"The Lotus Eaters" - читать интересную книгу автора (Soli Tatjana)

SEVEN. Hoi Chanh

Defectors

A week after the dinner where Linh was first introduced to Helen, he went to Darrow’s hotel room and was surprised to see a picture of her on top of a stack of prints on the table. Darrow never joined his reporter friends with their Vietnamese bar girls at the various clubs. Linh knew about a few native women, including the one in Cambodia, but Darrow never openly had a girlfriend.

Perhaps Darrow preferred Western women, but there, too, Linh had observed a fair number try to capture his attention with no success. Was he struggling to stay faithful to his wife back in America? He never talked of her in the way a man talks of the woman he loves. But then Linh himself had never spoken of Mai until she was gone.

Which made the picture of the beautiful photographer all the more startling-a single bloom sprung up on a parched riverbed floor.

Linh examined more closely, saw she was wearing a flak jacket and camouflage pants, that the palms behind her were water palm fronds. Darrow had not mentioned going out on a mission with her, and Linh felt a pang of betrayal at the omission. He had become possessive over Darrow’s company, as well as his confidences.

“Oh, you remember the freelancer from the States?” Darrow said, turning away, obviously irritated at Linh’s attention and the necessity of explaining himself.

“A very striking freelancer.”

“You’re right. I’ve got to straighten myself out. Breaking my own rules.”

“Everyone gets lonely. Even the great Sam Darrow.”

“Don’t make me feel worse.”

Linh shrugged and finally forced himself to look away from the picture. He hated the fact that he had forced this admission; he was becoming a prude. Darrow had rescued him at his lowest point, and he was determined to repay the kindness.

The next time Linh saw her, she was sprung to life from the picture, pacing Darrow’s hotel room. When she shook his hand, he knew she was blinded by Sam’s rough treatment. Darrow was in the process of breaking her young heart, and Linh quickly escaped the carnage.

At the hotel bar he stood drinking a citron pressé and asked Toan, the bartender, an old man who had relocated from Hue, about his oldest son just drafted into the Saigon army. Toan complained that the cost of bribes to get a safe desk job had doubled from the year before. During the whole conversation, Linh imagined Darrow and Helen upstairs, negotiating their way through their love. Although he had seen and suffered much, he did not find them frivolous; in fact, he found it more than optimistic that in the middle of war, people could still think about such things. Didn’t that mean the world could still recover?

Although Linh took his time finishing his drink, still he was too early returning and witnessed Helen, like a tien, fairy, crying alone in the hallway. As a youth, he had made a great study of all the Vietnamese myths, and a tien was often an essential feature of each hero’s story. When she saw him, she fled.

Months passed and neither Sam nor Linh brought up the subject of Helen again, although now a new picture of her was framed on the table. In one of his favorite fairy tales, that was exactly what happened to the tien: She disappeared back into a picture. Probably Helen had returned to her country, the romance of the war quickly tarnished.

Linh and Darrow were both surprised by the pictures of the execution, and Darrow admitted he had been keeping track of her. The way he said it revealed even more.

“She has made an impression on you.”

“I see her going through all the things I went through.”

“Yes?”

“And I don’t want her to do it… I see each step where I could have stopped.”

He had been with Darrow long enough to see that he was the best at his profession, and he cared passionately about it. There was the sadness, but he thought that had more to do with the personal. “I don’t understand…”

“ Gary has offered her a staff position with the magazine. I don’t want her getting herself killed making some stupid mistake. Work with her.”

“What if she doesn’t accept?”

“She will.”

From the tone of voice, Linh understood it was a lover’s assurance. “I prefer to work with you.”

“It would mean the world to me, my friend.”

When Linh came to her hotel room that night, she seemed embarrassed. She lit a cigarette, offered him one, then sat on the bed.

“We haven’t gotten off to the greatest start,” she said.

“Sorry?”

“Me making a fool of myself.”

Linh shook his head as if shooing away a pest. These Americans still took getting used to, their bald honesty, their constant confessing of deficiencies. In Vietnam, etiquette prevented such things from being talked of. He had been married for six months, bringing Mai sheet music every week, but she never sang the new songs before having him sing them out loud first. When he got angry at her, she finally admitted she couldn’t read; he thought she meant read music, but then it dawned on him she had also been memorizing his words.

