“She tell about that place in her story to Smith?”
Frye nodded, transfixed by Li’s face. “Sort of.”
“Beautiful little place. Not so big as the Michelin Plantation or the Fil Hol. Right in the middle of Three Corps Tac Zone, which was squat in the middle of the Viet Cong. Fuckin’ COSVN was less than a hundred miles northwest. It sat out in the middle of that jungle like a temple or something. Got run down after the French were kicked out, used for a bunch of different things. I used it to debrief Li. Was close enough for us all to get to, remote enough so we wouldn’t get seen and shot at.”
Frye looked at the slouching wall, clenched by vines. The fountain was in the foreground. Then a shot of Huong Lam, Bennett, and another Vietnamese man. Bennett had a bottle of champagne in his hand. Around Lam’s neck was the silver wave necklace that Frye had made for his brother.
Bennett drank down half a glass of gin. “The other Vietnamese guy we called Tony. He was Lam’s liaison. Never could get rid of him when there was a camera around. That necklace meant a lot to Lam, because he knew it meant a lot to me. What’d you make that thing out of, Chuck?”
“A quarter.”
“Nice work. Must have taken forever to file out that little wave.”
“Washington’s head is the top of the curl.”
“On patrol, Lam wrapped it in tape, so it wouldn’t jingle against his crucifix. He was a … weird guy. He was, like, half civilized and half savage. I never saw anybody fight with such a vengeance as him. You couldn’t tire him out. He’d take chances you wouldn’t believe. If we found tunnels, he’d go down. Most of the Vietnamese, they were too scared of those things. Not even Tony would go down there. We found a new hole one time, outside An Cat, hidden under a bunch of brush. Li’s intelligence told us where it was. We stood around for a minute while Lam got ready. He stripped down to just shirt and pants, took a knife in his teeth, a flashlight in his left hand and a nine-millimeter Smith in his right, and went in. We had tons of tunnel gadgets sent to us. Special shot-pistols, and headlamps like miners wear, radio transmitters that would strap to your back with the mike taped to your neck so your hands would be free. Lam never used that shit. All he had was a silencer for the pistol, because down there, a pistol shot could just about deafen you. He wouldn’t take a radio because things were too intense to be talking back with us. He wouldn’t smoke or drink or chew gum when he knew he was going down, because you really need your nose. Lam told me he could smell the Cong down there in the dark. Actually smell them. And he said he could feel them too, like sonar or something—he could feel their eyelids opening and closing, their muscles getting ready to move, their thoughts echoing off the tunnel walls.”
Frye could feel it himself, the solid darkness closing around him like fingers of a huge fist, squeezing his fear together, compacting his terror like a press.
Bennett drank again. “Thirty seconds later we heard three muffled shots. That meant he’d found another trap door. He’d always fire off three quick rounds through it before he went in. Then, two more of his shots, and one of theirs, way louder. Contact. After he got deep enough, we couldn’t hear much of anything. We’d just wait and hope he’d show again.”
Bennett stared at the picture of Lam. “He always would. They’d booby-trap those tunnels like crazy. They’d use snakes and spiders, spears and stakes, one-shot traps that would take your face off. They’d set crossbows in the walls and a trip wire in front you couldn’t see. They’d use fucking Coke cans to make grenades and fill them with rocks and broken glass. You set off one of those in a little tunnel and you were meat. One time he found three rats tied to a stake, and a vial and syringe not far away. He brought one of the animals out and we tested it—bubonic plague. The fucking VC version of germ warfare. Or they’d build a false wall and wait behind it. You got close enough, they’d whack you out with a fucking spear. They’d hide a claymore near the entrance ‘cause they knew when someone went down, a bunch of us would stand around and listen and watch. When the tunnel rat went in, the Cong would detonate the mine from inside and blow off the people above ground. But Lam, he was hip to all that shit. He knew. Sure enough, he came out all bloody and grimy. He’d found three VC and wasted them all. Lam didn’t say much more until later. He was too scared to talk. But when we got back and his nerves settled, he told me what went down. Turned out that time that there were four VC—all women. He’d taken out three and just couldn’t waste the last one. She was backed against a wall, not even bothering to hide anymore because she didn’t have a weapon and she knew he was gonna kill her. Lam just turned away and let her be. That’s what I mean about him being half civilized, too. He’d be unbelievably cruel, then do something like that. Lam had his own channel. Hell, we talked about everything. Looking back, I know I told him some shit I shouldn’t have. And he used it against us later.”
