The Lotus Eaters_ A Novel Part 30

Sergeant James joined the other soldiers surrounding the burned-out hull of the helicopter, already so weathered it looked as if it had been there decades. The men crouched over blackened mounds on the ground, unzipped a body bag, put on plastic gloves, and used spades.

Head pounding from a threatening migraine, Helen stood, her purpose gone. Of course, there was nothing there for her, but she had been unable to stay away. Her whole being unmoored, the excuse of going out was her only relief. A death to suffer through with no ceremony, no commemoration of who they had been to each other. A red drop fell on her s.h.i.+rt and then blood began to pour from her nose.

Linh was quickly at her side, pulling out a handkerchief, settling her in the shade of a tree.

"What happened?" she asked.

"Alt.i.tude.

Heat."

She sat with her head tilted back, the metal taste of blood stripping her throat raw.

"Don't be angry with me."

Linh was cleaning a lens with cloth. "For nosebleed? We all miss him."

"Then why the looks?"

"You have been here long enough but still you act like a child." Linh remembered Darrow's theatrics over Samang's snakebite death in Angkor. Why couldn't any of them accept fate? Why the long march out here? Of course, he must ask himself the same question. The answer that he feared for her and didn't fear for himself. More and more he believed detachment the only answer to the constant onslaught of loss.

"Just be my friend."

"I am always your friend."

Later she walked back and forth along the outside of the site, searching debris scattered a good distance from the crash. Between tall swales of elephant gra.s.s, she found small fragments of 35mm film, the emulsion burned away so that it had a milky, blinded look. Linh recovered a piece of the embroidered neckband that Darrow used for his favorite Leica; it had been wedged under a stone. Although he would have liked to have kept it, he handed it to Helen, and she held it carefully between her fingers, as if it still burned.

Sergeant James came over to her and handed her his canteen. "Miss?"

"Sorry," she mumbled. "Heat."

"We need to be pus.h.i.+ng off."

Helen nodded. Her fingers still searched the charcoal ground for slips of film.

"Ready to leave." He took back his canteen and screwed the cap back on. "Sorry for your loss. They died like heroes. Trying to rescue two of our own."

"Khong biet." I don't know. I don't know.

He crinkled his nose as if from a bad smell. "How's that?"

"Too many heroes in my life. All gone."

Her fingers were soot black as she pocketed three small pieces of film. When she wiped the sweat off her forehead, a black smudge trailed behind. The time of extravagant grief over; now she was dry-eyed and quiet. Something had changed, she feared, what ever connection she had felt for the land or the soldiers broken.

Linh came up to her and motioned to her forehead.

During those convalescent days he had nursed her in the Cholon apartment, he had nursed her in the Cholon apartment, Linh had decided the only tribute he could pay Darrow was to send Helen home safely.

She agreed to go only once the body was recovered. When they got news of the crash, Gary insisted that Linh go with him to the apartment. As soon as Helen opened the door and looked into Linh's face, she knew. The worst part how little a surprise it had been, how easy to accept. She pulled Linh inside and closed the door on Gary. But even the fatefulness of the death did nothing to diminish her grief. The sound of her crying tore open his own wounds. An agony to stay with her; an agony to leave.

During those long days, she had asked him about his life, and for the first time he revealed parts. She had earned this trust. He told how his father had been a nationalist, simply wanting in dependence for his country. When Ho embraced the early promise of Communism, he followed. Linh had joined the NVA, believing his father. Soon, they both realized it was a false promise. The family had been willing to lose all, escape. But they found the South, too, corrupted, filled with puppets for the foreigners.

Now Helen untied her bandanna and wetted it from his canteen, wiping the bandanna and wetted it from his canteen, wiping the charcoal from her brow and then spreading the wet cloth open to cover her whole face.

Under torture, men suffocated this way.

"It's time to leave." He plucked the cloth off her face.

Sergeant James stood at ease with the other soldiers, facing the ravine they had come up, feet spread, arms clasped behind his back like a sentinel. Two improbably small body bags lay at the soldiers' feet.