Now he looked at Helen and was shocked by her naked admission. And yet it was disarming and made him feel protective of her as over a small child who was helpless and too trusting. “I saw you for the first time at the restaurant. You come in drenched from rain.”

Helen made a face. “Another bad impression.”

“No. A hungry woman, I thought.” They laughed. Why had he omitted the true first time he saw her, getting out of the military jeep in front of the hotel, while he sat at the bar with Mr. Bao? Was it because he did not wish to be remembered in Mr. Bao’s company? Or was it that he wanted to keep his first glimpse of her private? Or, worse, was it because the habit of deception had become so ingrained in him, he preferred lies to truth?

The next morning Linh walked to her hotel and spent the whole day seeing the city again through her eyes. This happened each day, day after day; the realization dawned on him that now he was showing her his home.

Her first request was to learn enough Vietnamese so she could put the people she photographed at ease. No other American, not even Darrow, had made such a request. During the monsoon downpours, they would duck inside small tea stalls. She would hold a ceramic cup laced in her long fingers, listening to the drumming of the rain on the tin overhang of the roof while they practiced speech. Often children gathered at the sight of the foreign woman in their neighborhood, still a novelty, and giggled at her mispronunciation. They sat on the ground around the battered table, loose pieces of plastic wrapped around thin shoulders against the rain. Helen called over a food vendor and bought banh da, rice cakes with sesame seeds, for everyone. Linh was sure they, too, felt as if they were in the presence of a tien.

“How do you say ‘Thank you’?”

“ Cam on.”

“Come on?”

“Xin ba noi lai.” Please say it again.

“ ‘Com on’?”

“Better.” Linh laughed.

“How do you say ‘Can she speak English?’ ”

“Chi ay biet noi tieng Anh khong?”

The words came in a flood, impossible to separate them, guttural stops and starts that she felt she would never understand. “Sorry I asked.”

“We’ll go slowly. Use the words every day. Listen to stories. That’s how I learned English.”

Helen poured more tea from a dented aluminum pot. “I know it’s a letdown to go from working with Darrow to working with a beginner.”

“What is ‘letdown’?”

“A demotion. Step down.”

Linh took his cup. Again, this stating of what should remain unspoken, and yet he flushed in embarrassment that she guessed his feelings. “When the words form on your tongue naturally, you enter the heart of the country, I think.”

“But you’ve never been to America.”

“Once upon a time. My favorite was Chicago.”

But just as she started to question him, a group of children rushed in and swarmed them with questions.

After taking her back to the hotel that day, he walked along the river. How could he have made such an admission? Shameful. Yet he had been alone so long, had not talked from his soul to another person, that at the first sign of interest, his mouth flooded with words. No one should know about his years abroad.

His father had gotten caught up in politics at the university. He chafed under the unfair French restrictions for Vietnamese to advance to any real power. Studying the life of Uncle Ho, he was convinced of the importance of seeing the world. He spent a great deal of money and used many promises to get Linh a berth on a freighter going to the Middle East, and then on to Europe. Linh went one better in going on to America. Although those had been the happiest years of his life, there had never been a question of not returning, of not fulfilling his father’s wishes that he be of service to his country.

He was still haunted by what he had seen. In Phan Rang, dockworkers drowned and floating like milk fruit in the port after being ordered to jump into the water to salvage ships. On shore, French officials laughed, jiggling bellies of fat. Linh became as lean as a dagger. In Dakar, he watched the same horrors of colonialism, watched as natives were ordered by the French to swim out to his ship in a storm. Helpless, Linh watched from the deck as they drowned like heavy, dumb animals in the water. Although he had been called Chinaman in America, the freedom had been heady. But then he had gone into the South. His experiences taught him the need of freedom at all costs.

