Trinity Fields (45 page)

I would, and we did. Ariel was in Jessie's arms during the short ceremony down at city hall. A modest gold ring. Her parents we visited during our honeymoon drive out toward the West in a rented car. Mine we stayed with on the Hill for a couple of nights before we drove on toward the painted desert. Jessica, looking at the map one night, determined that we had to visit Bryce Canyon, my namesake. And we did, after wandering from El Morro to Gallup, up to Shiprock and down through Canyon de Chelly. Several summer weeks later we were back home and settled down in a new apartment we'd rented downtown. I did what I could do not to speculate about my oldest friend.

Nevermore . . . until tomorrow. This was the Ravens' motto. Their literary godfather might well have appreciated the blunt irony of the declaration. On their company patch, the one they had sewn on the shoulder of their leather flight jackets, the legend crowned a heraldic image of a fierce black bird perched on a white skull over crossbones. Where its talons attached to the skull bright red blood poured forth. The whole was set on a midnight blue background.

Nevermore, each day you would come back and this is what you would think. Never again should what happened that day be repeated. Fury is what they felt as they saw what they were doing was losing momentum, losing ground. Some month-old editions of military newspapers still found their way out to the frontiers where Kip and Wagner hung on with the other hinterlanders, having gotten further extensions by pulling strings and altering dates on records, and in these newspapers hidden as if in shallow graves covered over with optimistic rhetoric were all the signs that this struggle was coming to an end, and that no matter what oratory was used to scumble the fact, it was clear we had lost our war.

The edges fraying, the center seceding—these they could deal with. But trying to work after the secret had been blown was all but impossible. And now word came that they were about to be ordered out.

The hootch, a different kind of night than any before. The nevermore looked for all the world as if it would have no tomorrow. They were drinking. They had been drinking from early in the afternoon and they were still drinking late into the evening.

—Happiness is a warm gun, some sang.

—Bang bang, shoot shoot, others answered.

Why, if not to save his own scrawny behind, did the president blow their secret? Nixon's obfuscation about our presence in Laos had been perfectly in line with the tradition set forth by his two predecessors, had it not? But the introduction of bombers into the war in Laos, the massive bombardment of enemy positions on the Plain of Jars back in February 1970 changed, in the course of two turbulent days, the nature of their lives and mission here just like that. Covert was overt, and overt was the beginning of out. They would fly their devastating sorties for the next several years, burning climax forests and ancient jungles wholesale, leveling who and what had the temerity to try to stand. But they were worried about credibility gaps back home, back in the highest offices, and the disclosures that now had begun to come through from Laos to the people of America, many of whom had lost heart—if they ever had it in the first place—made the tangled war untenable.

And here were the Kips and Wagners out at the farthest end of it all, about to descend into freefall.

—Happiness is a warm gun, bang—

—Bang, shoot shoot.

—When I hold you, in my arms.

They scuffled. They were very drunk.

—Shoot shoot.

—And I fill you with all my charms.

—Bang bang, shoot shoot.

Le Due Tho ran circles around Kissinger in Paris, and as he did General Giap and the NVA stepped it up in the center of Laos. First they took Sam Thong, a civilian base. Then they set a course for Long Tieng. They knew, even if the rest of the world hadn't known, that one of the roads to Saigon was through Alternate.

March, and the battle raged. Refugees fled again, swelling the camps on the outskirts of Vientiane. Many of the Americans were now evacuated. But though Long Tieng held that time, it wouldn't hold forever. Betrayals were about to occur here. There was a peace agreement that would be negotiated, and a cease-fire was to begin, February 1973. We were to withdraw with honor, we had had enough of our boys dying over here.

—Bang bang, and they all broke out slapping each other on the back, chuckling so hard their teeth and gums were bared. Their laughter was blistering.

—You know what we are? said one.

—Singers, man. We're
singers
, said another.

—We're just the singers, not the song.

—No, man, said Kip. It had been Kip who asked the original question.

Some ignored him, some didn't. One who didn't said, —So what are we, man?