Bennett drank again and considered the picture. “He fooled us all, right up to the end.”
Another shot of the plantation, this one apparently taken by Houng Lam. Bennett and Crawley hugged Li, while a grinning Tony edged into the far side of the frame. The next picture was of Bennett and Li, crammed into a booth in a bar. Crawley sat beside her and three other soldiers were pressing into the shot, all drunken smiles. Frye noted a familiar face, far right.
“The Pink Night Club at the Catinat, Chuck. Helluva place. Li got a few gigs there. I got her an apartment on Tu Do Street in Saigon just a few weeks before I got blown up. Look at this one! That’s Li and Elvis Phuong. Great singer, that fuckin’ Elvis. He sings at the Wind sometimes. Li did a set with him and the band and Elvis backed her up. I thought she’d come unglued she was so nervous. Everybody loved her. She had that something about her. Now check this! There she is on stage.”
Li stood, mike in hand. Frye could see the muscles in her neck straining beneath the pure white skin. She had on a black miniskirt and a pair of matching boots.
“Nice, Benny. Burke Parsons, on the right?”
Bennett nodded and drank again, shaking his head. “Burke was CIA, so our paths crossed and we hung out some. He came and went. That was the spooks.”
The next picture sent a chill of sadness through him. Bennett was leading Li to a dance floor, her hand in his, her face beaming up at him, his trousers pressed tight around his good strong legs.
Bennett stared at the picture a moment. “They still itch and ache sometimes,” he said. “And my fucking knee gets sore. Remember the knee?”
“Football.”
“Back then, I thought torn ligaments were a bummer”—more gin—”But I never complained, Chuck. And I’m not gonna start now.”
“Maybe it would do some good.”
“Fuck complaints, little brother. Fuck you and fuck me. Now here, this is the kitchen of our place on Tu Do.”
Frye’s heart sank as he looked at the screen. Li was sitting at a table with a cup of something raised to her lips, caught unaware, a look of surprise on her face. The apartment looked small and almost empty, washed in a rounded, yellow, distinctly eastern light. There was a vase with no flowers in it on the table in front of her. Frye felt an overwhelming sense of solitude in the shot—the solitude of a girl without her family, of a soldier far away from his, of a small room in a big city soon to fall. Two solitudes, really, vast and hemispheric as two halves of the earth, coming together for reasons more desperate than either of them could have known.
“Nice apartment,” said Bennett. Frye watched him wipe his eyes with a fist. “Really nice little place to be. Cost me a fortune, but Pop sent money by the pound. You should have seen her, Chuck. Sitting on the bench at the plantation with a fucking guitar. She was just a girl. It was her innocence, how simply she accepted things. Innocence isn’t right—more like faith. Yeah, faith, that was what she had.”
Bennett drew carefully on the bottle. His eyes never left the screen. When he started talking again, it was to the picture. “Yeah, you should have seen her. She was everything I thoug
ht we were fighting for. She was young and beautiful as a girl could be. She’d sing all the fuckin’ time and that voice was like heroin inside my veins. It made me feel warm and good inside. She had one of those faces that seem to have a light on behind it. Even when there wasn’t any sun and it rained a week straight, she had a glow. It was unreal, but the things I felt coming alive in me when I talked to her, they were brand-new. It was like she was a perfect animal. A perfect human female animal, right there in front of me. Everything I thought that animal should be. We connected. She picked up English fast.”
Bennett dropped the carousel controller and hooked his thumbs together, flapping his hands like wings. “She’d do like that when she saw me. Frye always came out ‘Flye,’ like a bird. I told her we could fly away from that war together someday. We did. We tried to.”
“I see what you loved in her, Benny.”