Gary ’s first assignment for Helen was to cover the Buddhist strikes, visiting the pagodas around Saigon. At Xa Loi, the bonzes orchestrated protests against the Ky government. Linh described the marches three years before against Diem, telling her of the chaos then. Monks and nuns using their bodies as tinder throughout South Vietnam, horrifying and alienating the West. In Linh’s village, a nun described how she had daintily tucked her robes around herself in the town square, how a circle of bonzes formed a barrier against outside interference. “What could the military do? Shoot them?” The absurdity in Saigon of antisuicide squads equipped with fire extinguishers patrolling the streets.

Gary wanted Helen to get pictures of daily life in the pagodas. They took pictures of boys in brown robes receiving instruction and old bonzes reclining inside dark rooms, sipping tea and strategizing. Young men ran back and forth in their orange robes like waiters in a busy restaurant, pamphlets fluttering, directing traffic and arranging interviews with the head monks as if they were rock stars.

The noon heat and the thick smell of burning joss sticks drugged Helen, slowed her movements to those of a sleepwalker. When everyone retired for the noon break, she photographed a more peaceful mood-a single white-clad nun sweeping the grounds in front of the carved columns of the building, the shadow of a Buddha statue inside barely perceptible.

Under a banyan tree, Helen leaned back into a cradle of gnarled roots. Her shirt clung to her back. Linh motioned to a vendor who brought them coconuts filled with sweet, brackish juice. When he handed her a straw, she hesitated.

“Drink it.”

She nodded, emptying it in one gulp. “I’m tired of being afraid.”

“The VC are cunning, but they haven’t yet trained the coconut trees to grow poison.”

They watched women, young and old, enter the pagoda grounds carrying prepared dishes or baskets of fresh vegetables.

“Does the community supply food?”

“The community is the pagoda. They bring food or money, what ever they can, what ever is needed.”

“But they don’t have enough for themselves.”

“One is like a brick in a wall, interdependent; one has no meaning outside one’s relation to family and others.”

Helen sat up and pulled the fabric of her shirt away from her back. “Do you know why I came here?”

Linh shook his head, wary of more confidences.

“I wanted to be famous. I had dreams of being the only American to get pictures of the Ho Chi Minh trail. Stupid, huh?”

Linh smiled. “Darrow is very happy every time he gets a cover.”

“Really?” Helen laughed.

“He sits in his room and drinks a glass of scotch and stares at the cover for a half hour. Then he puts the magazine in a drawer and doesn’t look again.” Linh shrugged. “But he’s passed up shots that could have been his, too. And he mourns every death until it seems impossible that he can continue.”

“That’s why I love him,” she said.

He couldn’t stand hearing more. How could he go on day after day listening to this woman bare her soul to him? “I should go back to the office with the film.”

“Where is your family? I mean, what you said earlier, bricks in a wall?”

“I don’t want to insult. We are different from Americans. We only share important things with people who have earned our trust. Otherwise we dishonor our memories.”

She flushed, chastised, and tried to brush it off. “I ask too many questions. Join me for dinner to night?”

“I’ll meet you in front of the hotel early tomorrow.”

She turned back to the pagoda to hide her hurt feelings.

Linh walked down the crowded street and stopped at an outdoor café. He motioned to a busboy and paid him to run the film over to the office, then ordered tea and nursed it. He felt guilty about his gruffness toward her, but he had changed since coming to Saigon, grown a second skin that insulated him from others. It would have been smarter to be kinder. After all, that is what he liked about the Americans-their innocence, their willingness to share their life story with a stranger. After fifteen minutes, he crossed the street and surveyed the pagoda grounds.

The area was still empty, but he spotted her in a deserted courtyard. She sat alone, crying. He felt discomfited, her face so naked, as if she stood before him unclothed, and he knew the right thing would be to leave unobserved, yet he stood rooted to the spot. He recognized such pain. The reason-Darrow had told of her losing a brother to the war-was it enough to cause her to put herself in danger’s way? A place not fit for a man, much less a woman. He made a show of reentering the compound and stood in front of her. When she saw him, she showed no surprise, simply held her hand out to him.

“I’m sorry about prying. I hate when people ask about my father. Having to say that I hardly remember him. Or my brother.”

