The orphanage was something that simply happened because Bonnie My’s heart would not let her turn down children who came to her door. The first one was an eleven-year-old waif who begged for a job as a whore. She would work hard, she promised. She would go to bed with a hundred GIs a night! She might be little, but she was young and strong and she was not a virgin.
Bonnie My gave her a job sweeping and cleaning and provided her a room on the top floor of the building. One by one, other war orphans started showing up. Sometimes they merely appeared at the door, eyes downcast and sorrowful, hands either twisting in front or clasping the hand of a younger brother or sister. Word soon spread that the whorehouse offered children refuge. Bonnie My’s girls rescued kids and brought them to the hotel. Occasionally, some softhearted GI or VC knocked on the door and wordlessly thrust a child into the arms of whoever answered. Bonnie My currently cared for more than twenty orphans; they occupied the entire fourth floor of the four-story brick building. All except for the one room Lt. Pete Brauer leased.
“Untie her hands, please,” Father Pierre requested, walking over to the Jeep.
“When we get inside,” Pete said. “You’ve heard the old fable about the turtle and the scorpion crossing the river? She’s the scorpion.”
Fever flushed the captive’s cheeks, Her expression revealed no emotion, but the flecks of green in her dark eyes sparked. Her eyes were sharp and hard at the same time, filled with distrust and suspicion. Although she was gaunt from suffering, it required little imagination to see her as an especially attractive Eurasian. Father Pierre’s heart went out to her.
“What ees her name?”
“I don’t think she understands English,” Pete said, “and she refused to speak Vietnamese. She hasn’t said a word since we got her.”
The priest spoke to her in Vietnamese, then in French. She glared unblinking back at him. A half-suppressed cough caught in her throat, causing her eyes to water but not soften. Bonnie My laid a hand softly on the prisoner’s arm to reassure her.
“Bring the poor child inside. Quickly,” Father Pierre ordered.
She appeared too weak to stand. Pete first took out a camera and snapped her picture while she was still tied in the Jeep. To be used in bargaining with the VC, he said. Then he scooped the wasted figure into his arms and, following the priest and Thay Li, carried her to the back of the church and upstairs down a long dreary corridor to an antechamber with a heavy wooden door and a barred window. She kept her eyes closed, as though denying this was all actually happening. She hung limp in his arms as he deposited her on a narrow bed. She turned her face to the wall.
“Can the door be locked, Father?” Pete asked.
“I have a key.”
“Give it to me. I’m posting a twenty-four hour guard at her door. Piss Hole will stay tonight. You can untie her now.”
Contingents of U.S. and ARVN troops stationed in the town to keep it pacified likely discouraged the VC from launching a rescue attempt in force. But in spite of the VC threat to burn Bonnie My’s hotel, Pete had all but reached the conclusion that the girl, like so much else in this war, like rice and bullets and human dignity, was expendable. It seemed Commander Minh considered his lover, if such she were, unworthy of efforts to reclaim her. Pete only left a sentry at the mission to prevent her escaping.
He paused in the doorway, looking at the girl for a long minute. She kept her face to the wall. Then he pulled the door closed and locked it.
CHAPTER THIRTY
Father Pierre assumed the duties of caring for the girl he poetically referred to as “the maiden in the tower.” Although Lt. Pete kept a Nguoi Nhai soldier stationed at the cell door, for cell was how Father Pierre now thought of the antechamber, the priest took custody of the keys so he could come and go. He chattered away in both Vietnamese and French while he worked changing her dressings, helping her to the bathroom and, with Bonnie My’s assistance, sponge bathing her like a father bathing his daughter. He mended her black pajamas torn during her capture and gossiped endlessly about the town and its inhabitants. She never answered him. Once or twice she almost smiled, almost, but that was all.
“One of these days, bon fille beau,” he told her cheerfully, “you will be well again and you will walk out of here as free and lovely as you were before you were injured.”
She shot him a questioning look. He chuckled.
