Thai Horse (56 page)

THE SECRET OF HUIE-KUI

Hatcher felt a sudden rush of excitement. He had not been sure until that moment that Cody vas really alive. Now, looking at his old friend, he felt a sense of relief and joy.

Namtaan opened the shutters. Sunlight invaded the room, filling its dark corners.

‘Jesus, Polo, I’m glad you’re alive,’ Hatcher said. ‘I don’t remember you as being so tough,’ Cody said. ‘I didn’t remember you with white hair,’ Hatcher whispered with a smile, trying
t
o
break the tension.

‘Part of the act,’ Cody said.
Ever
y wife is very good at makeup and disguise. My real heir still has a little color to
it.’

‘What happened to your leg?’

‘Tore it up when I fell out of my plane. How about your box?’

‘Walked into a gun butt.’

‘Funny how simple stories become after a while,’ Cody said. ‘With time, an hour-long story is reduced to a sentence.’

He seemed taller than Hatcher remembered and thinner. Whatever bad cards had been dealt to Murphy Cody through the years had taken a toll, although the powdered beard and age lines added illusion to reality.

‘Look,’ said Hatcher, ‘if you think you can trust me, I’d like to have a couple of minutes in private.’

Cody thought about that for just a moment, then turned to the regulars.

‘Okay,’ he said. ‘Leave us alone for a minute, please. Namtaan, you stay.’

The regulars scuffled out of the room.

‘I’ve thought a lot about you through the years,’ Cody said, leaning against the windowsill, and stared out across the fields, and then he chuckled. ‘We saw some good days together, didn’t we?’

‘That’s a fact,’ Hatcher said.

‘Remember that New Year’s Eve? We went to New York, both ended up in bed with that girl, what was her name?’

Hatcher had to think for a mi
n
ute before he remembered. ‘Linda.’

‘Yeah, Linda.’

‘A very compassionate soul, Linda.’

‘Wasn’t she, though,’ said Cody’. He turned to face Hatcher. ‘You know, I’ve owed y
o
u an apology for a long time.’

‘You don’t owe me anything, Po
lo
.’

‘I had dinner in Saigon with my- dad about a month before I went down. The last time I saw him. He told me you were in Nam working un
d
ercover for him and had been for a couple of years. I felt about an inch tall, remembering what I said that night in San Diego. I guess my mouth ran a lot faster than my brains in those days. For what it’s worth, I apologize.’

‘Thanks. That means a lot to me.’

‘You’re a persistent son of a bitch, you know.’

‘I’ve been told that.’

‘So what’s the message, Hatch?’ Cody asked seriously.

‘It’s from your father.’

Cody was surprised. ‘My father knows I’m alive?’ he said.

‘That’s what I was sent over here to determine.’

‘Forget it,’ Cody said. ‘Let the dead stay dead.’

‘There’s no way to put this gently,’ said Hatcher. ‘Your father’s dying of cancer.’

Cody was jarred. He stared into space, then sucked in his lower lip. His eyebrows bunched together. ‘Oh Jesus,’ he said, and his shoulders suddenly sagged and the middle went out of him and he reached out and leaned against the window shutters. The seams in his face grew deeper. After it sank in for a full minute, he asked, ‘How long?’

‘Six months, maybe, if he’s real
lucky.’

‘Oh God
. . .‘
The words choked off in his throat. He lowered his head and tears ran down his cheeks. Pai stood beside him and put her arm a
r
ound his waist.

‘Y’know, I never thought I’d see him again, I took that for granted. I just never thought about
. . .
that someday
. .

‘He doesn’t care what you’v
e
done or what you’re doing,’ Hatcher said huskily.
He
just wants to know you’re alive, to see you once before he dies.’

‘God,’ Cody said. He wiped his face, and the age lines painted on it by his wife came
o
ff on his hand, leaving behind the true furrows of age a
n
d hard times. He stared out the window for a very long time. Neither Pai nor Hatcher said anything.

