Ruthless River

by Holly Fitzgerald

  The tree shadows playing on the tent wall fell across Fitz’s face.

  “Onions are good luck for us.” I massaged his neck and shoulders, trying to bring him back. “Don’t forget…your bag of onions brought us together.”

  He smiled.

  “For better or for worse,” I added.

  Fitz’s smile broadened as he struggled up on one elbow to kiss me. He moved his other arm across my bare breasts. Our ribs were so pronounced that it hurt when we touched. I tried to hide a flinch, reaching my hand up to his whiskers, his sunken cheek. His eyes were still sky blue, hidden under bushy eyebrows, but they didn’t sparkle anymore.

  —

  Drifting in and out of sleep all afternoon, we always woke hungry.

  “It’s still brutally hot out there.” Fitz peered through the tent door. “We’ll have to wait a little longer before we can look for more slugs.”

  He ducked his head back into the tent and shifted his weight toward me. Patting my head, he asked, “Do you want to hear the story of Skeeter and the mashed potatoes?”

  “Sure.” I nodded. I knew all about Skeeter Johnston, Fitz’s buddy from Vietnam, but I could hear the story again. I laid my head on a cushion of clothes in the crook of Fitz’s bony arm.

  “Okay, so when we were on patrol, we’d get a hot meal flown out by helicopter from Tay Ninh, once every ten days or so.”

  “How did the food stay hot?” I asked, already knowing the answer.

  It came in large thermos containers, Fitz explained, two feet high and three feet long, with lids that snapped down tightly enough to keep the meals steaming hot. It was rare to find a spot clear enough for the helicopter actually to land, so they’d use Charlie-4 to blow down trees to make room for the helicopter to hover, stump high. The bird would get as low as it could, and then the guys on board would pass down the heavy containers to Fitz and the others below. The men would line up the canisters, and then one soldier at each canister would sit on his helmet to ladle out portions to the passing chow line.

  Fitz described in detail how the soldiers’ thin olive fatigues tore easily, and no one carried a change of clothes, other than extra socks. Guys wore the same ones for weeks.

  “You wore the one pair of dark green underwear until it grew stiff.” He grinned. “Then you went without.”

  Similar to us, I thought, noticing the humming mosquitoes gathering outside our mosquitero, trying to get in.

  “Donald ‘Skeeter’ Johnston was a bucktoothed Georgia country boy who had ladle duty in the middle of the chow line one afternoon. When the soldiers reached him they began laughing hysterically.”

  I was laughing, too, because I knew the punch line.

  “So Skeeter looks down and realizes his pants are torn so badly at the crotch that his privates are dangling over the mashed potatoes!”

  This was the first time I’d laughed in days.

  “He saved my life,” Fitz continued, his voice shaking a little. “I was supposed to take five days’ leave to Sydney, Australia, but a new guy with more seniority came in the night before and bumped me off the list.”

  Fitz told his top sergeant that he would wait another month in the field for the next Sydney slot. But that night, Fitz and Skeeter shared a foxhole. Skeeter was just back from R & R in Singapore, and he kept whispering to Fitz about how great it was. Kneeling in the bottom of the foxhole, by the glow of a cupped cigarette, Skeeter showed Fitz a Polaroid shot of him and the girl he’d met there.

  “You gotta take R & R in the morning, man, you’re all pumped up for it. Forget Sydney, go to Singapore. I’ll give you her phone number.”

  Skeeter had talked him into changing his mind. Fitz left for Singapore the next morning. A day or so later, Company D had headed into LZ White, a forward base, to take a short break from patrol. On March 21, 1969, LZ White was overrun. Skeeter and others were fighting from within a sandbag bunker when an NVA soldier tossed a satchel charge inside.

  Fitz’s eyes watered. “Skeeter threw himself onto the explosive, pulling it under his belly. He gave his life for his buddies.”

  That night more than twenty soldiers in Company D were wounded, along with others from a second company, and at least six Americans were killed. Fitz was not among them because Skeeter had talked him into forgoing Sydney for Singapore.

  Donald “Skeeter” Johnston received the Medal of Honor posthumously for saving six American lives.

