Acres of plants were already consumed and blackened, and the fire now fed on earth and roots. I wondered what burned so hot and remembered napalm. But why napalm somebody's field?
I hated the feel of it even more than I hated stumbling through jungle, so I started climbing again, up away from the fire. Just before nightfall we found another stream cutting a ridge in half. We bathed again and drank and I gave Ahn two of my Midol for his fever, and allotted us two salt tablets apiece after saving one for my new crop of leeches. I tore the sleeve off my fatigue shirt and bound it around his stump with a piece of his old bandage. The stump didn't look as bad as I feared, but there was a nickel-size sore where the stitches had once been, and it was draining.
We climbed back up and over another ridge before nightfall, and bedded down between two rocks under a very large tree that gave us some protection from the rain. I dreamed my grandpa was pointing at the field and laughing, telling me about strip-and-burn agriculture, but he was saying something about how they did it with crop dusters these days.
When I woke the next morning, I felt the warmth of a small fire, smelled meat cooking, and heard it sizzling. William squatted, Vietnamese style, beside the fire.
"If I be Charlie, lady, you be dead," he said.
"I almost was anyway," I said, prying Ahn loose so I could stretch a little. William's aura still had a faint edge of black and maroon but was mostly blue, a little yellow, clear green. "You remember coming after us with a machete and a .45 by any chance?"
"Me? Nah, I go after VC. Got some too. One got away, the girlsan with the heavy artillery."
"That who you thought we were?" I asked. But he just looked puzzled, and hurt, and his colors started swirling around in a confused sort of way.
"Never mind," I said. "How did you find us?"
"Easy. You not exactly Sheena, Queen of the Jungle, woman. You see any of 'em?"
"Any of who?"
"Our boys. They around. Who you think called in that napalm on the taro field?"
"Is that what it was? I wondered. What's taro?"
"Good food. But ten to one some asshole thought it was weed. Or maybe they just wanna make sure Charlie don't eat no taro. I dunno."
"Wait a minute," I said. "If that was one of our planes that dropped napalm, then there must be some of our guys around-"
"You catch on quick, Sheena. I spotted a patrol of about six dudes just as I got to that taro field, but they was 'way far down the valley, and about the time I started into that field after them the planes come up and it was weenie roast time. I had to didi mau. But that patrol is maybe a day ahead of us."
"Of you, maybe," I said. "I'm surprised you could backtrack far enough to find us. You sure are one tough act to follow."
''Yeah. Well, I think we should find them dudes."
"If they're a day ahead of us, we'll never make it. Ahn's leg is going bad again."
"We all gonna go bad we don't get out of this shit pretty soon. Want some of this primo monkeysan here?"
I nodded and looked back toward Ahn. He was sweating in his sleep. "You could carry Ahn again. That would speed us up."
"It'd slow me down, though," he said thoughtfully. "That patrol's already got a day's lead on us."
We chewed monkey and thought it over. I was tempted. I wished I hadn't brought Ahn out here. And William was undoubtedly right. We'd lose our chance at rescue altogether if we slowed down for Ahn. On the other hand, if he was an American kid, we wouldn't even be discussing it. I decided not to discuss it anyway.
"Well," I said, "maybe it would be better if you left us here and went after them yourself. I don't think Ahn's going to get very far. His stump's infected."
"Lady, you don't seem to understand. We ain't in the world no more.
This be war, baby. I leave you here and when I come back, if you here, you probably be some kind of beaucoup messed-up fucked-over corpse."
"Okay, okay, I know, I know. Stop talking about it, okay? The whole idea makes me nervous. But frankly, buddy, I'm just about as nervous hanging out with you. That's twice you've nearly killed us."
"Will you stop sayin' that? I ain't harmed a fuckin' hair of your head-"
"It wasn't my hair I was worried about," I argued, ever as ready with witty repartee as I was when fighting with my kid brother.
"Nor nothin' else neither. Where you get this shit, girl? You ack like I crazy-truth is, you be the crazy one. What you tryin' to do? Set me up to get lynched for rubbin' up against your lily-white round-eye tail?"
"Watch the names, buster," I told him. "I'll make a deal with you, you don't call me round-eye tail and I don't call you nigger, okay?"
The red and black was growing in his aura again and I realized that I was no longer dealing just with William, my fellow refugee, but with an armed and angry man who currently killed people for a living and was having a lot of trouble telling which people were the ones he was supposed to kill and which ones were on his side.
He half rose, then sat down again, his eyes full of resentment and hostility and something else that fueled both-the grief that cloaked all the other colors in his aura, and the self-reproach that was growing in prominence. The colors were altering so quickly, shifting from one emotion to the other, that I was having trouble naming them, although I knew what they meant.
"What you watchin'?" he asked belligerently. But he stayed seated and his hands were open on his knees. "You look like you about to shit yourself. What's the matter? I look like some nigger mothahfuckin'
street gang rapist to you or what?"
"You got this all wrong, William," I said when I was able to detach myself from watching his aura. It had a hypnotizing effect that was soothing in a purely detached kind of way. But it was alarming how quickly his soft-spoken kindliness ran to anger. I was convinced it was misdirected when pointed at me, but I squirmed anyway. If I was not exactly a bigot, it was probably more from lack of opportunity than from actual ideals. There hadn't been any black kids in my classes until high school, though the neighborhoods near us had been integrating gradually-and with much paranoid grumbling and dire prediction from my relatives. I didn't mind talking to a black person, but the sexual stuff made me uncomfortable, all the more so because I knew that if I were the liberal person I thought I was, it shouldn't. But the real problem I was having was that even though William and I spoke the same language and were from the same country, I knew less about the problems and attitudes of the culture he came from than I did about the Vietnamese. Proximity to the soul brothers back at the enlisted barracks-hard-core groups who looked like the Army equivalent of street gangs and made nasty remarks as I passed-did not lead me to believe that I was going to be liked just because I was in favor of the civil rights marches on TV. But I was damned if I was going to be lost in the jungle with enemies all around and a sick kid and a crazy man and admit to being a bigot on top of it.
"Private Johnson to you," William Johnson snapped.
"You got this all wrong, Private Johnson," I began again. "You don't remind me of anything like a street gang."
"Nah?" he asked, sounding maybe a little disappointed.
"Nah," I said. "What you remind me of is this nice little old lady I took care of during my psych affiliation in training. She was just as pleasant and sweet as anything except that every once in a while she attacked clergymen and tried to castrate them. The rest of the time you couldn't meet a nicer person."