The Man from Saigon. Marti Leimbach

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СКАЧАТЬ to her now, so that it feels like she is walking on stumps.

      One of the soldiers has collected some bamboo that he is carving carefully for reasons she does not understand. She is aware of the heat, the air swollen with moisture, but she no longer seems to be sweating. She hears herself speak and it sounds like someone else talking, not her. “They’ll stand us on the side of a bomb crater, shoot us, and then we’ll fall in,” she says. Her mind flashes images, sometimes disjointed, as though she is dreaming. She sees craters and bones, tall dry grasses, the white sun. She shivers and wonders why; thinks it must be her own fatigue making her imagine this. The craters look like convenient graves. She’s seen them full of water, newly alive with marine life, and wondered then how the fish managed to find their way into bomb craters. She has seen soldiers bathing in them, peasants fishing in them. She’s also seen a body or two. She thinks this is remarkable, that she could die now in a hollow of the earth, in the footprint of an explosive whose origins are from some Midwestern town half a planet away.

      Her skin has gone strangely cool. Her lips taste of salt. Son is staring at her. The soldiers seem not to notice, perhaps not to care. For a moment she thinks she might fall asleep, right here, right now. Her head begins to dip, her eyes closing. She realizes she is becoming a heat casualty. She has seen troops medevac’d on stretchers in the same condition. Her awareness of this startles her. She recovers long enough to ask for more water.

      “Can you walk?” Son asks. These are his first words to her in many hours and they feel good, like the water itself. But though he has spoken only once, the sound echoes in her mind so that it feels he is asking again and again: Can you walk, can you walk? Part of her, the part that is thinking straight, still rational, knows that it is heat exhaustion that is the problem. She drinks as much as she is able, then nods and stands up. Her feet are bleeding, she realizes, but she can walk.

      They reach a clearing made some time ago by US troops who, judging from the look of the place, had apparently wanted to land a helicopter right here in the jungle. She studies the tree stumps that have been blown up, charred wood, charred ground, a lot of sudden sunshine that comes through like a knife. She feels almost drunk, her legs jelly, her arms shaking, the cool sweat like the glistening oil of a snake. She is glad there are no craters near by, even though she knows she is only imagining what might happen, that nobody has told her, told her anything really.

      The soldiers are busy scouring the land, looking for leftover C-rations, matches, cigarettes, gum—anything the soldiers may have left behind. There is a fair chance they’ll find something valuable. Marc once told her it was not uncommon for the Americans to bury a whole carton of C-rations rather than carry it. He told her this as they stood in a wooded area, a fire behind them from where the troops had burned a Vietcong hideout. She watched a GI walk to the river’s edge to dump a load of rations, then get another box and do the same again. What’s he doing? she asked. Marc looked up from his notepad, blinked into the sun, and explained. She’d had no idea. It was like a thousand details of this war that were a mystery to her. She looks now as the three Vietcong soldiers pick up bits of garbage, an empty Salem pack, a cracked Bic lighter. If found, rations are treasure to the Vietcong, better than money, which they seldom have a use for except to surrender to their superiors.

      She imagines the Americans back again, the soldiers who made the clearing. With their M16s, their bandoliers, grenades and knives and helmets. She wishes them back and for a moment she smiles, picturing the face of a captain she met while out with Marc on a story in Gio Linh. She didn’t think she’d paid that much attention, but there is his face in front of her now, the slightly wild glaze of his expression, the thin upper lip, the whites of his eyes bright against his face, which is dark with earth and sun, with insect repellent and dust.

      He’d stood in a clearing waving an ice-cream cone as he spoke. There’d been a story about how the troops were under-supplied, with TV footage of them describing how they might run out of C-rations at this rate. Command had reacted, first by getting after the reporter about “misreporting,” and second by sending barrels of ice cream and ammunition out to the soldiers immediately. She watched the captain talk between slurps of ice cream, which melted faster than he could eat it, running down his sleeve, attracting insects which he picked out with his fingers. They’d blasted out a temporary landing zone to get in a chopper for a wounded soldier and it looked like the clearing where she sat now. She half expected to see the white wrappers, the Popsicle sticks, packaging from dressings, cigarette butts. She half expected to see that captain’s grubby face, the dusty, sagging uniform, the reassuring gun.

      You shouldn’t have said what you did, Davis, the captain had told Marc. Ruins morale, a story like that.

      Wasn’t me, Marc said. I didn’t even know about it.

       It might not be you who did it, but it was your network, that’s for goddamn sure. I mean, why can’t you people get on the team?

      Marc sighed. I didn’t know the guy who did that story. We’re not all that friendly, the press. To each other, I mean.

      I don’t know. You look awful friendly to me, the captain said, moving his gaze from Marc to Susan and back again. Getting altogether too friendly, I’d say.

      She’d only known Marc a few weeks then, the charge of electricity so strong between them it was as recognizable as an army flag. They could deny it—to the captain, to a dozen others—but it was obvious, palpable, a disaster in the making.

      Under normal circumstances, if she were to think about the captain at all, she would have recalled with a small stitch of resentment the way he looked at her as if she was a nice little can of rations tucked into Marc’s own pack. But that is not what seems important now. What she thinks of now, what she wants most of all, is the ice cream. She is almost exhilarated by the thought of something cold and sweet and wet.

      Son is studying the Vietcong, the ground, the treeline. She imagines he is assessing the chances of running into American soldiers. He frowns into the distance, then looks away, and she concludes that nobody is coming. The only sounds are jungle sounds: the rustling of unseen animals, of scurrying birds and monkeys and rats. Occasionally, she hears a series of long, piercing cries and she imagines that one of the hidden creatures is murdering another of them, and she is reminded of the cries of the men she heard during the ambush. She blames herself for being here now. She swats at the insects that flutter next to her head, confusing her in the heat and dust with the vibration of their wings and the constant stimulation of movement near her eyes.

      As they begin again, moving out of the clearing, she asks Son once more if he thinks they will be shot. They are walking over splintered, dead branches strewn with new vines that grow easily over the broken land, around torn stumps already sprouting new buds, the land so fertile and determined it is a force of its own, as powerful as the war. For a moment she thinks she sees Son nod. This sends her into a desperate, pleading burst.

      “Is that right, then?” she says. “Is that what is going to happen? We’ll be shot?”

      He has no chance to respond. One of the soldiers indicates with his gun that she needs to keep moving. Walking is increasingly difficult. Her feet hurt; she is drying out. In a minute she’ll begin hallucinating, or perhaps she will fall. She feels invisible to the soldiers, who move them on like cattle. She feels invisible to Son; perhaps in his mind she is already dead.

      Salt pills, the juice of a dragonfruit, water and shade. She is nursed with these simple things and when she wakes she has no idea how long she has been asleep. She thinks it has been a long time, but judging from the light still left in the day, it has been less than an hour. They begin again to walk. She feels better than before, but not great. She wishes Son would talk to her, just a few words every once in a while and she would be satisfied. He still does not СКАЧАТЬ