Kip said, —I tell you what we are. Lizards, man.

—Bang bang, said another.

—That's pretty good, said the drunkest of them all, who got down on his stomach and said, —Watch me go.

—You've got it, said Kip, calm. —Slithering away on our bellies like lizards.

They calmed down a little. The drunk man lay on his side to catch his breath.

Kip continued, —And you know what else?

Silence, or almost. There was some laughter still in some corner of the hootch, apparently unrelated to the parody of lyrics, unrelated to the announcement that we were looking to pull back from the conflict, in order—as the wording went—to allow the indigenous forces to seize control of the destiny of their own countries: to leave in other words, as Kip saw it, the Hmong high and dry, the Hmong we had encouraged and funded, however meagerly, over these last years in the attempt to stop the domino flow. —What else? someone asked.

—We're not done yet.

A Raven, one of the younger men, said to Kip, —Don't talk that way.

—Why not?

—Because we are done. We're done here.

—No, said Kip, swaying. —No, listen. You're done here maybe, but I don't have the stomach for slithering.

Most of the men agreed with Kip, and soon enough a song was struck again when one man sang a capella, —Living is easy with eyes closed, not understanding what you see.

Then another, —I have to admit it's getting better.

—Bang bang.

—A little better all the time.

When he woke up some hours later Kip's first thought was, where was Wagner during all this? He crawled to his feet, stood unsteady, and left the hootch. Others slept here and there. He was reminded of the sweats the pueblo elders used to enact down in their kivas on the reservations. Or in the long houses—which Vang Pao's communal bunker was said to resemble—close quarters, considerable foreign substances introduced into the body, all men, crazed with the ritual of testosterone, so forth, as he stumbled—tripped literally—into the hard light (as Kip tells me this I remember our first venture to Chimayó and how firm morning sunlight can be when caught by the eyes of an enfeebled mortal)—tripped, then regained his footing.

—Wagner? he called out.

He forced himself to walk a straight tack.

—Wagner?

The airstrip was lifeless. Kip walked over toward Vang Pao's compound and asked the first man he met whom he recognized, —Have you seen Wagner? The man didn't know but asked him in Lao, Do you need help? In pidgin Lao Kip said, —I need Wagner. The man asked another Hmong something, and Kip could see that the news of the withdrawal was spreading through their ranks as well and that confusion was to be the order not just of the night but of day.

—Wagner? He go Luang Prabang.

His head felt like paste as he lifted off and the bowl of green mountains seemed especially beautiful as they lapsed below him and behind. A thought that had often come over Kip in the past came to him now as the vertiginous horizon with its subtle curvature loomed out beyond the scratched plastic of his windshield. The earth, its long curve way far away out there: it was too old for this lunacy. It was far too magnificent for this madness. It deserved to house better than the likes of us. Kip'd never thought about it before, but what did we do but take from it our fill and offer in return little more than our own dead bodies? The sun off his right shoulder rising into the low mist. The power of its whiteness. The depth of these valleys and the cold purity of the rivers that traced their floors. The flora stretching forth from every peak and furrow. It deserved so much more than what we'd given.

Landing in the royal capital Kip was in a state. His spirits were in such turmoil that he had to dead reckon his descent, the same he would as if it were night. But he didn't notice. He had to talk with Wagner. Wagner would have some thoughts about what they should do next.

Ariel, Aerie, Ellie—my daughter the airy sprite, the
Tempest
queen. Jessica, Jess, Jessie—court Jesster, Jess of the D'Urbervilles, Jess passing through. Nicknaming, shameless nicknaming, has always been an impulse of mine, and Ariel suffered through more than her fair share in her time with me. —Get
real
, Areal. —Don't be airy, Ariel. One might have thought she'd have grown impervious to the potential sting by the time she entered school, but in class, where the renaming of friends and foes is prerequisite in the process of growing up, poor Ariel got stuck with the nickname Eerie. My attempts at condolence, after she came home crying one afternoon, didn't work. Eerie, or Eerie-oh, it seemed, had metamorphosed first into Oreo, then veered into Weirdie, from that into Weirdo, and finally crystallized into a ditty, sung by several kids at recess that day,

Hey ho, what do you know?

