Tiger's Tail

by Gus Lee

  The munition checked out. He caressed the pack's flap. “Asshole LeBlanc broke my lock.” He snapped his fingers and two sappers ran forward. Each assisted the other to load, Pluto first.

  “Okay, Mushroom Man,” said Jubala, squaring away straps and slapping both rucks. “Good to go.” The big men moved out.

  “Good luck, Henry, wherever you're going.”

  “Time to unass Easy Street on the DMZ.” Jubala put out his hand. The RTO passed him the hand mike, and Henry made his call. The Ninety-five Mikes faded fast down the mountainside. The LZ—Landing Zone—was the orphanage. The children had been evacuated.

  Magrip, Levine and I followed at intervals, guarding the Mikes’ rear until Rangers came out of the trees to bring up the trail.

  Jet engines. A squadron of warpaint A-10 Warthogs fanned over the valley. Above them, in the unusually clear sky, were the racetrack contrails of F-14 Navy Tomcats. Somewhere above them was an AW ACS— Airborne Warning and Control System—directing traffic.

  The air vibrated from massed rotors. Fast Loach choppers searched the hills, then cleared. A squadron of Cobra gunships flying NOE, nape of the earth, flared on wide perimeter around the valley. A second Cobra squadron hovered inside the perimeter, then moved out as a trio of big Navy transport Sea Stallion CH-53 helos thundered in from different vectors.

  The helos circled the LZ, blasting snow, bending and breaking trees. They landed, and Marines deployed fast to establish a ground perimeter as white-parkaed troops jumped into the three Stallions with their rucks; the Marines reboarded and the helos lifted off, the Cobras on station to suppress possible enemy ground fire.

  The Ninety-five Mikes were taking their little mushroom-headed cartoon characters out of Korea via the U.S. Seventh Fleet. I watched the air fleet deploy to the sea. I felt all of Korea could again take a deep, collective breath.

  It was my job to go to Hong Kong. Underneath the pillows in the villa's side room, I found the tickets. Ramos Travel Agencies, Seoul. I opened the flap and checked the KAL flights. A thick wad of U.S. currency lay behind the tickets.

  The forced, uneven scrawl on the accompanying note said,

  Captain.

  Found dough in the warehouse. Couldn't burn it, could

  I. Light one for me. See you in Heaven.

  Your comrade,

  SGM Patrick T. McCrail

  Chang and one of his men had gone down the mountain on rope belay. The sergeant major's great, stilled body was paradoxically intact; the Wizard's had been broken in extensive and hideous distortions.

  Magrip and I recovered the Wizard's effects; there were none to be found on McCrail except a purloined cardiac nitro prescription bottle, rosary and fragments of cut det cord. We belayed the bodies up the cliff.

  In the small room where he had struggled for breath, I held the rosary, disbelieving that I would never again hear his giggle, his great Irish voice, that he would miss his long-awaited mission to Hong Kong.

  “Kan, it's been a helluva week. You did good.” Magrip had been as talkative as Buster Keaton in a silent movie. Now he jabbered like Walter Brennan with a hundred pages of script.

  He belched. “You missed a helluva firelight out there in the snow. Those Inmingun were good. Hell, there were only two of ‘em, and they fired our asses up.” Magrip had killed both of them. And McCrail was dead.

  I knew Magrip was trying to help. His goodwill was a Long River Western freighter, blowing smoke from afar.

  “Soon as we get stateside, I'm unassing the Army. You?”

  Butt Kicker and his Medal of Honor leaving the Army.

  “I'm going to sleep for a week.”

  “Job-First Jackson Kan—sleeping. Now, that'd be something. That's the one thing you don't do worth shit.”

  I saw Cara in bed and wondered if the Wizard had actually sent someone to harm her. I wondered if I'd leave the service for her, if I would propose to her principally because of her wonderful body, and if she had slept with anyone else this week. I knew I would welcome daughters, and wondered how I would feel having sons. Job-First Jackson. I wondered if I had been doing the wrong job.

  We got out of the jeeps at the turnaround and walked up the hill, the cold mountain wind painful to skin and lungs.

  “Mudang wants to see you,” said Magrip. “Alone.”

