Double Impact

CHAPTER ELEVEN

IT WAS LATE in the day when the truck at last pulled to a halt. Willy, half-asleep among the rice sacks, rolled drowsily onto her back and struggled to clear her head. The signals her body was sending gave new meaning to the word misery. Every muscle ached; every bone felt shattered. The truck engine cut off. In the new silence, mosquitoes buzzed in the gloom, a gloom so thick she could scarcely breathe.

“Are you awake?” came a whisper. Guy’s face, gleaming with sweat, appeared above her.

“What time is it?”

“Late afternoon. Five or so. My watch stopped.”

She sat up and her head swam in the heat. “Where are we?”

“Can’t be sure. Near the border, I’d guess…” Guy stiffened as footsteps tramped toward them. Men’s voices, speaking Vietnamese, moved closer.

The canvas flap was thrown open. Against the sudden glare of daylight, the faces of the two men staring in were black and featureless.

One of the men gestured for them to climb out. “You follow,” he ordered. “Say nothing.”

Willy at once scrambled out and dropped onto the spongy jungle floor. Guy followed her. They swayed for a moment, blinking dazedly, gulping in their first fresh air in hours. Chips of afternoon sunlight dappled the ground at their feet. In the branches above, an invisible bird screeched out a warning.

The Vietnamese man motioned to them to move. They had just started into the woods when an engine roared to life. Willy turned in alarm to see the truck rattle away without them. She glanced at Guy and saw in his eyes the same thought that had crossed her mind, There’s no turning back now.

“No stop. Go, go!” said the Vietnamese.

They moved on into the forest.

The man obviously knew where he was going. Without a trail to guide him, he led them through a tangle of vines and trees to an isolated hut. A tattered U.S. Army blanket hung over the doorway. Inside, straw matting covered the earthen floor and a mosquito net, filmy as lace, draped a sleeping pallet. On a low table was set a modest meal of bananas, cracked coconuts and cold tea.

“You wait here,” said the man. “Long time, maybe.”

“Who are we waiting for?” asked Guy.

The man didn’t answer; perhaps he didn’t understand the question. He turned and, like a ghost, slipped into the forest.

For a long time, Willy and Guy lingered in the doorway, waiting, listening to the whispers of the jungle. They heard only the clattering of palms in the wind, the lonely cry of a bird.

How long would they wait? Willy wondered. Hours? Days? She stared up through the dense canopy at the last sunlight sparkling on the wet leaves. It would be dark soon. “I’m hungry,” she said, and she turned back into the gloom of the hut.

Together they devoured every banana, gnawed every sliver of coconut from its husk, drank down every drop of tea. In all her life, Willy had never tasted any meal quite so splendid! At last, their stomachs full, their legs trembling with exhaustion, they crawled under the mosquito netting and, side by side, they fell asleep.

At dusk, it began to rain. It was a glorious downpour, monsoonlike in its ferocity, but it brought no relief from the heat. Willy, awake in the darkness, lay with her clothes steeped in sweat. In the shadows above, the mosquito net billowed and fell like a hovering ghost.

She clawed her way free of the netting. If she didn’t get some air, she was going to smother.

She left Guy asleep on the pallet and went to the doorway, where she gulped in breaths of rain-drenched air. The swirl of cool mist was irresistible; she stepped out into the downpour.

All around her, the jungle clattered like a thousand cymbals. She shivered in the thunderous darkness as the water streamed down her face.

“What the hell are you doing?” called a sleepy voice. She turned and saw Guy in the doorway.

She laughed. “I’m taking a shower!”

“With your clothes on?”

“It’s lovely out here! Come on, before it stops!”

He hesitated, then plunged outside after her.

“Doesn’t it feel wonderful?” she cried, throwing her arms out to welcome the raindrops. “I couldn’t take the heat any longer. God, I couldn’t even stand the smell of my own clothes.”

