The Lotus Eaters: A Novel (29 page)

"Shouldn't we go back and tell them the truth?" Helen asked. "Linh can report the beating."

Darrow leaned in close to her. "Don't ever put Linh at risk. Americans can get out of prison. If they put him away, there's nothing we can do. The South Vietnamese have their confession, and they'll stick by it."

"What about Ngan?" Helen said.

Darrow turned away.

The helicopter rose to tree level, and Helen tried to pick out their hut from the surrounding ones. Brokenhearted to leave, but especially with the villagers' fates uncertain. Impossible to find their hut, the thatched roofs quickly blending together, and soon they were too high even to be sure which hamlet was theirs among the infinite canals and rivers. Soon even the villages were indistinguishable from the dense vegetation and trees, the pattern of rice paddies making the view identical in every direction, the land closing up and becoming impenetrable once more.

The pilot turned around and yelled over his engine. "Want to go have a little fun?"

TEN
Thien Ha

Under Heaven

The day was a
perfect jewel, and long after Linh would remember it as the happiest day of his life. Neither too hot nor too cold. The sky a soft azure, unmarred by a single cloud; the white sand of the beach on fire in the sunlight. The helicopter pilot flipped off the switch for radio contact, hooked a sharp right, and came in low over the palm trees, creating a wind that raised the sand into small whorls, chopped the waves into emeralds at the ocean's edge.

Half an hour later, Helen, Darrow, Linh, and the helicopter crew were seated in a beachside cafe in Vung Tau, the old Cap St. Jacques, drinking "33" beer and eating cracked crab. The proprietor, thrilled by his dollar-laden clients, had two tables with large blue-and-white striped umbrellas dragged out onto the sand. For the occasion, he even ran a greasy towel over the oilcloth tabletop. When they ordered more beer, a small boy dug around in a trash can filled with ice that housed both the bottles and that day's catch. As the meal went on, orange-pink splintered shells formed a jagged reef around the table.

After lunch Darrow set up a chess set and played Linh while the helicopter crew ran touch football on the beach, recruiting the local boys, who kept running off with the ball. One of the men turned on AFVN radio.

Maintenance of the M16 in the field is affected by conditions. In the upper altitudes only a light lube should be applied, thin and often, especially often. Down in the delta, areas with plenty of water, be extra careful that your lubrication does not get contaminated. Take care of your weapon and your weapon will take care of you....

If you leave Vietnam on emergency-leave orders...

"Turn that damn thing off!" the pilot yelled. "Can't you see we're on vacation here?"

And, indeed, the relaxed faces of the people on the beach, the wet breeze and the lethargic waves, made the war seem somewhere far away. When Helen left to walk on the beach, Linh moved his knight so that his king was exposed.

"Hey, you can't toss the game!" Darrow said.

"Sorry, I can't concentrate."

Darrow looked around and spotted the pilot stretched out on three chairs. "Billings, you're up."

The pilot mock sighed, opened a fresh "33," and sat down at the table. Linh stepped over the reef of crab shells and made his way to the surf where Helen stood. They watched fishermen, their skin a dark, sun-cured teak, tug nets of beating fish up on the sand.

As they walked along the surf, a boy ran by, and when he was within feet of Helen, he reached down his arm and splashed her with water. She stopped and looked down at her soaked capri pants, then at the boy. She cupped her hand in the warm water and splashed him back with twice as big a spray. His eyebrows shot up in surprise, and he stood still and gave a loud belly laugh. Then began a tag game in earnest, Helen and the boy joined by his friends, running through the knee-high waves, catching each other in ropes of water. At one point, Helen was clutching Linh inside a ring of the boys who circled the two of them, pressed them in, splashing them with water, circling around and around. Helen had a sudden vision of her long-ago dream of the Vietnamese children when she had first arrived in Saigon, how threatening she had found them as they circled around her and Michael. Perhaps she had read the dream wrong, and they weren't menacing at all. After fifteen minutes, the novelty of the American woman wore off, and the boys retreated to a food stall. Helen stood drenched beside Linh.

"I'll tell you the truth, I hated it here when I first came. It was strange and frightening. But this time in the village... despite everything, this place moves me."

