Little Saigon

by T. Jefferson Parker

  The rain changed gears now, a steady shower of big warm drops. Frye guided the Whaler into a loose turn, heading back toward the Island. The ocean water boiled harder, and a mist rose from the surface.

  Frye looked at Bennett, who tossed away the cigarette, then steadied himself on the gunwales.

  “I couldn’t believe it when I saw lamplight in his hootch. The sonofabitch was just taking his time, packing up a few things. Tony was nowhere around, so I knew that Lam had wasted him. I went in alone and brought him out. He looked surprised, all right. It was hard, Chuck. He stood there wearing that necklace that I’d given him, and I wondered how in hell he’d managed to use me like that. I’d trusted him, almost all the way. If I’d been a little more naïve, I’d have opened that pack and blown up half of Dong Zu. I started to say something, but no words came out. He just looked at me, like he had no fucking idea what was about to go down. I ordered my men to take him out. I told my sergeant to sweat him, then waste him however they wanted. Then I got the demolition techs out and told them to get rid of the pack if it didn’t go off in the next couple of hours.”

  Bennett huddled tighter inside his jacket. “I went back and sat with Li for a while in the new hootch. We made love for the first time. For her, it was the first time ever. I could feel the power going out of me, and into her, then coming back. She was mine. Awhile later, I heard a chopper lift off, and I knew what they were gonna do to him. Somehow, Li knew. She was crying. I couldn’t fucking take it, Chuck. I left her there, went to the Officer’s Club and drank half a bottle of Scotch in about half an hour.

  “The guys came back a few minutes later. Two of them were laughing. No Lam. They said he wouldn’t admit a thing. He kept saying he was fucking innocent. The Cong were tough, Chuck. I saw a guy go for almost an hour strapped to a table with electrodes on his balls, and all he said was ‘No VC, no VC.’ He just died there, trying to chew off his own lips.” Bennett sighed. “Sudden Deceleration Trauma was what we called it. The joke was: It isn’t the fall that kills you, it’s the stop.”

  They were quiet all the way back to the dock. Frye climbed out and tied down to a cleat. He ran the fuel out of the carburetor and stowed the cushions under the benches.

  “Why don’t you just give up, Benny? The war’s over.”

  Rain slanted through the dock lights, splattered the stanchions, tapped the sand. Frye walked slowly beside his brother.

  “You feel something for Tuy Nha, don’t you?”

  “Well, sure—”

  “Then you have a little of what I have. I married it, Chuck. It’s part of me now. I love the way they love. The way they fight. The way they suffer and still fight. I love the way they look. When I woke up after the mine got me, she was the first thing I wanted to see. She was there for me, and she just plain wouldn’t let me die, Chuck. And she still wanted me when I came out of that hospital more gone than ever. What I hate most is the fact we lost when we could have won. We were almost there. Maybe someday, we will win.”

  Bennett smiled through the rain. “When it comes down like this, it’s just like over there. It takes me back. I love it. I hate it.”

  They moved across the small beach, Bennett laboring in the sand. Then up the lawn, a perfect green slope in the darkness. The yard lamps cast drizzly light toward the grass. “You go in one way and come out another, Chuck. You hope things’ll balance someday. What you want to be able to do is look your own eyes in the mirror and not be totally ashamed of all the shit they’ve seen.”

  “Yeah.”

  “You’ll never get it, because you weren’t there.” They approached the back door of the house. Bennett stopped on the porch. “Now Thach’s people are fucking with my head. It’s textbook PSYOPS. I got a plastic helicopter in the mail two days ago. After that, they left a GI Joe doll on my porch, with its head cut off. Three bottles of fucking champagne. Thach is ten thousand miles away, looking at a file on me, putting on his own electrodes. They called me again this morning. It was the same man who talked to me before they put Li on. They said to put two million dollars in two suitcases.”

  “That was all?”

  “Further instructions to come.”

  “You tell Wiggins?”

  “They know. I’ll have the cash tomorrow.”

  “Why not call off the hit? Call off the Secret Army. It’s what everybody wants. Maybe they’ll let her go. Maybe they’ll let our POWs go.”

