"That's a goddamn lie," I said.
"Okay, okay, cool it. Can you get someone to relieve you? Good. Theri.
let's go for a nice walk. If you really want to know about Xe, I'll tell you. But I don't want to talk anymore in front of him and I don't much like spending time in rooms full of people. It makes me jumpy."
He stopped, said something in soft Vietnamese to Xe, and bowed slightly.
The old man wearily inclined his head and closed his eyes, his hands crossed on the amulet in the gesture I'd seen so often. Only this time it reminded me of the classic pose of a corpse holding a lily.
I let Sergeant Baker know I was going to be off duty for a few minutes and led Heron through the screen door at the back of the ward, through the curtain of rain draining off the roof of the building and onto the streaming sidewalk between the perimeter fence and the back row of Quonset hut wards. It wasn't raining hard then, but we were both wet in patches before either of us spoke again. A cool green smell waited in from the perimeter, of ozone and fresh growth.
Outside I saw that Heron was in worse shape than I was, though not as bad as Xe. His eyes were infrared maps, and in the blue circles lining the sockets a large vein jumped. His mustache, waxed to ferocious points like the toes of Turkish slippers, twitched.
"Heron, I do care about Xe and I wouldn't have let anything more happen to him, you've got to believe that. I guess I just don't think on my feet that quickly and Meyers and Feyder were quicker. But I'm getting ready to go on R&R. Can Marge or someone on the ward contact you if anything happens to Xe?"
He shook his head dismally. "Nope. That's why I came over today. To say good-bye. I'm being reassigned to the field next week. I got in a little trouble I couldn't talk my way out of."
"Was it with drugs? Because I know you use pot-I saw you with Meyers and Feyder. . . ."
"Did you?" He looked mildly amused. "Is this a bust?"
"Come off it. What I mean is, you use drugs, well, pot anyway, you have access. I just need to know. The drugs aren't part of this power of Xe's you're talking about, are they? I mean, you don't have to be on something to see it? He doesn't, like, give people something . . ."
He stared me down. "What do you think?"
"I don't know what to think. You tell me Xe is some kind of native doctor and I've seen him get hurt twice trying to help other people, but the experiences I've had with him were like how I've heard LSD trips described. So when I saw you pushing pot to my corpsman and one of my patients, it made me wonder, you know?"
He looked down at his foot and nodded, his lips compressed. "Yeah, well.
The smoking's got nothing to do with Xe, but I'll tell you how that is for me. I think we need a little light anesthetic sometimes to get through this war. A man who's good and stoned isn't so uptight he's going to go shooting up whole villages, you bic? But that's my thing.
Xe doesn't need drugs for the kind of high he generates." He turned his back on me as if he had had the last word, and started walking back toward the ward.
I walked backward until I caught up with him, passed him, faced him. The sun came out behind him and I had to squint up. His lantern jaw shuttled back and forth beneath the pointy mustache. "Fine. I won't argue with you. Listen to me a minute, okay? Let me tell you why I even asked about drugs."
I told him about the ball of multicolored light around Xe and about the day I'd worn the amulet. "But was it really just that I was sick, or did I see something? Father O'Rourke said it could have been auras. Is that right? And if it is, why did I see them on everybody that one day when I wore the thingy he has around his neck, but then the other time I just saw his aura, but brighter, without wearing the necklace?"
"He allowed you to wear the amulet?"
"He insisted. He was going to surgery, and Xinh-l-he told her he wanted me to wear it if he was going to take it off."
"And you saw colors?"
I nodded.
"Shit. I wore it once, too, and I didn't see a damned thing. He's talked about you before, but he never let on that you'd worn the amulet.
The way he explained it to me, the amulet is a sort of magnifying glass.
It makes the auras of other people clearer to him, although he can see them, of course, without its help. But with it, he perceives physical and spiritual information about people that helps him heal them."
"I don't get it," I said. "It's usually pretty clear what's wrong with my patients, but I can't do anything about it just because I know what's wrong
"Maybe not, but he can. The way I understand it, the amulet also amplifies his aura so he can use his energy to help someone else's.
Before he got hurt he traveled all over the north part of the countrynobody ever gave him shit, not VC, not NVA, not ARVNS. Because he knew how to read them, how to heal the folks around, so that they always protected him from the hard-core badasses. Too fuckin' bad mortar shells don't have all that much of an aura." His voice was bitter again.
"How about the night I saw the ball of light, then?" I asked. "I wasn't wearing the amulet."
But he'd had enough of my questions and looked at me as if I were a sister who'd gotten more than her share of cake at his birthday party.
He shrugged. "You said you were sick. You figure it out." And he returned to the ward to say a good-bye to Xe that I suppose both of them must have known was final.
When I dreamed that night it wasn't about R&R or about Xinhdy or Tony. I dreamed about Xe. I couldn't remember much except that he was floating around in a big balloon and seemed to be looking for something. I had the feeling he was looking for Heron, but I also knew, the way you do in dreams, that that wasn't quite right. And ihen I thought it might be me he was looking for and I wanted to tell him where I was, but Lieutenant Colonel Blaylock was hiding in the jungle somewhere with a rifle and if she found out I was watching that balloon instead of being back on the ward, she'd shoot me and make sure I wouldn't get my Bronze Star either.
I went to Taiwan for R&R. After Xinh's death and my cheerful chat with Heron, I couldn't bear to stay in Vietnam one extra minute.
As soon as my papers were processed and Marge had rearranged the schedule, Sarge drove me out to the airport. Ahn rolled over on his stomach and wouldn't say good-bye to me, but That squeezed my hand and Mai handed me a folded paper fan. "Airplane too hot," she explained, fanning herself with her hand.
At the airport, the NCO in charge of the R&R flights said no way could he get me out. I started feeling panicky. It was one day of my leave just sitting there. I told him to send me anyplace, anyplace at all, just get me out of country. He found one seat on a plane to Taipei. I didn't have the faintest idea what I'd do in Taiwan. The corpsmen told me proudly of their exploits and showed me photos of their bedroombound dates, but I was damned if I was going to spend my little taste of freedom from the 83rd in one lousy room.
Sick of the Army, tired of the military milieu in general, alone in a foreign country I had never explored before, I headed straight for the naval base. I don't remember why. Maybe I needed time to become acclimatized to a week playing tourist. But I found I'd been missing things I'd taken for granted, even despised, before. I met a Navy wife at the PX coffee shop and sat for hours drinking coffee and listening to gossip and routine marital problems that would have normally bored me stiff. It felt good to hear another woman a normurse, nonmilitary woman, talk about ordinary, everyday housewifing business that had nothing to do with sickness or war or dying. I found her child-rearing traumas fascinating, her struggles with the base schools gripping. I cannot for the life of me remember if I even got her name.