The Lotus Eaters_ A Novel Part 18

"I'm sure that is true."

"That is how I've learned most excellent English."

Helen pictured the granddaughter living alone in the great foreign city, working long hours in some invisible job, yet back in her village she was a celebrity. After Ho Tung left, Ngan carried in their bags.

"I'm supposed to take it easy at least a month. Not much use for a one-armed photographer. I'm hoping a couple of weeks will do it. So I thought we'd have a little incountry R&R." He wished it were that simple. Since the accident, night sweats, insomnia, shaking, everything back with a vengeance. He couldn't say aloud that he hoped to be saved by her.

"And you just a.s.sumed I'd drop everything?"

Darrow picked up her hand and kissed it. He hadn't counted on her being standoffish, p.r.i.c.kly, and he almost wished for the company of his native women, their docile willingness. After saying good-bye to the chief, Helen went back under the shade of the roof, sat down, but it was hardly any cooler than standing in the road.

"How about it, Linh? You could use a rest, too," Darrow said.

"I need to do some errands," Linh said.

"Stay and relax. They've got a place for you up the road." He wanted to say, Stay Stay and keep me company.

"I'll be back at the end of the month." The smallest intuition that Darrow longed for the days at Angkor also. Instead, he had saddled both of them with this woman. He remembered how Mai used to exasperate him, and yet now he would give almost anything to have that irritation back. Was it like that for Darrow?

"What in the world are you going to find to do around here, in the middle of...

nowhere?" Darrow asked.

Linh spoke in Vietnamese to Ngan, and they both laughed.

"What's funny?" Helen said.

"That we are in the middle of nowhere. Everyone knows this is the center of the universe."

"Don't go all Buddha on me," Darrow said.

During lunch the two men talked about people they knew, upcoming operations that might be interesting to go on, although they agreed it all could change in a month's time.

"I'll keep an eye out for things," Linh said.

It struck Helen how differently Linh acted now, at ease and forthcoming to Darrow where he had been so strained with her.

Darrow sighed and pushed his plate aside. "I hear you two got a little trouble outside Pleiku?"

"Yes," Linh said. "They sent in a suicide convoy. We waited till next morning and then we went in."

Darrow turned to Helen. "Bad?"

Helen continued to eat. She burned with humiliation.

"It's okay."

When Linh was ready to leave, he stuck out his hand to her, but she moved around it and hugged him. A silent peace offering. "Come back soon. Let's have a little fun together, the three of us, okay?"

He nodded but was already walking off down the dirt path. He loved them each separately, but he was ashamed he did not want to see them together.

"Where does he disappear to, do you think?" Helen asked.

"Maybe he has a beautiful little bar girl that he keeps. Or he's a Viet Cong spy."

She laughed. "What? Linh?"

"You've got to start seeing underneath things. Finding the real story."

"You sound like MacCrae now."

"Once when we were in Cu Chi, my camera got... smashed, and he constructed spare parts out of nothing. I worried about the film, and he said he would process it in a bunker if I wanted. Since it was dark, we did it by starlight. He traveled with two porcelain plates--one for the developer, one for the fixer. Tied a small stone at the end of the strip and dipped it into the stream to wash it. Only the NVA are taught that."

Helen laughed. "You're joking. Not Linh. That's impossible."

At dusk, Helen and Darrow sat inside the doorway of the hut. Ngan served them Darrow sat inside the doorway of the hut. Ngan served them dinner--bowls of sticky rice and fried paddy crab and shrimp--and then bowed away. The USAID workers had sent over a cooler of beer, and Helen pressed an icy bottle against her neck.

There was an element of performance when Darrow was around others, but alone, he seemed tired, distracted. Although she was happy to be there, she had not had time to wind down from the mission. She traced the scar on his good arm; the warmth of his skin made her realize how happy she was to be with him again.

"At least I'll know the cause of this new scar."

"It's a sign that something worse didn't happen. It's a sign that I survived."

"Linh stopped me going on that convoy."

"What're you talking about?"

"In Pleiku. I wanted to show off how b.a.l.l.sy I was. I thought he was a coward for not going."

"It's experience. But he's a guardian angel." "So who guards him?"

Darkness fell; the jungle suddenly quieted. The only sounds the faint pulse of flame in their kerosene lamp, the lapping of water against moored boats along the river's bank. Small bats fluttered over the trees and river in loose rolls like drunks.

"I love... this country," Darrow said. "My dream is to photograph the North and South in peace."

"Why did you ask me to come down here? I mean, we could have met in Saigon."

"This is the third time I've been in a helicopter that went down. One time we ran out of gas and crashed into a hillside. One time we were rocketed. My mind was always clear before, ready; this time all I thought of was you."