He pulled out a cloth handkerchief from his pocket and handed it to her. “I think telling a friend this story is a great honor.”

She gave him a sly, crooked grin. “ Cam on.”

Before he could react, she stood and hugged him. No one had held him in a very long time. His head felt light, blood rushed hot to his skin. He made an awkward, panicked escape.

“I will be gone for a few days. A week at most.”

“But we have the story to cover.”

“Can’t be helped. You’ll be fine.”

Back at the café, he ordered a whiskey. He was meeting with Mr. Bao the next day in Tra Vinh, and had to have his head clear. He would gather maps and stop by the American commissary and pick up Mr. Bao’s new passions: two cartons of Marlboros and four loaves of Wonder Bread.

Linh allowed Mr. Bao to believe that they were having an effect on the American reporting of the war, although the reporters ended up being far more disillusioned by the truth than anything Linh could craft. “You just can’t manage to stick to one side,” Mr. Bao had said after finding him. Ironically, Linh’s intelligence gathering now included Mr. Bao, too, and his new sideline of drug trafficking, using the military for protection. He was making millions. Besides his dabbling in small-time brothels. His corruption made him the ideal partner for Linh-a man always open to compromise.

A week later, the helicopter dropped Helen and Linh off at Pleiku in the early morning. The change in geography was startling: the sultry flatness of the Mekong, with its inland oceans of rice paddies and white-hot sky, all replaced by the thinner, cooler air of the Central Highlands with its burned gold of elephant grass, olive drab of bamboo and scrub, its ancient menace of mahogany and teak forests.

Inside the military compound, a mission was being patched together to rescue an earlier convoy headed for a Special Forces camp on the Cambodian border. According to the last radio dispatches, only a few survivors were holding out.

Helen argued with the head sergeant, Medlock, a hound-faced man, and finally got permission to accompany the rescue. She felt jittery but swallowed the fear, already getting used to having Linh at her shoulder.

“You willing to share some of that?” Helen asked a first lieutenant, Reilly, sitting on an ammunition crate eating a chocolate bar.

“Sure.” He broke off a piece and handed it to her. “Need my energy for this baby.”

Helen nodded and put a piece of soft, melted chocolate on her tongue.

“You and I better keep our hats on.” He pointed to his own hair, the color of red-licked flame. “Our heads are like target practice.” He pulled out a beaten-up bush hat. “This here is my lucky one. Some shaman or something blessed it by pissing on it.”

Helen gave a short laugh. “No kidding?”

“Yeah, but he said whoever wears it won’t get hurt. So far not a scratch.”

“Makes up for having to put it on your head.”

“I got two. ’Case I lose one. You want to wear it?”

“Already have my own.” She touched the bush hat that Olsen had given her, that led to the Captain Tong pictures. She stood up. “Thanks for the chocolate.”

“You find me if you change your mind.”

Medlock gave a shout, and Helen searched for Linh, finding him with a group of Vietnamese paratroopers. “Let’s go,” she said. “We’re on.”

He looked at her and then looked back at the Vietnamese officers. He picked up the film and camera bags and followed her. In the background she could hear snickers from the paratroopers. “We’re not going,” he said under his breath.

“What?”

“This convoy will be ambushed.”

“Well, a chance of that. But we’re going.” She couldn’t let on that her stomach was sour, her hands clammy. Shouldn’t she be getting over this by now?

He put the bags down. “This time, no.”

Helen looked back at the paratroopers and then at him. Trucks lined up and loaded with supplies; jeeps filled with machine guns and grenades. A queer, unreal look to everything, and now Linh was spooking her. “Do they know something?” she said, pointing her chin toward the paratroopers.

“Let’s move out,” Sergeant Medlock shouted again.

“Listen to me this one time,” Linh said. He looked her in the face because this was more urgent than his politeness. “Stay behind.”

“I’ll look like a fool,” she said. “ Gary ’s expecting pictures.”

“Be a fool then.” His throat grew tight. “Here you listen to me. Here I know better.”

The sergeant came toward her with a clipboard. “ Adams, you ride in the second jeep.”