Finally Cody said, ‘Funny, isn’t it, how things you thought were important suddenly become
—
insignificant. All my life I had to toe die mark. Being Buffalo Bill’s son wasn’t easy. I couldn’t fail at anything
—,
He stopped for a moment, then sh
o
ok his head. ‘No,’ he said, ‘that’s not fair, I didn’t allow
myself
to fail at anything. It was in my head. I mean in my head the finger was always pointing at me from the time I was a kid. It wasn’t that he said anything to me. He didn’t push me, he didn’t have to, he was always there like a
—
like the giant in the woods you’re scare
d
of when you’re a kid. When I decided to go to Annapolis instead of the Point, it almost killed him. Shit, he went berserk. Here I was just trying to do something on my own, but, Christ, it was the ultimate insult to him. He ordered me to go to the Point, and when I refused he tried to get my appointment to Annapolis withdrawn. But it was too late.’

Hatcher remembered that nig
h
t when Cody had torn up his room in a drunken rage because he was alone at Christmas.

‘Hell,’ Hatcher whispered, ‘that was twenty-five years ago.’

‘Twenty, fifty, no difference, lie never forgot it. And he never let me forget it. That decision to go Navy clouded our relationship from then on. Maybe it still clouds it.’

‘Doesn’t much matter anymore,’ Hatcher said.

‘It does to me,’ Cody said in a faraway voice.

Cody continued to look out die window, shaking his head, clinging to Pai.

‘Look, Polo, I can’t say anything for Sloan, and I don’t know what the hell Porter’s motives were,’ said Hatcher. ‘Your father doesn’t give a tinker’s damn what happened or what you’re doing. He’s dying, for God’s sake, he wants to say good-bye. My job is to set up a meeting somewhere safe so you can see each other once more.’

‘What irony,’ said Cody. ‘As Proph
e
tt would say, two warriors facing each other across the river and no way to say good-bye.’

‘His abstract poetry eludes me,’ Hatcher snapped with a touch of irritation.

‘Don’t you get it?’ said Cody. ‘As
far
as the world is concerned, we’re all dead. In Prophett’s metaphor, we all crossed over the river. We can’t go home because there’s no home to go to. And some of us couldn’t go home if we wanted to. You know about Riker and Gallagher?’

‘I know they were both in big trouble when they disappeared. I assume Prophett can’t go back because he’s a hopeless junkie, you can tell by looking at him. Wonderboy
—
he’s learned to live with his face. But you, Corkscrew, Potter, Max Early
—‘

‘It all started back before Nam. Hell, my dad and the admiral arranged my marriage like a couple of feudal kings arranging a wedding for the good of the realm. It was like living in a strait-jacket, my wife and I were barely civil. The old man was over here. So I volunteered for the Black Ponies.’

‘In the end it all came down on Cody,’ Pai quietly interrupted him. ‘He had volunteered for the Black Ponies so nobody could say he was looking for an easy time of it. The losses were like snakes in his head, I could see it every day.’

‘It wasn’t just me,’ Cody said with a touch of bitterness. ‘It was the mission. It’s always the fucking mission. You set out to do what you have to do regardless of the cost. But then you begin to wonder
.

Hell, is the mission right or
wrong
? You probably don’t understand that, Hatch.’

‘More than you might think,’ Hatcher said.

‘The final irony is I
became
one of the losses. That morning I had picked up a letter for John Rossiter, my gunner. But I forgot to give it
to
him. I never carried any ID
—
shit, I knew if I went down and they knew who I was, who my father was, then school was out. So all I had was that letter and Rossiter burning to a crisp, the whole jungle afire behind me. I saw that chopper coming in and I thought, God, I’m gonna get
o
ut of this. Then suddenly it turned around and just
—
flew away.

‘Then the bullets started hitting around me, the fire was all over
—
so I threw away my dog tags. Next thing I knew, I had my hands up and they were frisking me and they found that letter and all of a sudden I was Gunner’s Mate John Rossiter.

