Trinity Fields (41 page)

It wasn't the full four weeks before he left. How dishonorable was it of me not to have budged? I didn't. A demoralized atmosphere saturated the apartment. It was stunning, benumbing. Kip pretended to apply for a job, perhaps did go out and look for work, but his efforts seemed to me faithless, hopeless, and his attempt to come back home seemed without heart, somehow way
off
. How else to put it? Like he was now a circle that wouldn't fit back into his former square hole. A triangle against a circle. The hole triangular, and he a mismatched square. His frustration he tried to keep to himself but it hovered about him until it shaded and finally swallowed him. In my ignorance, I thought to myself, Get with it, Kip. The narrowness of my behavior toward my friend should appall me even now, shouldn't it? I saw him struggling but felt helpless in view of his pain. I considered proposing to him the reason he felt he didn't belong was that he was suffering from the moral guilt of having fought in the war. If only he would come with me, join us all in protesting the abomination that was this war, then the balances of his conscience would be set right again, and he could feel that once more he belonged. But I knew that would be foolish audacity at work and of no help either to him or me or Jess. Pity was too vertical an emotion for me to display. He'd be right to resent it. But empathy, or sympathy, horizontal feelings as I imagine them, seemed beyond my reach. Our timing was more off than it had ever been. We, who once walked step for step in perfect cadence, saw and did every little thing together, could no more stride in synchronous calm than leap hand in hand over the moon.

And as much as he was out of step with me, he seemed inept with what used to be our world. I don't know what Kip had expected, but this was not it. Many were the times, in the years that came after, that I rethought my moves, reconsidered my conduct toward my friend during that awful season. I don't think I am cheating truth when I say that he was beyond me, and that even if I had wanted to reach out to him and help bring him back, haul him like you would a drowning sailor aboard a rickety, risky skiff, I would have found him resistant. But this, once again, may be the defensive conclusions of a naif, of someone who was opposed to the war without having the least idea what
his
war really was. I wonder how we lasted through those weeks. It is hard to know anymore. Certainty is the province of youth and the faithful. And, for me, the former is gone and the latter beyond my reach.

What occurred in the third week that brought everything to its crisis was that Kip, against all evidence to the contrary, became convinced that not only had Jessica and I cheated on him, but that Ariel—named by me, often cared for by me—was also fathered by me. A tragic absurdity that would resemble a cowbird come to clean out the nest of another bird in order to make room for its eggs—but then, through haste or craziness, forgetfulness or knowing perversion, throws its own eggs out, and leaves those of its intended victim safely in the twig cradle high in the branches.

Ariel, as I say, was possessed of Kip's eyes from her first day in the world. To me, his argument and accusations had to be the fruit of a terrible blindness, because all he had to do was look at the girl to know she was his. But Kip could not look. And Jessica would not bow to the madness of it anymore. She took Ariel one morning and left for her parents'. She gave me the telephone number and told me she was sorry to be such a cause of strife. It was insane, all of it. And what about Ariel? What kind of devastation was she suffering with all this mayhem around her?—but this was, of course, why Jessica decided to leave. I asked her if she wanted me to go with her to the airport. She said no. —Isn't that tender, I thought I heard Kip say, when I carried her suitcase down to the street. No response from me. I left them, Kip and Jessica, alone in the apartment, and sat downstairs for the long minutes of their goodbye. Guilt taunted fear, fear undermined desire, desire deplored my apparent failure to stop any of this from playing itself out.

My imagination flew scattershot through those spiraling moments, and ranged across a broad spectrum of delusions: at the farthest periphery of possibility I believed, for a moment, that Kip might even consider committing a fratricide of sorts. Why not?—it wasn't as if he hadn't been betrayed, I by then was willing to see. What grandiose lunacy, though. Feeling preposterous, I sat and waited. Then I began to worry for Jessica's welfare—but knew at once that it was more inane phantasmagoria. It wasn't until I came upon the thought that Kip might be prodded by all this wreckage into an act of self-destruction—an act that could just well touch his taxed soul—that I woke up. Jessica was standing next to me in the street. Ariel was crying in her mother's arms. Jessica had tears in her eyes, too.

—I'm sorry, she said.

