The Lotus Eaters: A Novel (36 page)

"Damned thing is he's right."

She stared at the water stain on the ceiling. "Who?"

"That SOB Tanner."

"About?"

"What pisses me off is seeing myself in him."

Helen sat up, knees folded beneath her chin. "You're nothing like him."

Darrow came to the bed and sat down. "I've been here too long. I hear something going down in Can Tho or Pleiku, I have to be the first one there."

"That's your job."

"I've been leading you along, too." He took hold of her arm, stroking the skin at her wrist. "I don't mean to."

"Don't leave because of me," she said.

Darrow shook his head. "Let's take our trip to Cambodia. I want to see the
apsara
s again. I had dreams there...."

Lying in his arms, she realized Darrow spoke with other people's words. Words she wanted to hear but that were not necessarily the same as the truth. He created himself like a collage, bits and pieces that she would never come to the bottom of.

"I'm ready to leave with you," he said.

She had dreamed the words so long that she barely made sense of them, but she tried to convince herself that the long siege was over. He loved her after all, and now they could go home.

When he left early that morning, she was still sleeping.

_______

It was this way
in Vietnam during the war--sometimes Darrow felt all powerful, felt he could ride fate like a flying carpet, like a helicopter, will it to do his bidding. Other times fate reminded him that he was only a toy, blown this way and that, swept away or destroyed on a whim.

The difficult decision made, Darrow felt lighter than he had in years. Helen equaled life to him, and he would let all this go and follow her, follow life out of this place. As scheduled, he joined the crew of a gunship, spent the morning flying in Tay Ninh province along the Cambodian border, photographing a cross-border black-market operation. It was a good morning, a good helicopter. He felt in his element. The pilot flew contour, almost touching the tops of trees, what they called "map of the earth" flying. Hostile forces could hear the plane but didn't have time to draw a bead on it in the dense canopy jungle.

The pilot, Captain Anderson, was in his midtwenties, a big puppyish kid with a constant grin, unable to hide his plea sure in flying. Sunlight glinted off his blond, buzz-cut hair. Darrow smiled, and the sobering thought occurred to him that he was almost old enough to have a son that age. Where had the time gone?

After doing an aerial recon, Anderson got orders to drop in on a couple of forward firebases in the Parrot's Beak. Isolated, the area was considered bandit country, riddled with VC and NVA positions. The night before, bases were attacked, and now enemy bodies, strung up in the perimeter wire, bloated in the hot sun as trophies.

Darrow and the pilot sat on the ground, their backs against sandbags, and ate C-rations, ignoring the fetid smell blowing in from the wire.

"I'm shy to say this, but you were the photographer when my dad served in Korea. You took his picture."

"No kidding?"

"I swear it. Recognized the name right away."

"That's amazing. So he came home. And had you."

"And five others. Wait till I tell him you were here."

"That'll be good. Very good."

"Where you headin' to after this?" Anderson asked.

"Heading home." The words felt strange in his mouth, as if they had no connection to himself. After all these years, where was home? He felt at home right there, with this young man who could have been his son, but wasn't.

The boy blew out a breath. "Home. You are one lucky--"

"Your father should be very proud. Do you miss home?" Darrow asked. In the bright sun, he thought the young captain's face impossibly unlined, impossibly innocent. Had he ever been so young? Choked up, he pulled out a cigarette and offered one. Anderson took it but averted his eyes, and Darrow realized that he had missed that look, the toughness in the jaw, that the captain was boyish only in his joy of flying.

"I do and I don't, you know?"

Darrow chuckled. "I'm there, guy."

Anderson, egged on, sat up, nodding his head. "I mean, I'm in the groove here. Finally. I can
do
this. But there... it doesn't make sense anymore. I don't know if I trust it."

"Me, either."

"Then why you goin'?"

Darrow shrugged. "A woman. Couldn't help myself."

Anderson laughed out loud. "No shit? Well, good luck to you. You're a braver man than me." He took a long drag of his cigarette. "I'm supposed to be one of the best pilots. So they send me on all the tough stuff. Hero shit. So the chances of me eating it are better than if I was just a washout. How fucked up is that?"

