The road was bad, so she put her arms around me. I was still pretty pissed off, but there’s nothing like hunger and fatigue to take the piss and vinegar out of you. This lady could ride, and she could shoot, and she talked the talk, and I had enough enemies in these parts to worry about, so I patted her hand.
She rubbed my stomach and asked, “Are we friends?”
I replied, “No, but I love you.”
She kissed my neck. I was reminded of a very big cat with very long fangs licking a captured antelope before snapping its neck.
CHAPTER FORTY-ONE
About forty kilometers from Dien Bien Phu, the road deteriorated instead of getting better as it approached the town. What is wrong with this place? There was not one reflective arrow or reflective anything, the ground mist was getting heavier, and it was diffusing the headbeam, and I was starting to get disoriented.
Susan said, “Paul, let’s stop and sleep here.”
“Where?”
“Here. On the side of the road.”
“I can’t see the side of the road.”
We pushed on, averaging about fifteen KPH, and the bike was wobbling at the lower speeds. About two hours later, pushing 10 P.M., a valley suddenly opened up on both sides of the road. The grade began a downhill descent, and within fifteen minutes, the road came into a wide, open plain. I couldn’t actually see much of the plain, but I could sense it, and I could see lights scattered around. There was a break in the clouds now and the weak moonlight and starlight reflected off what I thought was a lake, but then I recognized it as a series of rice paddies. Back in ’68, there were a lot of valleys in ’Nam nicknamed Happy Valley, meaning that GIs on patrol in the hills were happy to see the valley. This was Happy Valley.
The road curved sharply to the right, and there were huts on both sides. It took me a while to realize I was in the town of Dien Bien Phu. I saw a lighted sign to my left that said Nga Luan Restaurant, and to my right was a place called the Dien Bien Phu Motel. This was all like an apparition, and I thought I’d gone over a cliff and was now in Viet heaven. I said, “The Dien Bien Phu Motel looks like a winner.” We drove up to the motel office in the middle of a long stucco building and dismounted. I stretched and discovered that none of my muscles were connected or working. I actually had trouble walking to the reception office, and I thought I was going to fall on my face. I couldn’t even peel off my leather gloves.
Before we went inside, Susan said to me, “They’ll want our passports and visas, and they don’t take no for an answer in the north, nor will they take ten bucks instead.”
“So, we’re Americans. Doesn’t make us bad guys.”
She said, “Eventually, our names will be sent to the Ministry of Public Security in Hanoi, and there’ll be a record that we were here.”
“I understand. But I think we’ll be in Hanoi before our names are. We’re on the last leg of this journey, but if you want, we can sleep under the stars.”
She thought a moment, and I could see the trained professional now, weighing the risks. She said, “Let’s get a room.”
“Take it for four nights so they think we’re hanging around awhile.”
She replied, “They’ll take our passports until we check out, so when we check out tomorrow, they’ll know we’re gone. This is a police state.”
“Right. But make it four nights anyway, and that’s what will be reported to Hanoi. You go in. They don’t have to see me.”
“They do. Did I mention this was a police state?”
We went inside the small reception area. A middle-aged woman behind the counter was reading a newspaper.
Susan asked for a room in French, and the woman seemed surprised that we were checking in so late. She and Susan exchanged bad French, a little English, and a few words of Vietnamese. We had to produce our passports and visas, which the woman insisted she had to keep.
For ten American bucks a night, we got the key to Unit 7. My lucky number.
We left the reception room, and I wheeled the motorcycle to Unit 7 at the left end of the motel. Susan opened the door and said, “The lady said put the bike in the room, or we’ll never see it again.”
I pushed the motorcycle into a small room and left it near the foot of the twin bed.
The place had a small bathroom and one night stand, one lamp, and a clothes pole hanging on chains from the ceiling that looked like a trapeze for sexually adventurous couples.
We took our backpacks out of the saddlebags and put them on the bed, then Susan went into the bathroom, turned on the electric water heater, and washed her hands and face in cold water. She then went to the door and said, “The lady said she’d get something for us to eat. Be right back.”
She left.
I sat on the bed and took off my running shoes, then peeled off my wet socks. I got my leather jacket and gloves off and put the Colt .45 under the pillow. I looked around. I knew, somewhere deep down inside, that this place was awful, but at this moment, it looked to me like the Ritz-Carlton in Washington.
Susan returned with a bamboo tray on which were bamboo containers that when uncovered revealed soggy meat dumplings. She put the tray on the bed. Also on the tray were bowls of cold rice, chopsticks, and a bottle of water.
We knelt at the side of the bed and ate the meat dumplings and rice with our fingers. It took about thirty seconds to get the stuff down, and we killed the water in less time than that.
Susan commented, “I guess you were hungrier than you thought.” She added, “The meat was porcupine. No joke.”
“I wouldn’t care if it was dog.”
She smiled and put the tray on the floor, then stood and took off her wet, muddy clothes. As she was undressing, she said, “The reception lady was very surprised that we’d come in over the mountains at night on a motorcycle.”
“So was I.”
“She said this is the latest she’d ever checked anyone in, and she was about to turn out the lights and leave. We may have aroused a little suspicion.”
“Whatever we do here seems to arouse suspicion.”
Susan replied, “I think we’re okay now. She said there are some Westerners in town, though most of them come later in the season.”
“This place has a season?”
She put her hands on the clasp of her bra, then looked at me as if to say, “Is it all right if I get naked in front of you? Or are we no longer lovers?”
I stood and unbuttoned my shirt. Susan unclasped her bra and threw it on the motorcycle, then slipped off her panties.
Susan asked me, “You want to kill some time while the water is heating?”
Well, as pissed off as I was, Dickie Johnson was not at all angry. In fact, he was happy, and he and I were about to have an argument. But my big brain was nearly dead with fatigue, and little Dickie’s brain had slept for the whole ride, so I was no match for his insistent demands. I peeled off my shirt, pants, and undershorts as Dickie stretched.
We stood there in the lamplight, and our faces were dirty, except for where the goggles and scarves had been, and our bodies were covered with a damp sweat and who knew what else after two days without a shower.
She turned down the sheets, which had a reddish cast from what must have been heavily iron-oxidized water.
Susan crawled into the bed, rolled on her back, and motioned for me to come to her. I got into bed, Dickie pointing the way.
I got on top of her and slid right in. I mean, I couldn’t even walk or control the movement of my limbs, and my backbone felt as if I’d made a parachute jump with seventy pounds of field gear and tangled shrouds into a concrete pit; but I wanted to get laid. Amazing.