  “That bucktoothed country kid was a real hero,” Fitz concluded.

  “It brings tears to my eyes every time you tell it, Fitz. He was so young and brave.” Fitz’s face was brooding. I kissed his cheek and told him he kept Skeeter’s memory alive by talking about him. “How ’bout something funny? It’s still too hot to go out.”

  He smiled, ready. “Once I was on KP duty, stateside. I had to do whatever the mess sergeant demanded.

  “So he tells me that Supply is coming to determine how many fresh eggs the mess hall would get. Every box of powdered eggs had to be used up before more fresh eggs would be delivered. So the sergeant told me to dump all the powdered eggs and hose them down the drain before the supply man arrived. Of course, I tried to suggest that there might be a better way. He told me to do what I was told and to do it fast.”

  I grinned, encouraging him to continue over the noise of the ravenous mosquitoes outside the netting.

  “The drain area behind the mess hall was a square of cement about six feet by six feet,” he continued. “It slanted down to a round metal drain cap with slits. I’d opened each of several large boxes of powdered eggs and poured all of them into the drain, making a mound of yellow powder more than a foot high.” Fitz’s hands sculpted the air to show the size of the mound.

  “I began to hose the powder, just as the sergeant had ordered, but the more water I used, the bigger the mound got. You should’ve seen it morph into a shimmering, slimy yellow mass, like something out of a horror movie…just as the supply sergeant came around the corner.”

  Fitz chuckled as he slowly sat up in the tent, recalling the mess sergeant’s screams and the supply guy’s anger at the waste of food. He wondered if I’d ever tried to shovel a mountain of slippery scrambled eggs into garbage cans.

  “Can’t say I have,” I replied.

  We heard a large splash outside the tent. Excited, Fitz looked out. “I don’t see anything.”

  My stomach lurched at the possibility of food. “I suppose it is time to go out. It feels less muggy.”

  Fitz said that it must be about three o’clock, that we had a couple of hours to find dinner.

  Once again we had to face the swamp. “I’d give anything for a shovelful of those cold eggs,” Fitz stammered as we struggled over the raft logs, tipping sideways then catching each other. Moving at all was increasingly difficult. Talking, unless we lay still, was labored, slow and breathy.

  I reached for his hand so he could help me onto the little balsa. As I settled in the bow I twisted around to smile at him. Even with his tan and the golden hue of the late afternoon sun, his face looked much thinner than it had just a few days ago.

  We were quiet and focused. Every movement took effort and concentration. We heard a few splashes and saw ripples in the swamp. By dusk we still had no food.

  Chapter 28

  Little Moments

  MARCH 2

  Twelfth day trapped

  Fitz fished off the raft while I paddled through the swamp searching for a grasshopper or a slug for bait. I couldn’t stop thinking about the open-faced sandwiches I’d enjoyed in Copenhagen, and of small shrimp prettily placed on salad greens. During my college term in Denmark, my host family had served a breakfast of thin wafers of chocolate on crusty bread. At night, we students ate fricadillars, pork-and-herb meatballs served on forks, washed down with Corona beer. Right now any food at all would be paradise.

  I thought of Machu Picchu. Fitz and I had hiked all morning to reach its summit. When we arrived at the top, we found many other tourists
and their drivers had flooded the ancient stone buildings and courtyards that clung to a ridge far above the Urubamba River. After everyone else left, we lingered to absorb the silent majesty of the peak and its ruins, admired the misty, forested ravines and mountain range that ebbed and flowed in waves to the horizon. Birds flew below us while llamas grazed, unimpressed by the view.

  We ate cheese and bread and watched the sunset then walked hand in hand by moonlight down the twisting road, just starting to notice our hunger. When we reached the base, we learned the last train had left. An Indian woman invited us into her small house with its dirt floor and kerosene lamps. Chickens, ducks, and guinea pigs scuttled amongst the furniture. She sat us down to a meal of spaghetti topped with canned sardines. The aroma of oil and herbs still swirled in my nostrils. The next course she served was a guinea pig, halved and proudly displayed on plates adorned with greens. Fitz got the worst of it, though it was probably an honor: the head, front legs, and torso. Its face was looking right at him, as if pleading. I received the rump.

