“It’s — my ticket is waiting for me,” she said.
“Show me one ticket!” the guard said.
Marie moved her mouth, about to tell another lie, but instead said, “I have money. I have money, no ticket.”
The guard laughed and turned from her. He was brown and Polynesian-looking. She wanted to throw herself at him, and she saw herself crushing his Adam’s apple. The other guard was pounding bitterly with the butt of his rifle on the hood of the only vehicle to have floundered all the way to this last barricade, a black Mercedes that had evidently been mistaken for some kind of official transport, but which now turned out to be filled with a Saigon businessman, his wife and children, and several white-uniformed servants. As he pounded, the rifle discharged with a single loud crack by no means overwhelming in this cauldron of noise, and the guard, who couldn’t have appeared more startled if he’d shot himself, gingerly changed the weapon from hand to hand, and wiggled the safety. The Mercedes leapt into reverse, banging into the edge of the kiosk, and then instantly forward again, the driver making haste, after this gesture on the guard’s part, to turn around and leave. Everyone in the dust-streaked automobile was crying except for the owner, who sat in the front and managed to look only mildly set back by the sundering of his household and the destruction of his way of life. Between the businessman and a white-garbed maidservant, Marie saw her father’s ghost.
He looked at his daughter in some confusion, and then took off his glasses and wiped his eyes with his hand, for he too was crying.
She turned away from him. “I will fuck you,” Marie said to the guard. “My mother is dead,” she added. The guard looked at her in genuine amusement and also seemed a little shocked. “I can get a ticket,” she said. “Just tell me — what do you want?”
“Go!” the guard said, waving her on. “Go airport! You’ll die tonight.” He pointed to the area of the airport beyond them, the sunburned fields and the control tower diminished by open space. His expression showed real concern about the whole situation and possibly for Marie herself. “Nobody—” He just stopped there, weary of seeking foreign words for unprecedented things, and dropped his hand and turned away. Behind them, people were abandoning their cars and taking to the fields, avoiding the barricades entirely.
Marie moved past the guard and made for the tower in the distance. She picked up her pace, losing one of her high-heeled shoes and kicking the other from her foot. When she stepped on a sharp rock she knew about the pain but did not actually feel it. In the same way she knew that she was looking around inside the moment when her father had thrown it all away — Marie his daughter, her mother his wife, and the war in Vietnam — the instant in time when escape rises, rippling translucently, out of a stifling landscape. Already the noise behind her was drowned in itself. What she could hear was the wind through the chest-high blades of coarse grass, and faintly a jet engine, like chalk across slate. A plane that seemed unconnected with this sound lifted into the film of heat. Ahead of her, people who’d made their way through the field’s sharp teeth were coming out of them and taking to the road.
It was clear from the scene at the end of the paved service street that nobody was getting into the terminal today. At the entrance, under a modern awning whose aluminum gave a sting to the echoes of terrified and angry voices, the plate-glass windows and electric-eye doors were shattered and covered with boards. Dozens of purple-bereted Vietnamese Special Forces soldiers and Saigon Police guards held back a mass of city people at bayonet-point. Marie took in a picture of men who’d forgotten their purpose here and wanted only to be heard for once, their faces the color of bruises, the veins in their necks like ropes, and the black shocks of hair leaping from their heads as they let themselves be pushed from behind, oblivious of the bayonets, their eyes fixed on the faces of the guards. When a small man vaulted between two riflemen and tried to clamber through a space in the boards across a window, one of the guards turned and smashed the butt of his rifle into the man’s kidneys. He doubled up and fell to the pavement and crawled backward, driven before a bayonet, until he was consumed and trampled by the others.
Marie orbited the crowd’s periphery as if caged, checking through a route that touched panic, dull hope, and nauseated surrender. Lingering on the airport’s centerpiece — a broad disk of lawn, now trampled bare, and a flagpole still exposing the colors of South Vietnam to the wind — she found she’d drifted among the ranks of those who’d given up. Enclosed with their flag in a circle bounded by the asphalt drive, old men and women squatted on their heels, making pillows of their arms across their knees, and slept. Women sat on wide bundles of their belongings tied up in sheets, with children on their laps and other children standing around them, and here and there a husband waited with his arms wrapped around himself and his head bowed, exhausted and pensive, trying to find a way. Not even the children moved here.
The only thing to catch her eye was a figure in light khaki, and she followed his progress along the rear of the crowd. He moved deliberately but not slowly, looking at everybody and acknowledging no one. As he neared, peering right through her, she recognized his outfit as distinctly military. On the flap of his blouse pocket he wore an insignia of wings — Air Force flight personnel. His eyes scintillated as if he were drugged or dreaming. He was just a skinny boy who looked no older than Marie.
Marie was instantly sure he’d stolen this uniform. She grabbed him by the back of his shirt as he passed, and he turned around, smiling and dazed. “Where can I get?” She jerked the cloth of his blouse. “Where? I want a uniform. Uniform!” she repeated in anger, seeing he made nothing of the word.
As if they’d been together all day, he took hold of her wrist and pulled her along toward the rearward fringes of the mob before the terminal’s entrance.
“Merican money,” he said.
“Yes!” Marie said. “I have! I have it!”
With blows of his fists, like a figure come alive off one of Saigon’s theater posters for karate and t’ai-chi fantasies, he advanced them through the crowd and lunged at the first guard he reached, brandishing identification. The guard stepped back, and the boy dragged Marie between barricades. The guard shouted at the boy now, the two spoke heatedly in Vietnamese, the guard pausing to threaten the forward ranks of the crowd with his bayonet. “Vietnam money,” the boy said to Marie.
“Yes!” Marie said. “I have! Have Biet-nam mohnee,” she said.
There was no way through the boarded-up doorway. The guard led them behind the line of soldiers and police for some fifty meters to the terminal building’s east corner, where the windows ceased and only cinder block presented itself, past more sawhorse barricades, and then through a metal door. When they were inside with a few soldiers and two desks — where an odor of boiled coffee overwhelmed her and gave a fearsome homey ordinariness to things — all the men raised their voices. Talking fast and with great confidence, keeping her upper arm in his grip, the boy shook her at the soldiers as if she were compelling evidence, complete proof, that nothing was what they thought it was. Marie nodded emphatically, reaching for the money in her blouse and saying, “Yes, yes, yes,” to the Special Forces officer, a lieutenant she guessed, who was soon doing all the talking. What she might be bartering for was unimportant. The language of Saigon transactions was being spoken, the push and pull, the forefinger repeatedly jabbing the open palm. This man had something which he believed she could be made to want. She wanted it.