These refugees in Nam Yao used their hill in the way their ancestors had decreed. Their dead they buried at the summit in order that their souls find the path to heaven more easily. Below the burial grounds they disposed of their garbage and had their latrines—their refuse they kept in a place above them because, Kip was told, in this way on hot days the smell would rise away from where they lived and be carried off by winds. Below the garbage they’d built a shantytown. It ringed the hill in a disarray of misery. And finally, where the land flattened at the foot of the rise, away from the river, was a cistern—deep and wide—which they had dug by hand to collect rainwater.
When Kip first arrived a terrible thing had happened. The week before, a monsoonal deluge had swept through the river valley. The rain had come down not in sheets but walls of water and had, as if under the influence of an evil spirit, floated the bodies of the dead from their shallow graves, and carried them down through the garbage and human mire into the town of huts and hovels, on the crest of a river of death and filth that finally made its way into the communal cistern. It was a scene of inexpressible horror.
“There was nothing I could do but help them rebury their dead and then try to persuade them to move their dump. It was then I started doing this form of meditation, walking around the hill and up it. I didn’t really know what I was doing at first. I just walked. Sometimes I’d stop, if there was someone I could help. But then I’d go on until I reached the burial ground from where I could see across the Mekong into Laos in one direction, and out across the beautiful green hills of Thailand in the other. It didn’t take too many of these walks before I figured out what to do.”
There was a tributary creek that ran about a quarter of a mile from the encampment. Kip persuaded the Thai authorities to let him run a pipe, two-and-a-half-inch PVC pipe, from the tributary, along the ground and up the hill. He got his hands on an old generator and a pump. It took the better part of a month to accomplish this. “The day we switched on the generator and the sump pump, everybody was standing there waiting, watching. It seemed like the water would never come. All you could hear was air hissing out the pipe, like a gurgling sound, then hissing, then silence. It took forever but when the water finally came, and all these faces that I’d never seen smile suddenly began smiling and laughing—if I never did another thing, it was worth living just for that. It was the greatest moment of my life.”
He looks at me and I can feel that I, too, am smiling. It is suddenly quiet, incantations and volley of song are over and the priest has moved to the concrete pulpit to say the third station. I notice that the last segment of Kip’s little finger on his left hand is missing. The greatest moment of his life: after all these estranged years the same possessiveness in me toward Kip is brightly viable. I sit beside him and wait for him to continue.
Nothing’s more fertile than a secret. Secrets father secrets that in turn father more secrets. What is known is barren and marks the end not the beginning. But secrets lust to make more of their kind. Kip is delivering his own inverted sermon, it occurs to me as I hear the priest intone, “Como era en el principio, ahora y siempre.”
Secrets brought him here, not to Chimayó as such, but to this place he was describing to me as the morning went along and the congregants had gathered for another of the hourly devotions, and it would be through some kind of secrecy that he might get back out. The air is scented with smoke still, and the smoke in this valley in New Mexico quite soon becomes for Kip the smoke from a fire in another time and place. It is as if I am with him in Laos as he tells me that he dare not move. He dare hardly breathe.
From one secret to another he had journeyed. It was as if his life were bound together into a single iridescent winding sheet of stealth, so that Kip was always hidden inside a shroud. From one covert place on earth to another. It was second nature to him, though there was nothing secondary about it—more his first nature, this will to move in such clandestine ways. His life was being lived inside an integument, like one of Mary Bendel’s pupae. I remember she called us both chrysalid, once, and though we didn’t understand what she meant, we were wise enough to fear she was onto us. Chrysalid? we wondered, feeling like fools and looked it up in the big dictionary in the library. Chrysalid came from chrysalis, a protective covering, a sheltered state or stage of being or growth. It was an apt image, and I believe the term remains applicable to Kip. Yet even the chrysalis—this quaking life potent yet helpless, wrapped in its own protective cloak—is driven to reveal itself, and once the impatient butterfly bursts forth to take flight and show itself to the world, gaudy as a courtier, it is no longer a secret, but tempts death on its bright wing, and often finds it. Kip shared these penchants.
But how had it come to pass that he was in this clearing, on his side, breathing as quietly as possible, stifling his need to scream? None of our riskiest games might have prepared him for this. All through the night he discovered then rediscovered how far from home he had managed to come. He did not want to dream. He did not want to hallucinate. Was this the distance necessary for him to feel that home was home? Was home what this was all about? Just the kind of questions he did not want to ask himself. Not now, not here. He had never been much of a sleeper in the past. Insomnia would stand him in good stead in this expanse of knee-high cover. But was he awake? Hard to know.
The elephant grass whispered. It told him how exposed he was out here. It told him it was grass, and grass could hide only so much.
Maybe he and the other man should have stayed back in the trees and tangle, but they had understood that their hope of avoiding quick capture was to put as much distance between themselves and the wreckage as they could. They also understood that if they were to be evacuated, it would be possible only from the relative flatness of this rolling field. None of the friendlies would have been able to see let alone reach them under the dense canopy where they went down. This is what Kip thought, and he hoped the grass would understand.