  Something moved in the swamp: green on green, a small frog on a lily pad ten feet away.

  Oh, please, let me get you, I thought, staring at him. Neither of us moved. How could I catch him without a net? I quietly steered the little lopsided raft a few feet toward him then sat like stone as I drifted in his direction. I was within four feet when the gentle current turned the raft. I would have to be right over the frog to grab him. My paddle was in the water already, so I cautiously moved my arms back to steer a little closer. Two feet is all I need. Please!

  The frog jumped away before I could reach him.

  —

  After my morning hunt I returned empty-handed. Fitz had done no better. At high noon we lay in the tent, the heat burning into the plastic, our mouths drooling as food memories flooded us again.

  “Fitz, I can’t think of food anymore,” I finally said. “It’s too painful.” I didn’t care about fancy meals now. “Why can’t we just catch a fish?” I touched his cheek, alarmed to see his skin collapsing at his neck and around his collarbone. “We’ve got to get up and try again. Come on, let’s get on the little balsa and find some bait.”

  He grunted, getting up slowly.

  I wobbled out of the tent onto the deck, aiming for our small raft. Before we’d become trapped, I’d felt lithe as an acrobat, curving my feet around the Pink Palace’s logs. Now I stumbled across them, almost too weak to walk. I got down on all fours and crawled toward the little balsa like a baby learning to move. Fitz did the same.

  When we reached the small raft we sat cross-legged, paddling slowly along the tree line, within a short radius of the Pink Palace. I scanned the two-foot-wide lily pads, the bark of trees, and the leaves of bushes. Unseen life, like lost keys, must be right in front of us. We focused on one small area at a time, scrutinizing browns, greens, and yellows for nuances that might hide a bat, an insect, a grasshopper, a lizard.

  Fitz found a one-inch squishy grub tucked into a log. On top of another log he found a clump of minuscule worms—maybe an eighth of an inch long—too small for the bait hook. I watched them wiggle. With no soil, they seemed to exist on air.

  “Where do they come from?”

  Fitz shook his head. “No idea. It’s kind of eerie.”

  We picked them up and plopped them in the can.

  “Fitz! Berries!” My heart leapt at the sight of a few smooth, purple-green berries in the undergrowth. I plucked all six from a branch and held them out in my cupped hand. It was barely a mouthful, but I could imagine their sweetness rolling around my tongue. But would they be sweet? Were they poisonous? They felt hard and looked like unripe blueberries, but their bush had wider leaves than blueberry bushes back home, and their skin had a sheen to it. “Almost like blueberries” wasn’t blueberries for certain. Although ravenous, we were still cautious. Was it worth taking a chance for just a few berries?

  I dropped the berries into a second can to leave on the Pink Palace deck. “A bird might see them and land on the raft,” I said, smiling.

  “Then we can grab it!” Fitz’s eyes welled up. “I don’t even care if we cook it. I’ll just eat it raw.”

  “Me too.”

  We fell silent again as we paddled.

  It hadn’t occurred to either of us to eat weird grubs or squirmy worms. They were so unappealing to the touch and we assumed they’d be poisonous. We thought of them only as bait to catch something bigger to eat. I’d been drilled to be cautious of berries as a child, but nothing was ever said about not eating worms.

  I looked around at this strange and beautiful swamp, not knowing where to turn except to Fitz, and I thought of God. I felt his presence in the breeze, in the silence, in short, shrill bird calls, a fish splashing, and the crack of a rotten branch. I felt he held all things in his arms, connecting us and our world into one large circle.

  We’d started to pray out loud together, so now we asked God’s advice about eating the berries. Deciding whether to eat them was a dangerous crapshoot. I heard God’s voice in our words as we talked out our decision, and I felt his love giving me strength. As I struggled for life, turning to a power bigger than me was as natural as breathing. I treated God as my therapist. What would he do with these berries? A client often carries the therapist in his mind away from a session into daily life, using the therapist as a model, an aid to decision making. That was me with God.

