The Jade Emperor

by Suzanne Jenkins

  Led to a makeshift dining hall set up for US troops, a meal of grilled steak, rice, canned fruit cocktail and wilted lettuce with oily dressing awaited. One soldier grimaced and asked while holding up a lettuce leaf, “What is this crap?”

  “Eat it and enjoy it,” their leader said. “It will be the last time you get anything fresh for a year.”

  After they ate, another man in uniform came to Steve’s group telling them it was time to go. When they left the air-conditioned airport, the atmosphere socked Steve in the face, heat suffocating him, sweat and grime dripping into his eyes as he juggled his duffle bag, and followed the guy in charge, who was leading them to what appeared to be the flight line. The screeching of jet brakes as planes landed and the scream of engines as they took off were deafening.

  “This is your hooch,” he yelled, pointing at Steve.

  The small group looked on in dismay. Having heard the word during their introduction to Vietnamese speech, the hooch was a small structure, less than eight by four feet, made of sandbags and covered with a tarp. The hooch was big enough for one cot. Steve would spend the night alone, terrified.

  Although they were in the city, where they’d been told there was no fighting, the sounds of mortars and rapid sequence firing mixed with the flight line noise and voices shouting kept him awake all night.

  And the mosquitos - the mosquitos made such a huge impression on Steve, after the experience, he’d slathered his children with bug repellent before allowing them to go out in the yard in summer, one of his few caring deeds toward them.

  The next morning, his arms and face were swollen with bites. The sun wasn’t fully at the horizon when the leader came to wake the men. Their group gathered at the flight line, and before long, a small prop plane landed and taxied closer to them.

  “This plane is especially for you,” they were told. “Goin’ to your new home.”

  Walking across the scorched pavement to the small plane, Steve felt sick. Tired, dirty and hungry, he couldn’t imagine what the next hours would bring. During the short flight to the base, he’d think of Kelly for the first time in over twenty-four hours.

  Closing his eyes, he avoided the images of her naked, especially when she was pregnant with the beginning of a belly showing. She was so proud of it, too; that was something he couldn’t understand. It was almost obscene, the protuberance that shifted with the movements of the fetus. He referred to it as a fetus, not the baby or his baby.

  “Look!” she’d say, arms stretched out at her sides.

  His response, diverting his eyes, trying to be kind; “Aren’t you going to get cold?”

  Lamaze was in vogue at the time, a new, safe way to have a baby, and Steve refused to participate in any way with the birth, egged on by his father, who spurned such things as unmanly. Refusing to have sex with her once she started to show initiated another lifelong pattern; Kelly sniveling next to him in bed while he ignored her, falling right to sleep.

  Instead, he’d think of her during those last hours of his leave before going overseas, hovering, bringing him food, trying to serve him, to take care of him. Wanting to be left alone, he finally exploded.

  “Jesus Christ! Back off, Kelly. This is my last chance to relax, and you won’t leave me alone! Leave me alone!”

  Wishing he could sleep on the couch, he forced himself to stay next to her in bed, but he didn’t touch her. The next morning, Major Dailey offered to take him to the airport, and as much as Steve despised his father-in-law, he took him up on it, hoping his presence would help his wife and mother keep some dignity. It was hopeless, his mother and Kelly crying and hanging on him, baby Augie even looking confused.

  Finally, when it was time to board, the flight attendant took pity on Steve and ushered him on first, calling for all the servicemen to board ahead of the other passengers, which was not something regularly done for the troops during the Vietnam War.

  After they landed at the base, Steve suffered from sensory overload, the steaming jungle at the edge of the China Sea unlike anything he’d ever experienced before. The barracks came next, and seeing where he’d spend the next year of his life, his harsh, demanding feelings toward Kelly softened, as his misery led to him feeling empathy for the first time.

  A trip through the dispensary came next, where nothing was said about the mosquito bites except you’ll get used to it, and then lunch. The chow hall was in a building separated from the barracks and bathhouse by a concrete wall six feet high. Moving through the gate single file, Steve had found a psychic place he’d return to regularly, referred to as his zone-out, blindly following along, doing whatever he was told, numb, too tired to resist, and no choice but to comply.

