A Million Shades of Gray (3 page)

“Where's the river?” the taller of the two men demanded.

Y'Tin pointed behind him.

The man seemed to be cleaning his teeth with his tongue for several seconds. Then he scratched at a tooth with a finger before returning his
attention to Y'Tin. “Don't you know how to talk?” he finally said.

“You follow the path,” Y'Tin said in Vietnamese. He bowed his head subserviently a couple of times, for he could see they were in a bad mood. They stood before him for a moment longer, and he wondered what was coming next. Then the tall one said, “Let's go” to the other, and they left.

Y'Tin felt Lady relax as she continued down the path. “Who are they to call me
moi
, eh, Lady?” He slapped the side of her neck. They emerged from the jungle near the elephant pen that Y'Tin and the other keepers had built several years ago, before Y'Tin was officially an elephant keeper. They had wanted to make sure a roof covered the elephants during sunny days. Even with mud caked on their backs, the elephants still liked to relax in the pen. Y'Tin had also built a small hutch for himself, so he could sleep near Lady every night. Originally, he had wanted to build his own longhouse. He had liked to mention to people how he was going to be the youngest handler ever, even though he'd already told everyone. In fact, one day he had said to his father, “Ama, since I'm going to be the youngest elephant keeper someday, maybe I should have
my own longhouse by the elephant pen.”

His father had replied, “If you build it, you can have it.”

“I can't build it on my own. I was thinking that since I'm going to be the youngest elephant keeper ever, you would help me.”

His father had laughed. “When I was hunting at your age, nobody built me a longhouse.”

So Y'Tin didn't get his own longhouse. All he could build by himself was the hutch.

Now Y'Tin looked toward his family's land and saw his mother and father weeding in their tobacco field. Sometimes people commented that his father loved tobacco as much as Y'Tin loved elephants.

Every day the villagers worked in their fields as if there were no war raging. The last American soldiers had left Vietnam in 1973, and after that daily life continued. Y'Tin's father still worked in his beloved tobacco field, and Y'Tin still went to school, still took care of Lady. He fantasized that the North Vietnamese Army and the Vietcong would leave them alone and that his people would remain in the Central Highlands, where they had lived for hundreds—maybe thousands—of years.

The tribes' other two elephants, Geng and Dok,
were already chained and waiting patiently until their elephant keepers finished working in the fields. Geng was the Knuls' elephant and was handled by Tomas, and Dok belonged to the Hwings and was handled by a boy named Y'Siu.

The chains were long enough to allow the elephants to reach the bamboo trees and tall grass in the jungle but too short to allow them to reach the fields owned by Y'Tin's family. Y'Tin wasn't supposed to, but in July when the sugarcane was ripe, he cut plenty of canes for Lady. It was her favorite thing. He always cut off the sweet end for Lady and gave the rest to Geng and Dok. He knew Lady was more spoiled than the others, but she was also the hardest working. Still, sometimes Tomas reprimanded Y'Tin for spoiling Lady. At sixteen Tomas was the oldest, so Y'Tin and Y'Siu always deferred to him. One day Y'Tin had suggested they chain the elephants farther out because there was a bigger bamboo stand there. Tomas had pursed his lips and said, “They're fine where they are.” Y'Tin was a little miffed, but Tomas was the boss man.

Besides a few minor run-ins with Tomas, the only difficult time Y'Tin had experienced as an elephant keeper was before he began training.
A man from another village had wanted to breed his bull with Lady. She'd gotten pregnant and, at twenty-two months, had given birth to a male, whom Y'Tin had named Mountain. That was when he built a little house, so he could give round-the-clock attention to Lady and Mountain. But Mountain had died at six months, and Lady had been depressed for a long time. She lost so much weight that her ribs stuck out. Y'Tin lost weight as well, until his own ribs stuck out. That was something Y'Tin and Lady had gone through together, and after that they had been connected by their spirits.

Now Lady was pregnant again by a wild bull who'd stormed the village. That was twenty-one months ago, meaning Lady might give birth at any time. For reasons not understood, nobody in the village had ever successfully raised a calf of a domesticated elephant, but Y'Tin planned to be the first.

