“For medicinal purposes,” he says. I smile because I know if I do, I can have anything I want. And what I want is to want this, to be here, trying the best I know how, to match love with something like it.
I can cook a few things, and do: spaghetti, tacos, pot roast. Most nights I come home after work. Sometimes I go ride with Frank in his truck and help with the papers. We finally make love in the back of the truck, on a pile of newspapers and a sleeping bag he keeps in there. My tailbone bruises, and the bruise feels like something real. I like it. I like Frank. Mostly I like seeing a single image of the world.
But this goddamn smile. It feels like it’s painted on. My skin feels like it’s painted on.
Gail won’t stop writing. It’s like she’s throwing bricks.
Something’s got to break. I guess when you get right down to it, something already has.
11. Two Days, Then the Bus to Cambodia
I hear that now you can fire Kalashnikov rounds for a dollar a shot out at Củ Chi, and they have widened and deepened the tunnels to accommodate Western bodies. Mick had the perfect build for tunneling, and he liked dark, enclosed places. I still can’t imagine, though, after the stories I’ve heard, how he went into those things. I have tried for years to tell myself it was lucky, in some alternative configuration, that he didn’t have to come home damaged and try somehow to fit in. I’ve known some of his compatriots, here and back in the States, and not a one of them is right in the head. They’re light-shy and twitchy, still startling at certain sounds, still having the bad dreams after so much time. The suicide rate for the tunnel rats is even higher than it is for the guys who got to shoot at other people, and get shot at, out in the open. Sometimes they take other folks with them when they go. Innocent bystanders, as if any of us is truly that.
Meantime, I drink and shoot pool and pretend that I am helping somehow, with the kids and with my students, though it really did not take me long to figure out it is not the Vietnamese who need help here.
When I feel myself approaching critical mass, I burrow in at the Rex with the Aussie, who works with the Vietnam Airlines guys out at Tân Sơn Nhất, training pilots and mechanics about airplanes in peacetime. These guys, he’s told me, know plenty about planes in wartime: their water buffalo drink from bomb craters turned lotus-choked ponds; their kids are born missing limbs, or with their limbs put on lopsided. By God. Every couple of months he gets a ten-day leave and goes off to Norway — to hike, to “veg out,” he says, unwind before he goes berko. When he leaves this time, one of his pals finally tells me, in as kind a way as possible, that the Aussie is in Norway because his drop-dead Norwegian model girlfriend has just had his child there, a boy, and he is pulling together the paperwork to get them permanent visas and bring them back to Saigon.
“So,” this pal tells me, “maybe you should forget about him now.”
“Done,” I say, though of course we both know that is a big, fat lie. I have not had time to forget. Give me some time.
“He should have told you.”
“Should have. Maybe he was going to when he got back.”
“Pigs fly,” he says.
I spend twenty precious dollars on a four-minute phone call to San Francisco, to my keeper, my tender, my friend — the one whose heart I took such lousy care of because I still had no business trying to operate mine, and because there was nothing dangerous or particularly fucked up about him. It has been over a year, so clearly he is surprised to hear from me, and he waits for me to tell him why I am calling. I listen to his breathing, watch the seconds go away on the pay phone at the post office. I am standing under a larger-than-life-size portrait of a smiling, radiant Ho Chi Minh, in what is officially, at least in name, his city. I say into the phone, “Do you miss me?” but I have not left enough time for an answer at the pace we are going. I want to be missed. MIA like my brother, but with the prospect of being found. Flags flown and torches carried. APBs out for my arrest. I don’t care how.
Finally, I hear, “I don’t know what—” The line goes bleep, then dead. I do not call back, though I should, to say I am sorry for what I did, for who I am, for calling, for reminding him, for asking for something I don’t deserve: for someone to want me. For a reason to one day, perhaps, in this lifetime even, recross the ocean. Selfish as that reason might be. Crazy as it might be to believe, even for a little while, that it would do.
I think about calling home. My real home. I think about calling.
• • •
My pool-playing buddy Clive gets arrested; it is unclear exactly what for, but suddenly his taxi girls have taken up residence in our bar. The cops beat him up and he spends two weeks in jail with a fractured cheekbone, a badly stitched flap of skin covering it, and a dislocated shoulder. When he gets out, he is wearing filthy bandages, a sling made of an old ammo belt, and shoes. June has already been deported back to Thailand. Their bar is shuttered. Clive has no money — as they have searched and taken what they could find, frozen his bank accounts — so we take up a collection and gather 350 US dollars between us. He has two days; then he’s on the bus to Cambodia.
When we give him the money, he cries — blubbers, really, like they say.
Ian asks first, “What’s the plan, mate?”
“Got none.” One-handed, Clive clenches the edge of the bar like it’s a high window ledge and he is outside, suspended over a very long drop. He bends his elbow and leans in to put his forehead against the wood, in a motion that could be mistaken for prayer. We wait, grouped in a loose semicircle around the pool table, while he gathers himself. He turns and eyes the felt longingly. Then he looks at me. “Learn to snooker, girl. Can you do that? At least the ones who’ve got it coming.”
“I’ll try, Clive.”
“Might learn to like it.”
“Never know.”
Gentleman that he is, he shouts us all a round before he goes. We write our real names on beer coasters so he can send mail to us poste restante, knowing it will never happen, knowing in a few months he won’t be able to match but a few of the names to faces, but it is what we do: send a piece of ourselves with him. He leaves, his new shoes somehow broken in already, molded to his feet like black wax. His shoes are what we look at as he ambles away, how they carry him off, ungainly and unbelievably gone.
A couple of nights after Clive leaves, Ian and I get a few beers in us and decide to break into his bar. Luc, the Froggy that Phượng has her eye on for me, comes with us. We’re presumably going just to check it out, and then Ian says he thinks Clive mentioned a stash somewhere, maybe in the storeroom, but he doesn’t know of what or exactly where. Could be money or hash or some other kind of drugs. “Could be girls,” Ian says, not sounding like he’s kidding.
We hail three cyclos. The young drivers race halfheartedly, figuring out quickly that we are not tourists and don’t want anything but a ride. There is no rain tonight and instead just half the moon. The river reflects it, rainbowy with diesel, smelling like exhaustion and fish. We pay the drivers at the corner nearest the bar and wait for them to drive off before we duck into the entryway, where Luc goes to work on the cheap Chinese padlock. It’s big, like the one at the Lotus, but Luc demonstrates his wizardry by picking it in about twenty seconds flat. “Voilà,” he says, a bit theatrically.
Ian makes it through the door without mishap, but Luc and I sort of fall through it, into a snarl of overturned bar stools and sundry wreckage. “Ô la vache, crap, sheet, mer-duh,” he says as we untangle ourselves. I get a bit of elbow in the ribs — deserved retribution, I suppose, for taking him down with me — but when he gets to his feet, he reaches for me, to help me up. It is dark but for a bit of that half-moon filtering in through a high window. I have a small flashlight with me and switch it on. The bar looks like the Ia Drang Valley after the First Cav got done with it. Nothing that should be standing is; all of the pictures have been torn off the walls; June’s collection of porcelain figurines and other knickknacks is smashed and scattered. There is broken glass, like shrapnel, on every horizontal surface. It scrapes beneath our feet as we make our way to the storeroom door. I can’t believe Luc and I didn’t get cut when we went down, but somehow we hit a clear patch.