"You don't have to be the best pilot."

Anderson laughed. "Wrong! I do, and they know it. Can't help myself." He thrust his hips lewdly. "Flying's the only
other
thing I've ever been good at."

The next day Anderson
and Darrow were on their way to the firebase at Kontum.

The morning passed, uneventful, and Darrow spent the hours in a dreamlike mood, lulled by the closeness and speed of trees under his feet. Except for the earsplitting noise of the engines, it was a bird's-eye view of the world, like boyhood dreams of flying before other dreams, dreams of war, had taken over.

He would take Helen to Angkor and show her the expression on one particular face. Serenity mixed with savagery. Only she could understand--the history of the place showed both a great lust and indifference for violence. And wasn't that what they had become, Helen and he, interpreters of violence? A very twisted connoisseurship. They would sit on the warm stones in the evening, and he would whisper his greatest fears to her.

That the image betrayed one at last. It grieved and outraged, but ultimately it deadened. The first picture, or the fifth, or even the twenty-fifth still had an authority, but finally the repetition made the horror palatable. In the last few years, no matter how hard he tried, his pictures weren't as powerful as before he had known this. Like an addict who had to keep upping the dose to maintain the same high, he found himself risking more and working harder for less return. He would never again be moved the way he was over that first picture of a dead World War II soldier. Was his own work perpetrating the same on those it came into contact with? A steady loss of impact until violence became meaningless? His ridiculous brawl with Tanner when in truth Tanner was the logical progeny of their profession. Maybe they deserved to be charged with war crimes, too.

He worried, as the trees sped by beneath his feet, that Helen did not believe he loved her other than by his leaving. But he would prove it to her in a hundred thousand ways.

They were flying over the Plei Trap Valley when Anderson, whom Darrow now imagined as his and Helen's son, tapped him on the shoulder, yelling over the roar of the engine, the boyish grin absurd and comforting. "You okay?"

"Fine. The heat's getting to me."

"I got two wounded for emergency evac. We're the only free ride around. Okay with you?" he asked eagerly, as if he were borrowing keys to his father's car.

"Let's go." Darrow laughed and gave him a thumbs-up. He had gone a little deeper, and then not intending to, deeper still. Didn't every man in every war believe that he would be the one to make it, to survive, to return home filled with tales? Darrow was no different. The unspoken truth of how each of them survived their time.

Minutes later they dropped into a combat spiral, and he felt the familiar wrenching of the stomach, the mouth going dry. And then a terrible shattering, as if the helicopter had been hit by lightning, smote by a giant hand instead of a rocket. Now the boy turned all warrior, face grim and masklike as they spiraled earthward; a tearing sound signaled the rear tail torn away. The green of the trees roared toward them with a sickening rush, and between the branches Darrow saw flashes of light. The smooth, brown warrior from the Lolei temple, the eyes wild. Reluctantly, Darrow lifted his now gravity-weighted head and looked at Anderson once more. Son. He took leave of him and looked out. A rush of green and then Helen's face. The branches like arms reaching out. He calculated odds he had escaped from before as he heard the whooshing sound, the vacuum of air as the cockpit glass became as bright as a new sun. White knuckles and sunlight and her eyes. An infinity of green. Every shade of green in the world.

THIRTEEN
Ca Dao

Songs

Name: Samuel Andre Darrow

Rank/Branch:

Unit:

Date of Birth: 7 May 1925

Home City of Record: New York City, NY

Date of Loss: 14 November 1967

Country of Loss: South Vietnam

Loss Coordinates: 14127N 1074920E (ZA045798)

Status: Missing in Action

Category: 1

Acft/Vehicle/Ground: OH6A

Other Personnel in Incident: Captain Jon Anderson

The mission to recover
bodies had been denied for months because of enemy movements, the area considered extremely dangerous, but then recon reported the enemy had pulled out. An invisible veil lifted, and although nothing to the eye had changed--the hills remained just as green, the paths stretched out in their promise of innocence--the land officially became neutral again.

