Jessica reminded herself, when these regrets crowded her head, as they did more and more now, that wartime romances—at least as she had understood them through the movies—often were fraught with problems. She remembered the Preston Sturges picture The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek that was supposed to be a comedy but which she didn’t find funny at all. It was a campy classic, and she had gone to see it by herself, in fact with the thought that it might cheer her up, or at least distract her from her own problems.
A room full of newspapermen has heard the report of a miracle. Mayhem, pandemonium, everyone talking at once. The telephone lines are singing, —Miracle down at Morgan’s Creek, there’s a miracle down at Morgan’s Creek. What was it, what was the miracle? They all want to know. Jessica settled into the plush violet velveteen of the seat to enter into the world of Betty Hutton and Eddie Bracken. Flashback to 1943, late spring or early summer, a time when Jess was only a year old, the foliage full in the black-and-white print, the war storming overseas. The sweet patriotic youth of Morgan’s Creek looking sharp in their starched uniforms, under orders to ship out early next morning, determined to have themselves one devil of a farewell ball. Betty with her bright smile and coquette’s manners, and Eddie whom the service rejected because whenever he was nervous—which was almost always—he began to see black spots before his eyes. Here is the problem. Eddie loves Betty, Betty loves the boys. Betty’s father refuses her permission to attend the dance, so Betty arranges to go to the movies with Eddie. But Betty is just using the date with reliable Eddie as a ruse to trick her father. Once she’s left the house and is safely out of sight, she ditches her nervous suitor—tactfully telling him she will pick him up after the movie is over, and borrowing his car in order to drive to the dance. Eddie, poor fool, complies. Hands in pockets he disappears into the moviehouse.
The party. Many drunken and happy faces. Betty dances and dances the evening away with one anonymous, dashing soldier after another. Somehow during the night a group of them, boys and girls, reeling with the spiked punch, gets it in mind to drive to the nearest justice of the peace, and all get married. It is accomplished in a haze. Betty, in the morning light, still plastered, swings by the moviehouse to pick up loyal Eddie, who’s been sleeping on a concrete bench. The front fender of his jalopy is bashed and the seats are bedecked with paper ribbons, decorations from the dance. Eddie, ever patient if a bit nonplussed, drops her off at home. It is only later, when Betty is recounting to her younger sister the hilarious events of the evening, and her narrative comes to the part where a bunch of them blindly drove off to get hitched, that a shadow of dismay crosses her face. She glances down at the ring on her finger and nearly faints. She can remember getting married but cannot remember her husband’s name. What a fine mess. And that’s not all. She soon comes to believe she’s pregnant. How can she keep her father from finding out that she went to the soldier’s dance after all? What is she to do? It doesn’t take her long to figure out the answer. Why, she’ll get Eddie to marry her, of course. Eddie will have to take the blame for this unfortunate pregnancy, but Eddie’s enough a swell kind of boy to agree to a little thing like that. Eddie will understand.
Jessica left the theater before the film was over. She didn’t stay to find out what the miracle was, because if she believed in miracles before she saw this movie, she certainly didn’t believe in them now that she had. Miracles were fools’ fiction, panacea for the thick, the dim, the stubborn. Betty disgusted her because Betty was selfish, and Eddie disgusted her because Eddie was selfless. No, she thought, there was no more a miracle to be celebrated at Morgan’s Creek than there was in New York. The deep insolence of patriotism was what irritated her most about the movie, that the boys shipping off to their uncertain fates on the battlefield should be exonerated—if only for a night—from responsibility for the bedlam they leave behind.
It was hot in the streets. Thick humidity clamped down on the night people, of whom there were many, couples here and there just ambling along, individuals sitting on stoops. Jessica didn’t want to go home yet and found herself walking toward Central Park. Haze hung in the trees like blurred gray webbing. She drifted without purpose until she found a bench. Images from the Sturges film replayed themselves on a warm, low screen of mist for her, and she had no trouble summoning an image of the boy who stood before the justice of the peace with Betty and said, “I do,” in a slurred voice, “Ahy thoo,” like a solemn sneeze, and as she did she changed his face to that of Kip. The imaginary portrait was more disturbing than she might have expected. It wasn’t that his countenance was distorted: she hadn’t twisted him into a monster. Quite the opposite. It was simply Kip she saw projected against the sheet of night haze, Kip neither smiling nor frowning, not quite looking her in the eye but not looking away either. She wanted to ask him something and he looked at her in such a way that she knew he had no answer for her.
