The Lotus Eaters: A Novel (52 page)

"Fucking pigs." Matt took a long drag off the joint. The smoke emptied out of his mouth with a gasp.

"You're like, drawing attention to us, throwing things out the window," Tanner said to Matt.

"I'm hungry," he said, flinging himself back down into the seat.

Her story, told at long last and at such cost, seemed already forgotten by both of them. Minutes passed.

"So why'd you stay so long?" Matt said.

Helen was silent. "Because it seems like you're doing the most important work in the world. Leaving was like dying."

They drove on in silence until they heard the soft
thunk, thunk, thunk
of another flat tire.

"Jesus," Tanner said.

They pulled off near a small hut, hidden from the road by a bamboo thicket. Tanner pulled out the jack and a new tire while Matt wandered off toward the building.

"Where are you going?" Tanner yelled. "Why don't you help me?"

"I'm taking a piss, okay?" Matt said.

"Why's he going to the hooch? Asking for a bathroom?" Tanner shook his head. "He's resourceful, that boy."

A few minutes later, Matt reappeared around the corner of the hut and waved them over. Up close, Helen saw that his eyes were marbled with red veins from lack of sleep and smoke. They followed him to a small dirt yard in the middle of which lay a struggling but still alive goose.

"His wing and his leg are broken," Matt announced in a dreamy voice.

The animal labored to get away but only made dusty circles in the dirt. Its black eye looked dull, but when Matt moved closer, the bird made a gritty, hissing noise at him.

"How can you tell?" Tanner asked.

"I grew up on a farm, man," Matt answered. "And it's about lunchtime."

Tanner snorted.

Helen looked from one of them to the other. "Don't we need to get going?"

"We need to eat," Matt said. "Give me an hour."

"I'm still working on that damned tire. Go ahead," Tanner said. "Are you sure that thing's not diseased? Doesn't have rabies?"

"Birds don't have rabies, man."

Helen regretted coming with these two, couldn't stand their squabbling any longer. Their recklessness made her afraid. She had lasted this long because she took only calculated risks. With the fall of Saigon, she'd done her bit. Covered the takeover, and should have gone home. Cambodia was a whole other thing. "I need to get out of here. I need to get to Linh."

Both of the men turned to look at her.

Helen wiped her face. "Never mind."

Matt's attention went back to the goose. "Maybe he fell out of a cart or was run over. He'll be dead in a few hours and then he'll go to waste."

Helen walked off and sat in the shade of the hut while Matt made quick, expert work of beheading the goose, plucking the quivering body, then chopping it up to cook over an open fire. The whole spectacle disgusted her, but after the pieces began to fry, releasing the smell of cooking meat, she felt a stab of hunger and realized she was starving. The body always betrayed one's best intentions. Memory of the recently flopping body, the head and neck thrown a few feet away in the tall grass, vanished, and instead she remembered Sunday dinners at home when Charlotte cut slices of white meat and put them on china plates as thin as flower petals and passed them down the table.

Matt grinned and brought Helen big, dripping chunks of breast and thigh wrapped in paper. She ate it down fast, laughing with the two men over how good it was, wiping the grease off her mouth and chin, then wiping her hands against her pants but unable to get the oily residue off.

Matt sat next to her holding a drumstick and attached thigh in both hands, biting off enormous mouthfuls of steaming meat.

"So how did you end up with a Vietnamese?" he said.

She smiled and took another bite of meat. "Ask Tanner. He's made a hobby out of analyzing my love life."

"Not bad chow, huh?" Tanner asked, taking a long drink from a bottle of whisky.

Helen nodded. "It's good." Matt gave her another handful of breast meat. She took a long pull off the bottle and handed it back.

"Linh's okay in my book," Tanner said. "He's a good photographer, and he keeps his nose clean. Doesn't seem to resent the fact that he's treated like a second-class citizen in his own country. That most of us suspect him of being a Red."

"That's big of you," Helen said.

"What I'm saying is that Linh is a realist. Of course he loves you; he got the prize. Darrow thought it was all owed to him. He kidded himself he was here for a higher purpose when he was just grubbing around for a byline and an award like the rest of us. Darrow would have put you on that chopper and come out here himself."

