“So,” this pal tells me, “maybe you should forget about him now.”
“Done,” I say, though of course we both know that is a big, fat lie. I have not had time to forget. Give me some time.
“He should have told you.”
“Should have. Maybe he was going to when he got back.”
“Pigs fly,” he says.
I spend twenty precious dollars on a four-minute phone call to San Francisco, to my keeper, my tender, my friend—the one whose heart I took such lousy care of because I still had no business trying to operate mine, and because there was nothing dangerous or particularly fucked up about him. It has been over a year, so clearly he is surprised to hear from me, and he waits for me to tell him why I am calling. I listen to his breathing, watch the seconds go away on the pay phone at the post office. I am standing under a larger-than-life-size portrait of a smiling, radiant Ho Chi Minh, in what is officially, at least in name, his city. I say into the phone, “Do you miss me?” but I have not left enough time for an answer at the pace we are going. I want to be missed. MIA like my brother, but with the prospect of being found. Flags flown and torches carried. APBs out for my arrest. I don’t care how.
Finally, I hear, “I don’t know what—” The line goes bleep, then dead. I do not call back, though I should, to say I am sorry for what I did, for who I am, for calling, for reminding him, for asking for something I don’t deserve: for someone to want me. For a reason to one day, perhaps, in this lifetime even, recross the ocean. Selfish as that reason might be. Crazy as it might be to believe, even for a little while, that it would do.
I think about calling home. My real home. I think about calling.
• • •
My pool-playing buddy Clive gets arrested; it is unclear exactly what for, but suddenly his taxi girls have taken up residence in our bar. The cops beat him up and he spends two weeks in jail with a fractured cheekbone, a badly stitched flap of skin covering it, and a dislocated shoulder. When he gets out, he is wearing filthy bandages, a sling made of an old ammo belt, and shoes. June has already been deported back to Thailand. Their bar is shuttered. Clive has no money—as they have searched and taken what they could find, frozen his bank accounts—so we take up a collection and gather 350 US dollars between us. He has two days; then he’s on the bus to Cambodia.
When we give him the money, he cries—blubbers, really, like they say.
Ian asks first, “What’s the plan, mate?”
“Got none.” One-handed, Clive clenches the edge of the bar like it’s a high window ledge and he is outside, suspended over a very long drop. He bends his elbow and leans in to put his forehead against the wood, in a motion that could be mistaken for prayer. We wait, grouped in a loose semicircle around the pool table, while he gathers himself. He turns and eyes the felt longingly. Then he looks at me. “Learn to snooker, girl. Can you do that? At least the ones who’ve got it coming.”
“I’ll try, Clive.”
“Might learn to like it.”
“Never know.”
Gentleman that he is, he shouts us all a round before he goes. We write our real names on beer coasters so he can send mail to us poste restante, knowing it will never happen, knowing in a few months he won’t be able to match but a few of the names to faces, but it is what we do: send a piece of ourselves with him. He leaves, his new shoes somehow broken in already, molded to his feet like black wax. His shoes are what we look at as he ambles away, how they carry him off, ungainly and unbelievably gone.
A couple of nights after Clive leaves, Ian and I get a few beers in us and decide to break into his bar. Luc, the Froggy that Phượng has her eye on for me, comes with us. We’re presumably going just to check it out, and then Ian says he thinks Clive mentioned a stash somewhere, maybe in the storeroom, but he doesn’t know of what or exactly where. Could be money or hash or some other kind of drugs. “Could be girls,” Ian says, not sounding like he’s kidding.
We hail three cyclos. The young drivers race halfheartedly, figuring out quickly that we are not tourists and don’t want anything but a ride. There is no rain tonight and instead just half the moon. The river reflects it, rainbowy with diesel, smelling like exhaustion and fish. We pay the drivers at the corner nearest the bar and wait for them to drive off before we duck into the entryway, where Luc goes to work on the cheap Chinese padlock. It’s big, like the one at the Lotus, but Luc demonstrates his wizardry by picking it in about twenty seconds flat. “Voilà,” he says, a bit theatrically.