“Ali, mon jeune ami, you do understand more than you appear to! The American has no reason to hold you once he admits that you are value-less to him.”
He looked at her with warm eyes.
“I am a priest and will soon be old, but I am also a man,” he told her. “Your beauty is such that it stirs the blood of even a priest and an old Frenchman. Lt. Pete is not an old man. I have seen the way he looks at you.”
A blush might have darkened her cheeks. Her eyes raked over the antechamber’s bare walls until they reached the barred window. From her bed she could see clouds and then there was a gentle rain that made beads on the insect screen.
The only way Father Pierre’s mission survived in a war zone was by maintaining a strict neutrality. He let it be known that the girl was staying at the church because she was wounded and needed his help. He did not attempt to hide her presence. Besides, he always said that in God’s eyes the souls of enemies were equal.
“Naturally, Minh ess knowing the young lady ees here,” Father Pierre admitted to Pete. “However, put yourself in his place. To storm the castle to get her back ees being most foolish. His medical facilities are primitive at best. He ees saying to himself, ‘Let the Americans doctor her and make her well, after which she will return to us.’ A guerrilla who lives off the land and ess fighting must be ruled by the head and not the heart. As long as she ees crippled, she ees useless as both mistress and fighter.”
Lt. Pete and his Nguoi Nhai kept busy in the Delta, Making their presence known and felt from the My Tho River to the Bassac in the south. The bounty the NLF offered for the head of Ohmja Nguoi Nhai soon exceeded even that for the River Rat, Lt. Lump Adkins. Piss Hole rarely let Pete out of his sight, having taken it upon himself to see that the bounty was never collected.
Though occupied by the war, Pete seemed drawn to the Catholic mission at Dong Tam.
At every opportunity, he roared into town in Turncoat with Piss Hold giggling and hanging on with both hands.
“Has she said anything yet?” he would ask Father Pierre.
“Still there ees the long silence,” the priest always reported with a shrug.
The wound in the captive’s lung healed rapidly with antibiotic therapy prescribed by the army doctor friend of Pete’s from the base. The leg was also mending, although the bullet had chipped her left femur. It would take weeks before the cast was removed and she could place her full weight on it. She might even have a slight limp for the rest of her life.
It was her soul that seemed to be wasting away, keeping her weakened and confined to bed. Pete always found her staring out through the barred window at the small piece of sky visible from her bed. Like a caged bird longing to fly. She never looked at him when he entered.
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
One afternoon Pete stood frustrated in the antechamber watching the girl on her cot. On a sudden impulse, he demanded gruffly, “Would you like to go outside?”
Not even the flutter of her eyelids acknowledged that she either heard or understood. Her gaze remained fixed on the window, through which a yellow bar of mote-filled light filtered to square itself on the floor.
Pete glared at her. He looked at the window.
“Why the hell do I bother?” he grumbled. “Lump was right. I should have let the crazy bitch die.”
Angrily, he bent and scooped the frail body off the bed. Her leg cast stuck out past his arm. Fear or astonishment, likely both, flickered across her features. Too weak to resist, she merely went limp in his arms and closed her eyes, clearly expecting the worst. He carried her down the stone steps and out into
the garden where the sun shined, insects buzzed and birds called.
“She needs some air so she can get well,” Pete snapped at the priest, who came running. Father Pierre’s brows lifted, but he smiled his skinny smile and bowed.
Pete lowered her gently to one of the concrete benches in the shade of the trees that surrounded the nymph fountain and pool. In those days, water burbled out of the nymph’s cupped hands and pooled clear at her feet. Huge ornamental carp in the pool reflected the light like flashing gold bars.
“Relax,” Pete consoled her. “If I was going to hurt you, your ears would have already been on Piss Hole’s chain.”
Piss Hole waited in Turncoat on the street, keeping vigil. He was never far away.