"That's a good thing, right?" Helen took a long sip of beer. All his words were the right ones, but she wondered if they had just come too late for her to hear them. "What exactly did you think about me?"

"You've made me selfish," he said. "You've made me greedy for life again."

In the middle of the night, a rustling on the roof woke Helen. She grabbed a the night, a rustling on the roof woke Helen. She grabbed a flashlight and poked it through the opening of the mosquito netting and onto the ceiling.

In the corner, a greenish gold gecko turned to pose in the light, in his mouth the wiggling body of a scorpion.

Stealthy as a thief, Helen rolled off the straw mat and stood in the doorway, watching the night.

A golden moon hung over the outlying palms, casting a light so bright she could make out individual grains of dirt on the ground. A faint coolness to the air, more lovely because of the previous heat. The surrounding roofs of pale thatch gave Helen a feeling of calm and protection. Everything she had thought she wanted within her grasp, perfectly all right with her if time stopped at that very moment, but already something had changed. No turning back, only advancing frame by frame by frame. The scene in front of her not just itself, but a potential shot: the widest aperture, the slowest shutter speed. Allow in every drop of light. Shallow range of depth, focus on one thing. But were they the thing to focus on?

In the distance she watched an old woman come out of one of the huts and stretch her arms over her head in the moonlight. She walked to the well, pulled up a bucket, and drank heartily from the ladle. A frame. She pulled a pin from the bun at the back of her head and let her long silver hair spread over her shoulders. A frame. She made her way to the riverbank and onto the wooden dock, hooked her bare foot on the edge of a boat that had been knocking against its mooring. It wasn't until the noise stopped that Helen was aware of its earlier irritating thump. With expert, practiced movements, the woman bent down and wound the rope more tightly. She then walked back up past the well and disappeared between a clump of trees. With a slow enough shutter speed, the woman would have blurred to nothing, become a ghost.

From around the corner of the house, Ngan appeared. "I get you something?"

"No." The girl's sudden appearance annoyed her, breaking her reverie, but she tried not to show it. "Can't sleep."

Ngan folded up her leg and stretched it out, like the egrets Helen watched along the riverbanks. "Warm night."

"Who was the old woman down by the dock?"

"No one. Just old woman. You go back to sleep."

Helen watched Ngan disappear behind the house again until Darrow's voice broke the stillness, and she laughed, a great flood of happiness that she wasn't awake alone.

"Why're you up?" he asked.

"This place is like Grand Central. Promise we can stay here forever."

"Come sleep. All I promise is pineapple pancakes for breakfast. And a day of fis.h.i.+ng."

She turned away from the dark mystery of the village.

At dawn they rose and, at Ho Tung's invitation, joined the villagers gathering to and, at Ho Tung's invitation, joined the villagers gathering to go out into the rice paddies. Helen asked Ngan to make coffee in the morning, but the girl only knew how to boil tea. When Darrow came back from a shower, he was balancing a pot of French roast and cups on a tray in his one good hand. He poured two cups as they watched the dawn color the tops of the palms.

"Where did you get that?" Helen asked.

"A good reporter never gives his sources," he said, bending, kissing her neck, her collarbone, her elbow.

Out on the road, the women gossiped as they walked along the half-mile of dirt road. Children flitted back and forth like sparrows. Two girls told the story of a ghost in a tree who gave out money. Their mother boxed their ears for lying but admitted that she had saved the coins. When the girls saw Helen, they screamed and ran away. The men remained solemn, smoking cigarettes, their eyes on the sky, divining the day's weather.

At the edge of the paddies, the women kicked off sandals and waded into the brackish water. They tied on hats under their chins to free their hands, began the movement of bending and swaying, back and forth through the rows of green rice stalks, weeding.

A miracle that the war had not touched this place. One could almost pretend that it was peacetime, but they owed that to the cleverness of the Hoa Hao.

Helen took pictures, listening to Darrow's advice on framing. She motioned three young girls to move closer together as they bent over their work, faces hidden under identical conical hats, only the differing patterns of their s.h.i.+rts separating them from each other. Behind them stretched the sunlit water of early morning. Small, bright green rice plants surrounded them like the subtle brushstrokes of a painting.

"Here you have time to move things around. In the field, you have to find an anchor for the picture--a soldier's face, a background, and you just start shooting. You can never go wrong zeroing in on a face. Shoot all day, you might get one good picture."

As the farmers moved farther into the paddy, Helen and Darrow sat down under farther into the paddy, Helen and Darrow sat down under trees on the bank. High white clouds dissolved in the rising heat until the sky became hard white and as empty as an eggsh.e.l.l.