—Damn you, she whispered at his miasmic face.
When she came home I was awake. It was as if she left one movie and walked straight into another.
—You all right? I asked.
I followed her from the front room to the doorway to her, or rather, their room. She pulled out a suitcase from the closet, theirs. There was a domesticity established between Jessica and myself that allowed me to trail along behind her without giving much thought to her possible desire for privacy. If she wanted to be left alone, it was understood that she’d simply say so. She hadn’t answered my question.
—Well?
—Well what?
She was staring at the chest of drawers as if shocked by it, somehow, as if it were most unfamiliar.
—I said, Are you all right?
—No, I’m not all right.
—You mind if I ask you what you’re doing?
She’d broken whatever spell had come over her and begun to pull clothing from the chest. A heavy white cable-knit sweater was packed, then unpacked.
—Jessica? What are you doing?
—I’m going over there. She didn’t look up at me, was on her hands and knees now in the closet rummaging through a clutter of shoes, both Kip’s and her own.
—Over where? I asked with some innocence.
—Vietnam, she said. —To Saigon, that’s where.
—Saigon, I said, voice flattened by the variety of responses I felt. How I envied Kip at that moment. Who was he to deserve this devotion, or deference or homage or passion or allowance? I managed to say, with broader voice, —He’s not in Saigon, Jessica.
—I’m going to find him and he’s going to know.
—You already wrote him, give it time. He maybe hasn’t even got the letter yet.
—I want him to know.
—He’ll know without you going there to tell him.
She said, —It’s hot in Saigon, right?
Summoning the presence not to say something catty, I said something silly. —Don’t you need some kind of special visa or something? You can’t just pack a suitcase and go to Saigon.
Silly or not, this slowed her down. She appeared forlorn and frail in the yellow light that gave from the closet in a downcast column, and my eyes underwent a strange sea change of sorts. Rather than gazing on her with the lonesome empathy of an unrequited lover, I found myself staring at her with open anger.
—What?
—I said you can’t just get on a flight to Saigon, just like that.
She looked at me for the first time since she’d come in. My voice must have produced the words in different timbre. Her pupils expanded toward the edges of her irises, were so commodious that I felt as if I might fall into them if I stared at her long enough. —Are you all right? she asked.
I ignored this and said, —There’s a war on, Jessica, remember?
She laughed, but soundlessly, and I will never forget the shape of her lips, turned outward into a wave neither frown nor smile but with elements of both, her whole face broken into a contortion, her forehead furrowed with drifts of parallel lin
es, her eyes welling into tears, which never flowed easily with Jessica.
—Jess, I said, helpless as a scolded child.
It was as if she drew the tears back into herself; she would not cry, nor laugh. Her face was once more hers. —South Vietnam’s our ally, isn’t it? I’m sure citizens can go there. Tomorrow I’ll get a visa, and then I go. I can’t live like this.
—You can’t live like this, I echoed, but she didn’t hear me, or if she did, she wasn’t able to detect my irony.
Nothing more was exchanged that night between us. I left her to her preparations and craziness, and back in my room, behind the closed door, made a pact with myself to move out again—this time for good—when she was gone. Withdrawal was the only path toward sanity here, I assured myself. To persevere in the face of her attachment to Kip seemed immoral, I assured myself. This time I would take all my belongings with me. She could find someone else to cover half the rent, it wouldn’t be so hard to do. Left as is, the roles we’d assumed would lead us to unavoidable sadness, and I told myself I didn’t want to learn to loathe Kip any more than I already had. It wasn’t right. I had to give all three of us a reprieve. I was sick of being ashamed at all my gestures of duplicity. And I could sense that now I was at the outer bounds of my patience with Jessica, too. Though I might not want to admit it, I was on the very verge, myself, of exploding. God knows, if I were a shrewder man, I’d have abandoned this mess a long time ago. It had to end.