  The drums and cymbals were back at work. The scents of sweet incense and fertile barley tea filled the thick air, the trance of music a living thing. I found a bathroom and washed my hands and face with the same vigor I had used after meeting Dogface Nagol in the CG's mess. I looked at my scarred arms and hands, as if I could see the plutonium, as if soap could wash out McCrail's death.

  Song Sae sat in lotus. She wore an elaborate multi-colored silk robe with a white headband, a diva in a satin bed. She was wonderful, unreachable, unearthly, fantastic, barely familiar, her neck still red and violated.

  Her eyes danced happily. “Annyonghashamneeka, dae-wi.”

  “Anyahashameeka, Moon-kidae.”

  “CAE-Hi, the wang mansin offered to you an answer to your true question. She will hear your question now.”

  The mudang stepped across the sea of pillows to sit beside me.

  “I have no question.” The drums seemed to argue.

  “CAE-Hi, who is this woman you love, who cannot love you? The woman who shamed you?”

  “She didn't shame me. Her name is Cara Milano.”

  Song Sae and the mudang spoke. “CAE-Hi, this cannot be. The woman is an Eastern female and looks like Hoon Jae-woo. It is why you have such a strong reaction to her.”

  The girl at the Dong Nai.

  I shook my head and cleared my throat. “I don't love her.”

  “CAE-Hi, English has a flaw. Only one word for ‘love.’ For romance, for being crazy for music—or loyal to parents, hungry for special food, heartsick for children, enjoying vacations, thrilled by soccer, no? Americans love hamburgers, mothers and women and their country and rock and roll with the same word, but not, I think, with same style. In some style, you love this girl. Not romantically, but she is in the heart.”

  I closed my tired eyes, heavy and injured by the sergeant major's death. The drums and brass cymbals were like goads and crucifixes, whips and lubricants. I had talked about the six dead females to Doc Benton at Letterman Hospital, to no effect. Telling the wu about it would not help. I would do my next job, in Hong Kong, and feel better.

  My heart was being squeezed by the brass and beaten by the drums. Song Sae sat next to me, silks rustling.

  “Give her up. Relieve the pain. Tell us, who listen and understand. When men are sad, they are silent. You must cry out pain while someone listens.” She caressed my inert hands.

  Give her up. She waited patiently. The drums were moving me and I spoke.

  “I killed her.” My voice not my own but BaBa's voice when he sold our boat for passage out of China. “And her baby sister. Probably her mother and her grandmother and maybe some aunts. Six people.” My chest ached. The girl ran toward me. I willed it to be Jae-woo, the teenager in the mudang's garden, but it was the girl with no name, her body waiting for the slugs, and I couldn't watch, flinching in my soul, trying to flip the channel, knowing every program in my skull was set to receive the same grotesque horror show, frozen in constant reruns, prosperous and full in tragic endings.

  “(9 wa, dae-wi! It had to be an accident! You are not a murderer.” The mudang asked what I had said. Song Sae explained.

  The M-16 gave its small, squirrelly recoil and I jerked as the wang mansin tickled my face with a goose feather, smiling like a secretive witch. I brushed it away and it returned, tickling.

  “She wants you not to be serious, dae-wi” said Song Sae. “Laughing is a very big part of life. You are supposed to live.”

  I was going crazy and the world was going to hell. America was becoming a pleasure island without an admission charge. The President's going to be impeached, the races can't live with each other, Cara's not hom
e at three A.M., McCrail's dead, and I killed girls and women and buried men without rituals. I have no sons to give the jia, and my mother weeps for her lost, unsmiling, childless son because her babies died in China. The feather tickled.

  Song Sae nodded, her eyes tearing. “Yes, it is so. But did you not dive into the river to swim with the fish that look like Chinese officials? Did you not try to save your baby brothers? Did you not embrace a holy woman who cannot give physical love? Did you not laugh once at death? Did you not look like a wet chicken with flying feathers? Are not so many things we do silly? Did not Colonel Bin fall down stairs like a drunk man?” She laughed, rich, musically, from the stomach, filling the room with a delicious, ridiculous, earthy cackle that forced from me a chuckle. Her laugh was joviality itself.