"I'm pleased."

"Since we're wet, let's swim out to that buoy," she said.

"I can't."

"Come on. What if I get a cramp? You'll need to save me."

Linh looked down at the water slapping over his knees but said nothing.

"What?"

"I cannot swim."

Helen sensed his embarrassment and took his hand. "Then you're in luck, because I taught swimming every summer during high school."

They walked together along the sand, away from the crowds, coming across dead jellyfish whose purple translucent flesh reeked in the sun. At a deserted stretch, they entered the water that had only a hint of oily coolness. Helen showed Linh how to hold his breath underwater, to float on his back, to move his arms for the breaststroke and the sidestroke.

She touched him, hand against hand, arm against chest, trunk against back, with a kind professionalism, like a nurse with a patient. Linh dunked his head underwater again, opened his eyes wide to allow the sting of salt, the excuse for tears. No one had touched him, except in the most incidental way--Helen's hug, the brush of strangers--since he had lost his family. He had numbed himself to the absence, but this strange baptism woke each part of him to a fresh agony. He dunked his head again, held his breath till his lungs threatened to buckle, surfaced to the shattering of light, spluttering, the far-off laughter of playing children.

Helen put her hand on his arm. "Are you okay?"

Linh shook his head. They walked out of the water and stood in the sand.

"Don't worry. It doesn't come all at once. You'll get the hang of it."

"Why do you dream to photograph the Ho Chi Minh trail?" he asked her.

"I did." Helen shook out her hair. "I still do. Not for the same reasons anymore." She brushed sand off her arms. "I'm beginning to admire them. Their fierce will. Do you understand someone better when you've sat down and eaten a bowl of rice with them?"

The sun spun low in the sky, turning the South China Sea into a long liquid field of bronze.

"I thought of you all the time in the village. You should have been there with us," Helen said. "I felt it, the thing you talked about, being a brick in the wall."

With those words, Linh knew without a doubt he loved her. He barely remembered walking up the sand to the cafe, how they stood shoulder to shoulder, how her hair dried to the color of light straw.

As they approached, Darrow stretched his arms over his head, smiling at them even as he cast a troubled glance down the beach. All Linh could see was the radiance of Helen's face as she gazed at Darrow.

"I only have that fierce will for those I love," she said under her breath to Linh. "I need to get him away from here."

Years later Linh would wish that there had been some sign that this moment was the perfect one, balanced on the edge of changing, that the three of them would never again be together and as happy as they were then. But even if he had known, how did one hold time? Instead, there was a shout from one of the crewmen: "Ice cream!" and Helen grabbed Linh's hand as they hurried through the white powdery sand, stumbling, laughing, blind.

The three of them
returned to the war that had brought them together, but the war itself had changed. Saigon with it.

Helen and Linh went out to photograph the refugees crowded into the new slums overwhelming the city. The faces they met were weary--bones pressing against skin, hollow-cheeked, eyes sunken and stony from hardship--looking away, not into the camera. An indication the enemy was winning?

Life in the city remained as schizophrenic as ever: Each night Helen waded through dozens of quickly mimeographed invitations to dinners at posh restaurants and cocktail receptions at the embassies. As the war grew larger, the social life of the city expanded with it. They attended the official functions dutifully, knowing that nothing of interest would come out of it beside the line about winning the war.

Darrow and Helen returned a couple, and they now took their place in the expat life of journalists and adventurers. Many came from ambition, as Darrow had claimed, but just as many came to escape what ever bound them to home--jobs, family, boredom. Media stars mixed with journeymen photographers and freelancers who never took a picture, a movie star's son, and a Connecticut debutante. American teenagers washed up on the streets, straight out of high school or college dropouts.

They met at all-night parties hosted in dilapidated French villas or in seedy bars scattered through the city. They listened to Cuban music a wire-service stringer supplied; they drank rum and scotch, smoked pot and opium. Most of the men had Vietnamese girlfriends; the few women had a number of men to choose from.

The talk of the parties was about the price of brandy and the availability of hair spray and war; the latest restaurant and nightclub and war; divorces and marriages, war; romances and salaries, war; babies, the danger of the countryside, war; eventually they came back to the bedrock of their existence, the cause of the present Americanized incarnation of Saigon, and it was always war.