I’ll do my best to help you, the grass promised.
Where was his companion? he wondered, and no sooner had he considered that than he forgot. Have you gone crazy? he asked himself. What did the grass think? And what did the ant in the grass think?
Had he been concussed? Had his helmet failed, or had he not secured it? Too many questions. He could not be sure whether he’d even worn his helmet. He touched his skull and his helmet was not there. Maybe he had lost it when running away from the fracas of metal and hollow clacking of gunfire. In war people died more often from the little mistakes than the grand errors of judgment. A false step, a forgotten detail.
Now he was trying to think of what he had just thought. Hell met, oh yes, the grass had asked him if he’d hell met.
—Talk forwards please, he murmured.
Then he slept, then he woke.
—Yes and no, he told the grass. It was an answer, but of course he had unremembered the question that invited it.
His colleagues had his coordinates, he was almost certain. It was a matter of who found him first, his people or their people. He had nothing to eat but a granola bar, and nothing to drink, and though he was not hungry, he was thirsty. Maybe the ant would bring him something to drink. Ants know how to carry heavy loads. A thimbleful of water, sir? he asked the ant. The ant wiggled its antennae, the grass rippled.
—Forget it, he said.
Maybe he had a toothpick on him. That would alleviate the thirst and help the time along. His fingers worked through the pockets of his flight vest and touched one by one his possessions. They weren’t numerous. His medical kit, his map, his survival knife, his Colt .45 automatic, his bartering gold, his blood chit —a piece of silk folded into a wad with a message printed on it in several languages asking whoever could read it to help the pilot. And here was his pointee-talkee, the phrase book the air attaché had given him back in Vientiane, a bad joke really, the Yeah Right, Dream On book he called it, using the same name he once used, upon his discovery that God was dead, for t
he Bible. The pointee-talkee had English phrases printed on the left-hand pages and Vietnamese and Lao translations on the right, phrases like “I am hurt, please get me to a safe place, you will be rewarded,” phrases that were likely never to save a single soldier. It was common knowledge the enemy did not bother taking prisoners in Laos. Not a matter of sadism but rather convenience, as there were neither contingencies nor facilities for prisoners here. It was understood that if you went down and you were captured, you would not be officially recognized as having had anything to do with Laos. Your biography would be rewound to point of departure from Vietnam and odds were that you would just flat disappear as if you had never existed. Were someone to suggest you’d been fighting in Laos, he would find out just how obtuse our government can be when it wants. Field command wouldn’t know of you. The ambassador is terribly sorry and denies any intelligence of your activities, and would take the opportunity to reiterate that this was a neutral country and we were not engaged in any military operations here. Maybe you were a mercenary, he might suggest, or maybe you were mad. Maybe there was some mistake. Your parents would get a little note saying you were missing in action and that’s about all it would amount to. So much for the pointee-talkee and the blood chit.
Overhead the beautiful stars flickered and aligned themselves into patterns. Kip lay like a child on his back and began to count them. He tried to think of all the different worlds at war up there in the black spaces between the twinkling suns. He wondered if someone were lying in a place foreign to them on one of those worlds, looking out into the universe too, wondering what his fate would be, counting the stars to while away the long, long night. This idea pleased him. Stars were ever-wonderful medicine. As a boy, when he was sick in bed, he would do this, count the many white grains of light in the heavens above his window. The stars had always been our friends. Soon the early mist would dampen them along the horizon, then put them out one by one.
Was there poetry on those distant worlds? Blake had never seen these constellations, had he? More questions—or was that the grass speaking again. No, it was he who was thinking. He thought, It wasn’t Blake but Milton who went blind. Milton had two or was it three daughters and they wrote down his poems as he dictated. And Blake? How many daughters did Blake have? And what was it like to have daughters? Kip didn’t care, not really, not then and there. What would Thoreau have done in the same situation? Answer, Thoreau would never have got himself into this situation in the first place. Kip didn’t smile, but were he in less pain, he might have smiled. He was trying to stay awake and alive, pushing his consciousness along as if it were the Sisyphean stone, up the long hill, and up the long hill again when it rolled back down, as it did over and over.
He slept, and then he woke.
The ant had brought him water and as he drank the ant spoke of Urizen and Lucifer. I never would have thought you’d know so much about such things, Kip marveled. The ant demurred. When Kip thanked him for the water, the grass laughed a little, and the ant began to laugh along with it. You’re drinking air, fool, the grass said, finally. When Kip reached out to crush the ant, it was gone, of course. And when he looked at the blades of grass he saw that they were only blades of grass.