Now he attached Lady's chain to her leg and gave her trunk a good scratch. “I'll see you after school,” he told her, but her attention had already turned to a bamboo tree. It was ridiculous, but even before he left, he was already feeling lonely for her. Y'Tin was
the last elephant handler back from the river, as he was every morning. While he attended school, Lady would stay chained here unless there was work for her to do hauling wood or crops.

Y'Tin walked toward the village. The fence surrounding it was made of bamboo stalks sharpened at the tops. Years ago the Americans had wanted many villages to put up fences. The fences were to protect the village as well as to let the Vietcong know that this village did not support them. Y'Tin walked through the gate, on which hung the green, red, and white flag of his people. A drawing of an elephant decorated the flag, so naturally, Y'Tin approved of it.

He moved quickly past the longhouses, which all looked the same: slanting thatch roofs and stilts several feet high holding up the structures. The houses were built north to south. He had heard that in America nearly every house looked different from the house next to it and houses could face different directions, depending on how the street ran. Y'Tin thought that seemed disorganized, but who was he to judge?

As he approached his family's longhouse, he clucked at the chicken coop and opened the door.
The chickens scurried out to forage. They were a motley collection: red, black, white, brown. Once, a Special Forces soldier had watched with interest as Y'Tin clucked for the chickens in the evening. He'd asked Y'Tin how he knew which chickens were his and not another villager's. Y'Tin tried to be polite but laughed a bit when he explained, “We know which chickens are ours, and they know us.” Sometimes the Americans were funny. He really missed them. And they had a lot of weapons to fight the North Vietnamese and the Vietcong. In the Central Highlands, life had seemed safer when the Americans had been here, even though Y'Tin had heard gunfire almost every night. He still heard gunfire.

Y'Tin climbed the ladder up to his longhouse. At 130 meters long, it was the biggest in the village. His entire clan numbered sixty, not counting the two babies who were still in their mothers' stomachs. Y'Tin had never set foot in parts of his house. He mostly just went from the entrance to his family's room. One of his aunties lived at the far end, in the biggest room. She was a widow and had her room all to herself. Though she was just thirty-two, she had been widowed three times,
and, frankly, after that nobody was too keen on marrying her.

Y'Tin nodded to one of his seven uncles, who sat on a mat eating rice in the entrance room. His uncle chewed and swallowed.

“Do a good job in school today,” his uncle said. “You know how important it is to your mother.”

“I'll study hard,” Y'Tin said, but he knew his uncle didn't believe him. Nobody ever believed him when he said that. Maybe he should start saying something new when people told him to do a good job in school. Maybe he should say
Absolutely
, the way the Americans would have.

Y'Tin went to the family bedroom to grab his schoolbook. He looked at it with distaste. Most days he couldn't even bear to open it up. One thing about school was that even though all the children were different, they all used the same book. Did that make sense?

He didn't feel he should have to attend school. As an elephant expert, he would always have work. The village would always need elephants. He begged his parents again and again to let him stay home. He would work on them for a few weeks and then not say anything for another
few weeks, so that each time he complained, it would seem fresh to them. He thought he might be wearing them down, because sometimes after he begged them, he saw his parents meet eyes in a certain way, the way they did when they disagreed but didn't want to say so in front of Y'Tin and his sisters.

School was really his mother's idea, and his father always supported her when it came to raising Y'Tin, H'Juaih, and his younger sister, nicknamed Jujubee. Rhade women could be bossy. Y'Tin had heard that the women were more subservient in some of the other thirty-odd Dega tribes here in the Central Highlands. But in the Rhade tribe the women held a lot of power. His mother wanted him to go to school so that he could move to the city one day. “That way, you can have a better life,” she liked to say. He tried to explain to her that he didn't want a better life. Except for school, his life was fine the way it was. Maybe after Lady died he would check out the city. But Lady was just twenty-one, and elephants lived to sixty or even longer. In forty years Y'Tin would be fifty-three. Then, and only then, he might want this better life his mother spoke of. But he didn't like to think of
Lady dying. Sometimes, even though her death was many years away, he cried when he thought of her dying.