Pete lowered himself next to her on the bench and supported her with one hand on her back until he saw she was not going to fall. She was very weak. Then he used both hands to light a cigarette. She glanced at him curiously when she thought he was so occupied and wouldn’t notice. He made a shrugging gesture that reflected in his broad face. The intense blue eyes lifted. He half-offered her the cigarette. She looked away quickly and sat there stiffly in her mended black VC pajamas.
That was how they occupied the next half-hour, sitting side by side, Pete slowly smoking his cigarette and watching the carp in the pool, the girl staring frozen into the distance. It was like neither acknowledged the existence of the other.
When she began weaving from exhaustion, Pete picked her up again and carried her back to her prison. It became a ritual of sorts after that. Whenever Pete came, he no longer asked the priest if she had spoken. He merely went straight to her cell and carried her into the garden. Father Pierre thought he detected a new note in the girl. He couldn’t be certain, but she seemed to look forward to the SEAL’s visits. She became fidgety and jumped at sudden noises at the door if a few days passed without Pete’s making an appearance. She started to gain strength. Color returned to her cheeks, She put on weight and soon no longer looked as though she might shatter like porcelain if touched.
As her health improved, Pete let her have the concrete bench to herself while he occupied the opposite one to smoke his cigarette. He would sit there silently for an hour, his carbine propped next to him, watching her. She ignored him to remain equally silent. Father Pierre observed them from the window of his rectory, wondering how long it would take before they broke the stalemate drawn between them.
“’Under all speech that is good for anything,’” he quoted,
“’there lies a silence that is better.
“’Silence is deep as Eternity;
“’speech is shallow as time.’”
One day Pete brought paints and a canvas.
“I used to dabble in art,” he explained to Father Pierre, passing it over lightly. “I got started painting when I was in reform school.”
The priest’s brows lifted. “Reform school?”
“I stole a 1938 Chevy and ran away from home to join the navy. Besides, I might as well have something to do except chain smoke while I’m sitting there watching her. I’m beginning to think she might be deaf and dumb.”
The priest smiled.
Pete’s first canvas depicted her in her black VC pajamas sitting in the garden, her leg cast and bandaged and propped out straight in front. Her face looked as blank as an unpainted canvas. Her eyes were different. Pete’s surprisingly talented brush captured the pain and longing in them, the dark underlying turmoil. It was a haunting work. Somehow, in it, the horror of war shown through more graphically than had he painted a field of mangled corpses.
He continued to portrait her each time he came. A puzzled look gradually crept into her expression. She began to watch Pete from the safe distance of her concrete bench perch, but looked quickly away whenever he tried to trap her eyes. She attempted to catch a glimpse of the canvas. Pete turned it away from her, which only added to her curiosity. She pretended it didn’t matter. What was it to her what the American did?
Often Thay Li Chung was at the mission when Pete came. The two holy men and Pete relaxed in the garden and talked while the SEAL and the priest worked over a bottle of bourbon. The girl perched on her bench and watched, lines of puzzlement wrinkling her brow. It was like she was trying to figure out this strange rough American who had first shot her, then saved her life. Her dark eyes with the flecks of seawater in them followed his every movement.
“Suffering is universal, my son,” Thay Li whispered to Pete. “Her spirit struggles.”
Pete shrugged, as though it mattered little to him, “She’s simple-minded.”
“A young woman is like the river,” Thay Li said with a kindly smile. “The lines of a woman’s body resemble the waves, her breasts represent the ducks swimming on the surface, the nymphs are seen in the brilliant colors of her face.”
Pete started with astonishment. He grinned at Father Pierre. “I thought monks were celibate,” he said.
Thay Li chuckled. “I have not always been a monk. But one must remember that the bed of the river is dangerous, its course difficult to perceive and leads rapidly to the ocean.”
“Are you trying to warn me of something?” Pete grumped,
“Of the peculiarities of all young men and women,” said the Buddhist.
“I’m not so young any longer.”
Thay Li glanced at the girl. “I think you are younger than when you came to Vietnam,” he said.