The truth of it stung Helen.

The sky was a high, pale blue with long wisping tails of cloud. The only sound their chewing and the rustling of paper.

"Where the hell did you learn to cook like that?" Tanner finally asked.

Matt looked at the two of them. "Truth time? My old man beat me so hard I decided I better run away if I wanted to stay alive. Went to North Dakota at fourteen years old and cooked in a greasy spoon till I was eighteen."

"Why North Fucking Dakota?"

"I once heard my mama say nobody in their right mind would ever go to North Dakota. So I thought the odds were good they wouldn't find me."

"Did they?" Helen asked.

"Never even looked. Best time of my life." Matt bowed his head. "Found an Indian woman who worked the cash register. Made love to me every day for four years until she found out I lied about my age. Kicked me out, can you believe it? She did things--"

"We don't want to hear about your squaw," Tanner said.

Helen's mind was buzzing with alcohol. The sense of urgency pouring out of her. "So then what did you do?"

"Came to Vietnam," Matt yelled and clapped his hands.

She didn't want to know but had to ask. "How old are you?"

"Nineteen." He arched his eyebrows. "Why? Interested?"

"We need to go."

"Best way to go to a genocide is on a full stomach," Tanner said, and Matt and he burst out laughing. Helen smiled. Clowns. Gary was right; she was glad he didn't know where she was. But after the pictures came in, all would be forgiven once again. It was always about pushing the envelope.

"This is the big one," Tanner said. "I can feel it. We're going to be famous."

"Interviewed by Cronkite," Matt said. "The TV guys will fight over us."

"Fuck the TV guys."

Helen almost envied them their glee, their lust for fame, their complete and unblushing lack of empathy.

"So, what was it like back in 'sixty-five?" Matt asked.

"You came too late." Helen smiled. "The good old days are all over."

Bellies full, they drove
in drowsy silence until they approached the border. The guard house appeared abandoned, but they slowed the car anyway. The road ahead was littered with rocks and leaves, but otherwise empty except for a lone old man walking toward them, down the middle of it, carrying a suitcase in each hand. He stumbled as they passed him, refusing to look up, either from fear or exhaustion. They stopped the car.

"Can we help you, Father?" Helen asked.

He stood still, unsure in the bright sun, squinting behind black-rimmed eyeglasses like the old Vietnamese man's.

"
Teuk? Nuoc?
" Water? she asked, making a drinking motion.

He dropped his bags, exhaustion now evident in shoulders that remained stooped, and he shuffled over. He wore a tattered, dusty white shirt and khaki pants. His feet in rubber sandals were cracked and bleeding. Tanner dropped the tailgate for him to sit on, then went into the front of the car and got his camera. Helen handed the old man a canteen of water, and he gulped it so quickly he retched.

"Whoa, take it easy, old man," Matt said.

"Where did you come from, Father?"

"Prek Phnou, outside Phnom Penh. I am a teacher."

"That's far away on foot."

"I walk week. More. I don't know. Lose track of everything. I hide in the day in forest, but Khmer Rouge leave me alone. They think I will die on my own."

"We are going to Phnom Penh," Tanner said, crouching down and snapping pictures of the man as he drank.

"Te!"
No! he shouted.
"Te Kampuchea! Te Phnom Penh!"

"It's okay, Father."

"They empty the city. The hospitals. Terrible. I see things I did not wish to live to see."

"Are you a person of Vietnam?" Helen asked.

He bowed his head and nodded. "I go back after many years."

She knew better than to ask about his family. She went to the front of the car and got another canteen and handed it to him. "Take this. Do you have food?"

He shook his head, and she grabbed sandwiches, cookies, and C-rations.

"Here. And some bandages and ointment for your feet. The border is here," she said, waving her hand at land without demarcation, except for the guard house in the distance. "The next village not far." What was far to an old man on the verge of collapse?

"Don't forget an opener," Matt said, coming around the side of the car, for all the world like a polite schoolboy.

The old man kept sitting.
"Aw kohn, aw kohn."
Thank you, he said.

Tanner came back. "Let's hit the road."

Helen nodded. "I'm sorry, Father. Can I take your picture?"