Far away the hollow thrum of underground explosives could be heard like a heartbeat. Many hilltops over, delicate white puffs of smoke hung in the air.

The Montagnards were supposed to carry the remains out, but they did not show up. James said they were probably still blowing bunkers, so the soldiers decided to carry the bags themselves and not risk getting caught out overnight.

In single file the soldiers walked step by step down the dirt path, the ground loose and red under their boots, each of them shouldering the end of a splintery wood pole, and the unevenness of their strides and the small slips in the crumbling soil caused the bags to sway and squeak. Linh and Helen followed--the ravine plunging, hairpin and overgrown-alternately blinded by the sunlight and then plunged into dark shade as they made their way back down the steep mountain.

Thorn bushes crowding the path snagged at Helen's pants, and once, as she gazed out over the valley, a large thorn dug a long scratch along her arm. Beadlike drops of blood formed along the wound, but she was oblivious to it until Linh came up next to her and rubbed it roughly with a piece of cloth, his eyes glittering.

"You must watch where you're going. Be more careful."

When they made it back to the LZ it was sunset, and a helicopter was on its way to drop supplies and take them out. Helen ached to go back to the city, to the crooked apartment she had not moved out of, boxes half packed. She waited with her back to the two bags lying by the side of the clearing.

As they waited, four LRRPs, called Lurps, walked in from the bush. They highfived the platoon digging in for the night, nodded thoughtfully to the bags at the edge of the clearing, then squatted under a tree and began to boil rice and dried meat. These types, MacCrae's kind of guys, worked in deep cover, adapting to native ways and language.

Linh went over and joined them. Exhausted, Helen sat on a box of rations. She was surprised when one of the men held out a plastic cup to Linh, and more surprised when he accepted, squatting down to drink with them. By the jerk of Linh's head and the guttural laughter of the soldiers, she guessed it was the local hill tribe moons.h.i.+ne, a fermented alcohol made of rice, lethal stuff.

The helicopter came in, and everyone turned away to s.h.i.+eld their faces. The whole camp pitched in to unload supplies. Two of the Lurps jumped up, jubilant and drunk, and each took one end of the first body bag and swung it up on the floor of the helicopter, where it landed with a hard thud.

"Careful!"

Helen yelled.

The two men stared at her with blank expressions. "They won't feel a thing anymore, dolly," one of them said to the howling laughter of his companions.

Helen stared at them and at Linh sitting there, a part of them. "I'll remember that when I carry your bag."

The soldier made a motion with his hand as if he had touched something hot.

"Sssssss!"

Helen watched as the next bag was loaded in carefully, almost tenderly.

Linh staggered up to her. "We're not going out. We're going on patrol with them."

He nodded his head back to the Lurps eating their dinner.

"You're drunk." Helen's gaze took in the group of men who were oblivious to their presence. "Do they know this?"

"Already arranged."

"By who?"

He wagged his head. "Me."

She rubbed her boot back and forth in the dirt, a long, tired arc. "I'm beat. You go.

I'm going back on this ride."

Linh grabbed her arm. "For me, this time. Without questions."

She hesitated. After Darrow's death, she felt strange around Linh. The memory of the three of them together making the absence more painful. "I don't have enough film."

"Enough for the job."

"Which is?"

Linh studied her face, looking for something. "You said you wanted to photograph the Ho Chi Minh trail. Still do?"

After three days, Helen no longer thought of the crooked apartment or Saigon. no longer thought of the crooked apartment or Saigon.

Even Darrow changed from a pain outside, inflicted, to something inside, a tumor, with only its promise of future suffering. The fastness of the jungle struck her again in all its extraordinary voluptuousness, its wanton excess. It enchanted. Time rolled in long green distances, and she took comfort in the fact that the land would outlast them, would outlast the war--would outlast time itself.

They traveled straight west for three days, illegally crossing the border at some point, and continued on. They moved beyond rules; she, in her grief, was also beyond rules. Gradually, as happened each time, Helen was absorbed by the details of the patrol-the heat, the terrain, the soldiers--till nothing else existed. She was impressed by the obvious relish with which they went about their job, hardwired for it in a way other units were not. They lived deep in the land; traveled through it like ghosts. No base camps or supply drops. Understood there would be no mercy if they were caught. They made do with very little--whatever was on their backs or taken from the land.