The driver had lifted her several bags into the trunk of his cab and was back behind the wheel.

—What does that mean? I asked. I wanted to tell her that I was going to miss her but instead I shook her hand and hoped that she would recognize it as some sort of fingerprint trade.

—I'll call you soon, she said. All I could do was kiss Ariel on the forehead and turn to go back upstairs.

Kip, too, was leaving, it was clear. The same duffel he'd arrived with was now out on the floor and into it he was pressing clothes, a couple of books, odds and ends. —Where are you going? I asked. He was all concentration; I was fully excluded. I asked another question or two, said something to the effect that he should take it easy, he was bringing all this down on himself and on us without thinking things through. —Kip don't do this, man, I said.

He said nothing to me. I looked at Ariel's ornate crib there just next to the bed and felt utterly emptied of thought or feeling. I left the room in silence, walked to my own, paced the few possible steps its small size allowed, then went out into the common room. I sat down by the door. Soon enough he carried the duffel out of the bedroom.

—Where are you going? I asked.

—Brice, he said. —I love you like a brother. And I love Jess, too—

What? I thought.

—But I've got to go.

—Where?

—Goodbye, Brice.

—Where are you going?

He extended his hand down to me and I grabbed it and he pulled me to my feet. We shook hands. He left. And I thought to follow him, catch up to him and tell him to come back with me to the apartment where we could rethink everything, sit and talk, give it all more time. I'm sorry Kip, I thought. I'm sorry for my intransigence and Covetousness and my callow feelings of rivalry, I thought to tell him. But I did not follow him. Sorrow moved in and through me, but I myself was unable to move. I haven't any idea how long I stood there staring at the shut door.

Hay las sierras debajo de los llanos
, as an old New Mexican saying had it. There are mountains below the plains. Kip always liked that expression, and sometimes in response to a question from one of the neighborhood kids he might not want to answer, a question like—Where'd you guys find those arrowheads? he'd pull a straight face and say, —
Hay las sierras debajo de los llanos
, then turn and walk away. It never failed to work. Dramatic and cryptic in equal doses, it left our friends scratching their heads, puzzled but somehow impressed. What's more it would leave their question unanswered. Where we hunted for arrowheads and the little shards of Anasazi pottery we collected was our business.

On the other side of the world there were mountains above and mountains below, too, just like back home in New Mexico. And like back home, in Laos—perhaps even more than in Vietnam—things could seem upside down and inside out.

The Geneva Accords were seven years old, and for seven years both sides had broken the treaty. Laos had been declared a neutral state but the highlands had been trampled by Pathet Lao and Royal Lao, by so-called neutralists and Viet Cong, by all manner of covert American forces, businessmen and spooks, mercenaries and vagabonds, from the day of signing to the day the Ravens were born. Not that it stopped when the Ravens came in; the converse, in fact—it only got crazier. The one thing all sides honored was a general distaste for the press. Let us fight in privacy—
privatim pugnemus
—might well have been the axiom for this place and time, sealed with wax and signed in blood. Leave us alone and let us get it on. This wish, for the most part, was granted. While the accords were most specific about the prohibition of foreign troops and bases in Laos, the North Vietnam negotiators knew as well as their adversaries in the dark gray suits sitting across the polished mahogany table that the topography of Laos was rugged and sparsely populated and was therefore ideal for clandestine infiltration by either or both parties. Deep valleys, mountains with multiple peaks like spades shoved skyward, lush forest green with succulents and scented by exotic flowers, and jungles whose floraed floors raindrops never touch for all the leaves that intervened between the clouds and the earth to intercept them. No, there was no need for either side to withdraw troops upon the signing of the treaty, they had but to deny their presence, and did so in the grand tradition of tactical fraud. The statesmen wielded their subtle mistruths—“subtle mistruth” being the everyday white lie that throws people off, say, for just long enough to get a covert problem squared away, and a good excuse readied for public consumption—with calm. They colluded, in their way, knowing that their fraudulence was in fact too big to believe, because logic would dictate that deceit on such a grand scale could never be sustained. And would therefore not be risked to begin with. But, as the phrase has it, there is a time and place for everything. And for Indochina this was that time and Laos was one of the places.