  Her pretty shoulders shook as she guffawed, her head back, losing her balance and somersaulting backwards as she squealed. She laughed and laughed, hiccupped, hitting the pillows and shaking her head. She laughed contagiously.

  I chuckled, then I laughed. I laughed because she was funny and nothing was funny, because my mind was being cleared of thought and static and I was being ushered into a realm of hilarity with the power of narcotics. I laughed stupidly, a fool in an absurd world, a stranger in Asia, an American, trying to help everyone.

  It sounded like crying and tears ran down my face and I sobbed, drowning out the drums and cymbals as I wept in racking, chest-aching sobs for the girl, for her family, for that damned bloody day, my tears flowing parallel to unknown tides, the salt of Vietnamese waters pouring from my eyes and choking me, choking my life, making everything I did meaningless and late.

  The mudang pulled my head into her lap while I wept, my head rocking, my torso, my heart, my inner Chinese organs in agony, her gown wet with me. She narrated over my tears, her voice hoarse and low, speaking in step with the drums, the echoes of a hyenalike hysteria still in my head. I sobbed, the tears flowing like rainwater across bright, broad-leaved Indochinese palms.

  “Kan Hu-chin, firstborn son, can you hear?” She said it again.

  “Hu-chin, you have a big, muscular body, and yang power in the world. But you have the innocence of a small boy. Open your heart, boy, to our words. We are wiser than you.”

  The wu spoke.

  “She says, ‘You think God should not allow little boys and little girls to die. That nothing justifies God's cruelty. Listen to me:

  “‘You treasure the girl's death. It is your proof of God's error. You keep your bond with her, to protect a Chinese misery.’ ”

  The drums kept beat with my heart.

  ‘“There are greater things that deserve your loyalty.’”

  Candles flickered. Light reflected in golden sparks from candelabra. The wu's voice softened and I cried for the sergeant major, for his never having seen the sun since the very spring in which I had reported to Vietnam.

  “She says, we are part of the universe, a dot of people, ocean and trees, swept clean by winds from the moon and sun. Under these stars and winds, Hu-chin, we have roles to play, using births, lives and deaths for good or for bad.”

  The mudang's voice rose an octave. So did Song Sae's.

  “She says, life is hard and it is good. The winds bring us news and tell us truth, changing us.

  “It is sad that some trees are too proud to listen, to take the life lessons of the winds as shaping, as changing. You know, Kan Hu-chin, trees that do not bend to the wind are broken.”

  The shaman's fingers ran lightly through my hair, her touch felt in my fingertips and toes, as if she were Cara and not an ancient haroboji with a bent back.

  “Men are trees. Tall, proud, confident to know all things, and too strong to bend. They take. They do not submit to anyone.

  “The world breaks these men and their bodies. Hearts, livers, stomachs, backs, brains, sex organs. No che chub herbs can fix it.

  “The Wizard thought he was the wind, that he could bring change and mold humans, to use us. He named God every hour, but submitted to no one, seeing himself as the God he named.”

  I was breathing, short and choppy. I started to sit up.

  “Submit,” said Song Sae. I exhaled. I lay back.

  “That was his in-yon, his fate, to see Heaven while living in Hell, giving words to God while spiting Him.”

  Song Sae spoke crisply. “Your true question, Hu-chin, when you were in war, was whether God was dead. Am I right?”

  Seven years ago, dripping Indochinese mud and the blood of children, I had looked up to see an empty sky, a vacant Heaven. Eighty-nine well-trained, disciplined, heavily armed American men, muzzles up, standing over dead babies, girls and women.

  Under my command. The little dead girl resembled the Wong family's third daughter, my betrothed. The little baby looked like my infant brother, Hu-chien, Strong Tiger.

  I had looked up through the thick foliate canopy, praying to God to make my error a bad dream. Please, Lord, make it a dream. Into that prayer I had poured my soul and the blood of innocents.

  I had gotten my wish.

  “CAE-Hi, you say you do not believe in God. But you are so angry at God, He is most real to you.” I recoiled as the mudang began to rub me as if I were a cat. I held her hand and she stopped. I let go and she began caressing me again, focusing on my face, the temples, the scalp. Her hands, the incense, were opiates.