Deep in the wilderness, Helen experienced the longed-for slipping beneath the surface, losing the sense of herself as separate from her surroundings. After five days all thought of the war was gone. Only movement and land covered, the safety of the men and herself. She lost her tiredness, lost her appet.i.te. Simply ate and slept enough to have the strength to keep walking. The idea of taking photos small and beside the point. The Lurps mostly ignored her except for the one who had made the body bag comment. After a week he came up and complimented her: "You're almost invisible."

On the tenth day they received a click-hiss on the radio, a signal an NVA convoy would be pa.s.sing within hours. They set up positions in the bush with a clear view of a wide dirt path that crossed a quick-moving river. The sound of the water concealed them against accidental noise.

Linh and Helen cut branches to create a tripod inside a large bush, then hid the camera and zoom lens with leaves. Linh attached a cable release for the shutter. "When they come, no movement. No framing. We have to be lucky. If your hands shake, no problem."

She listened and did what Linh told her without question. Enacting a ritual to summon a spirit, conjuring an enemy that had for the most part remained invisible and otherworldly. Beyond belief that such a force could be made up of individual people, and she wondered if it was the same for the North Vietnamese--did they fear the magic of the Americans, with their planes and bombs? Their endless machines. Each time the Americans came across fresh footprints of rubber sandals, they stared at them with a kind of queasy awe. The only tangible evidence of the enemy's existence so far was dead bodies, but strangely, the dead were somehow less, did not match the fear and terror they inspired, much like one could not imagine flight from the evidence of a dead bird on the ground.

Hours pa.s.sed that held the weight of days. Ten feet away, Helen heard the clickhiss of the radio again as the Lurp nodded up and down the line and then shut it off. More hours, with only a minimum of movement. The day overcast and cooler, a thin fog curled at the top of the mountains, and the first enemy soldier materialized on the path without a noise.

How young they seemed.

Barely out of boyhood in their shabby khaki uniforms, thin so that their pants, rolled up, revealed the large k.n.o.bs of knees. The AKs strapped across their chests looked too big for them to handle, children playing war with their fathers' guns. Their faces so serious and yet they moved with the energy of teenagers, confident in their steps. When the first soldiers came to the river, they stopped and scanned it up and down, but they were at the narrowest and slowest-flowing part--the Lurps made sure of that before setting up positions--and Helen pressed down on the cable release over and over, hoping that just by sheer numbers she would come up with a usable frame, the click of the camera inaudible over the gravelly sound of the running water.

The first soldiers waded in their rubber sandals halfway across the river, the rus.h.i.+ng water reaching waist-high so that they had to raise their weapons. Behind the point guard, soldiers came with heavy loads strapped onto bicycles, a bamboo pole across the handlebar and another from the seat of the bike for steering. One of them said something to a soldier in the stream, and the young man again scanned the river up and down and shrugged.

The bicycles shuddered in the river, the rus.h.i.+ng water tugging against the canvas bags, forcing the drivers to cross quickly, almost at a jog because the power of the current would tire them, soaking the bags heavy and making their jobs harder. More than fifty bicycles pa.s.sed in an hour.

Next came a kind of crude wagon balanced on four fat rubber tires. Two soldiers directed it, one front and one back. Halfway across the river, a front tire caught on something underwater, and the force of the soldier pus.h.i.+ng from the back made it go in deeper, splaying the wagon sideways so it was at a forty-five-degree angle to the bank.

The two soldiers tried to straighten it, then back it up, but the vehicle wouldn't budge.

Now the soldiers closest to the Americans stopped on their side of the riverbank, laid their bikes down and slipped off their packs, and waded into the water to free the wagon. It took eight men to get it moving, and when they reached the other side, the steep bank was too slippery, and the wheels couldn't gain traction. An order was given to cut down poles to create a ramp.