  The food blurred into two segments: a gray meat in gravy with canned vegetables, and grilled beef. Rice served with every meal would be the culprit of several bouts of food poisoning his barracks endured.

  During the early days of his tour, writing Kelly first thing each morning became a ritual that would be the only connection to his life in the States. Everything else that totaled the here and now was Vietnam.

  While in this trance, he met Lee Nguyen, who became life for him again. Whatever he did in Vietnam was completely separate from the life of Steve Boyd, husband of Kelly Boyd. The two men were different human beings. Kelly’s husband existed long enough to write her a newsy, rarely emotional letter once a day.

  Sergeant Steve Boyd worked on the flight line, played cards, and drank beer with his co-workers, and when Lee was available, went to her hovel outside the base and had sex. The rest of the time, any interaction they had was while he was at the NCO club where she worked, which included a daily sexual encounter somewhere hidden on base.

  The few minutes a day spent with Lee, with her simple words and all her focus on Steve, took the edge off his nearly paralyzing fear - attacks on base, mortars whizzing by his head, explosions on the flight line, helicopters coming in with wounded or dead on board.

  The physical structures on base, including the flight line made of metal, set his teeth on edge. Even the smells - overwhelmingly of jet fuel, of creosote, of earth and sweat - made his gorge rise. The already thin boy quickly lost weight so that he became a shadow of himself. His fatigues hung on him, the belt around his waist cinched in to keep his pants from falling around his ankles.

  Watching the perilous effect his new environment had on him, Lee cooked for Steve, bringing care packages for him on base, having to share with the guards who searched her belongings. Soon, his weight stabilized on the new diet of dumplings and fresh fish and vegetables.

  Woven in with the attacks, the dead bodies, the heat and stench, and grueling twelve-hour shifts, Lee staked her claim for part of his free time, and the boy fell in love with her, ignoring the day when he’d have to leave to go back to the States and serve out the rest of his commitment to the armed forces, and to Kelly Boyd.

  When the time came, they were inconsolable, clinging to each other, the threat of court-martial the only thing that Steve reacted to. He had to leave her forever.

  In his simplicity, Steve never thought of getting her contact information. Lee was in Vietnam, and he would be in Michigan with Kelly.

  After their reconciliation, the first night they spent together in the Clock Motel, holding each other close, they talked about that omission.

  “We could have written each other every day,” he said. “I was such a dummy.”

  “Me too,” Lee said. “I tried to find a way to tell you I was having your baby, but Baker came around after you left, and I was afraid if I asked him for help finding you, when he left, I be stranded. So I lie to him.”

  “How’d that happen?” Steve asked, a little jealousy creeping in; he was glad Ted Baker was dead.

  “He came around the club, just like you,” she said, not covering up any of the sordidness for his sake.

  It was better to get it all out in the open so they could deal with it.

  “I had sex with him right away so I cou
ld lie about Titan,” she said, ignoring his wince. “It was the only way. The South Army was losing battles with the Vietcong, and the Americans were leaving. He get us out of the country before the fall of Saigon.”

  “Wait, you had Titan in Vietnam?” Steve asked, the horror of what it might have been like for her if she’d been forced to stay there, if Ted Baker hadn’t pulled strings or whatever he did to get her and his son out of the country magnified.

  “Yes, I had him at the clinic on base,” she said.

  Steve was beyond speech. He got out of bed, pacing, running his hands through his hair. He wasn’t a big letter writer, but he did keep in touch with a few men from his company, and no one had said anything about Lee, in spite of their relationship being very public on base.

  “I guess everyone knew you went with Ted immediately after I left,” Steve said. “I’m not judging you; I’m just trying to understand.”

  “They all knew,” she said. “Remember, I wanted him to believe it was his child. His baby.”