Ian makes it through the door without mishap, but Luc and I sort of fall through it, into a snarl of overturned bar stools and sundry wreckage. “Ô la vache, crap, sheet, mer-duh,” he says as we untangle ourselves. I get a bit of elbow in the ribs—deserved retribution, I suppose, for taking him down with me—but when he gets to his feet, he reaches for me, to help me up. It is dark but for a bit of that half-moon filtering in through a high window. I have a small flashlight with me and switch it on. The bar looks like the Ia Drang Valley after the First Cav got done with it. Nothing that should be standing is; all of the pictures have been torn off the walls; June’s collection of porcelain figurines and other knickknacks is smashed and scattered. There is broken glass, like shrapnel, on every horizontal surface. It scrapes beneath our feet as we make our way to the storeroom door. I can’t believe Luc and I didn’t get cut when we went down, but somehow we hit a clear patch.
“Lucky,” I whisper. Neither of them looks at me or asks what on earth I am talking about.
Ian opens the door, and incredibly it appears untouched. It is almost empty, and meticulous, as June would have kept it. There are several bottles, unopened, of the local whiskey; a single case each of 333 and Tiger beer; and, on the top shelf, a few gallon jars of snake wine, complete with snakes, coiled inside as if they are sleeping off a big night. A hammock stretches across the back wall, attached to rebar-fashioned hooks on either side. I picture Clive in here on a hot afternoon, fanning himself with the day’s edition of the Saigon Times, a beer on the floor within easy reach of an outstretched arm.
Ian starts palming the walls between the shelves, looking for a secret compartment or a trapdoor. I hold the flashlight for him while Luc sits on the floor, smokes a cigarette, and watches us. “You think you will find some dop?”
Ian laughs. “What ees zees dop?”
“You know,” Luc says. “Dop. Smok. Hashish.”
“Maybe,” Ian says.
After he’s gone over every inch of wall, he borrows my flashlight to inspect the wooden floor planks. He finds a tiny chunk of hash in a crack between two of them, and another one, and another, like a trail of bread crumbs leading out of a forest. We are stunned to find anything at all and wonder how it got, and stayed, here. Luc keeps saying “Incroyable,” as if he is saying a prayer. Ian finds maybe two grams total and divides it up among us.
“Let’s get out of here,” he says, and Luc gets up from the floor. They start for the exit, but I hang behind.
“I’ll see you guys later.”
Ian says, “Share what you find?”
“Sure.”
Luc says, “Watch out the gendarmes.”
“The gendarmes got nothing on me,” I say.
My eyes have adjusted to the darkness, so I assemble the few bar stools that are still intact and line them up where they belong. Clear a space around the pool table and find a broom. It is while I am sweeping up the glass that I see a large patch of dried blood on the floor. I figure Clive caught his cheek on the corner of the table somehow in the fray and lay there for a time while it bled, watching his Vietnam life pass before his eyes.
I am taking stock of the pool balls caught in the table’s net pockets, seeing if they are all there in case someone should happen by at three in the morning looking for a game, when the door opens and Luc slides through it. He throws the bolt on the inside and makes his way to me and my broom. “Why you still look? Why you don’t stop looking?” He takes the broom out of my
hands and leans it against the wall. “Now,” he says. He sounds exasperated, a little breathless, like maybe he ran here, but that is highly unlikely. Nobody runs in Saigon.
It is not the most eloquent kiss—not what I would expect from a mouth that offers up words like bites of ripe dragonfruit—but it is a kiss. He actually tastes nothing like fruit of any kind but like cigarettes and cognac and, for some inexplicable reason, butterscotch. I don’t know where to put my hands, and after a minute he puts his on the sides of my face and then pulls tenderly away. He has a pipe, and we smoke some hash. It’s strong so it doesn’t take much to get me stoned. We finish clearing space around the pool table and shoot a couple of games in the near darkness. The smack of the balls as we scatter them across the felt and drop them into the pockets is the only sound, except for an occasional lorry or motorcycle or boat motor in the distance. Saigon is sleeping. So rare.