‘Riker was the first to recog
n
ize me. But he kept mum, they all decided to keep mum. But I figured the least I could do was act like the ranking officer.’

‘He tried negotiating with Taisung,’ Namteen said. ‘To get medicine for Wond
e
rboy and morphine for Johnny and keep Max out of the hole so he would not go crazy.’

‘And food, just food,’ Cody said. ‘I became the camp negotiator, the pimp. The fuckee. If Prophett needed heroin, I sold a piece of myself for heroin. If Wonderboy needed medicine, another piece for medicine. Another piece to keep Max out of the hole so he wouldn’t go stark raving mad. I was Taisung’s slave.’

‘The trouble was, I really didn’t have anything to trade for,’ Cody said. ‘And then
. .

‘And then?’ Hatcher repeated.

‘And then Pai came to us,’ Cody said.

Unsure whether Cody was ali
v
e or dead, Pai had set out to find him. She knew only to go northwest and northwest she went. In Vietnam she was
Vietnamese
. In Cambodia, she
was Cambodian. In Laos, she became Laotian. Wherever the was, she smiled and talked and listened. She worked when she had to for food and then mo
v
ed on. She waded through the rice paddies, dodged the Kh
m
er Rouge, slept in trees to avoid wild animals, almost died t
w
ice with fever.

She kept going, crossed the Anni
m
itique, found the remains of one camp the telltale holes dug in the ground, the remnants of bamboo cell doors
—
dev
o
ured by vines and ground crawlers. The skeletons. She mo
v
ed on, encouraged and discouraged at the same time.

And then one day she heard the voices
—
the unmistakable profanity of GIs
—
and she crept through the jungle grass and saw the camp and that night she crept up to the holes in the ground they called cells and softly caned his name as she crept from one to the other and finally she heard Cody’s unbelieving voice answer, ‘Pai?’ and she lay across the crisscrossed bamboo doors, reached dow
n
and felt his hand take hers.

‘Oh, Cody,’ she whispered through
h
er tears, ‘at last I have found you.’

It had taken her six months to get to the Huie-kui.

‘Oh, Cody, at last I have found you,’ Cody repeated her words. ‘God, I can’t tell you how I felt at that momen
t
’

He stopped and swallowed hard a
n
d then said, ‘And finally.
. .
I had something to offer T
a
isung.’

He whispered as if he feared the words would turn to ashes in his mouth, and they hung in the air along with all their terrible implications.

‘It was my choice,’ Pai said in her soft voice. ‘I wanted most to keep Cody alive, to keep them all alive. No one asked me to do what I did.’

‘And I didn’t stop her,’ said C
o
dy, turning and staring straight at Hatcher, and the expression on his face said all that needed to be said about what living had cost him and the woman he loved.

‘We stayed alive, most of us anyway. Jaimie Solomon was eaten up with cancer. He got back to the States. Joe Binder died in the camp, and Sammy Franklin died of malnutrition before Pai ever
fo
und us.’

‘Jaimie Solomon?’ Hatcher said, remembering the note that had been left on the Wall.

‘The main thing is, Pai kept us there,’ said Cody. ‘Taisung didn’t send us to Hanoi. We honestly believed that if we went to Hanoi it was all over.’

‘I seduced Taisung,’ Pai said, staring at Hatcher’s feet. ‘I went downriver and brought him liquor, cigarettes, everything he needed to make life easy for him. Then I brought him China W
h
ite.’

‘That was my idea,’ said Cody. ‘Hook the son of a bitch. Once he was hooked he’d do anything to get a fix. Johnny Prophett had the connection and Pai was free to move around.’

‘First, a little for the nose,’ said Pai. ‘Then the needle.’

‘Then we had the son of a bitch,’ said Cody.

Earp appeared in the doorway drinking a beer.

‘Everything okay?’ he said.

‘Come on in,’ Cody answered. Earp entered the small room and leaned against the wall.