  Watching him pace back and forth, Lee’s anxiety was growing. “Stevie, I knew things were getting bad. We heard the rumors. If Baker didn’t get me and Titan out, we would have died there. He support us for a whole year in Laos. It took that long for my visa to come through.”

  He grabbed her hands. “Lee, I am so grateful to Ted Baker. I swear to you, I have no ill will toward him. Our past is past. When I think of what you were going through…who watched baby Titan when you worked?” His concern for Titan contrasted to his apathy about who babysat Kelly’s children.

  “Other women with children,” she said. “We watched each other’s kids. It was the way all women did it. You watch my kid, I watch yours. I was lucky because Baker got me and Titan out in time.

  “I sent money to my family, money Baker gave me. I have sisters in Houston. There’s a big Vietnamese community there. The weather like Vietnam, too, hot and humid, not like Chicago, where you freeze to death. But Baker live in Chicago, so me and Titan, we live in Chicago.”

  The news that she had family in Houston bewildered Steve. He didn’t know anyone outside of a few cousins in Tennessee who didn’t live in Michigan, and now Lee was telling him there were others from Vietnam, people she knew and loved, living in the States.

  As often as he could, Steve had visited Lee off base at her mother’s house, a dilapidated hut built along a shallow ravine. The hut was attached to a string of huts that shared a common back wall. Lee’s mother was old by Vietnamese standards, at least sixty, and she looked every year of it. Steve didn’t wonder about her age; he assumed Lee was his age and her mother had a baby late in life.

  The town, Qui Nhơn, had been a nice, quaint fishing village before the Americans came. That was the locals’ story. Although they didn’t have to hide Steve when he visited, they didn’t make a production out of it either, whispering, keeping the woven bamboo curtain at the door down. The mother and younger sisters facilitated Steve’s visit when they could, making excuses that they had to go to market, or go down to the river to wash clothes, everyone scrambling so the unmarried daughter could have privacy.

  The squalor Lee lived in didn’t register with Steve. He was too young, romanticizing everything about her. During the monsoon, the ravine filled with water; a river of mud, sewage and debris flowed past the door of the hut. Everything was wet - sheets, clothes, the walls dripping. Fungus grew everywhere, even on his feet.

  The last time he visited, Vietcong were spotted coming into town. Lee’s mother rushed in from the street. A few words of Vietnamese he understood - Cong, kill, guns - and he got on his feet.

  “Up on the roof!” Lee cried, pushing a chair out of the doorway, into the street.

  He jumped up on the thatch, Lee directing him to get to the rear of the hut and cover up with more thatch. Petrified, it wasn’t until he heard the rapid staccato of machine-gun fire that he realized he’d left Lee and her mother down below, at the mercy of the enemy. They weren’t looking for civilians, however. In the past, Lee and her mother had treated the soldiers to tea and cake, and were therefore safe as long as the soldiers didn’t see an American uniform. South Vietnamese soldiers were their target, and as luck would have it, an entire detachment sat at a small café that afternoon, taking a rare break and ultimately losing their lives.

  When the melee was over, Lee rushed outside with the chair again and called for Steve to get down. The feeling of powerlessness stayed with him long after the experience. He didn’t linger at the hut for much longer that day, weaving his way back to base by sticking close to buildings, staying out of sight whenever possible.

  Now, in the comfort of Ted Baker’s modest brick bungalow in the center of Chicago, Steve couldn’t keep his hands off Lee, wanting her close at all times, the memory of longing for her vivid.

  “Stevie, you suffocate me!” she complained, pushing him off.

  “Get used to it,” he said with rare insistence. “I keep thinking how close we came to never seeing each other again. My mind is made up. I’m retiring. You and I are getting married as soon as my divorce comes through, and I’m never letting you out of my sight again.”

  Chapter 12

  The sun shone bright, reflecting off the piles of snow, and even sunglasses couldn’t help against the blinding light. In years past, Kelly would be occupied with the needs of her family, but on this morning, there was nothing to interfere. With Karen busy having a coffee date, Kelly was at a loss for what to do. Bundling up against the weather, she wasn’t going to run today. Instead, she’d take her time walking around town.

