A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain: Stories

by Robert Olen Butler

  By now I’m sure the girl thought we were both a little cracked, so she drifted away. I came to Vinh’s side and we walked on. “Iguanas,” he muttered.

  I said, “Do you know why iguanas?”

  He shook his head no.

  I said, “Because Puerto Vallarta is a very romantic place, and it has to do with iguanas.”

  Sometimes I will surprise my husband with a piece of information, and though it usually has something to do with the parts of American culture he has little patience for, his natural curiosity gets the better of him. This was one of those times. He looked at me sideways, not exactly turning his head to me; he was trying to say that he wasn’t really interested in this but I’d better tell anyway. In these situations I don’t say anything immediately. I choose to ignore this look of his. I make him ask for it. The culture I grew up in does give a woman certain subtle ways of maintaining her dignity.

  “There’s a reason?” he finally asked.

  “A reason?” I said, as if I’d already forgotten about it.

  “Yes,” he said firmly. “A reason for the iguanas on the beach.”

  “Oh, yes,” I said, and I waited.

  Vinh stopped walking abruptly. I took a few more steps, as if I didn’t notice. “Gabrielle,” he called after me, and I stopped and turned and looked surprised not to find him beside me. I returned at once, being the good wife that I am. When I got to him, he settled himself so as not to seem too eager to hear whatever this was that I knew. He even used the casual form of my name, though he said it with the French pronunciation and I don’t think he has ever learned that in English he could have a little joke on me with it. “Gaby, why is it that they think tourists want to have their pictures taken with iguanas?”

  “It’s nothing really. It’s just a foolish thing.”

  “Gabrielle,” he said in the voice I was waiting for. My husband is very attractive at this sort of moment. Someone else might get angry or imperious or dismissive or whiney. But Vinh turns gently urgent, like he is a child with a little pain that his momma has to make better. “Please tell me,” he said.

  So I told him about Liz and Dick. Elizabeth Taylor in “National Velvet” is a wonderfully beautiful girl. Even later, in “Cleopatra,” she is very beautiful. You might think that a Vietnamese would not appreciate that kind of full-bosomed beauty. But people often admire qualities that are quite different from their own. And Richard Burton of that same time is equally attractive, say in “Look Back in Anger” or “The Bramble Bush.” His voice, particularly, can thrill a woman. He, too, was in “Cleopatra” and that, of course, is when the story I told Vinh really began. Liz and Dick—Cleopatra and Antony—fell in love, and since they were both married to other people and that was in 1962, there was a big uproar. Then the next year Richard Burton came to Puerto Vallarta to make a film. (I didn’t tell Vinh the name of the film at this point so that I could hold back the big answer to his question and keep his attention. He was still wondering about the iguanas.) Elizabeth Taylor followed him to this place and they rented two houses with a bridge between them, over a cobbled street, and the world was watching that bridge very closely for months. By now Vinh was getting a little impatient, I knew. Just impatient enough—I always could sense when I was about to lose his attention. So I told him that the name of the movie was “The Night of the Iguana” and there were Puerto Vallarta iguanas featured in it and that’s why the little girl had her business.

  Vinh was disappointed at the payoff of this story. I knew he would be. He almost always was. His brow wrinkled up and he pursed his lips and I wasn’t upset at his reaction. I liked it very much that he continued to insist that I finish these little stories even though his deeply practical self almost always ended up finding them trivial or foolish or simply incomprehensible. He still always asked me to go on. He insisted. And I don’t exactly understand it, but I took it as a kind of faithfulness to me.

  “Iguanas,” he muttered and I heard the word again late that afternoon, across the lobby lounge in the Fiesta Vallarta Hotel. Vinh and I had a handful of drink coupons, an unexpected extra benefit from curtain number two, and we’d come down to the lounge in the open-air end of the lobby facing the sea. The three American game-show couples were already there, and I could feel Vinh tense up because they were loud and they were having a frivolous good time and I knew that what pleasure Vinh hoped might be squeezed out of this trip had to do with being quiet and peaceful.