‘Jaimie left you a note,’ said Hatcher.

‘A note? Where?’

‘At the Wall in Washington, the Vietnam memorial. He thanked you for Thai Horse. Now I know what he meant. He was talking about the Thai Horse that led the fallen warriors to heaven.’

‘That’s right. It was Pai who led us out of that hellhole into Bangkok,’ Cody said. ‘That’s why Johnny called her Thai Horse.’

‘The war had been over almost a year, and Taisung was still holding them,’ Earp said. ‘That’s where I came into it. Hanoi was on to Taisung. He was going to run for it and leave us there with a handful of guards. They probably would have killed us. But Pai offered a trade-out. She’d set up an escape and he could come out with the boys. I was living in Bangkok and helped set up the escape route and the boats.’

‘We should have killed Taisung ‘when we had the chance,’ said Cody, ‘but he was too quick for us. He stole one of the boats and made a break.’

‘And you just stayed here in Bangkok?’ Hatcher said to Cody.

‘That’s right,’ Cody said. ‘During the years I was a prisoner, things happened things that could never be explained properly.’ Cody stopped ‘with a sigh, then went on, ‘When we finally escaped
into
Thailand in late ‘76, I found out I was officially dead. The insurance was paid, my wife had remarried.
M
y kids had a new father. Me? I had Pai and a chance to start over. What was there to go back to, Hatch? I decided to stay dead. When we first got out I used to fantasize about sneaking back just to get a look at the kids. They were one and two when I left, still one and two in my head
—
they’re in high school now. Well, so much f
o
r fantasy. Hell, I don’t even have a passport.’

‘And the others?’ Hatcher asked.

‘Well, we had Gallagher, who was looking at five to ten years for grand theft, and Riker, who was facing a court-martial for striking an officer. ‘You know Johnny Prophett’s problem. He and Melinda stayed here because dope is inexpensive and accessible. That’s when Sweets and Wyatt started the Longhorn. Tombstone just kind of grew out of it.’

‘How about the rest of them? Corkscrew, Potter, Max Early?’

Earp said, ‘When we got out, Early called home to Utah. The phone was disconnected, the house was sold, his wife and two kids were long gone. What the hell did he have to go home to? Corkscrew? And ex-Detroit pimp. Bangkok was heaven compared to that. Besides, the only family he had was his brother and he was killed on that ridge. And Potter? What was his option
—
a scratch farm in Arkansas and a wife who serviced everybody in the state while he was gone? The irony is that we were all bonded by those years of imprisonment. Corkscrew and Early couldn’t reveal what had happened to them without
j
eopardizing Cody, Riker and Gallagher, so they all stayed dead.’

‘The boys on the far side of the river, as Prophett would say,’ Cody remarked.

‘So what happened? How did Taisung get back into the act?’

‘We had this kid. Kilhan
n
ey, Ted Kilhanney. That’s when all the trouble sta
r
ted.’

‘Taisung tried to
buy
us, Hatcher,’ said Pai. ‘To make mules of us.’

‘Blackmail?’ Hatcher asked..

‘Of the worst kind,’ Cody- said. ‘He threatened to expose me, Gallagher, Riker and Ki
l
hanney unless we turned mule for him. That’s what he was doing for Fong, recruiting dope carriers. And Kilhanney was the most vulnerable.’

‘Who’s Kilhanney?’ Hatcher asked.

‘A real Greek tragedy,’ Cody answered. ‘A Catholic priest
—
how do they put
it? —
fallen from grace. Somewhere between Saigon and Bangkok, he lost his religion. He was giving so
m
e G
I
s last rites and the position was counterattacked. In the camp he lost what little faith he had left. When we got here, he fell in love with the wife of a Thai politician. You think we’re screwed up? He was
really
screwed up. He couldn’t face the World, and he was torn up with guilt. Naturally he was the most vulnerable and the first one Taisung went after.’

‘What happened to him?’