Pete really was beginning to wonder if the captive could talk at all, in any language. He painted her in a number of poses, improvising because mostly she had only one pose—staring straight ahead through or past him. He talked to her sometimes, even learning a few phrases in Vietnamese from Piss Hole to try out on her. All without response.
“Fuck it,” he exclaimed in ill-tempered exasperation.
Her head turned toward him. Their eyes met and it was the first time since she regained consciousness on the floor of the Team House at Shit City that she really looked at him. It caught him off-guard. He was too stunned to say anything. He merely stared back at her. He saw her shudder, as though from a sudden chill. He straightened on the bench, laid his paintbrush and cigarette aside without taking his eyes off her.
She was full of even more surprises.
“A woman’s curiosity cannot be resisted,” she said in a soft voice, in perfect English. “May I see what you have been painting?”
Still mute, Pete turned the canvas to face her. Her eyes widened. Her gaze shifted from the painting to Pete, then back again.
“It’s me! It’s beautiful,” she whispered in a husky voice, obviously touched. “Why are you painting my portrait? I am your enemy.”
“What else was I going to do?” he asked defensively. “Talk to myself while you sat there sullen?”
She hesitated.
“My name is Mhai,” she said.
Pete started to tell her his name.
“I know who you are,” she said. “I hear the Father calling you Lt. Pete.”
Pete snorted. “I was beginning to think you didn’t have a tongue. You speak good English.”
“Also French, Russian, Vietnamese and Chinese,” she said. A little too smugly, or so Pete thought.
It chafed him that she had put off so long saying anything. Her nearness now that they were talking unsettled him.
“Come on,” he muttered peevishly. “I’m taking you back to your room.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
How different my own war had been from Pete’s war. Pete had had some control of his war, dictating terms for fighting, choosing places and times. I had had little control, mostly going wherever I was sent and doing what I was told, the 9th boonirats, the Hardcore, eagle-flighted and jitterbugged and slogged all over AO Kudzu, like puppets at the ends of strings manipulated from above.
Pete had dinner with enemy commanders and fell in love with beautiful VC women. For my boonirats and me, the enemy remained flitting shadows in the forest, dangerous, scheming, malevolent beings
who decimated us incrementally with impersonal booby traps and furious ambushes, who refused to come out in the open and fight like true soldiers. To us, they were “gooks” or “dinks;” they were never real people. I would never know a Commander Minh.
Pete’s war had time for painting canvases in a garden, for meeting and befriending monks and priests and orphans and whore house madams. My war was trench foot, leeches and bone-deep fear and fatigue, horror piled on top of horror.
It was almost like our wars were on separate continents, on different worlds, instead of merely separate layers of the same war in the same place at the same time.
“There was a deep need in Lt. Pete and in Mhai as well,” Father Pierre said presently, lifting his head slowly from the remains of supper at table in the mission rectory. “Which they are fulfilling in each other. Lt. Pete ees having a tender side he let few people see.”
Lump Adkins in San Diego had said almost the same thing.
Father Pierre slumped lower in his chair, now such a very old man, and as frail as a reed beaten by monsoon rains. His hands trembled slightly, The young girl, his attendant, brought an oil lamp as darkness settled. Its flickering flame highlighted and shadowed the priest’s face in different areas. His eye sockets remained caves, out of which glinted his eyes with the lamp flame reflected in them. The bony cheeks and broad forehead running up into near baldness glowed with light, There was the illusion of a halo backlighting his head.
The girl came again to clear the table of soiled dishes. Van my cabbie jumped up to help, but returned shortly, looking chastised and a little sheepish. The girl re-entered, throwing Van a sharp look. She bent over the priest, whispering into his ear.
“Yes. Yes. Go, my dear Co Ly. That ees all for the night,” Father Pierre said, favoring her with his tremulous smile. “As you are going, will you be kindly showing Monsieur Kazmarek’s driver to his room? I am sure he is being most weary after his travels.”
The Return: A Novel of Vietnam Page 14