Nobody else was around except his uncle. His sisters had no doubt left for school quite a while ago, and the rest of the clan was working in the fields. Y'Tin glanced at them as he left the village. Every day was nearly the same for them. But every day was different for Y'Tin.

He took a final glance at Lady before stepping into the jungle to head for school. Y'Tin was always late. Always. The teacher, Monsieur Thorat, once paddled him on the legs for tardiness, but the paddle barely even stung. Monsieur was too nice to paddle anyone with force. And if he did give Y'Tin a hard paddling, Y'Tin knew his father would withdraw him from school. Sometimes Y'Tin wondered whether he should try to induce a hard paddling. Then he would get to stay home. On the other hand, it could be that his mother would just send him to a different school, one farther away and without such a patient teacher. And Monsieur Thorat actually knew an awful lot of useful and interesting information, but for some reason he hardly ever talked about it. For instance, Monsieur Thorat had
told the class that in Thailand, American tourists paid elephant handlers for rides on their elephants. Y'Tin wondered how much an elephant ride cost. Monsieur Thorat had passed around a Thai magazine, and in it were pictures of painted elephants on parade. Y'Tin definitely would like to see that one day. And Thailand had not been dragged into the wars of Southeast Asia. That made Thailand even more interesting. Also, Monsieur Thorat had been to America. He said that Americans called a little rain a “storm” and called a storm a “torrent.” He said Americans liked to visit other countries for “vacations.” And he talked about “smog.” He said most Americans worked inside buildings. Y'Tin wondered what that was like. He thought that it would kill him to work indoors every day. Anyway, as fascinating as Monsieur could be, he usually chose to be boring for reasons that would always be a mystery to Y'Tin.

Y'Tin tossed his book in the air and caught it as he walked. He had taken this path through the jungle countless times, but about halfway there he felt an odd fear, as if someone was watching him. He looked around but saw nothing unusual. This vague fear had been coming to him more
and more often as North Vietnamese troops grew more aggressive about sending soldiers into South Vietnam. Supposedly, the Americans would take “severe retaliatory action” if the North Vietnamese broke what Monsieur Thorat called the 1973 Agreement on Ending the War and Restoring Peace in Vietnam, the treaty that ended American involvement in the war between North and South Vietnam. The meetings to discuss the agreement took place in Paris, and Ama always called them the Paris Peace Accords. All Y'Tin knew was that the North Vietnamese had broken the agreement and the Americans were nowhere to be seen. Y'Tin thought if they'd given the 1973 Agreement on Ending the War and Restoring Peace in Vietnam a shorter name—like the Paris Peace Treaty—the North Vietnamese would have followed it more. It was just a thought.

The school was a longhouse, which, unfortunately, had the only windows Y'Juen had ever seen. The reason this was unfortunate was that Y'Tin thought the view was more interesting than Monsieur Thorat, so it was hard to pay attention.

When he finally reached the school, he slipped into his chair and opened his book. Monsieur Thorat ignored him. Several boys were absent
today. Y'Tin wanted to know why but sat attentively as Monsieur Thorat discussed nouns and verbs—now,
there
was something useful for an elephant keeper. A large part of class was conducted in French because the school had originally been set up when the French were here in the 1950s. But now the French were gone, and the only thing left of them was their language. There were English-speaking schools also, but Y'Tin didn't live near one and his mother did not want him living outside the village in order to go to school. Besides, she liked the French language. She even used a few French words like
bonjour
,
au revoir
, and
beaucoup
.
Beaucoup
was one of the favorite words of the Americans. They had used it all the time, because everything in this war was
beaucoup
:
beaucoup
soldiers,
beaucoup
weapons, and
beaucoup
deaths.

Monsieur Thorat turned to the class suddenly and said in Vietnamese, “I forgot to mention. I'm looking for an assistant in my house. My wife is pregnant and needs someone to help with our children.”

“My sister will work for cows,” Y'Tin offered.