But it was her life with Darrow in the crooked apartment behind the Buddha door in Cholon that formed Helen's true history. What was between them balanced the madness outside.

Darrow and Helen were
sent to cover a refugee exodus below the DMZ--a poisonous, sinewy, snakelike stream of old fuming diesel trucks, loaded-down bicycles, carts, wagons, and people. By the time they reached the convoy, a dozen other journalists were already there, including Robert. Then Matt Tanner appeared. Helen had not run into him again since their exchange over the Captain Tong pictures, and she considered that a good thing, and regretted seeing him now.

Tanner walked on, not acknowledging them. Robert shook hands, polite and curious. As soon as he saw them together, he realized he had lost all chance with her.

Darrow and Helen walked alongside the refugees while Linh asked questions. People had evacuated in a panic; there was a shortage of basic supplies. They passed Helen with slow, solemn steps, taking no notice of her camera. Food and water were scarce. Although she was parched, Helen avoided sipping from her canteen, guilty that she had water and at the same time protective, afraid to be mobbed for it.

After the calm of the village, the sheer numbers of people overwhelmed; the scale of the disaster made her feel useless. Dry-mouthed, she licked her lips, tasting salt, growing more thirsty. When an old man collapsed on the side of the road, she stooped down, shielding him from view, and gave him precious mouthfuls of her water, but in seconds a crowd formed, and she had to move on.

The sides of the road, used as both kitchen and toilet, had turned to mud, the stench unbearable. Some of the older villagers so frail every step was a miracle of will. Darrow walked ahead and ran into Tanner and two other photographers circling a young man as he struggled to pull a cart loaded down with belongings. A tiny, aged couple--grandparents?--sitting in the back with three small children in their laps. The young man had taken off his shirt and wrapped it around his head. His ribs were sharp, etched, every muscle and tendon roped with the strain of pulling the cart. Tanner appeared especially bull-like as he towered over him, bending as he angled his camera to capture the young man's expression.

Darrow jumped forward, pushing Tanner hard in the back so that he braced his hands on the side of the cart to keep from falling. The wood wheels of the cart shuddered and creaked from the sideways thrust.

"What the hell--?"

The young man stopped and put down the stays of the cart. His chest heaved with hard intakes of breath. Indifferent, resigned to what ever would happen next.

Darrow motioned him to the back of the cart and picked up the stays himself and began to pull. The young man's eyes widened, but he followed the cart, speaking softly to the white-haired couple. The woman turned her arthritic neck to study Darrow's back.

"What the fuck stunt is this supposed to be?" Tanner screamed. "You lunatic!"

Robert watched the scene unfold. Let Darrow hang himself, but he couldn't stand Helen's stricken face. He shook his head. "Go on ahead, Tanner."

"He's a goddamned nutcase!"

"Go on!" Robert yelled.

Linh slipped the two neck straps from Darrow's neck.

"Put them in the cart," Darrow said. "Go ahead and get some pictures farther up."

Linh jogged ahead. Darrow's face tight, jaw quivering. Helen didn't know what to do, and in her indecision, she walked alongside the cart. A brawl averted, Robert dropped back down the line without a word to either of them. Whatever had gone wrong in Darrow's head was her problem to deal with now.

For two hours, not a word was spoken. Finally the young man ran up to the front of the cart and tapped Darrow on the shoulder. He pointed to a shady spot under the trees, and Darrow nodded and pulled the cart off the road. The moment he set down the stays, the old couple sprang up and began handing down the children. As the old man washed their faces with the corner of a handkerchief and some water, the old woman unpacked a basket of wrapped banana leaves.

Clenching and unclenching his blistered hands, Darrow stood awkwardly, not knowing how to leave them. What are the boundaries of charity? When started, where does it morally end? His upbringing had been a secular one, but how he longed to have the crutch of faith, even temporarily. Something had exploded inside his head, an anger he thought he had dealt with.
The cool thing for us is that when this war's done, there's always another one
. The placid thought floated in his head that he would have shot Tanner point-blank if given the chance.