After a few games, Luc looks at his watch. “Time,” he says.
“Time for what?”
He doesn’t answer, but goes to the storeroom to fetch a jug of snake wine. While I lean against the wall and watch, he pours it around the room, over the pool table, the bar stools, and the bar.
“Are we going to burn it down?”
“Oui,” he says, as matter-of-fact as that kiss, and empties the last of the snake wine, and the snake, onto the floor.
“I wonder what kind of snake that is.” Despite how stoned I am, I know how stoned I must sound.
“A dead one,” he says. “Let’s do eet.”
Snake wine is basically grain alcohol wrapped around a serpent, and it goes up like gasoline. Luckily, Luc has made sure that we are all but out the door when he lights it. We take off for the river, and smoke begins to pour from the windows. Flames climb from the inside out and up to the roof. We find a small, uninhabited boat tied up to a bigger boat, and huddle together in the bow, breathing hard, watching Clive’s bar disintegrate. The front of the big boat is carved into the shape of a dragon and we are in its shadow. No one comes to put out the fire. A few sleepy cyclos pedal up and sit, backlit by the flames, in a row at the curb. They look like they are watching a movie.
I am reminded, inexplicably, of the Aussie, who will be coming back any day, and I wonder if I will even tell him I know about the girlfriend and the baby, or just go on until they get here as if nothing has changed, seeking refuge in a room that could be anywhere, in any country, at any time. Or maybe I will do the more rational thing and take up with Luc, and we will burn stuff down. I think about Frank and how careless I was, how I never looked back until now, and still don’t know why I didn’t, or why, now, I have.
I try to remember what Clive looked like, how he moved and the way he spoke. Every time he starts to slip away, I bring back that one quick dance, that pirouette, and begin again. I am glad the bar is gone. All those knickknacks.
When the sun comes up, we walk along the quay, stop at a phở stand, and sit down on low plastic stools under a mesh awning. There is a small, dirty-blond dog asleep next to the table. He has many small scars around his muzzle, and his ears and stubby tail twitch away the flies. The soup is good and hot; we top it off with basil leaves and chili sauce, stir it all together. My lips burn as I eat, but I can’t drink the water, so I just let them.
Luc asks if I have ever been to Củ Chi. I say no, not yet. He says how can that be? He says he has a motorcycle. A real one. Russian. Not one of those little 50cc jobs. I nod. When we finish eating, Luc pays the bill and kisses me on both cheeks.
“Saturday?” he says. I do not say anything. I do not say no. He waits a minute and says, “Ten o’clock. Le matin.” He goes. I finish my soup. The dog watches.
I teach two classes at the business school, and after they are over ride my bicycle to the zoo. Two of the street kids I know are selling postcards and “shwing” gum to dumbfounded visitors they have helped cross the wide boulevard, where the onrush of bicycles, motorbikes, and the occasional car or lorry never pauses or breaks for even a second. The kids acknowledge me with almost imperceptible nods, and they don’t try to sell me anything. In one corner of the zoo, I find a large black bear in a very small cage. He is not moving and his paws are covering his eyes.
I go home at four to shower, change, and eat, arrive at the bar at six, get a beer from Tho, retire to the window with Phượng. The sun sets as it does here, without prelude, and the sky goes from light to dark as if a switch has been thrown. Phượng leans her back into one corner of the window frame, her fingers laced across her middle and her head turned to gaze outside. Her expression tells me nothing, but I have seen her and Ian in deep conversation, laughing sometimes, sometimes not laughing. They are going to keep the baby, I think. Together. And I am jealous of what they have.
“Will miss Mister Clive,” she says.
“Đó là sự thật.” It’s true.
She looks at me, one eyebrow raised. “Been study?”
“Some,” I say.