“No,” Bennett said quietly. “You don’t. She was Vietnam. Her parents came south in ‘fifty-four because they were strong Catholics. Mom died of fever; they killed her father because he wouldn’t shelter the Cong. You know what she wanted? She wanted to study music.” Bennett examined his gin, tilted back the bottle and drank. “So there she was, like the rest of the goddamned country, trying to be left alone while the Viet Cong terrified them at night and we ran the place during the day. She’s why I’m here, I thought. These are the people we came here for. We’re here to give them half a chance at running their own lives someday.
Frye watched his brother lean back and stare for a long while at the ceiling.
“You tried.”
Bennett reached clumsily under the couch cushion and brought out a .45. He almost tipped over, then righted himself and studied the barrel of the gun. “See this? I’m not afraid of this.”
“Put it down. You’re drunk.”
Bennett clicked off the safety and looked down the barrel again.
“I got soaked in Agent Orange, Chuck, and I don’t have cancer. I saw worse shit than you can dream up and I’ve never had a flashback I couldn’t handle. I had enough pain for a whole city, but I don’t shoot, pop, or snort. I drink because I always drank. I don’t even collect the disability I got coming. You know why? Because I’m one tough stand-up motherfucker, and they can keep their dollars and send ’em to someone who needs it.”
“Come on, Benny. Put it down.”
Bennett gazed through Frye. “I got my legs blown off, that’s all. But Chuck, I gotta tell you right now, if they kill her, I’m gonna blow my brains out too. That’s no complaint, that’s just what is. Without her, I’m a bunch of pieces left all over the globe. With her, I can still see why it happened and why it was worth it.”
Bennett clicked back the hammer, hooked his thumb against the trigger and rested the gun in his lap, barrel pointing at his chin. “What more can I do, Chuck? What more? I keep looking, and she doesn’t come home.”
Frye reached out his hand. “Come on, brother,” he said softly. “We’re gonna get her. She’s okay. It’s going to come out all right, Benny. I promise. Then it’ll be just like old times. We’ll eat on the island on Thursdays and argue with Pop, and Mom’ll be happy and Li can write some more songs on the Martin. Maybe you can meet this new girl—Cristobel—she’s really good, Benny. The four of us could do something. Maybe we could get the family like it was in the old days. We’ll be tight again. Come on, Benny. Debbie’s gone. Don’t you go too. That wouldn’t be fair.”
Frye reached out and touched his brother’s hand. Slowly, he eased Bennett’s thumb from the trigger guard, then brought the gun away. Bennett tipped over, burped, tried to sit back up and tipped over again. “What am I supposed to do?”
Frye and Donnell worked his clothes off and got him to the shower. Bennett slumped in the corner and stared out, a defeated soldier, while the warm water ran down him.
CHAPTER 20
BACK HOME, FRYE GOT INTO A PAIR OF MEGA-Trunks and waxed his board. He made the ten-minute walk to Rockpile while the first light of morning coalesced in the east.
The hurricane surf had hit. He stood on the sand and watched the horizon, the plate-glass water, the gray waves marching in, precise as infantry. Each crashing mountain sent a tremor up his ankles and into his legs. Eight feet at least, he thought, and all muscle. Hard, vascular tubes, well shaped. The air filled with spray, and the sand vibrated. Frye watched two surfers carefully picking their waves. One took off and got launched from the lip—nothing but the long fall down for this man—his orange board trailing after him like a flame. The other thought better and backed off. More like ten feet, Frye saw now, and getting bigger. The beach trembled. The wide white noose of a riptide wavered out when the set ended.
He could still smell the death in his nostrils, on his skin, in the air around him, everywhere.
What am I supposed to do?
I don’t know, Benny. If I did, I’d do it for you. But it’s clear to me that you’re over your head and so am I, and that things are going to get worse before they get better.
Frye sat on the damp beach, took a handful of sand, and let it run between his fingers. He wondered if he’d simply been there more, closer to Bennett, more involved with the family, more present, somehow this all wouldn’t have happened. Ridiculous, he thought. But little things can make the difference. The road is paved by degrees, the thousand paths taken, or not. We steer by the second. Take your eyes off the road, you hit a cement mixer or cream a nun in a crosswalk. Take your pick. It’s the small stuff that adds up, or doesn’t. Something here prevents something there—a word, a gesture, an action.