She stood for a moment looking at the ground. She hadn’t expected this-not an assistant but a babysitter. Her confidence so fragile that she was afraid if she backed down now, she would always find reasons to.

Medlock sighed. “Look, don’t give me trouble about the lead truck. I need my men on that one.”

Helen kept silent, Linh’s eyes on her. If she let him order her around now, there would be no end to it in the future.

“ Adams? Am I disturbing you?”

“I’m going to have to pass.”

“Hurray, one less problem.” He walked away, already forgetting them. Now that the choice had been made, she took off her bush hat and wiped her forehead, angry that she had given in, angry that she already felt the physical relief from fear. Failure pounded at her. “I doubt you would have kept Darrow from going.”

“I wouldn’t need to. He would know better.”

“What would’ve he known?”

Linh shrugged, tired of the conversation. He could not endure this. He would go back and give Darrow an ultimatum-either he worked for him or no one. Certainly not this woman.

Helen glared. Without a word, she turned and stalked away toward the communications bunker. The rest of the morning she took pictures at the field hospital. Her nerves were badly jangled by the tension of the camp, the sight of the wounded, the thought of what she had avoided. Although they worked side by side, she didn’t speak to Linh once. Her intuition told her she had missed something important, and far from helping her, he had talked her out of it. She planned on ending the arrangement when they returned to Saigon.

But the outgoing flights were loaded with wounded, and they would be forced to spend the night. At sundown, as she was lounging in the communications bunker reading a magazine, the radioman waved Sergeant Medlock in.

“The lead jeep set off a mine. Everyone inside got it.”

Medlock shook his head, his long face even longer, and punched his fist on the table.

The radioman listened again. “Sounds like the rest of the convoy is blocked and ambushed. They want to know how to proceed.”

“Damn it,” the sergeant said. “Give me the phone.” He looked around the bunker at the grim faces, then spotted Helen. “This is classified, sweets.”

Helen left. An hour passed and the sergeant wheeled out from the bunker, short of breath. She approached him.

“The rest of the men caught it. We’ve got two left, hiding in the jungle.”

She said nothing, tried not to think of the faces of the men she had joked with that morning. By nightfall, the radioman had lost contact, and it was concluded the two had not survived. Linh didn’t stay with the Americans but went to sleep with the Vietnamese soldiers.

In the damp, stale air of the bunker, only flashlights were used for light. Sergeant Medlock sat on a crate next to Helen, hesitated, then passed her a flask; she took a deep drink. He asked why she had changed her mind about the convoy.

“I didn’t. My assistant refused to go.”

“Little coward saved your life. Bullheaded orders from headquarters. I grew up in the Oklahoma panhandle; worked the stockyards. Let me tell you, no difference. Waste of lives. I don’t want to be giving the orders for it.”

The night stretched long and bitter, her thoughts chasing from fear to self-pity to animal joy at being safe. Around midnight she left the bunker for fresh air and a smoke. She nodded to the perimeter guards and offered them a cigarette. When they hissed to her that it would attract sniper fire, the risk wasn’t enough to keep her from squatting down against the sandbag wall and cupping her hand over the tip until she sucked it down to a stub.

Damp and still. Fog curled in the far-off rubber trees, overhead stars poked through the clouds, spiked and fierce.

She hated the night, the stopping of activity. Sleep out of the question, stomach churning, bowels watery. Looking around, she wondered how she had gotten there, why she needed this. Such a cliché to expose the war, or even wanting to test oneself against it. Whatever else, the place was a magnet for evil, or had they, Americans, brought it with them, like the European colonists brought pox in their blankets to the New World? Nothing she would do, including photographs, could have any effect on it. Such a nunnish urge to find purpose or clarity or even to bring ease. Since she had arrived, she had merely been running from illusion to illusion-by turns obsessed, deluded, needy, full of herself, thinking she had achieved some small understanding. MacCrae stoking her vanity, but now she was simply lonely and tired and confused.

