Finding Moon

by Tony Hillerman

  Tank! Moon jerked wide awake. It was dawn. Silent. The APC was motionless in the brush at the very edge of a road, the engine not running. He saw no tank.

  Nguyen Nung’s bandaged head and torso were within touching distance-in the other roof hatch of the APC. Nguyen had the binoculars to his face, aimed down the road and to the left. Moon saw trees, saw that they were among low hills now, out of the delta’s flatness. He saw that the road curved away to the left. And then he saw a flutter of motion. A thin black line extended upward, a green pennant flying from it moving in the breeze. And at the base of the line a gray-green shape that could only be the top of a turret.

  Osa was tugging at his pants leg again. He looked down.

  “Mr. Lee has gone to take a look,” she said.

  Damn! “Why didn’t you wake me? Where are we?”

  “At the border. On maybe just inside it. Mr. Lee said he thinks this must be a Cambodian checkpoint.”

  Moon took another look. Beyond the pennant, the hills rose into the morning mist, green and forested. That would be right, he thought. The map had showed the land rising sharply where Vietnam and its rice delta ended. It showed the Cambodian highlands rising abruptly there, forming a barrier between the Mekong and the Gulf of Siam.

  Osa guessed what he was thinking.

  “We’re right where we are supposed to be,” she said. “The map was accurate.”

  “But there wasn’t supposed to be a border control point here,” Moon said. “That was supposed to be down on Route Eighty where the traffic is. Down on the coast.”

  “There’s probably one there too,” Osa said. “Probably a big one. Here there seems to be just a tank.”

  “Yeah,” Moon said. “Just a tank.” He lowered himself stiffly from the machine gunner’s pedestal “I’d better go and help Mr. Lee scout things out.”

  “Two,” said Nguyen Nung from his perch. He held his hand down, two fingers extended.

  “Two tanks?”

  “Two tanks,” Nguyen agreed, sounding pleased by this linguistic advance, if not by the news.

  “I wouldn’t go,” Osa said. She was twisted in the driver’s seat looking back at him. “Mr. Lee is wearing peasant clothing. And he’s small. if they see him, he will just look like a local farmer. If they see you-” She left that hanging, unfinished.

  “I’ll be careful,” he said. The rear ramp had been lowered. He ducked and walked out of it. Osa said something loud-probably Dutch, and probably an expletive.

  He kept to the roadside brush, angling toward where he’d seen the tank. Ahead of him among the trees, something rustled. Moon crouched behind a growth of young bamboo. It was Mr. Lee. He squatted beside Moon.

  “A tank is parked on each side of the road,” Mr. Lee said. “And then there is a small bamboo building in the middle of the road.” He described it with his hands. “You know. The road goes on each side of it. It is open on the front and both sides. To collect duties, I think.”

  “Is it empty now?”

  “No one is in it unless they are sleeping on the floor. Empty, I think. But there is one other house, made of planks with a palm roof. Is anyone in it? I don’t know. One cannot see the inside.”

  “What kind of tanks?”

  “What kind?” The question came as a surprise. Mr. Lee seemed not to have been aware that tanks came in varieties.

  “Are they both alike? Do both have round turrets on top?”

  “Yes. Just alike.”

  “Do they have tractor treads, like ours? Or do they roll on big wheels? How big? Try to describe them.”

  “Treads,” Mr. Lee said. He described what sounded to Moon like an M48 tank, mainstay of the U.S. Army and the model it provided its allies. It was what Moon had hoped to hear. if Mr. Lee had described the rounded shape of a Russian-made T54 it would almost certainly have meant the Khmer Rouge were there.

  “Did you see any sign of the crew?”

  Mr. Lee shook his head. “But maybe they’re inside. There was no way to tell that, of course.”

  “They’re not inside,” Moon said. “We can bet on that.” No sane person would sleep in a tank if there was another place to bed down. Certainly not in this awful climate. “Now we need to find out if anyone is in the house.”

  Mr. Lee looked at him thoughtfully. “They did not hear our engine when we came up,” he said. “I think we could back slowly away. Then turn around. Then we can find another way to cross the border.”

  “We didn’t find another way when we studied the map. No track we could use without gong miles back toward the Mekong.”