  “You feel the magic of her hands. You cannot study it; only feel them, and it is more than you expect to feel, more than you can understand.” Currents ran through me. I had a sensation of being a fish, my muscles dropping away in a wind-whipped sea of female pillows.

  “Her care for you is not because you are powerful, smart or beautiful, but because you are in need.

  “CAE-Hi, whose God tells her to behave so, to care for you because you need, and not because you deserve?”

  Grace. I shook my head. I whispered: Your God, BaBa.

  “She says, ‘Remember the stars above your boat in China. Above your men in a forest war. Men cannot create such things. Think of your mother's face and tell me if God is so uncaring, so cruel. You see the girl in your sleep and when you are awake. Think of her now.” I shut my eyes tightly, trying to hold on to stars.

  “God made her. God made your brothers. Men killed them. We cannot know why. God gives sky and stars. He gives choices, but He always takes back our dead.

  “It is we who make human war. Men kill. God only makes war in our hearts. We cannot know all that God knows. If we knew all, we would not be human beings. If we do not recognize mystery, we are only animals.”

  I took a great breath. “She means Bosa, Buddha?”

  “Hu-chin, she means the God of your father. Wang mansin says, the girl died for her own reasons. You did not intend to harm her.

  “You were in battle. She was with a war party and would have killed you and all your men without shedding a tear, laughing over your bones and blood, gaining face for killing a Chinese warrior.

  “You know the history of your people. For a thousand years, Chinese men rode into Vietnam, causing war, killing men and making women cry. Oh, Hu-chin, your tears are ancient tears for ancient debts. The wu cares for you, because you are a soldier crying for women not of your tribe.”

  A long silence of drums and brass. She had been a runner for a long-range strike team, fighting me, an old enemy. I had felt the creases in her blouse caused by the strap of an AK-47. I had smoothed them while I blew breath into her. I ached for her, her hard days, her sad end, her life bleeding out, calling for her father.

  The shaman spoke.

  “She says you made the girl a martyr. A Vietnamese liet sy. Killing a girl was so horrible that it suspended your spirit. The horror was not yours; it is the old horror of war.

  “When you wear her death as your skin, you become like the Wizard. He thought he had God-like powers, and both you and the paksu Wizard focused on the dark world.

  “His evil was hating nonwhites. Your evil is blaming God for the guilts of p
eople. You have made carrying this girl your most important duty.

  “There are other jobs for you to do. The girl served her purpose. She cared for her family. She did what her father asked of her. She died a death that means something in her life. Your brothers are in Heaven with the God of their father.”

  The mudang smiled with her bad teeth. She spoke.

  Song Sae said, “Your purpose is to remain in the world of stars, sunrises, new moons. She says, ‘You have helped my village. You took the fire of hell and the guns from the Valley of War.’

  “Your mi-gae is to serve others. To make a firstborn son. To help other clans by protecting children. To honor females as true equals to men.

  “To help all people who still need. To show humility and honor God for your life. To laugh, whenever you can.

  “She says, you tried to breath life into the girl when she was dead. The bitterness of her death passed into you. It lives below your tongue and impairs your ki-bun, your harmony.

  “Empty your mouth of bad mi-gae, of your anger at God. Do not blame God for the pains of males. Clean your mouth with willow branch, for you have six female lives to give up.”

  Song Sae handed me a teacup, a bowl and a branch.

  I sat up and took the cup, bowl and branch, placing them carefully on the flat top of a great pillow. My hands trembled, the overrelaxed muscles responding slowly.

  My mouth was bitter. Death, misery, angry wounds in my mouth. I saw the rain forest, felt my absorption in it, my inability to control war. I was firstborn and loved the power of my self-blame. I saw the dead baby, the dead girl, the women.

  Perhaps I was not so weak against Chinese fate if the Dong Nai had been my personal fault. I was not so useless and hateful if I felt profound and everlasting guilt from the death of children.

  I heard the mudang ‘s words. We cannot know all that God knows.

  I rinsed with tea. I rubbed my mouth with the soft branch. The taste it left was neither sour nor sweet. Neutral, inert, open to possibilities. I remembered McCrail.