  Northern Louisiana and her husband were at the bar and they were both facing into the lounge, their elbows thrown back behind them onto the counter. The husband was young and so blond his hair and mustache seemed almost white, made even more pale by the deep tan of his skin. I was thinking his work kept him out in the Louisiana sun, but Minnesota and her husband were sitting in overstuffed chairs at a little table nearby and he was at least thirty years older than Mr. Northern Louisiana and his hair, though thinned out quite a bit, was just about the same bleached white color and his skin, though more leathery, was just as tan. I couldn’t see him sweating under a Minnesota sun, so I figured maybe they both went to the same franchise of tanning salons that turned all their clients out like this.

  The Tic-Tac-Dough woman was at an adjoining table and she was smiling and speaking to the others and it was from her that I heard the word “iguana.” She was probably telling them the same story I’d told Vinh, since her specialty (I’d been right about her) was question answering and this was a set of those countless facts that clung to her mind. I have a similar static-cling mind, and as I watched her, her husband crossed my sight carrying two drinks from the bar. He handed one down to her and turned to sit and his T-shirt had a map of Vietnam and the words I’VE BEEN AND I’M PROUD. This didn’t surprise me because I’d felt certain I’d read the sign of the dog tags correctly. The veteran sank into the overstuffed chair, and as he was trying to arrange himself, he glanced our way. Vinh was tugging at my elbow. He wanted to leave, I’m sure, but I kept my attention on the veteran, whose eyes widened slightly at us and then slid away as Minnesota laughed loud and said to his wife, “Eileen, honey, nobody today would even give them a second thought. What’s a little adultery anymore?”

  Vinh had my elbow in a strong grip now, but I leaned near to him and said, “We’ve got free drinks coming and I need one right now.”

  Vinh whispered, “I’d rather pay in a quieter place.”

  I answered, “There is no such place.” This was a little gamble. I didn’t want to turn him more strongly against the vacation, but I did want to sit and watch these people. It was like television, like the games and the soaps were mixed together.

  Vinh sighed and nodded to me that it was all right, that as long as he was stuck in this whole thing, he really couldn’t do anything but go along with me. So I took him to a table not next to the three couples but not far from them either. Vinh turned his chair at a right angle to all the other people and he faced the line of bougainvillea at the end of the lounge and the sea beyond. I listened carefully for a while.

  Minnesota went on about how acceptable adultery had become and I watched her husband and he seemed to be trying to figure something out about the ice in his drink and I suppose he was used to this kind of talk and she finally grabbed his arm and said that present company was of course excluded. And then Northern Louisiana told a story about how one of the game shows she’d tried out for turned her down because she wouldn’t let the host kiss her on the lips and this had come out in a discussion with the director of the show, who was prepping the contestants, and he said that the host always kissed the women contestants on the lips. Not her, she’d told him, and that’s for damn sure, honey, they didn’t do that where she came from. And then the question-and-answer woman, whose name apparently was Eileen, said that she wished she’d gotten on “Jeopardy” that was the show she really wanted to get on, and it didn’t have anything to do with not wanting to kiss somebody. If something like that had prevented her, it wouldn’t have been
so disappointing.

  And somewhere along the way, as I was sipping the drink that the waiter brought and feeling invisible, I realized that the veteran was glancing now and then in my direction. I wondered if he’d learned enough about us over there to recognize a Vietnamese when he saw one. I knew he was thinking about it, wondering if Vinh and I were from Vietnam. And after a time I began to worry just a little bit what his attitude might be. The very visible veterans I’d encountered were unpredictable. They seemed to be one extreme or the other about us. We were fascinating and long-suffering and unreal or we were sly and dangerous and unreal. I kept my own eyes on his wife, who was certainly pitched to a lower key than the other two women and whose sense of disappointment about the show she had appeared on intrigued me. I would have expected her to feel only proud of winning at whatever she did. Though maybe this expectation is my own little prejudice showing through. Why shouldn’t this American woman have the same sort of disappointment of dignity that I myself felt? She interested me. She felt disappointed and she hadn’t even had to dress up as a duck. To overcome a slight lull in the conversation, Northern Louisiana declared how wonderful a coincidence it was that they should all meet, all Americans and all game-show winners. At this, the veteran turned to me and said, “Are you from America, too?”