  “True,” Mr. Lee said. “But that was the map. Just lines on paper. Now we are here. We try, and try again, and try again. And we finally find a way.”

  “No,” Moon said. “We finally run out of diesel fuel.”

  “Oh,” Mr. Lee said. He made a wry face, shrugged. “There is not enough extra oil in those cans you brought along?”

  “We have enough to get there. If the roads aren’t too steep, I think we’ll have a little bit left.”

  Mr. Lee considered this. He’d pushed the conical hat to the back of his head, and the slanting early morning light emphasized the lines age had left around his eyes. Moon had thought from that first night in Los Angeles that this man’s face was unusually expressive. Now it registered something between despair and sorrow as realization sank in and hope drained away. Then he shrugged and managed a small laugh.

  “Ah, then,” he said. “I think you could carry your brother’s little baby out.” He thought again. “And Mrs. van Winjgaarden could lead out her brother-although I really think she no longer has any hope that he’s alive. But how can I carry out the kam taap that holds my ancestor’s bones?” He smiled weakly at Moon. “I think Mr. Nung would be happy to help me, but with those injuries it would not be possible.”

  “Nguyen couldn’t carry much,” Moon agreed. “I could help.”

  “Then we go on?”

  “There must be fuel in those tanks,” Moon said. “Almost certainly they’ll have fuel in them. Why would they park them there empty?”

  “Yes,” Mr. Lee said. “Of course. Do you know how to get it out?”

  Moon laughed. “That’s within the range of my talents,” he said.

  “I would think that when the Cambodian government broadcast the surrender order and Pol Pot took over the government in Phnom Penh, these soldiers just went away,” Mr. Lee said.

  “Just climbed out and went home,” Moon agreed. And hoped fervently that he was right.

  It proved to be a good guess. The proud green pennant of the Royal Cambodian Second Division flew from their antennas, but the two M48s had been left to rust.

  By sunrise, Moon had drained enough diesel oil from one of them to refill the tank of their M-l 13 and had them rolling down the track into the Cambodian hills. Within thirty minutes they’d seen the first evidence of Pol Pot’s Zero Year campaign. The track had become a narrow dirt road, winding upward into the forest toward, they hoped, Via Ba. It passed a cluster of a dozen shacks, all apparently deserted. One seemed to have been a store, and on its porch three bodies were hanging by their necks, their hands tied behind them, two men and a woman. One man wore brown trousers, a white shirt, and a vest, the other the saffron robe of a monk. The woman was naked.

  A mile beyond that, the track they were following intersected with another. Moon pulled the APC across the roadside ditch and parked it out of sight among the trees. Mr. Lee spread the artillery map on the rice sacks, with the map Rice had marked for them beside it. Their little intersection was on the military chart, but only one track showed on the commercial version. It seemed to be the one they had been following from the checkpoint through the empty village.

  Moon was disappointed but not surprised. “I think this other road must be newer. It wasn’t there when the commercial map was made.”

  “So you think we find Vin Ba up the other road?” Mr. Lee said.

  “Well,” Moon said, “t
he army screws things up when it can, but this map must have been drawn from aerial photographs. A computer scans them and redraws the photos on paper. The army hadn’t even heard of Cambodia until about ten years ago, so the photos have to be fairly new.”

  “I wish I could say it looks familiar,” Osa said. “I must have flown right over this when I went in to see Damon. But, you know, I just remember hills and trees.”

  “Things look different from the air anyway,” Moon said.

  “I do remember Ricky pointing down to a little village in a narrow valley and saying that’s where his Lila had been born and where her mother lived. Then we flew over terraced fields, and mountain ridges, and we landed at Damon’s place.”

  “This must be Vin Ba then,” Mr. Lee said, with his finger on the map. “Very close to here.”

  It proved to be less than two miles: a long fuel-draining climb uphill, a sudden ridgeline, and then, as the APC tilted downward, they saw cleared fields and terraced paddies. A village was almost directly below them. Moon stopped, got the binoculars from Nguyen, and examined the place.

  He saw no sign of life. Three of the houses were roofless, apparently burned out. The Khmer Rouge seemed to have been there. Were they still here? Why would they be?