Chilled, she returned to the bunker and lay down fully clothed on the dirty cot, boots on, cameras an arm’s length away; her mind unable to stay on any one thing for long, a revving engine. At three in the morning, she heard machine-gun fire, then incoming artillery. Their own mortars began, the empty whoosh of the shell out of the tube, and for the next hour there was the regular pounding of guns, slamming of ground. No one spoke inside the bunker, vulnerable flesh wombed in earth. In the dark, Helen pressed herself on her cot, longing for the relative luxury of her hotel room in Saigon, of having a good meal and an iced drink. Creature comforts taking an importance all out of proportion to what they offered. Again, she made herself small bargains-buying a silk scarf she’d had her eye on-if she made it out.

At four thirty in the morning, she dozed off and was awake again at five. Mortally weary. She rose, stiff, and washed her face with a napkin and water from the canteen. The sergeant handed her a cup of tepid coffee. The thought of food nauseating, but she traded out rations for fruit cocktail, ate two cans, then drank the juice.

At dawn a third convoy was ordered to get ready to collect the bodies of the first two failed missions. Linh sat at a small fire with the Vietnamese soldiers, boiling tea and rice for breakfast. She hesitated, not sure about approaching him. But when he caught sight of her, he rose at once. He walked her over to a low wall of sandbags and indicated she should sit.

“I want to apologize-” she began.

“I got a message through the radio-Darrow’s helicopter was shot down in the Ca Mau area. Darrow is fine.”

She felt the ground swaying underneath her at the possibility of something happening to him. “He’s okay?”

Linh turned away, the expression on her face too painful. He had seen that expression in Mai’s face and taken it for granted. “He said only scratches.”

When the trucks began to load, he stood, hefted the pack of equipment onto his back, and walked over to her. They boarded without another word to each other. Now she couldn’t remember why she had placed such importance on the mission; she resented the time it would take to complete. If only they would call it off, she could take the next flight out. She had badly lost face with Linh and didn’t know how to make it up.

The trucks grinded through their gears as they climbed into the mountains along muddy, hairpin-turn roads. The wall of trees and plants on each side provided a thick screen that could have shielded any number of snipers. Sometimes a hole in the foliage allowed a sight line twenty or thirty feet into the jungle, sunlight filtering through the dense overhead canopy, turning individual shafts of light the color of honey.

Linh reached out to touch small white flowers clinging to the trunks of trees as they passed. The trucks climbed sullenly up the red dirt road, engines drowning out every sound, the only movement the bouncing, swaying bodies of the soldiers. Some of them turned outward and squinted into the jungle, fingering the clips of their machine guns, the rings of their hand grenades. Others simply stared at the floor of the truck bed or closed their eyes or prayed, resigned and unconcerned, weapons splayed under their feet. Plenty of time for fear when the trucks stopped. But Helen was hardly aware of her surroundings, barely noticed the jungle or the soldiers, wondering if it was true that Darrow was unhurt. What if she got hurt now, before she saw him?

They reached a straight part of the road that leveled out, a slight depression muddied with the remaining trickle of a steam struggling across it. The abandoned trucks, noses buried in jungle, impeded their way.

Engines were cut and clips slammed home; the new silence rang in Helen’s ears. She ducked at the shriek of a bird, and the soldiers in the truck snickered. Odds were good that the enemy had long since departed, but still they moved forward with slow, deliberate steps.

The first thing was the vinegary sweet meatlike stench. An elemental imprint on the brain one recognized without knowing why. The instinct was to run, but instead the soldiers crawled forward, and Helen reluctantly followed. Clouds of birds and insects flew up as they neared. The ground littered with the detritus of battle-ammunition casings, a destroyed radio, hastily moved sandbags, bloodied bandages; weapons stolen.

A swarm of translucent orange-winged insects rose up, a kind of locust, and underneath Helen saw a flash of strawberry blond that she at first mistook for a clump of flowers. Two thick, loglike shapes covered with leaves, and going closer, she saw they were the bloated legs of a body. And then a few feet farther the lucky bush hat. Two soldiers rolled the remains into a rubber poncho, but the body did not move away in one piece. She turned away and vomited.

“That’s what you get, bringing women out here.”