When no one was looking, Helen touched Darrow on the chest, the knee. His physical proximity made her feel content, and the great urgency she had felt when she first arrived began to fade.

"You stroke me like I'm your pet dog."

"When you were a boy, what was your favorite game?"

He watched her stretched out on the gra.s.s, her hair wrapped over her throat. "I don't remember being a boy."

Helen sat up, kissed his eyelids although the villagers would see. She didn't want to hear the sad details just then. "You are my pet dog. A golden retriever. Rover."

Darrow nipped at her fingertips. "Rover's hungry."

At noontime, Ngan appeared with a basket of food. After she had set it out, she with a basket of food. After she had set it out, she sat in the shade some distance away, ignoring their invitation to join them. One of the women started a singsong chant, a ca dao ca dao, and the other women joined in the refrain.

"They think we're useless," Darrow said. "If my arm were better, I'd join them."

"Really?"

"Yeah, sure. Why not?"

Helen stood up, took off her own sandals, and rolled up her pants.

"What're you doing? Come back."

She waded in. The women stopped working and, pointing, talked and laughed excitedly. Ngan hurried to the edge of the water, giggling and covering her hands over her face.

"I was joking," Darrow shouted, but Helen waved him off. He was filled with enviousness, recognizing his old impulsiveness in her. "s...o...b..at!"

The water and the mud squished warm between her toes. She sank several inches into the muck, then midcalf-deep, and could feel things squirming underneath her feet.

Each time she lifted a leg, a pull of mud on her ankles. The vision of Michael rose, unbidden, his struggle against the suck of mud, helpless, shooting, betrayal as the helicopter took off, the pain and panic as he realized he was dying, but she pushed this away quickly. She could not lose face and return to the bank; she waved and moved farther out. After she joined the line of women, one of them showed her how to weed the seedlings along a row. When Helen accidentally uprooted a clump of rice, a woman grabbed it away, chiding, and replanted it. This was serious business--the difference between eating and not. These were not bad people, she and other Americans were not bad, only the war had made them appear so.

From far away, the scene looked graceful, but up close the work was grueling.

The heat tore at her. Women's faces wet with sweat, drops running down their noses and chins into the water.

After an hour, Helen's back ached from the constant strain of bending. She stood to ease the pain, jamming a fist into the small of her back. Her sungla.s.ses kept slipping off, so she had to put them in her pocket. One of the women handed her a hat, but still the glare off the water blinded her so that she had to squint to see the bank and Darrow. She was surprised how he appeared from far away--shoulders hunched, head down, almost convalescent.

As their feet dredged the bottom, a sour mash smell filled the air, a green smell of algae mixed with the reek of waste used as fertilizer. The chanting of the women was the only thing that kept her going--casting a spell. She remembered as a young child going with her father to the base for drill instruction, the sound of cadence as she waited sleepily on the gra.s.sy track field.

After half a day's work, blisters formed on her hands. She returned the hat and trudged sheepishly back to the bank. Even in this limited way, she had a feeling for what Linh had described--a brick in the wall, invisible except as part of the whole. When she stood on dry ground again, Darrow was leaning against a tree, reading a book.

"Blisters," she said, holding out her hands, palms up.

He smiled and closed the book. "Why? Token suffering?"

She smiled and wiped her wet hands on his s.h.i.+rt. "I'll never eat rice the same way again."

At first Helen was relieved to be away from combat, but as time pa.s.sed, her relieved to be away from combat, but as time pa.s.sed, her thoughts returned to the soldiers she had met; what had happened to them; what it meant.

The old curiosity gnawed, and she thought she wouldn't last, would need to make an excuse and rush back to Saigon. The seeming importance of events, and her desire to be there to record them. But with the pa.s.sage of days, it grew difficult to remember the shape and taste of the fear that had enveloped her; she stopped believing in its power.

Distance and the land worked on her. The lure of the war diminished, got quieter, lost its ravenous pull. The world shrank to the size of the village and then opened back up to the infinite in the same breath.

Their lives fell into a rhythm of sunrises and sunsets, of wind whispering through growing rice, of high white morning clouds dissolving to the metallic sheen of noontime heat. Their movements slowed to the speed of the thick, spreading rivers, the water buffalo's heavy footfalls. Their ears grew accustomed to the coc.o.o.n of Vietnamese, living like young children oblivious to meaning, only Ngan's painstaking, slow words requiring the effort of understanding; she, like a nurse, making every day comfortable. Their thoughts, too, slowed, filled with the sunlight through palm fronds, heat loosening muscles, tension unwinding from their bodies, until the war was something far outside both of them.