That night, despite the droning mosquito that drew a vortex in the darkness of my room, despite the ponderous summer heat, I slept a dreamless and benign sleep.
Back in Long Tieng he would sleep too, sleep for several days in the Raven hootch. When he awakened he got up and that seemed to be the end of it. Kha Yang was ready to fly again as soon as his partner wanted. They went up later that same morning. Kha Yang noticed that their experience on the ground hadn’t made the American more reserved or cautious. If anything, the good-luck star over his head was brighter than before, and he proceeded with greater grace and accuracy and abandon. He would be back to his sixteen-hour days within the week.
So how had he gotten there? I want to know.
The stories come fast, and to me they are so singular in their way that I find myself forgetful about how awestruck I should be at the fact that their narrator and protagonist is here in the person of my oldest friend, my daughter’s father, my wife’s ex-lover, a man I thought I would never lay eyes on again, someone better forgotten, it often seemed to me. But we are here. And what Kip is telling me I am envisioning with a kind of charged clarity that is hard to fathom, and harder to explain. Spring light, desert air, the valley filled with believers, the magic of Chimayó and its inexplicable purity—these contribute to my own sense of the deep importance of this meeting between two men who have been strangers to one another and at the same time intimates, even counterparts like gender-same yin and yang, like the light of chiaro and dark of oscuro that characterizes an old master painting.
We sit, we speak, we listen. We do this with unwonted urgency. I want to remember everything. He wants me to remember, and I know that though I would try, I might never hold on to all of it. It dawns on me that I am hearing the history of the other half of my life for the first time. The only time. It seems, too, that by giving me that other half Kip senses he will survive somehow, intact and fulfilled. He says, “I was discouraged beyond any concept of discouragement I’d ever had before. There aren’t words for it. Demoralized is too optimistic. Depressed is too cheerful. Bored to tears, bored to death, beyond death even.”
Deeply, unutterably discouraged. Before Laos and Long Tieng, existence was an unexpected grind. After all he had gone through to become a pilot, here he sat bored as bother in the sultry sun and the deep humidity, on a pitted concrete slab that may once have been a tennis court, next to the remains of a small building—some sort of clubhouse, or garden shed—that had rotted down to its stone chaff of a couple of broken walls. Southernmost South Vietnam. Here he lay back in his own private getaway on a decaying mattress and listened to warped, scratchy records and tried to get himself to learn Vietnamese, a language that but for a few words and phrases evaded him, and perfected his tan. Some might envy his position down in Ca Mau, precisely because nothing was happening. But it was different to wish for calm and to be caught in calm. Kip was tired, exhausted not from physical exertion or mental stress, but from inactivity. Enervation had set in like rust, or mold.
Can Thó, the nearest major military base, was some two hundred kilometers to the north. Between Ca Mau and Can Thó were rivers and jungle and fields. Hong Dan and Go Quao were the only villages of any size you might overfly between them. Compared to the north there was little activity in this region anymore and command wanted it to stay that way. Hence the strategic value of peaceful Ca Mau, at least on paper, on maps. But to be stationed here was, for Kip, a terrible detention. Already he was softening. He drank too much with the others. He slept too long. He’d even taken up smoking—a habit he had always despised in the past, perhaps because his father had been a chain-smoker, and anything his father had done was to be avoided. The cigarette occupied his hands, the pouch and papers, the expertise involved in rolling one’s own. The burning in his lungs, which bothered him, was even deemed somehow valuable in breaking the deathly dragging boredom, in that it gave him something to concern himself with—should he stop smoking, or not, and if so when, today or tomorrow? Well, it was a problem he would have to think about.