  “Burned,” Nguyen said. “Hooches burned.” He was standing in the machine gunner’s hatch, pointing, looking at Moon. “Too late, you think?”

  “Let’s go see,” Moon said, and squeezed back into the driver’s seat.

  “‘Way we go!” Nguyen said, and Moon heard him slamming a new round into the breach of the.50. The belt rattled as Nguyen adjusted it.

  But there was nothing for Nguyen to shoot at. The road dropped off the hill, emerged from the trees, and became an even narrower track following an irrigation canal. Some of the paddies had been newly planted with shoots of rice, but no one was working the fields. The village seemed empty, the only sound the throbbing of the diesel.

  Mr. Lee’s hand was on his shoulder. “I think they heard our engine far away. It made them afraid the Khmers were returning.”

  “We’ll see,” Moon said. Rice had told them that the Vinhs and their neighbors in this village were not ethnic Khmers. It seemed more likely to him that Pol Pot’s troops had followed the pattern of atrocities they’d been hearing described on the radio. They’d left no one behind. They would find the bodies of the old and the sick, with the young people swept away to work camps to be taught the Zero Year philosophy.

  Moon cut the ignition and climbed up into the hatch, into the sunlight and the silence.

  Where now would he look for Ricky’s baby?

  Nguyen was looking at him, making a wry face and the empty palms-up gesture of failure. Moon nodded. He climbed out of the hatch and dropped to the ground.

  From somewhere behind the house just ahead

  of them came grunting. A pig? Then a rooster crowed. The door of this house Moon faced had been made of bamboo canes wired together hung on leather hinges. It stood open now. Moon looked in at a dirt floor partly covered with a mat, at a cabinet turned on its side with its contents of dishes and pots scattered around it. But the grunting was coming from behind the next house-fifty yards down the community’s irrigation ditch.

  Two pigs, both lean and mean by American pig standards, were tethered by long leg chains to one of the posts that supported the back porch of the small bamboo-and-thatch hut. The sight of Moon provoked a chorus of frantic grunts and squeals. They had water in a rusty metal trough. They wanted food, expected it, demanded it, competed for it, snapping and pushing.

  The pigs suggested that some villager had been there after the Khmer Rouge left. Pol Pot’s troops might fail to catch a rooster, but they would hardly have missed two tethered pigs. But swine devoid of their owner could tell him nothing, least of all where to find the swineherd. And these unfed swine might be as abandoned as the empty houses, the trail that had turned itself into a street, the rice paddies, the ditch that irrigated them, the whole little valley and the hills that closed it in. He would find something back at the APC to cut the chains and free them. That should be a job in the range of his competence.

  Nguyen the warrior was still standing behind the.50 caliber, conditioned by his dangerous years in the Brown Water Navy to expect ambushes. His expression, as much of it as was visible around the now-grimy bandages, suggested he wouldn’t mind a fight. Nguyen had expressed his distaste for Cambodians in general and Khmer Communists in particular when he first understood they were heading for a village across the border. He had provided a half dozen anecdotal examples of Cambodian rudeness, barbarity, dishonesty, laziness, and otherwise slovenly conduct. Mr. Lee, in translating this, added that the feeling was common among Vietnamese, North and South, and was matched by a Cambodian contempt for Vietnamese, and exceeded by the distaste felt by Laotians for Thais, and vice versa.

  Nguyen waved and said, “Nobody?”

  “Nobody,” Moon agreed. “Just two orphaned pigs.”

  Osa appeared from around the APC, her face and hair wet. Washing in the irrigation ditch, Moon guessed. He’d try it himself. It seemed to be fresh water diverted from the stream they’d crossed on the way in. He would wash, and collect Mr. Lee from wherever he’d wandered, and get to hell out of here. Finish this. Be done with this. End it. Forget it.

  Osa was smiling a rueful smile. “Too bad. I guess nobody is left,” she said. “I know you had hopes. I did too. It is a terrible disappointment for you.”

  “Que sera sera,” Moon said, thinking of Halsey’s standard formula for dealing with hostile fate. Thinking of Sergeant Gene Halsey dead under the jeep. Of course. What would be would be. And for Malcolm Mathias, despite grandiose intentions, this empty village was what would be at the end of the road for him.