  Approaching the little coffee shop crowded with weekend diners, people enjoyed the sunshine, sitting outside like it was a summer day, as only Michiganders will do. In the past, she’d keep walking, too embarrassed to go in alone and not wanting to embarrass Reggie. Now that was all changed. She was alone for good. Was she going to continue to deny herself pleasure because of pride? It was now or never. Entering the coffee shop, the smells were heady and enticing, and there were several people inside, sitting alone. It wasn’t a big deal, evidently. Getting a cup of coffee and a flaky pastry, she took it back outside and sat in a freezing metal chair. The steam rose from the surface of the coffee as she took a sip. She’d lived in town all her life, yet this wasn’t an experience she’s taken the time to have. Perhaps freedom from all the prior constraints - work, a husband who hated to leave the house, (at least with her,) and her own fears - allowed her to relax.

  It was enjoyable sitting there, her mind a blank. The sun came around to the front of the shop, and she actually felt warm. Reluctantly, she got up when it appeared people were waiting for tables. Window-shopping alone, she spent more time gazing at interesting things, no one hurrying her along with their own agendas. Not far from the coffee shop was a used book-store. Hesitating for just a second, it was the kind of place where Kelly would often lose control, stacking piles of books on the counter, having to make trips to the car. Since she was walking today, she’d try to restrain herself. The shop kitty rubbed against Kelly’s legs, purring. She made her way to the back of the store where the history books resided, her guilty pleasure. Although there were comfortable chairs, she stood, leafing through one dusty book after another.

  “Hey! I wondered where you were,” Lisa said.

  Kelly looked up, her beautiful daughter smiling at her. “Wow, you look all glowy today!” she said, leaning in for a kiss. “What brings you downtown?”

  “I was bored, you weren’t home, and Ben and Liz are headed to her mother’s house, so here I am. What do you have there? I need a new author,” she said, eyes zeroing in on a fiction shelf across the shop.

  It was nice; for the next half hour they browsed in companionable silence. Kelly couldn’t help her critique; when Lisa was preoccupied, she took a good look at her daughter’s figure. For all the walking she and Ben did, it didn’t look like she’d lost any weight. Feeling guilty, Kelly knew she’d contributed to the void in the family’s lif
e by placing too much emphasis on food. Lisa, Reggie, and lately, Alice too struggled with their weight. Trying to shake it off, she knew she could place the blame for all her children’s weaknesses on her own shoulders if she wasn’t careful.

  “I’m going to take this one,” Lisa said, walking to her mother, reading the description. “‘A raw, sexy thriller.’ That sounds like it’s right up my alley.”

  “I might take this, but maybe I won’t,” she said, holding up Walthrum’s Vietnamese Digest. “It’s too late.”

  “Why is it too late?” Lisa asked, concerned.

  “Dad’s not coming back because I’ve decided to take a sudden interest in Vietnam.”

  “Mom, Lee has liver cancer. Dad told Ben, and he told me,” Lisa said, walking to the cash register.

  “I know all about it. I had the misfortune of being in the car when she told your father.”

  “If she dies, well, you get my point,” Lisa said.

  “Honey, he’ll stay with Titan if she dies. Although I’m not ready to announce it to the world, Daddy leaving me might be a gift.”

  They paid for their books and left the overheated store, the cold, fresh air intoxicating after the dusty gloom of the bookshop.

  “Do you want to have coffee?” Lisa asked, nodding to the café.

  “Sure,” Kelly answered. “I was already there today, but I’m ready to make up for lost time.”

  “Let’s make this our tradition,” Lisa said. “I have gossip, by the way. Alice told me Aunt had a coffee date with one of Max’s co-workers, and it went so well they’re driving into the city to go to Eastern Market for lunch.”

  “She did? I wondered why I didn’t hear from her,” Kelly said, feeling left out.

  They took their coffee outside. The crowds had thinned out, the sun back behind the clouds and the temperature dropping.

  “Would you take Daddy back if Lee dies?” Lisa asked.