And Frye knew that the last ten years of his life had been a slow retreat from his family, his wife, his own future. When you ignore enough problems, he thought, they become one problem. And the more you ignore it the faster it grows until you end up sitting on a cold beach, wondering if the one thing in your life you do well is going to kill you. More than anything, you hate yourself for being afraid.
I want back in. I can try.
He paddled out. Past the shorebreak, he looked south to Cristobel’s faded blue apartments, which from this angle seemed to be spilling into the water. Brooks Street will be pumping, he thought, so will Salt Creek and Trestles. You have to admit it: Rockpile on a hurricane swell is one ugly break. A surfer waved; Frye waved back.
Sitting outside on his board now, he blew into his hands, tried to get the blood going. All he could feel was the damp chill of the tunnel, and the putrid cavern where Loc’s brother lay. He shivered. The morning sky was gray and so was the water, and somewhere far to the west they met without a seam. The next set lined up against it. He lowered himself to the board and paddled hard, rising with the first wave. He was surprised how big it was. The next wave came close behind, bigger still. He scrambled up its face and pitched over on the far side, ready for another. Third time’s charm, he thought, sliding for the sweet spot on the incoming mountain, finding it, pivoting his board and with three hard strokes of his arms, felt the wave’s mass catch hold of him, take him up, then hesitate and offer him that one last opportunity to get out.
Frye looked down, felt the panic clustering at the base of his spine. He looked down at the miniaturized shore, the tiny hotel and blue apartments, the toy cars inching along Coast Highway a thousand feet below him. He looked down at the water sucking out, the beach receding. He felt the wave rising, rising, rising with him into the gray sky, gathering its aqueous tonnage for final release.
He made one last terrified assessment, then bailed.
Grabbing his board with both hands, he yanked it back toward the ocean as hard as he could. He plopped down to safety as the wave rose, hovered for a moment, then boomed ashore behind him. Somehow he made over the next wave of the set. He sat up on his board, heart thumping, arms weak and cold. The board dipped and bobbed. He could see his feet below, pale smudges in the dark water.
Frye could never remember feeling so isolated out here, so separate and temporary. It is not good to feel pa
rt of nothing.
He just sat there and watched the next wave coming in, his face flushed, feeling some part of himself—a portion of what he’d always been, a sense of substance and character, a feeling of singularity, at very least a passion that defined him if only to himself—passing him up with every untaken wave.
The clean-up wave formed ahead of him, the last and largest by far.
What he did next was partly out of spite, partly out of desperation, partly out of shame. It was the one thing he could think to do that was positive. He did it for Li and he did it for Cristobel and he did it for Bennett and he did it for himself. He did it as a funeral for the way he had been.
He pivoted, stroked twice, and dropped in.
The downward rush was exceptionally steep and fast, his board trying to jet ahead without him. He eased a rail into the flank of water and shot laterally, the wave lip smacking his head. Then he was in front of it, banking back down, body bent and arms out for balance, centered for speed. At the bottom he snapped his heels out and leaned in, shooting up again as the board rose instantly and he loosened his knees for the shock, climbing up the vertiginous wall, looking back to the big cylinder that gained quickly on him. Near the top he crouched and leveled off and let the heaving barrel come over him, then stood and slowed just a fraction to get far back into it, where the sand and the foam swirl furiously and the world condenses to a roar that you can feel all the way to your bones. Frye gently traced his hand along the wall of water that enclosed him, fingers thrumming liquid ribs, feet vibrating with his board, looking ahead as through a fluid telescope to where the wave was forming—this momentary heart of things—fresh and big and new out of the sea. In a moment of purest velocity, knees bent slightly and his fingertips brushing the cylinder, he stood there: reduced, washed, opinionless.
As usual at this point, Frye never knew what hit him.
All he did know was that he felt suddenly dark and pressurized, strangely removed now, with only a dull thundering somewhere overhead. No light. A rotating kind of motion, but not self-governed, as if he were a gear driven by other gears in some great liquid machine.
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