Linh and Helen went in with a Green Beret unit and two South Vietnamese rangers familiar with the terrain of that part of the Ho Chi Minh trail network. They went in on cargo transports, linking with a contingent of Montagnard mercenaries led by Special Forces officers.

After hiking through the morning, the main force went to destroy enemy bunker complexes, while their unit branched off and went on the five clicks to the crash site. Because the bodies had not been recovered, Darrow and the pilot were listed as MIA. The mislabeling of the truth angered Helen, and she climbed the hills in a spirit of righteousness. She had not wanted to bring her camera, but Linh insisted that they bring a minimum of equipment.

From a neighboring hill, Helen focused binoculars and saw the blackened smudge of the crash site, the surrounding vegetation burned to charcoal in the fire. "There it is," she said, feeling foolish at the excitement in her voice.

Linh watched her, his eyelids half closed in the bright sun. Without a word, he followed one of the rangers down a steep ravine. He had been angry at her insistence to come, thinking there was no point in endangering herself.

Helen stayed in close to the man assigned as her escort, Sergeant James. He was a tall man with reddish hair and fair skin. Whenever they stopped for a break, he would take out a zinc stick and run it along his face and neck till his skin was white with the stuff. "I've burned and peeled so many times, I'm down to my last layer of skin."

Absurd as it was, Helen rushed her steps, walked ahead of James and passed Linh in her frenzy, as if time were still a factor, could change anything that mattered.

The crash site lay near the top of the hill, a view of green mountains extending all the way to Laos and beyond. The afternoon light slanted through the sky, cast everything in shades of greenish gold. The scent of grass was blurred by charcoal. The wind came up, a faint rustling of leaves, a clicking of bamboolike chimes in a graveyard. The most sacred place she had ever been.

She remembered Darrow waking her at dawn, watching the sun pour slowly across the Cordillera. The mountains too far away to ever reach, but now, deep inside them, they still stretched out of her grasp, unknowable.

"Ever been here before?" she asked.

"Not likely. This is
beaucoup
dangerous bandit country. But recovery isn't bad. Once they're already dead, the enemy usually isn't interested in scoop-up."

Sergeant James joined the other soldiers surrounding the burned-out hull of the helicopter, already so weathered it looked as if it had been there decades. The men crouched over blackened mounds on the ground, unzipped a body bag, put on plastic gloves, and used spades.

Head pounding from a threatening migraine, Helen stood, her purpose gone. Of course, there was nothing there for her, but she had been unable to stay away. Her whole being unmoored, the excuse of going out was her only relief. A death to suffer through with no ceremony, no commemoration of who they had been to each other. A red drop fell on her shirt and then blood began to pour from her nose.

Linh was quickly at her side, pulling out a handkerchief, settling her in the shade of a tree.

"What happened?" she asked.

"Altitude. Heat."

She sat with her head tilted back, the metal taste of blood stripping her throat raw. "Don't be angry with me."

Linh was cleaning a lens with cloth. "For nosebleed? We all miss him."

"Then why the looks?"

"You have been here long enough but still you act like a child." Linh remembered Darrow's theatrics over Samang's snakebite death in Angkor. Why couldn't any of them accept fate? Why the long march out here? Of course, he must ask himself the same question. The answer that he feared for her and didn't fear for himself. More and more he believed detachment the only answer to the constant onslaught of loss.

"Just be my friend."

"I am always your friend."

Later she walked back and forth along the outside of the site, searching debris scattered a good distance from the crash. Between tall swales of elephant grass, she found small fragments of 35mm film, the emulsion burned away so that it had a milky, blinded look. Linh recovered a piece of the embroidered neckband that Darrow used for his favorite Leica; it had been wedged under a stone. Although he would have liked to have kept it, he handed it to Helen, and she held it carefully between her fingers, as if it still burned.

Sergeant James came over to her and handed her his canteen. "Miss?"

"Sorry," she mumbled. "Heat."

"We need to be pushing off."

Helen nodded. Her fingers still searched the charcoal ground for slips of film.

"Ready to leave." He took back his canteen and screwed the cap back on. "Sorry for your loss. They died like heroes. Trying to rescue two of our own."