By 1964 Vietnamese and Pathet Lao troops occupied the Plaine des Jarres, in the heart of Laos, and when Hanoi continued to hold that none of their men set foot on Laotian soil, it was a lie of sufficient boldness that it ossified into a truth. Who was in a position to protest or accuse? You tell people the sun is yolk and the moon is cheese, tell them over and over with a straight solemn face and eventually some of them are going to believe you. There isn't a politician on earth who hasn't read this basic law in his unwritten handbook on human nature. Given—surprise, surprise—that we were building up our own presence within the country's borders, any allegations leveled by us at Hanoi might have a ricochet effect we could ill afford just then. Wink, don't blink. And besides, those who were being displaced, those whose ancestors had eked out an existence and maintained tribal cultures there for some four thousand years only to be killed in crossfire and cast into exile, those people weren't cause for worry. They had no diplomatic skills and no means of communication with the outside world. The ethnic groups who lived in the mountains of Laos could hardly communicate with one another. They would work well and hard for us, because if we lost, they lost even more. The Hmong, we employed them for a few dollars a month in supply support and trained them to stalemate our mutual enemy. If they failed, they would lose a war perhaps—an inexpensive one, compared to the hundreds of millions that were being spent over the fence in Vietnam—but we would lose only a battle. Cynical? It would be a pity not to win, but should that happen, it would come to be considered no more a problem to see them cut down than it was for Catullus's indifferent ploughman to leave the flower after scything the field. And we could still claim we were never in there waging an illegal war. The dead may not verify the presence of infiltrators, friendly or otherwise.

From the first, the Hmong who lived in those wild mountains reminded Kip of the pueblo Indians of his birthland. They planted their crops, raised their livestock. They were given to deep spiritual attachment to the earth beneath their feet, which was bounteous when respected, and the heavens overhead, which could be cruel or lenient depending upon how perfectly the ways of worship the ancestors had ordained were followed. In the highlands of the Hmong the orchids swelled in the misting mountain fogs of the morning, and the bamboo grew and pine scented the high air. In the mountains of the pueblo Indians hummingbirds attended the dark, fluted flowers of the sacred datura, the jimson weed, and the children walked out into the dry calm flats populated by all manner of cactus, from prickly pears to green-flower hedgehogs. Just as the Jemez Indians called themselves
people
—Jemez comes from the Tewa word
hetnish
, meaning “people”—so do the Hmong, whose name for themselves means “mankind.” Both had been the prey of vicious interlopers and their wars. Both moved from place to place when it rained too little or too much.

Both were possessed of a trenchant taste in color and angle, of an aesthetic that was clean and wildly brilliant at the same time. Look at Chimayó weavings, look at a Hmong needlework technique
pa'ndau
(means flowery cloth, or flowers from the mountain, the
phou
). The zigzags, ecstatic colors, the silverwork. But being unfettered in art and life are different matters. The Hmong and pueblo Indians were pushed from mountaintop to mountaintop or plateau to plateau, were made captive in their own worlds. Both, Kip believed, were like bamboo and barrel cactus and would survive no matter how harsh the adversities. The spirits that animated the heavens and the plants and the rains and the earth that quickened into life under those rains, the spirits could be trusted. The ancestors would watch over them. But it was forever a struggle.

Kip spelled backward is
choose
. And he made his choice, though I never knew this at the time of its occurrence.

It took a little doing to get back to Long Tieng. The military goes into the populace and seeks out boys who would be warriors, but when those same boys are trained and taught all the ways of combat, are given their jets to fly and ordnance to drop, and are sent out into the dangerous air to complete their tours of duty—when those same boys keep wanting to fight some more, and ask for a third tour of duty, or a fourth, then the air force pulls a curious reversal. Two tours as a pilot, or about a hundred missions, is considered the most that can be expected. Less than that and the pilot's training time was a bit of a waste. More than that, well? A pilot who wants to keep on flying, wants to go up and up again and again—after a time, he is considered a little mad. He becomes suspect. Why you want to go back up? they ask. You've done your duty, your service to the country has been of distinction, and your nation is grateful to you. Now reenter civilian life and pick up where you left off.