are slightly hunched from time and a life of hard labor. His chest is bony and his legs are scarred and sturdy. His graying hair is receding from a high, broad forehead. Piercing black eyes are set in deep over high cheekbones. The Woodcutter's face is a shrewd and open face with a wispy white chin beard, and his laughter shows strong white teeth.
The Woodcutter loves to tell war stories about his exploits against the French, but the one gung ho sea story that the Woodcutter never tells is about how he won his medal and became a Hero of the Revolution.
One hot day, back about the time I was busy being born, a big green French armored car attacked the village. The armored car was destroying the rice crop and was killing the people.
The village Self-Defense Militia had two Chinese mortar shells, but no mortar. And there were no grenades, because the people had not yet learned how to make grenades.
The Woodcutter filled a gourd with kerosene from lamps, and added a strip of oilcloth to make the gourd into a primitive Molotov cocktail.
As the Woodcutter attacked, pausing to dip the oilcloth into a cooking fire, the armored car was moving past the giant banana tree and was maching-gunning everything that moved. The French gunners were astounded to see a man in a loincloth charging across the village common, gourd in hand. They fired. The Woodcutter was hit. Once. Twice. Again. And then a fourth time.
The French gunners stared in disbelief at this supernatural being. He threw the gourd. They tried to abandon their vehicle. But the gourd exploded and the French soldiers died in fire, screaming.
Now the villagers called the Woodcutter Bac Kien--"Uncle Fire Ant." The Woodcutter was the fire ant that bit the French so painfully that the French were forced to take their foot off of the village.
The big iron war machine that was killed by a barefoot peasant still sits under the giant banana tree, rusty brown now and with a full crew of lizards.
The Woodcutter gets tired of humiliating me at Ping-Pong and has retold all of his favorite parables and proverbs and tiger jokes--The tiger is more honest than man, because a tiger wears his stripes on the outside, the United States is a paper tiger powered by gasoline.
Americans are ferocious tigers but they are helpless against determination, America is on the back of a tiger and is afraid to dismount, in the United States they have killed all of the tigers and the rabbits are in charge.
I go outside to find Johnny Be Cool.
Johnny Be Cool is in the water buffalo's bunker, feeding his prive possession. He's constatnly washing the bo, feeding it, pampering it.
By village standards Johnny Be Cool is a man of means. He bought the water bo with his own money, earned as a shoeshine boy while on his spying missions, and he rents out the lumbering monster to farmers who are too poor to own a buffalo. Johnny Be Cool saves every piaster. Someday he will take a trip to America to find his father, John Henry, that steel drivin' man.
Johnny Be Cool watches the water buffalo eat. As the bo crunches his food lazily, Johnny Be Cool offers me a strip of sugar cane.
Johnny Be Cool and I sit together in the moonlight, sucking noisily on our sugar cane.
Johnny Be Cool encourages the water buffalo to continue eating by taking out a small bamboo flute and playing a tune, close to the water bo's ear.
The only other sound is the soft, rhythmic tapping of Song's typewriter.
At dawn the next morning, Song, Johnny Be Cool, and I join everyone in the village for the harvest in the rice fields.
When I was a kid in Alabama I could drag a nine-foot gunnysack from dawn to dusk, picking cotton to earn a little extra money to throw away on suckers' games at the county fair.
The first thing you learn about harvesting rice, if you have ever picked cotton, is that the pain hits you in exactly the same spot in the small of your back. After ten hours in the sun my revolutionary enthusiasm is not what it should be. I've gone soft since I gave up farming and started fighting in a war.
It does feel good to get my hands into some dirt, even if it is mud.
I kick some water at a duck as it paddles by and I think about the truth in Uncle Ho's slogan,
"Rice fields are battlefields." Nobody ever said that back in Alabama, but somebody should have said it, because we had the same war, grow to eat, eat to live.
In this world without supermarkets farmers are Asian Minuteman, a hoe in one hand and a rifle in the other, and rice is life itself, god's gemstone, and hunger in the rice fields is a military defeat. Each planting season is a new campaign in the war that never ends, the war of water, weather, and soil, the life-and-death struggle some men wage against stump roots.