  Bennett smiled. “There won’t be any hit tomorrow night. We’re going to take him alive at kilometer twenty-one. Hell either tell his men to let Li go, or they’ll kill him. His life for hers. By nine P.M. tomorrow Li will either be free, or they’ll both be dead.”

  CHAPTER 24

  THE STORM ENDED AS QUICKLY AS IT HAD begun. He parked at home and walked down to the festival grounds, where the Pageant of the Masters had been delayed. The city smelled of wet eucalyptus and ocean spray. As Cristobel said it would be, Frye’s ticket was waiting for him at will-call.

  He found his seat, a minor chill moving through him under his still-wet clothes. The tableau on stage before him was called “The Four Muses,” said the program, and showed four gold-painted women posing in recreation of a sixteenth-century French statuette. The women were suspended mid-air—even from the third row Frye could not see how—giving them a precarious, otherworldly quality. Breathing stopped, a low murmur rose from the crowd, breeze jiggled the rain-slick trees around the amphitheater.

  Then the stage went dark, and the announcer’s resonant baritone came through the speakers. Frye could see the golden bodies floating offstage in the darkness. Where do goddesses go when their workday is done?

  “The Pageant of the Masters would like to take just a moment,” said the announcer, “to pass along the good news to anyone who has not heard it yet. The MIA Committee, based in our own Laguna Beach, will be negotiating with Hanoi for American soldiers still remaining in Vietnam. The pageant extends Its warmest congratulations to Lucia Parsons and her committee.” There was a round of applause, cheers from the crowd. “Our next piece is based upon …”

  He closed his eyes for a moment, and issued a vague prayer heavenward that they could get Li back. Benny’s falling apart, he thought. What if his plan caves in? She was his purpose, and Benny always needed a purpose. Without that, he’s just a storm of impulse, not containable by skin alone. What was it that Benny had said after he’d come out of the hospital in Maryland, back to California with his new wife, his new body, his new life? She got me through this, brother. She’s not just a woman. She’s my god.

  His muse. The stage lights came on slowly, and he found himself staring at a life-size Remington bronze, the cowboy galloping his horse across some timeless plain, reins in one hand, lasso in the other, hat brim flipped up by speed. Frye could almost hear hoofbeats. The crowd’s inhale was palpable.

  Momentarily transported by this illusion, Frye crossed his arms, sank down a bit in his seat, and tried his best to think nothing except whether this cowboy was going to catch his cow.

  It was impossible to think of anything but Li. What are your chances, Benny, of pulling this off? Not very goddamned good. But what would work better? No wonder the FBI is keeping wraps on the Thach story, with the POWs on the line. Hanoi sends over a terrorist squad and—just in time—happens to discover American soldiers still alive. Some diplomacy.

  The next thing Frye knew, the announcer was telling the apocryphal story of Susanna, wife of a prominent Jewish merchant, who went to her garden to bathe. Left alone by her servants, she was viewed by two elders, who approached and demanded her submission. If not, he explained, the elders would claim to have seen her in adultery with a young man—a charge which could get her stoned. Susanna refused, the elders barked their story to the local tribunal and she got the death penalty. Only the cleverness of Daniel, cross-examining the elders and finding two differing accounts, saved her from death. Susanna’s virtue was triumphant. The tableau was a re-creation of a painting of Susann
a at her bath, under the eyes of the scheming elders.

  When the lights went on, Frye caught his breath and felt his heart dissolve in one instant. Cristobel stood at the garden pool, about to step from her robe, her head cocked slightly as if she’d just heard a rustle from the two men spying on her from the trees. It was the angle of her head that caught him, the long gentle plane from ear to shoulder, white in the light and set off by the blue water of the pool. Her hair was tied up loosely, a strand or two escaping down and across her face, almost hiding the eyes that looked to the ground, both innocent and suspecting at once. Something in the angle of her head caught Susanna’s indecision and doubt. Her arms were already lowering the robe, her neck and shoulders already bare. Frye considered the sculpted roundness of her limbs, the uninterrupted perfection of her back, and a leg, barely visible where the loose white material gave way with Cristobel’s step to the water. He barely noted the lurking men, the trees, the bench beside her on which rested three small vessels and a folded towel, or the two servant girls disappearing in the background toward a house. The breeze moved her robe, just slightly, and Frye saw her hair brush her cheek. The lady beside him whispered something, but he ignored her. He hated the sniveling, cretinous elders, though he felt like a third. Any chance you’d like to go to bed with me? He shifted in his seat. What odd compulsion had brought Cristobel to this tableau and its shadows of seduction, rape, betrayal? What’s going through her mind right now, with a thousand elders’ eyes fixed on her body?