  Osa was studying him, looking worried. “Maybe-” she began, but could think of no way to finish it.

  “Let’s find Mr. Lee,” Moon said, “and make sure we haven’t missed anyone-or anything. And get the hell out of here.”

  “He said he would be back very quickly,” Osa said. “He said he wanted to find his kam taap.”

  They waited. Even Nguyen was quiet, thinking his thoughts.

  Finally Osa touched his arm. “When the wars are all over and there is peace again, then you could come and find the little girl.”

  “Yeah,” Moon said, thinking maybe someone could do that. But not Malcolm Mathias.

  “I think it would be easier then. There would be refugee agencies to help people find their relatives. It was that way in Java after the war.”

  “I think I should go and find Mr. Lee. Maybe I could do that.”

  As Moon said it, he saw Mr. Lee walking down the track toward them. “I find not a thing,” Mr. Lee said. “But I think there is a place back there”-and he pointed to a field beyond the ditch-“where some people might be buried just a few days ago. And I find where the Khmer Rouge have torn down some tombs and broken the kam taap that were left in them.” He paused. “But I did not see mine.”

  “I guess that’s our only good news,” Moon said.

  “Ah, no,” Mr. Lee said. “Not so good. It would be better to find it broken than not at all. I could gather up the bones and have another kam taap made for them. There are ceremonies that could be done. And then the place would be found for their permanent tomb, where the wind and water are correct.” He paused, attempted a smile. “Now they are simply lost. Just as they were when I came to your hotel room in Los Angeles.”

  His words, and the sorrow in the old man’s face, reminded Moon that delivery of these bones was an unfuffilled Mathias contract and another failure on his list. He tried to think of something reassuring to say, thought of nothing, and the frustration, fatigue, and disappointment turned to anger.

  “Why do they do this?” Moon said, gesturing toward the emptied village. “Pol Pot and his army. On the radio they’re saying the son of a bitch wants to turn Cambodia back to farming, fishing, the simple life.” He gestured
at the row of shacks along the ditch. “What’s simpler than this?”

  Mr. Lee looked away, frowned. “I think it was the religion,” he said. “Mr. Rice said he thought the people of Via Ba followed Lord Buddha very closely. They were very good Taoists. The other villages would know that. if they know that, the Khmer Rouge would soon know it. Or they might see it here in the village. They would hate that. Buddhism is part of the decadence Pol Pot has told them they must wipe away.”

  Which meant, as it turned out, that Mr. Lee was not going with them. Mr. Lee would stay behind. He must study this village, this valley, as a geomancer would study it, to find a feng shui, the place where a devout Taoist would have left his kam taap until Mr. Lee came to recover it.

  “I will find it,” Mr. Lee said. “It will be a place next to the hills. Better, it will be between the protecting spurs of two hills where the energy would flow down to it.” These are called the “green dragon” and the “white tiger,” Mr. Lee explained, and they kept the wind flow mild. And from this spot between the two, one should be able to see water flowing away. Not toward the place but away from it.

  There was a lot more of this explanation, and Moon nodded now and then to indicate he understood. But he didn’t want to hear Mr. Lee’s pitiful clutching for a last straw of hope. He wanted to get the hell out of there. Back to keeping Shirley’s dog, fixing J.D.’s truck, keeping Rooney sober. Back to Durance and the sort of problems someone like Malcolm Mathias could cope with. Back to the sort of women he could understand.

  BANGKOK, Thailand, April 28 (UPI)-An embassy spokesman said today that the United States would contest Thai government plans to return aircraft flying Vietnamese refugees here to Vietnam.

  He said the aircraft had been provided to the South Vietnamese at a cost of more than $200 million and would fall into the hands of the Communists if returned.

  Noon, the Twentieth Day

  May 2, 1975

  IT LOOKED FAIRLY EASY ON THE MAP. Rice had drawn a line in blue ballpoint ink from Via Ba angling slightly toward the border. He’d made a blue dot and written in Phum Kampong. “I remember now that’s what Damon called it,” Rice had said. “Actually, you should put in one of those little pronunciation hats over the a, the way the Cambodians spell Kâmpong.”