Five soldiers, including one young boy, took out small hatchets shaped like halfmoons and began combing through the surrounding brush. Four of them moved upstream, away from the Americans, but the young boy moved downstream, straight toward them.

Helen held her breath and moved her head in time to see one of the Lurps nearest her pull the pin out of a grenade and then the boy soldier was near them, but he was not looking for a pole. He seemed glad to stop marching, and he looked up at the sky and down the stream and reached in his pocket, pulling out something white that he quickly stuck in his mouth, and as he began to chew, Helen realized it was gum, and the surprise made her smile. An order was barked from one of the soldiers holding the wagon in the stream, and the boy soldier veered directly toward Helen and Linh, seeing the easy lure of their cut branches. He reached for one of the poles holding the camera, bringing his right hand with the hatchet up. When the pole came away in his hand, he found himself looking eye to eye with Linh. The boy soldier's eyes grew big, and his chest inhaled a yell when his vision caught the movement of Helen's hand on the cable, and his eyes grew larger.

Helen looked at him and knew that it was probably the end for all of them, but something in his face and gestures made her unafraid. Gently she raised her hand and ran her index finger lightly across her neck, more a statement of the situation they all found themselves in than a threat, and the boy soldier exhaled without a sound, stepped back, his eyes traveling again to Linh, who raised his own hand to cover his face, palm down, slowly dragging his hand down his features, fingertips finally grazing his chin, a mime to erase all that had been seen, and the boy soldier turned quickly at the new barked orders from the men soldiers in the stream, and again he looked at the river, squinting as the sun reflected off of it, motionless for a moment before he moved away, blowing a big, sugary bubble.

Poles were cut and put under the wagon, and it tracked up the muddy bank. The last of the soldiers, including the boy, crossed, and then the clearing was empty, only footprints proving the whole thing had not been a dream.

When they returned to Saigon they did not stop to shower or change but went Saigon they did not stop to shower or change but went straight to the magazine's darkroom and kicked out all the a.s.sistants.

Gary got word of the pictures and left his apartment before curfew to spend the night at the office. "You're kidding, aren't you? How'd you do it?" He was grabbing at his collar around his neck as if there were a pressure there. With shock, Helen realized that in the last month his hair had turned white.

"Are you okay?" she said.

"I forbid you to take chances like that. Or at least, tell me first."

Helen looked at him coolly. She had long suspected that Gary cared more than he let on, yet it was in the nature of the business that they all wanted to please him, that he created, subtly, the compet.i.tive drive and risk-taking that produced the pictures. "We were on our own time."

"Do it again, you're fired."

"And get five better offers the next day." She was beyond the point where he could make demands, unspoken that she would take the same risks anyway and simply sell to another magazine if need be. The pictures didn't matter anymore.

"Don't make me go through losing another photographer," he said. And with that, she was chastened.

"The pictures all go under a dual byline, okay? No one else in the darkroom till we finish. No one touches the negatives."

"Let me have a peek, okay? At least the first contacts."

"We'll see." She worried about the quality of the exposures, the dim light and the lack of aperture adjustment.

"You're my top paid feature person now. Tell Linh I'm putting him on staff fulltime."

Helen nodded her head and gently closed the darkroom door behind her.

Linh began with test clips. As Helen feared, the light had been too dim. Linh left the negatives in the developer longer to increase the contrast and sharpen the edges. His first test got better and better, but at the moment both of them thought the exposure perfect, fog developed over the shadows. "Too long," he said. "We'll shorten the next one."

Helen sat on a stool in the dark, the red light on Linh as he moved back and forth.

"What do you think?"

He studied the next test negative, then turned the overhead light on. He handed it to Helen, and the air went out of her when she saw the poor range of tone and the weak edge markings on the film. "It's not going to work. These are terrible."

"We can fix it. We'll leave it in developer longer. Use two baths. I'll make it work."

Helen chewed her nail. "How'd you learn to do all this?"

"This is nothing. I used to work in the forest at night with only stars. I rinsed negatives by letting water run over the strips in the stream. Dried them by hanging them along small leaves."