Impudence and imprudence landed you in this mess, motherfucker, he scolded himself. But what passion was there in a life lived with prudence? It was Blake who wrote that only Incapacity would fall in love with Prudence. The line, could he remember it? Prudence was rich, it began. No, it went Prudence was a rich, ugly old maid courted by Incapacity. Yes, he could draw it up from memory—his tenacious, slipshod memory—and this meant that the accident hadn’t robbed him of that part of his mind, but what book was it from? In a moment the answer to his question would come. All he had to do was wait and it would rise to the surface like a message in a bottle carried by obedient waves to his tempested beach. He wondered how could he remember such eccentric fragments? Surely, he reasoned, this was the first time in history that someone lay wounded just here, in this particular wild field of hissing grass, hissing like surf over sand, who conjured a line from the English poet William Blake to anesthetize an evil night. His incapacitation promised to be temporary only, and given he had tried never to court prudence he wondered whether the time to begin was now. An old maid, perhaps, but what had Prudence accomplished to get rich? Pondering this would occupy a quarter of an hour, if not more. Keep out the bad thoughts for fifteen minutes because fifteen minutes was eternity. He closed his eyes, having realized that he’d forgotten which star was the last one he counted.
They had assured him he would never make it through the night up here if he were downed. In most ways it was worse to be shot down over Laos than North Vietnam. There you became a prisoner of war and were reduced by interrogation, torture, humiliation, the gradual destruction of your ego and your will. Here, when you went in you could cry “Mayday Mayday” over the radio for as long as you liked but chances were you were on your own. They might well hear your cries, but often there was nothing they could do. He could still see the long face of the man who, with a rheumy wink, told him that, back in Vientiane. He’d said it without inflection, —Not even a posthumous medal for those back home since officially you’re no longer a member of the service. . . . No, I tell you sir, the best advice I got for you is don’t get hit.
Where was the grass? He rolled on to his side again. Here I am. Good, the grass was again articulate. Where was the ant?
Fifteen minutes, Kip. One–one thousand, two–one thousand, so the seconds crept just as they had when we used to play hide-and-seek down in the summer canyons. Say, how did Prudence come by her fortune? Hard to guess, quite a question. Three–one thousand. He thought about it not because he cared to know the answer—he decided there was none, Willy Blake had erred—but because given all the reasons there were to abandon hope, you still hoped, and you didn’t want to hope, and so you blocked out hope by answering impossible questions. But hope seeped through and stained you anyway. You still pressed your defiant ear hard to the sky to hear the signs of your salvation.
So what happened here?
Before the catastrophe he had stretched forward in the cockpit to landmark his position, note the coordinates on the inside of the windshield with his grease pencil in case the crash would knock him witless. If he could still read and if his UHF survival radio—the field radio that was his “hope chest” (he liked naming these things)—were functional, he could call in his latitude and longitude and try to summon a rescue chopper. The impact had mangled the plane but not caused a fire. They’d already made their run and were on their way back, so fortunately the fuel was low when they took the hosing. He knew where he was. Lima Site 21, Sam Thong, he could make it on foot, if he were lucky enough not to be seen and taken, in two days, three at the outside. Dear Prudence would dictate staying put and waiting for air to come and retrieve him. He would make the decision to move but didn’t. He resolved to wait, not be cavalier, and the line from Blake began to persecute him again.
Kip had never been shot down before. His aircraft was, he estimated, half a kilometer north of where he lay. He couldn’t remember exactly how he got from the jungle to this field, the adrenaline must have powered his legs. Neng Kha Yang, his Hmong backseater, was conscious on impact, more than conscious, had helped him out of the fragile, broken Bird Dog. They had sprinted together through the thicket until they reached a flatland. Neng Kha Yang had gone out to patrol the area, not to secure it but get a better sense of the immediate topography, while Kip lay in this shallow cover, awaiting morning, not daring to sleep but also oddly doubtful whether he even was conscious. He wondered what was next. Would a Spooky gunship appear in predawn before the enemy found him? the enemy who he heard now and again, as close as a few hundred yards away, having fanned out from the downed aircraft in search of its crew? Would our people bring in one of those Psyops soundships to hover, and broadcast at full volume to point of distortion the music of breaking glass, or women weeping, or b
agpipes wheezing, or babies screaming? We did that to torment the enemy in Vietnam, in the theater east of here. Psychological combat. Nobody knew whether or not it worked but we derived a certain pleasure from the savagery of the gambit.
No, there was no such backup in Laos. A bat drove peeping through the dark. Bats here, he thought. Was that acrid stink cordite, or just the stink of fear pouring off him? Or was it napalm. No, that could not be right. No nape here. It was terror and nothing more he smelled.
He could remember a first lieutenant, thin peaked fellow with dilated pupils, who once threatened to cut off a prisoner’s nose back near Can Thó. The boy had sneezed in the lieutenant’s face during an interrogation. Prisoner stank of terror. Smelled like this present stink.
—Leave him alone, Kip said.
—Fuck off, the lieutenant said.
—He’s sick, look at him.
—He’s about to get a whole lot sicker.
Kip had learned to turn away from situations like this. They never had happy endings. The kid’s fate was sealed and Kip knew that arguing with the lieutenant was a waste of time at best, and at worst could turn into something ugly between himself and the marine.
—You soft on slopes? the lieutenant pushed.
Kip said nothing.
—I tell you what. You like his nose so much, I’m gonna make you a little present.
The prisoner, understanding nothing, sat with his mouth open. His eyes darted back and forth between Kip and the lieutenant.
—You’re cracked, man, and with that Kip backed away toward the door of the hootch.
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