“Phượng think a lot,” she says. “Good on ya.” She smiles, makes a small fist, and socks me lightly on the shoulder. “Me too.”
I say, “You are such a knucklehead.”
“Next week lesson,” she says. “Have to go now.”
“I-Feel-Like-I’m-Fixin’-to-Die Rag” is playing in the background. The line “Be the first one on your block to have your boy come home in a box” is the one that always makes me flinch. I picture my mother (Dad in a shadow behind her) looking out at the snowy buttes, tracing patterns in the frost on the insides of the windows, trying to imagine a place where there is no winter, where it is always hot, and when the rains come after weeks of threats and dry thunder and lightning in the west, people pour into the streets and squares to soak it up in the most literal sense—to express their gratitude for the one absolute requirement of a country like this one, a place where at one time, not all that long ago, what most of them probably wanted more than anything was to raise their families, farm their land, and be left the fuck alone.
I sit on the windowsill and watch Phượng walk away. Her áo dài is blue tonight. (Of a color intermediate between green and violet, as of the sky or sea on a sunny day. The boy went blue, and I panicked.) I know it is a special one she wears when she has a date. I expect Ian will show up to get her pretty soon, in his tattered linen sport jacket, and they will go to the roof of the Rex for dinner, stand at the edge of the terrace and watch the city: the young couples on their motor scooters, riding around and around the circle in front of the opera house on Nguyễn Huệ, slowly, hypnotically; the cyclos parked on the side streets, smoking, patiently waiting for passengers—someone, anyone who is prepared, however reluctantly and in whatever condition, to go home.
12. Somewhere in the Real World
The ad says, “Sunny Potrero Hill flat. Share with two ‘males.’ Straight-friendly. Must like cat.” The only cats I’ve ever really known were the barn kind, wild and prone to grasshoppering at any movement that could possibly be considered untoward. I assume the cat in the ad will be different, will allow petting and behind-the-ear scratches, like Cash would, if he were still around.
I like the idea of an animal, of getting to know something gradually, little by little, with no obligation to converse. I’ve come home tongue-tied is why. From Saigon. After the equivalent, in time, of a tour of duty there, and then some. I’m shell-shocked, though not in the usual sense. It is no longer Vietnam but America, now, that shocks, with its shiny veneer, its heaps of shrink-wrapped paraphernalia. Besides which, the war has been over for a long time.
At least that war has. But there have been others since, ongoing and everywhere, and maybe they are partially to blame for the fact that something feeling quite like armed conflict still carries on in my head. Armed but deceptively quiet, as if all the combatants are required to use silencers, and the stealth missiles to remain stealthy clear to impact.
I didn’t want to come back. I had grown to love being one of the missing, living in a pla
ce where no one could find me, no one could just stop by or call me up. I was so far away from my memories, I could almost pretend they were someone else’s. I had learned that distance was a force field—so very useful—and my mind was so busy trying to get me through the city and the days, I could forget for long stretches of time I’d ever had another life.
But I had. It had not gone anywhere, maybe temporarily into witness protection.
It took several weeks and a serious effort just to go buy a plane ticket, and it killed me that it had been so easy. To leave Vietnam. In one piece. I did not think it should have been that easy.
When it became apparent that I would never do it by myself, Phượng went with me and coaxed me gently into the EVA Air office. “See? No problem.” She put a dainty hand on the small of my back and pushed while I resisted. Phượng is surprisingly strong for a five-foot-tall, ninety-pound girl, and I found myself moving forward, in a swimming-through-tar sort of way, despite my best efforts to stand still or, better yet, back up all the way to and out the door.
“Nice lady help you.” The way Phượng said “help,” it came out sounding like “hey-oop.”
I knew she was making fun of me, however lovingly, because I was acting like an idiot.
“I could do with a little less sarcasm,” I said.
“Yes, dear.” The tiny girl continued steering me toward the nice lady in question, whose smile I knew was almost certainly genuine, but to me she looked remarkably like a crocodile. Or a “coco-deal,” as Phượng would say.
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