  This took me by surprise. When I first saw the movie “The Invisible Man” with Claude Rains, it got me to thinking about what it would be like to be invisible. And the scary part was always getting yourself into a place where you shouldn’t be and then suddenly becoming visible again. Well, that’s how I felt at that moment. The man had a loud voice and the attention of all these people suddenly swung around to me. And to Vinh, as well. Before I answered, I looked at him, to see if he wished to speak for us. He glanced over to the veteran, but his gaze returned to the sea and I faced the group and I tried very hard to make my pronunciation just right and I said, “Yes, we’re from America. I won this trip on ‘Let’s Make a Deal.’”

  Everyone laughed very loud and I was certain that it was friendly laughter, all of it, laughter at this sudden extension of the coincidence, no laughter at me, no one imagining me dressed up like a duck, no one thinking how absurd for this Asian woman to be a game-show winner. Minnesota cried over the laughter, “Four” winners. What a hoot.”

  The Vietnam vet seemed particularly pleased. I could tell, though, that there was still a question in his mind about our home country, but his hunch about us was getting stronger. All of this was in his face, the way he finished laughing before the others and began to squint at us with a little smile. At least I could read him enough to know he wasn’t a Vietnamese-as-the-enemy type of veteran. I looked at the faces of the others as the laughter faded and they were all friendly, and I mean no disrespect or arrogance when I say this, but I felt a little bit proud of them, like they were children who behaved really well when you didn’t expect it.

  The veteran said, “May I ask where you’re from?”

  I understood what he meant, but I chose not to show it all at once. “New Orleans,” I said. Perhaps not to betray my little game with the veteran, I did not look at him directly when I answered. I glanced across all the other faces and the young woman from Northern Louisiana could not hide a little jolt of distaste over this. Even that pleased me somehow. These were human beings and they had to have their own narrowness, their own prejudices. This woman showed it to me not because I was an Asian claiming game-show equality with her but because I was from New Orleans.

  “I mean originally,” the veteran said, and he added, “You don’t mind me asking?”

  I was turning back to the man and ready to smile at him and say I didn’t mind at all and let him wait a few more moments before I confirmed his hunch, but before I could say a word, I was surprised to hear Vinh’s voice, not hostile or angry but still very firm, say, “We are from the Republic of Vietnam originally. Now we are American citizens and so are our children and so will be our children’s children.”

  For him to take over and answer the question would not surprise me. But the elaboration of it, talking about our children and our children’s children (though in Vietnamese culture the unborn and even the unconceived children are already thought to be part of the family), this is what surprised me. He was looking directly at the veteran and the veteran was looking directly at him, and maybe Vinh thought he was drawing a line, like the man does, the male animals do, here’s the line of my territory—look at it and don’t get too close. But maybe not. Because when the veteran suddenly smiled broadly and jumped up and strode the few steps over to us and bent and insisted on a handshake from my husband, Vinh gave his hand without hesitation and he was very intently looking into the face of this American, as if he was a man who needed a thousand baked chicken dinners and hadn’t decided who to buy them from.

  The veteran said, “I’m Frank Davies and this is my wife, Eileen.” He checked back over his shoulder and his wife was looking a little confused, not knowing whether to continue to talk with the other Americans or to come over to us, as her husband was motioning for her to do. Then the pinch of confusion was gone and the face I saw at the pool returned, the placid face exactly in between exasperation and affection. “Come on, honey,” Frank Davies said, and the couple at the bar turned to get the bartender’s attention and the woman from Minnesota said something to her husband and Eileen Davies rose and came over and shook our hands and she and her husband sat down with us.