“You think that’s bad? Just wait till the mildew sets in.” Turning his face to the sky, he let out a satisfied growl. “Now this is the way we were meant to take a shower. The way the kids do it. When I was here during the war, I used to get a kick out of seeing ’em run around without their clothes on. Nothing cuter than all those little brown bodies dancing in the rain. No shame, no embarrassment.”

“The way it should be.”

“That’s right,” he said. Softly he added, “The way it should be.”

All at once, Willy felt him watching her. She turned and stared back. The palms clattered, and the rain beat its tattoo on the leaves. Without a word, he came toward her, stood so close to her, she could feel the heat rippling between them. Yet she didn’t move, didn’t speak. The rain streaming down her face was as warm as teardrops.

“So what are we doing with our clothes on?” he murmured.

She shook her head. “This isn’t supposed to happen.”

“Maybe it is.”

“A one-night stand-that’s all it’d be-”

“Better once than never.”

“And then you’ll be gone.”

“You don’t know that. I don’t know that.”

“I do know it. You’ll be gone…”

She started to turn away, but he pulled her back, twisted her around to face him. At the first meeting of their lips, she knew it was over, the battle lost.

Better once than never, she thought as her last shred of resistance fell away. Better to have you once and lose you than to always wonder how it might have been. Reaching up, she threw her arms around his neck and met his kiss with her own, just as hungry, just as fierce. Their bodies pressed together so tightly, their fever heat mingled through the damp clothes.

He was already fumbling for the buttons of her blouse. She trembled as the fabric slid away and rain trickled down her bare shoulders. Then the warmth of his hand closed around her breast, and she was shivering not with cold but with desire.

Together they stumbled into the darkness of the hut. They were tugging desperately at each other’s clothes now, flinging the wet garments into oblivion. When at last they faced each other with no barriers, no defenses, he pulled her face up and gently pressed his lips to hers. No kiss had ever pierced so true to her soul. The darkness swam around her; the earth gave way. She let him lower her to the pallet and felt the mosquito net whisper down around them.

Making love in the clouds, she thought as the whiteness billowed above. Then she closed her eyes and lost all sense of where she was. There was only the pounding of the rain and the magical touch of Guy’s hands, his mouth. It had been so long since a man had made love to her, so long since she’d bared herself to the pleasure. The pain. And there would be pain after it was over, after he was gone from her life. With a man like Guy, the ending was inevitable.

She ignored those whispers of warning; she had drifted beyond all reach of salvation. She pulled him down against her, and whispered, “Now. Please.”

He was already struggling against his own needs, his own urgencies. Her quiet plea slashed away his last thread of control.

“I give up,” he groaned. Seizing her hands, he pinned her arms above her head, trapping her, his willing captive, beneath him.

His hardness filled her so completely, it made her catch her breath in astonishment. But her surprise quickly melted into pleasure. She was moving against him now, and he against her, both of them driving that blessed ache to new heights of agony.

The world fell away; the night seemed to swirl with mist and magic. They brought each other to the very edge, and there they lingered, between pleasure and torment, unwilling to surrender to the inevitable. Then the jungle sounds of beating rain, of groaning trees were joined by their cries as they plummeted over the brink.

Even when she fell back to earth, she was still floating. In the darkness above, the netting billowed like parachute silk falling through the emptiness of space.

There was no need to speak; it was enough just to lie together, limbs entwined, and listen to the rhythms of the night.

Gently, Guy stroked a tangled lock of hair off her cheek. “Why did you say that?” he asked.

“Say what?”

“That I’d be gone. That I’d leave you.”

She pulled away and rolled onto her back. “Because you will.”

“Do you want me to?”

She didn’t answer. What difference would it make, after all, to bare her soul? And did he really want to hear the truth: that after tonight, she would probably do anything to keep him, to make him love her?

“Willy?”

She turned away. “Why are we talking about this?”

“Because I want to talk about it.”

“Well, I don’t.” She sat up and hugged her knees protectively against her chest. “It doesn’t do anyone any good, all this babbling about what comes next, where do we go from here. I’ve been through it before.”

“You really don’t trust men, do you?”