He stared up at her with a blank look. "Daughter, there is no one left who will care." He stood uncertainly, looking down the road. Something passed across his face as she focused her camera, a shudder, and after the picture was taken she felt embarrassed at the intrusion. The image she wanted was her first sight of him--a small, anonymous figure in the distance with the two suitcases. She couldn't stage it. He felt around in his pockets and pulled out a sandstone medallion no larger than a small coin with a Buddha carved in relief. He handed it to her.

"I can't accept--" she said.

"I have one, too. It has given me hope." He pulled out another one from his shirt pocket. "Put in your mouth, like this." He opened his mouth, revealing a few lone teeth, and placed it on his tongue, then closed his lips. He spit it back out. "It protects you from harm. That is why I escaped, why they didn't kill me like they killed the others." He made a chopping motion with his hand.
"Vay choul."
With the back of a hoe.

Helen took the small Buddha, hand trembling, and bowed to the old man. "I hope it protects us as it has you." As they drove away, she watched him pick up his suitcases and limp down the road. She leaned out the window and took the picture she had wanted from the back.

"I wouldn't put that in my mouth, birdie," Tanner said. "No telling where that little medallion's been."

Like a pair of hyenas, Tanner and Matt laughed as she watched the old man grow smaller and smaller in the side-view mirror until he was only a shadow that disappeared on the horizon.

They had been driving
long hours, a tortured skirting of crater-size potholes made by B-52s years before, riding through dry stretches of rice paddy that were smoother than the road, making slow progress, when they came upon a roadblock.

From a distance, it seemed just clutter, but up close its message was stark--a skull, a helmet, a gun, a shoe. They had entered a land before language. A clear meaning that beyond lay only danger. Beyond be dragons. The scorching air now seemed suddenly to crackle, dry and treacherous, incendiary. Helen stuck her head out the window and looked back the way they had come. Had the old man made it to shelter? When Matt and Tanner were preoccupied with the map, she slipped the medallion in her mouth, the texture gritty like pumice, tasting of salt and dirt and iron.

"Looks like we've caught up with our quarry," Matt said.

Helen turned back to the parched landscape ahead, the ground and sky a series of harsh reds and yellows, the trees stunted and full of prickling spines, the place like tinder, waiting for conflagration.

The first shape seemed to be only a pile of rags at the side of the road, but when the station wagon slowed down it turned out to be the corpse of a small boy, curled on his side as if in sleep, a tiny hand covering the gap where an ear was missing. Helen felt the courage pouring out of her, despair and fear taking its place. A quarter of a mile farther on, more bodies: a woman in her twenties with her hands spread out at her sides as if in surprise; a man with his arms folded behind him as if he were relaxing. Then the bodies began to crowd the road--families, groups of men, old people, women--struck down in rows like scythed sheaves of rice, so that Tanner had to slow the car and swerve back and forth along the road, until finally the bodies became so numerous and thick he had to stop to avoid running over them. Tanner and Matt got out while Helen sat loading film in her camera. When she was ready, a Tiger Balm-smeared handkerchief over her nose, they moved forward, cameras clicking. Tanner motioned to her, and she walked to the edge of the road and saw the sunken field piled with hundreds of bodies, many decapitated and bludgeoned, so that they knew the stories of
vay choul
were true, killing with hoes to save bullets.

"We are the only ones who have this on film," Matt whispered, his jaw tight and quivering, and then he turned away and vomited.

Helen put her hand on his back. "It's okay. It happens. Get some water."

"Not to me." Matt shrugged her hand off and wiped his face.

She bit her lip, annoyed at his petulance. "It's the first time I started to like you," Helen said.

"Then you've got some weird criteria," he said.

"We have enough," Tanner said. "Let's go."

The two men ran back to the car. Without thinking, Helen edged down the embankment and took more pictures of the piled bodies, framing the picture from a lower vantage point, with sky behind them, so the massiveness of the piles could be felt.
If the picture was no good, it meant that you weren't close enough
. She did a close-up of a young girl's face that was as peaceful as if she were asleep, a single flower tangled in her hair. Five minutes later, Helen climbed back up and ran to the car. Inside, she pushed down the lock on the door, then laughed at her own foolishness. "I'm going crazy. Get out a bottle of something."