  For a moment he swore her gaze wandered across the seats to him, but that was silly. Her leg was imponderably lovely. Was she getting cold? His body felt light and his mind distant, as under hypnosis. I could sit here all night. But the lights began to dim and he watched in genuine sadness as Cristobel’s form lost its clarity and dissolved, slowly vanishing into the dark.

  He met her outside the stage door an hour later. Her hair was still up and she was wearing a loose blue dress, tied at the waist with a sash. Two men he assumed were the elders walked with her, and she said good night to them at the bottom of the steps. They looked at Frye with a protective air, then headed down the sidewalk different ways. Cristobel ran down the stairs, smiling, and threw her arms around him. “Can you believe what Lucia did? It’s just the best thing I could have heard tonight.”

  “It sure is. My jaw dropped when I watched the news.”

  “I’m just so … there’s no way to say. Did you like my piece in the show?”

  “Not bad …”

  She stopped and regarded him, askance. “The rain got our timing off and made everything slippery.”

  “It changed my life, really.”

  “Do you expect me to believe that?”

  “Yes. Get some coffee?”

  “I’d prefer a little motion. All that posing makes me want to move.”

  They walked up Broadway, slick with rain and littered with eucalyptus leaves. The storm had left in its wake a clear dry sky, with stars emerging deep in the west. Cars hissed along the boulevard. Frye noted that the savings-and-loan thermometer read seventy-one. Even from two long blocks away he could hear the rumbling surf, and when a big wave hit it sent tremors up the sidewalk and into his toes. They tickled.

  “Feel that?” she asked.

  “Oh, yes.”

  She took his arm. Frye felt an immense pride as he walked down Broadway with Cristobel, secretly desiring that anyone who’d ever wished him harm could be here for this march of triumph. He would be humble in victory, though: signing autographs, giving advice, laying on hands, and what have you. They crossed Coast Highway and headed up the boardwalk toward Heisler Park.

  “Must be kind of hard playing Susanna, considering the recent past,” he said.

  Her arms stayed in his. “I showed up for the audition, and they offered me Susanna,” she said. “I was shocked. Then I thought about it, read the story in the library, and decided it might be therapeutic. Kind of like you going out on a two-foot day, maybe. Just to get wet again.”

  “That’s it. One step at a time. First night kind of rough?”

  “I wanted to run. The applause helped. It’s all a matter of getting comfortable with myself again. When something like that happens to a woman … well, I felt … unclean. Spoiled and dirty. Somehow you have to get the shame out of your head. Time helps. And putting your toes in the water again. And being made love to by you.”

  “You were beautiful. All I saw was you.” Frye stopped and put his arms around her. “I’m sorry about what I did, what I said. Both times.”

  “I am, too. Sorry you found out I had this obsession about you. I was going to play this very cool. Now, I’m busted.”

  He kissed her. People on the sidewalk had to move around them, but Frye didn’t care. I could get lost in this woman, he thought.

  She broke away and looked at him. “There’s something dark in you right now, Chuck. What happened?”

  They lay on his living room floor and let the warm breeze pass over them. She rested her head on his chest. Frye stared at the ceiling.

  “You can’t keep it all bunched up inside,” she said.

  “I know.”

  A moment later, he was spilling it. The Secret Army, the tape, the tunnels, Eddie and Loc, Minh and Wiggins, Hanoi’s POW revelation, Bennett’s transcontinental grudge match with Colonel Thach. He left out the details, in deference to his brother, his family, his own sense of what you tell someone and what you don’t. “The biggest worry I had last Sunday evening was getting a job,” he said.

