She says, “I do not want you to misunderstand for these three clays. When I shake your hand just now, I was full of some strong feeling about you, a good feeling. I did not say in return ‘I love you,’ but I do.”
And she’s gone. I watch her this time as she moves off, past Ho with his hand on the child, and into the crowd. When I lose sight of her, I dig my own restless hands into my pockets and I find the pack of Ruby Queens. I tap out another cigarette and I light it up and I suck in a deep drag and it burns in me but I keep it in and all the empty nights on the road come with it, all the nights pulling smoke in and letting it out, over and over, and I keep the smoke inside me now, like holding my own ghost.
He is on the curb when Mr. Thu and I drive up. He has a small bag beside him and we stop. I can see his forehead wrinkle when he sees Mr. Thu. I get out. We do not shake hands this time.
“You remember Mr. Thu,” I say, even before he can ask. “We will drop him at his house on our way out of town.”
Ben nods. I open the back door for him. Mr. Thu is already out of the car and picking up Ben’s bag and he heads for the trunk. “Please,” I say to Ben, motioning him into the backseat. I feel how formal I am, how distant this all sounds. He does too. He gives me a brief, sad look and he moves and bends, entering the backseat. I do not care if anyone sees or what they think, though I am very discreet, really, turning my body to shield this thing I do, but as he goes by me I move the hand holding the door and touch him on the back of his thigh, just a quick touch and I grasp the door again and close it.
I step away from the car and my heart is racing. I should be more considerate of Ben’s fear. But I will not share it. I am looking for this trip to escape my father, not find my mother. I will not even think of my mother. Somewhere along Highway One, well before Nha Trang, I think things will become clear on their own.
I turn from the car. I look around. The xich lo drivers are in a clump in the midst of their cabs, arguing about something. The doorman at the Rex is looking down the street. No one has seen my counterrevolutionary act. I get into the front passenger seat. As soon as I close my door, I hear the trunk slam shut. I look into the backseat at Ben. I want him to be smiling, happy for my touch. He is not. His eyes are very sad.
I say, “I am sorry.”
“Why?”
“For touching you.”
Mr. Thu is opening the driver door, unaware what we are saying in English.
“Don’t you know what it is I’m afraid of?” Ben says.
“Of course I know.”
The door closes. Mr. Thu is beside me.
Ben leans forward and touches my shoulder, just with the tips of his fingers, and he sits back deep in his seat again, his eyes looking out the side window. I tell Mr. Thu to take us to his house.
Mr. Thu lives in a place where I have taken many foreign officials and businessmen, a New Economic District where the rapid development of the Socialist Republic of Vietnam is very clear. There are many streets, soon to be full of children and trees, where blocks of beautiful apartments, constructed from highest grade portland cement made in modern factories in Can Tho, glisten white in the sunlight. We drive down such a street and stop. Before Mr. Thu gets out, he and I speak a little in Vietnamese — he thanks me for this time off, because he has a sick child and his wife’s two brothers and their families are visiting from Hanoi, and I thank him for letting me take the car — and while I am speaking my own native language, I am feeling very strange. I am thinking very much how Ben cannot understand what I say or what I hear. And I am hearing even the English in my head as a foreign thing, words about cement production and economic development. And I know I cannot touch Ben when Mr. Thu is gone, though that is what my body yearns to do. This strange feeling makes itself clear to me: I feel suddenly like a person who does not know who she is.
Then Mr. Thu is out of the car and walking away and I watch him until he has disappeared into one of these modern socialist-state apartments. I sit for a moment even after he has gone and I do not say anything and I do not look into the backseat. Ben is silent, too. I am the ghost now. I think what it must be like for my father, watching someone he loves without a language to speak with or a body to touch with.
Then Ben speaks my name. “Tien.”
I turn. He slides forward in the seat. Our faces are very near. I wait but this is as close as we are going to get. So I ask him, “Are you ready?”
“Yes.”
“Do you think you can drive on Vietnam’s roads?”
“You forget what I used to do here.”
“My truck driver.”
“I know the rules. Never stop. Small gives way to large.”
“You are ready to be as dangerous as my countrymen.”
He smiles at this thing I say. I am glad. He gets out of the car and goes around and he slides in behind the wheel, beside me.
I clutch the steering wheel and it’s a stunningly familiar thing. To drive and not to feel.
“What have you done these three days?” This is Tien’s voice and I turn to her, trying to hear what it is that she’s said.
Finally I answer, “I’ve watched a paddle fan spin on the ceiling.”
“I have no fan to watch. I have only tourists and prayers to a man I think maybe does not hear me anymore.”
My hands are cranking the engine. I want to drive now.
Even though it’s not a truck and an interstate. It’s a Fiat sedan with a Saigontourist sticker across the back windshield and an alien street rimmed by an ugly block of apartments. And another street, running through a cleared field waiting for more concrete, and another, packed full with motorbikes squeezing past ramshackle produce stands and restaurants and warrens of scrap wood and corrugated-sheet-metal houses. She tells me where to turn, but says no more than that. I’m glad. I want to hold a wheel and drive in the silence that was my life for years. Even going slow. Even with young men with black flares of hair and young women in sunglasses looking in on all sides while I creep ahead only to find myself in another press of new eyes. It’s all right. I’m holding the wheel, I’m moving, I turn off the air-conditioning and roll the window down and let in the smell of exhaust, a smell of the road, and I have a place to drive to, a place ahead that will resolve all this.
And finally the city traffic loosens somewhat and the road widens a little and though it’s full of potholes and oxcarts and trucks pushing in front of me or jumping out of the oncoming lane and forcing me over, still I can push a bit and I lay on my horn and the women on bikes and the tiny three-wheel Lambretta buses and all the motorbikes give way for me. I just stay clear of the trucks and they’re funky-ass things, for the most part, old deuce-and-a-halfs or old commercial De Sotos and Jimmys, with jerry-built water tanks on the tops of their cabs and copper tubing feeding down into the engines, doing the work of long-gone radiators that can’t be replaced.
And then we’re farther out of town, heading for where Long Binh must’ve been, a massive Army base camp out northeast of Saigon, the place we all passed through on the way into the war. And there are billboards: an enormous display of a piece of PVC pipe, a giant tube of some Hong Kong toothpaste, and a billboard that pleads, GOLF VIETNAM. And then there’s a turnoff to the place where a sign says they’re building the Vietnam International Golf Club. I try to figure how far we’ve come, to see if they’re building that right there on the doorstep we used for all the guys to come and fight in Vietnam. But I don’t think the government that has filled Tien with all those little riffs of ideology would have the sense of humor for that.
I think of her. I look. She has her face turned to the rush of countryside. A flooded rice paddy now. Women out there in conical straw hats bent into their work, up to their ankles among the low green plants. And a boy near the road on the back of a water buffalo. I look to the highway and I swerve around a pothole as big as the buffalo’s head.