She rinsed her mouth with water from her canteen and let the tears dry on her face as she pulled the lens cap off the camera. Most of the scenes too horrific to be used, but she took the pictures anyway because she had to keep her hands and her mind occupied. The promises of leaving replayed themselves in her mind. In this place filled with death, it was impossible to believe that Darrow remained unhurt. She wanted to go to Linh and be reassured all over again, but she couldn’t get him away from the other soldiers.

So she turned to the work. During their days wandering Saigon, Helen hadn’t known more than loading the camera and shooting, centering the images so they could be cropped, but Linh taught her how to extract the meaning out of a shot. It seemed impossible to concentrate on light, shutter speed, and aperture in the middle of combat or even in its aftermath, but those were the peculiar requirements of the job. Now the distance of technique saved her.

He had told her to picture the image being formed; the idea of light going through the lens, striking the translucent emulsion, staining it dark. The more light, the longer the length of time, the darker the stain. Those areas most saturated by light-by intensity and duration-called latent images. No turning back, only advancing frame by frame by frame. All the grays had to be sorted out, lights and darks contrasted, even if it meant making them up. She saw that even pictures that purported the truth involved a great deal of discretion and taste and choice, that subject matter and angle and intent were as involved in image-making as they were in the military briefings.

After the area had been searched, Linh stood apart looking down a gully along the side of the road. Helen went to stand near him, hoping he would say something more about Darrow, but when he remained silent she squinted into the gully. “What is it?”

“Look at those white flowers. Everywhere on this hill. I noticed them while we were in the trucks.”

Not understanding such callousness, she stared hard at his profile for a minute. “How did you know the rescue convoy would be attacked?”

“You mean do I have ‘spy’ knowledge? Do I have a secret phone to Viet Cong headquarters? Medlock knew it was a death mission. He had no choice. When the NVA leave a few alive, it is to lure more in. Guerilla tactics. I was a soldier once.”

The Vietnamese troopers complained about having to load the bodies onto the truck. Sergeant Medlock and another officer argued with them. Voices grew pitched and strident. Finally the Americans, even though there were fewer of them, loaded alone, and then the Vietnamese grudgingly helped. By the time all the bodies were on the truck, tension was high.

Helen took a shot of the back of the loaded truck with its inert human cargo like a sculpture from a circle of the Inferno. She knelt and framed the truck like a mountain, the focus sharp on the tread of the tires, the matching tread of the boots of the dead. The darkness of the surrounding jungle and the light on the road made it seem the most forlorn spot in the world.

“Man, let’s blow this place,” one of the soldiers said.

The trucks rumbled back to life. Helen rode in a jeep with Medlock while Linh rode with the Vietnamese soldiers in the trucks.

When they arrived back at base camp, the Americans went into the mess tent to eat while the bodies were loaded into helicopters for transport back to Saigon. Helen didn’t know what else to do, so she followed the officers and stood in line for hamburgers and more fruit cocktail. She sat at table and spooned peaches into her mouth although they tasted obscene to her.

“Did you see the price of the new radios they’re selling down at the PX?”

“It’s easier to buy radios and trade them for cigarettes. Sell them on the black market and make a fortune.”

“I’ll start my retirement fund right in Saigon,” Medlock joked from down the table.

“Next time I’m in town, I’m going to load up on chocolate.”

A pause, a moment of panic because Helen did not hear half their words, so lost was she in the memory of the strawberry-haired soldier’s chocolate, but then Medlock asked if anyone had caught the football scores from the paper. The world went on.

When Linh came inside, Helen was drinking coffee. “Can I talk with you?”

She felt exhausted and not up to dealing with him. Their relationship was wearing on both of them. She sighed but didn’t want to make matters worse. “Can it wait?”

“I told Darrow we’re going back to Saigon now. He wants for you to fly down to Mekong Delta today.”

“He’s really okay?” Helen hesitated. “About yesterday…” She was mortified by what now seemed like a temper tantrum on her part.

“I check when we’re okay for flying out.” He walked away, brusque, but he didn’t want to be tampered with any longer. Easier to keep a distance. With Darrow, that had been acceptable. She wanted more, wanted too much, pushed him past his limits. What she wanted, finally, more than he was willing to give.