The Woodcutter grunts his disapproval of my harvesting technique, steps in close behind me, grabs my wrist roughly. He demonstrates the proper way to hold the Luoi hai, a rice sickle with a curving blade, and how to grasp a rice-heavy bunch of stalks, how to slice the bunch at the base under the water, quickly, but smooth and sure so that none of the dull gold rice kernels shake loose. A grain of rice is a drop of blood.
Trying to look like I'm squared away, I cut a few more bunches, wading knee-deep in muddy water, rice-stalk stubble pricking my naked feet.
The Woodcutter watches me closely, then says, "Someday, Bao Chi, you will hear the rice growing. Someday. Maybe." With a critical grunt, he climbs up onto the paddy dike and walks away.
Rice sickles flash up and down, glinting in the sun. It's like being inside a vast machine that hums and crunches. Each harvester piles cut stalks into a crooked arm. When the bunch is big enough it is tied with twine and stacked on the foot-worn paddy dike, where they are picked up by the village children and carried to thrashers who beat the rice stalks by hand to remove the grains. The grains are rolled to remove the husks and then tossed into the air on flat rattan baskets until the thin husks are blown away by the wind.
The people of Hoa Binh, peasants up to their knees in paddy muck, work in the yellow furnace of the sun all day, dawn to dusk, and they talk, and laugh. Sometimes they sing.
Men, women, and children work in harmony with Xa, the land, because the pull of the land is strong. Back in the World, farmers are becoming almost as rare as cowboys and Americans no longer respect the land or people who work the land. In Hoa Binh the ancient bond of centuries, soil, and farmers is still strong.
A courier kid runs along the paddy dike, a little boy in a faded yellow T-shirt that says ELVIS
THE KING. He hands a tiny envelope to the Woodcutter.
The Woodcutter thanks the young courier, opens the envelope, nods approval, scribbles a brief reply on the back of the envelope with a ballpoint pen, then hands the little envelope back to the boy.
The boy salutes, double-times back down the paddy dike.
The courier kids come to the Woodcutter like that all day, every hour or so.
Three or four times each day artillery shells crash though the air over our heads and chug away to hit some target in the mountains. Except for the odd short round, we ingore the shells.
Several times each day we hear the sounds of approaching helicopters. We ingore the helicopters as long as they don't come in groups and don't come in too close or too fast.
Nothing freezes teh blood
faster than the black shadows of these airborned machines. If we run, we're VC, and they shoot us. If we stand still, we are well-disciplined VC, so they shoot us anyway.
But if it's an attack and the helicopters are going to land they come lick locusts. If a single chopper landed here alone, the people of the village would not try to feed it yams.
A hundred angry villagers would hang as dead weight from the slender rotor blades until the rotor blades were twisted, bent, and broken. They would hack through the fragile aluminum fuselage with wooden hoes and rakes. The door gunner would be slashed without mercy by a flailing wall of rice knvies and machetes. With bare hands the people of the village would rip apart the smashes Plexiglas bubble and then the pilot's helmet would be pounded and stabbed and battered with stones and farm implements until the dark green sun visor over the pilot's face turned black with blood.
At noon we eat lunch from wicker baskets brought out from the village by pretty teenaged girls, the Phuong twins, White Rose and Yellow Rose.
Eating the fist and rice, I think about how my dad and I, after a long morning of plowing with a mean mule, used to eat lunches of cornbread, mayonnaise and tomato sandwiches, poke salad in a brown paper sack, and well water in Mason jars.
As the Woodcutter drinks pickle juice from a gourd dipper like the gourd dippers we used on the farm when I was a boy, the Woodcutter's hands are like my father's hands, callused and scarred, but hands that can feel the life in good soil and the solid strength in a block of wood.
One of the Phuong twins gives me a plugged coconut. Her smile revelas dimples that would melt an asbestos brick. Both of the Phuong twins have round, happy faces, with flawless complexions, black hair braided into pigtails, and hair-trigger giggles. Today they're both wearing black pajama trousers and matching pink shirts.
I lift the coconut between raw, blistered hands. I drink the delicious cocnut milk in long swallows, chugging the cool, sweet liquid.
The Phantom Blooper Page 8