  “How come you always think you have to solve it all and fix everything? Seems to me you lay a lot of blame for things right on yourself. That’s either foolishness or arrogance, Chuck. You know that?”

  “Who the hell are you, Toni Grant?”

  He felt the muscles in her jaw tighten. She lay still.

  “Sorry,” Frye said.

  “I know it’s there, Chuck. I can feel it. But what is it? What is it that eats at you so bad?”

  He closed his eyes and felt her head on his chest and smelled her rain-damp hair. He listened to the cars whisking by on Laguna Canyon Road. He could hear the power lines buzzing below, aggravated by the rain. Then, the sounds seemed to fall an octave and all he heard was a faint ringing in his ears. He could see it. He could see her. He could hear the seagulls yapping overhead.

  “I had a sister, Cris. Her name was Debbie and she was a sweet kid. Two years younger than me. Kind of skinny, built like me, Nice smile. Hair like straw. Freckles. Tomboy, I guess. I imagine that she’d have grown into a good woman.”

  Cristobel’s fingers moved through his hair.

  “We were close in a lot of ways. Closer than me and Benny, because he was five years older than me, and you know how older brothers are.”

  “I sure do. They ignore you.”

  “Yeah. Well, Benny taught me to surf and I taught Debbie. Other kids had little league or powder puff or whatever. We had waves. We were close enough to the beach, we could ride down the whole peninsula on our bikes and find where the break was best. All summer that’s what we did. When school was in, we’d get up at six, surf an hour, then make it home for breakfast. After school, back out again if the wind hadn’t picked up too much.”

  “Mike and I had horses. Same kind of thing.”

  “When I look back now, I can see she worshipped me. Me. I just tolerated her, but that’s how brothers treat sisters. She’d always do what I was doing—wear the same kind of clothes, get her hair cut like mine, pick up the slang I got from my friends. I think the first word she learned was bitchin’. Hell, she asked Mom if she could get braces when she was old enough because I had the damned things.”

  Cristobel laughed. “For a while I thought Mike’s pimples were really swell.”

  Frye could see her, peddling beside him on a red Stingray, dragging a surfboard behind her on the wheeled cart he’d made her. “When I went out on the big days, I wouldn’t let her come. She’d scream and bitch and I’d
make Mom keep her home. One day I came back from a six-foot morning at the River Jetty, and Debbie had spray-painted all over my surf posters. Then one day, the swell was up, and I saw Debbie’s bike and board were gone. I went down to the point at Nineteenth Street. Ten foot, solid walls, sets lined up four and five at a time. The current was so strong I watched a guy paddle out at Seventeenth Street and before he got outside, he was four streets down—all the way to the pier. Man, it was awesome just to watch those things come in. Her bike was chained to the trash can and she was already heading out. She was eleven years old.

  “So I went after her. I had to wait five minutes for the set to end just to paddle out. The Whitewater was high enough to keep the goons from going in. There were photographers and a crowd there, just to watch. I got outside and looked back to shore. It felt like I was a mile out, the houses looked like something on a Monopoly board. It was twelve feet. I’d never seen it like that. Corky Caroll was out, and Rolf Arness—Matt Dillon’s son. They still got pictures of that day up in some of the surf shops in Newport. Every place has its Big Wednesday, and that was ours.”

  “Big as Rockpile two mornings back?”

  “It made Rockpile look like a swimming pool.”

  Frye shuddered. “I was thirteen. I’d been surfing the point since I was six. And I’ll tell you, when I got out, I was scared. Debbie was thirty yards away, and I could see how white she was. I told her to go back in, so she paddled away further. The more I yelled, the less she paid any attention. Finally I got sick of screaming and missing waves, so I got my hair up and dropped in. It was second wave of the set, ten feet and I shredded that sucker all the way to shore. It’s the kind of ride you don’t forget. I still haven’t. It was the first time I ever made Surfer magazine.”

  “Not the last.”

  Frye looked up at the ceiling. Cristobel slipped her hand inside his shirt and ran it over his chest.