Miss Eerie Weirdee Ariel?

I told her that back when I was a boy, there was no end of jokes about my initials. Fighting back was futile, I told her. I was a bum, a bowel movement, bum muck.

One of the playground songs in Kip's honor went,

Kippy Calder,

Who is he?

His friends all say

He's a double-you-see.

but I didn't tell her that one, instead told her one of mine,

—Little hungry baby Brice

Eats the tails of rats and mice.

And though they screech and squeak and cry

He'll eat them till the day he—

Hey, you're not listening, I said.

Ariel remained mute. I thought to say something about doggerel being a means for people who liked each other to express their affection in an ironic way, but knew enough to see when a deaf ear was about to be turned toward me. It was something she would simply have to wait out.

—Just consider the source and rise above it.

Ariel said. —Thanks for nothing, Brice.

I wanted to tell her not to call me Brice, but she'd left the room by then and I lapsed into one of those rare but inevitable moments when parenthood observes itself with a little cool distance and asks, Now let's go over once more how I got myself into this particular tangle, what do I think I'm doing trying to be somebody's father? And distance or not, the voice of putative reason would speak, and say something to the effect, Listen, she no more asked to be a daughter than you a father—you're doing fine, you both are doing great, just keep it up, keep on going.

Ariel, the next morning, would hardly remember the trials of the day before. She wasn't a holder of grudges. In fact, as she worked her way through the grades, through high school, and on to college, she reminded me of no one more than my own mother, at least in certain respects. She was enamored of learning things, not just from books, although she was a prodigious reader, but from whatever source presented itself. Whenever we traveled together, the three of us, Ariel would never fail to engage people in conversation, make immediate friends. I think this was less the result of gregariousness than simple, but willful, interest in what was going on around her.

Knowing this about Ariel only made more difficult Jessica's and my decision not to tell her about her relation to Kip until her twenty-first birthday. In a way Ariel was beyond us, or so we felt, in that she most probably would have taken the news in stride, would even have seen it as
cool
. —But Brice, that's so
cool
, I could just hear her saying it, and then imagine what inevitably would follow: —Are we absolutely sure he's gone? I mean, we should find out about MIAs, shouldn't we, there's an organization or something. We have to find out for sure.

It was this eventuality as much as anything that kept me in dread of the day the revelation would be presented. To be sure, fear that she would reject me, that I would be exposed as a genial imposter, terrified me. This is why I've always been more resourceful than Jessica in finding reasons to prolong the status quo, and keep Ariel in the dark.

—You'll always be her mother, I once said to Jess. —Whereas I'm never going to be altogether her father.

But fear of my own heartache surely was not the only thing that prompted dread at the prospect of letting her in on the secret: to witness all the disappointments Ariel would suffer in any quest for her other father would have been devastating. There is no question that she would want to find him, nor was there much hope that anything would come of it.

Missing in action, absent without leave, something had happened to him. For the longest time I resisted looking into it myself but a long while before the birthday approached, I decided to run some checks on William Calder.

Inevitable disappointments were just what was experienced at every turn. He was not listed as killed in action or POW, I found, nor was he registered as MIA. When I made the next logical step to find out if he'd deserted, absent without leave, I was astonished to discover that no studies had been made of AWOL soldiers—a claim I considered as silly a lie as I'd ever heard. Over the course of weeks of telephone calls and letters I came to realize that it was no lie. The Veterans of Foreign Wars office could not help me. The Veterans Administration archives and its public affairs office possessed no such list. The Department of Defense was not of assistance, nor was its public affairs office, nor was its Southeast Asia archivist. The personnel office press agent could not help me and the National Archives did not have a catalogue of AWOL soldiers. I approached the National Personnel Office people in St. Louis and met with resistance. The Washington National Records Center maintained they knew of no such document. The end of it came for me when I was told by a gentleman at that center, —Try the library.