  I saw no discomfort on Vinh’s face at all of this. I could tell if he was really wishing to make a quick escape, and he wasn’t. This interested me greatly. He turned slightly toward these two people but not all the way. He was still angled more toward the balcony and the bougainvillea and the sea than he was toward the veteran and his wife, but he clearly accepted their being with us. He did not look away from them, and there was not a single little glance to me as if to say, Look what you’ve led me into now. He was apparently content.

  Frank Davies said, “I was in Vietnam, as you can see,” and he thumped himself on his chest. Vinh and I both dutifully read his T-shirt once more.

  Eileen’s hand came out now and fell lightly on her husband’s as it returned from his chest and landed on the arm of the chair. The gesture seemed to be a reminder not to say certain things that he had said many times before. When he felt her hand, Frank looked at his wife and he began, “My wife . . .” But he paused, again measuring his words. I expected him to tell us that his wife didn’t like him talking too much about all of that, but apparently even this was something he’d agreed not to say, for he finished the sentence: “ . . . she’s the winner in the family.”

  This was a reference to her game-show victory, but when Frank heard himself say this, you could see his face flinch as he unexpectedly interpreted his own words in another way. He could not resist: “I wish I’d been part of a winner for you folks.”

  Eileen smiled faintly and I looked at Vinh and he thought for a moment and then he squared around in his chair, leaving the sea. “What are you drinking?” he asked.

  “Coca-Cola,” Frank proclaimed. “I’ve given up the hard stuff.”

  “And you?” Vinh smiled over to Eileen, and she looked at me before she answered. Her eyes searched my face for a moment and it seemed like she was trying to see if it was okay with me for her to answer him, if there was some sort of hidden protocol from our culture that she needed to observe in requesting a drink from my husband.

  I felt so sure that this was what was going on that I was about to remind her that we were from New Orleans, but before I could speak, she looked back to Vinh and said, “White wine.”

  Vinh called over the waiter and ordered the drinks and Frank caught the waiter by the sleeve before he went to get them and said, “Coca-Cola from a bottle. Not a can, por favor.”

  The waiter nodded at him as if he understood this request and Vinh said, “You’ve given up cans, too?” When Vinh was in his sharpest business mood, he could probe people like
this, and it was not always with a friendly intent. But Frank laughed loud and he said that he sure as hell was. Vinh smiled and nodded, and this may be surprising, but I was having trouble now reading his mood. I make so many presumptions about people from the things I observe, and I’m usually right. But I’ve been around Vinh long enough to observe when he has made his feelings invisible to me, and this was one of those times.

  So the drinks came and we talked, Vinh and me and this proud-to-be Vietnam veteran and his wife, Eileen. We asked where Frank had served and it turned out that he’d been a helicopter mechanic in Qui Nhon. He told us a story about how he’d had trouble with a “butter bar” because Frank was going up on his own time as a door gunner and he was supposed to be just a mechanic. When I got a chance, I asked what a butter bar was and he said a second looey and that was not much help. It had to be some kind of Army man, perhaps a rank. But as his words flowed on, I was sitting there thinking about Frank Davies going into the place where the Army men eat their meals and there was an incident at one of the tables, Frank was arguing with a bar of butter and they came to blows and Frank squeezed the bar and it was oozing through his fingers and all the men were sighing like a game-show audience, but Frank was in big trouble.

  Then Eileen was at my elbow. She’d moved her chair closer to mine and she leaned near and she said in a low voice, “The men do go on about the war, don’t they?”

  This snapped me out of my little fantasy and I looked over to Frank and he had turned his attentions strictly on my husband, and Vinh was listening to him, leaning slightly forward and listening as if with great interest. He spoke to Frank and I didn’t catch the words, but Frank nodded vigorously and said more and I turned to Eileen and replied, “My husband doesn’t often talk about all of that.”

  “Was he a soldier?” Eileen asked.

  “Yes,” I said, “a very good one. He was a major in the airborne. But later, about a year before the end of the war, he was reassigned to Saigon City Hall, where he worked in a special program to develop business in the city. They were trying until the very end to make the economy work, to make people want to defend their way of life. Everyone respected my husband.”