  My parents didn’t attend church. They would drop us at Sunday school then go home to work in the garden. Nature is where I felt most connected to God. This jungle was raw, unyielding nature. Feeling God all around us did nothing to alleviate my hunger. Fitz attended a parochial school, so he breathed religious ritual more than I did. He knew more prayers, too.

  He would pull them out when we were desperate, and I, for the first time, saw how comforting that could be.

  We had gone to church for Christmas Eve service in La Paz, where animals were brought down the aisle to be blessed. That was the closest I’d ever felt to God inside a building. It wasn’t because of the icons and gold figures of saints, the crucifix and the stained-glass windows. Beautiful, yes, but they were art. It was the barefoot Indians in handwoven shawls carrying babies on their backs; it was the chickens, the goats, the dogs and hens that made me feel God’s presence.

  We returned to the Palace after several hours of searching beneath the draining sun, with only the six berries, one grub, and a half-inch ball of tiny worms. One thought pressed against me like a concrete slab: if we can’t catch a fish, God must want us to die. Even though I’d felt so sure he would help us. He must have some other plan, I decided. There are fish here. I just saw one jump. So why can’t we catch one?

  I knew our families would eventually wonder why they hadn’t heard from us. They would call someone, but what if that wasn’t for a month, or two, or three? If we had fish to eat, perhaps we could make it until help came.

  We set the six berries on a log of the raft in the hope of attracting a bird. We pushed the tiny worms and the grub onto the huge hook then watched them disintegrate.

  Fitz pulled out the toothpaste and began eating it for dinner.

  Chapter 29

  Bees

  MARCH 3

  Thirteenth day trapped

  I opened the mosquito net and tent flap seeking the cooler air of morning. “Watch out!” I yelled, trying to close them again as hundreds of bees flew inside. Within seconds they were in my hair, on my face and neck, descending on every part of my naked body. Flapping my hands, I tried to brush them away, but they stung me every time I moved. “Fitz!” I screamed as I reached to tighten the flap where others were pouring in.

  He was flailing, too. “Damn these things!”

  “Stop moving!” I said.

  With nowhere to run, I carefully lay down beside Fitz. My chest was heaving as the blanket of insects moved in different directions over me. As long as I remained dead still the bees seemed to calm down. “Oh, God, where did they come fro
m?”

  Fitz was staring at me, his eyes wide open in shock. The bees covered him like clothing, emitting a continuous purring. “Are they eating us?” he asked.

  “I don’t think they’re biting,” I said. “I think they’re slurping our sweat. Maybe they’re after the salt?” I whispered. “Oh, God, what can we do?” Bees crawled in the creases behind my knees, under my arms, stinging repeatedly.

  “I’m going to roll out of the tent into the water,” Fitz said. “Perhaps they’ll drown.”

  He yelped in pain as he opened the flaps and pushed himself off the raft into the channel.

  I followed him, the bee stings as unrelenting as a tommy gun. The warm water felt soothing, but the bees did not drown. They swarmed above our heads. Fitz submerged again then surfaced. We both hung on to the raft while treading water. The swarm grew bigger and louder, hovering over us. The bees were not leaving.

  “The mosquitero!” I yelled. “We’ve got to get under the netting. That’ll keep them off us.” To go back inside to where the netting was hanging down from the tent peak meant passing through the bees again.

  “You first,” Fitz said. “I’ll try swatting your back.”

  I thrust myself onto the raft as Fitz, treading water, tried to push up my legs. The bees were not fooled. The swarm moved instantly as one, but they hesitated to attack, perhaps because my sweat had been washed away. Fitz followed right behind me, screaming loudly. Most of the swarm turned and flew toward him, but they didn’t land.

  We crawled under the mosquitero, slamming our hands down on the few bees that made it inside behind us. They looked like yellow jackets but were slightly smaller. I picked up a paperback, using it like a hammer, squashing the bees as quickly as possible. Some stung me before dying. Between us we killed all the bees inside the netting, including a couple stuck in the folds, which we pinched with our fingers. We pushed the drape of the netting as wide as possible within the tent, using paperbacks to hold down the folded edges on the board deck. We lay down, stroking each other’s backs in a desperate search for comfort.