The detachment set up in what seemed to have been a monastery, or an old French hotel—rundown now but clearly once a place, if not of splendor, of certain amenities. Architectural details there were few and those were the worse for wear. The balustrade leading from lobby to the floor above was of ornate molded wrought iron capped with a teak rail. A chandelier in the dining room collected dust but still threw off translucent reds and purples and blues through its many glass prisms. Guest rooms where the officers bivouacked had small balconies, each fitted out with more of the same fanciful wrought iron. The original furniture must have been stolen, Kip figured, before we got here. Now, but for tables in the bar and some chairs whose fabric was haggard and cushions fatigued, the place stood pretty empty. What furnishings existed were standard-issue Army gear. Cots in the rooms, drab olive blankets meant for another war in another climate, folding chairs. Radio and other communication equipment had been set up in what used to be the manager’s quarters. Like Kip, all the current residents of the hotel were American military, and like him most were unhappy about the noncontact assignment they had drawn. Morale was low, frustration was high. The couple of men who weren’t upset by all this stasis had already seen some action, already been through shooting incidents, and could speak with authority, had stories to tell. They considered the hotel a nice respite, a place to fill out papers, drink in the evening, relax. A tropical country club fallen on hard times.
—Hey, one said, what’s the rush? You’re gonna see more than you ever wanted to see in no time.
—Not at this rate I won’t, said one of the new arrivals.
The first man continued, —Over in the U Minh forest, over there west of Ca Mau, over toward the coast? Over there they got a war on. U Minh’s a triple-canopy forest, doesn’t get more dense.
—Triple-canopy? asked Kip. This was a story he hadn’t heard before.
—Trees peaking at three levels. Short trees, medium, then your top cover of tall trees—triple canopy. The forest is so thick, you can’t see what’s going on down on the ground, which makes it perfect headquarters for the bad guys. So one day there’s a bunch of us talking about this damn triple canopy and how we got to find a solution to it and we come up with this scheme, see. What we’re going to do is, we decide the best way to handle this situation is to burn it down.
—What?
—Burn it down, from a triple- to a zippo-canopy forest. So we get together with some C-123 jocks we’d met at the Can Thó O Club and one Su
nday we get some old condemned jet fuel and we load it in drums, bring it down, and we fly over and dump barrels and barrels of this jet fuel, and set it on fire. Let me tell you. That was one fire. Beautiful bitching old mother of a fire, beautiful. But what happens is we light it so good that it starts making such an updraft, it causes a thunderstorm to start in the humid air, unstable air there, a freak rain, and what happens but it rains so hard, it puts out the goddamn fire!
The man laughed, and the others joined him but none of the neophytes felt differently about their wretched lot in life. Kip, who neither laughed nor asked the man any further questions, in fact knew that forest. Whenever he got tired of sunning himself out on the concrete at the outskirts of town, whenever he wearied of his thoughts and the same old songs on the plastic portable turntable, he would take one of the planes up and just fly around looking for something to do, all the time monitoring the various ground radio channels—calling in to command posts to see if they needed anything checked out.
Once he had flown out in that direction and there was a Coast Guard ship whose captain wanted to fire his guns at something, get in some activity on the day, and Airborne Command radioed Kip and asked him if he had any time available, and Kip said, —Sure, sure, while thinking, What else do I have available? and they gave Kip a frequency and a call sign to contact the ship, and this captain asked him if he had targets, he had some boys on board who wanted to shoot their guns.
—You want to shell anything in particular? asked Kip.
—Put us on whatever strikes your fancy, sir.
The collection of huts whose coordinates Kip gave the captain appeared to be abandoned, two of the three were roofless, but of course he couldn’t be dead sure. He banked to make a second pass to verify the farm was deserted but the captain called all clear, and so he had to make a fast departure from the airspace so as not to take a hit himself. Maybe there were people in there, maybe not. He tilted his wings to a vertical and bore away. —All clear, he said, long before he was all clear. Out of the corner of his eye, down by one of the shanties, something moved. With luck, an ox. He didn’t want innocent blood on his hands already and for no good reason. Wasn’t that the tragedy inscribed into the very words, Los Alamos, that designated home? He didn’t need to repeat such things here. No, he decided; nothing had moved. A shadow was all it had been. The sun had caught a wing strut at just the angle that would create an illusion of ground movement.
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