She laughed. “Should I?”

“Is it all because your old man walked out on you? Or was it something else? A bad love affair? What?”

“You could say all of the above.”

“I see.” There was a long silence. She shivered at the touch of his hand stroking her naked back. “Who else has left you? Besides your father?”

“Just a man I loved. Someone who said he loved me.”

“And he didn’t.”

“Oh, I suppose he did, in his way.” She shrugged. “Not a very permanent way.”

“If it’s only temporary, it’s not love.”

“Now that sounds like the title of a song.” She laughed.

“A lousy song.”

At once, she fell silent. She pressed her forehead to her knees. “You’re right. A lousy song.”

“Other people manage to get over rotten love affairs…”

“Oh, I got over it.” She raised her head and stared up at the netting. “Took only a month to fall in love with him. And over a year to watch him walk away. One thing I’ve learned is that it doesn’t fall apart in a day. Most lovers don’t just get up and walk out the door. They do it by inches, step by step, and every single one hurts. First they start out with, ‘Who needs to get married, it’s just a piece of paper.’ And then, at the end, they tell you, ‘I need more space.’ Then it’s ‘How can anyone promise forever?’ Maybe it was better the way my dad did it. No excuses. He just walked out the door.”

“There’s no such thing as a good way to leave someone.”

“You’re right.” She pushed aside the netting and swung her feet out. “That’s why I don’t let it happen to me anymore.”

“How do you avoid it?”

“I don’t give any man the chance to leave me.”

“Meaning you walk away first?”

“Men do it all the time.”

“Some men.”

Including you, she thought with a distinct twinge of bitterness. “So how did you walk away from your girlfriend, Guy? Did you leave before or after you found out she was pregnant?”

“That was an unusual situation.”

“It always is.”

“We’d broken up months before. I didn’t hear about the kid till after he was born. By then there was nothing I could do, nothing I could change. Ginny was already married to another man.”

“Oh.” She paused. “That made it simple.”

“Simple?” For the first time she heard his anger, and she longed to take back her awful words, longed to cleanse the bitterness from his voice. “You’ve got some crazy notion that men are all the same,” he said. “All of us trying to claw our way free of responsibility, never looking back at the people we’ve hurt. Let me tell you something, Willy. Having a Y chromosome doesn’t make someone a lousy human being.”

“I shouldn’t have said that,” she said, gently touching his hand. “I’m sorry.”

He lay quietly in the shadows, staring up at the ceiling. “Sam’s three years old now. I’ve seen him a grand total of twice, once on Ginny’s front porch, once on the playground at his preschool. I went over there to get a look at him, to see what kind of kid he was, whether he looked happy. I guess the teachers must’ve reported it. Not long after, Ginny called me, screaming bloody murder. Said I was messing with her marriage. Even threatened to slap me with a restraining order. I haven’t been near him since…” He paused to clear his throat. “I guess I realized I wouldn’t be doing him any favors anyways, trying to shove my way into his life. Sam already has a father-a good one, from what I hear. And it would’ve hurt everyone if I’d tried to fight it out in court. Maybe later, when he’s older, I’ll find a way to tell him. To let him know how much I wanted to be part of his life.”

And my life? she thought with sudden sadness. You won’t be part of it, either, will you?

She rose to her feet and groped around in the darkness for her scattered clothes. “Here’s a little advice, Guy,” she said over her shoulder. “Don’t ever give up on your son. Take it from a kid who’s been left behind. Daddies are a precious commodity.”

“I know.” he said softly. He paused, then said, “You’ll never get over it, will you? Your father walking out.”

She shook out her wet blouse. “There are some things a kid can’t ever forget.”

“Or forgive.”

Outside, the rain had softened to a whisper. In the thatching above, insects rustled. “Do you think I should forgive him?”

“Yes.”

“I suppose I could forgive him for hurting me. But not for hurting my mother. Not when I remember what she went through just to-” Her voice died in midsentence.

They both heard it at the same time: the footsteps slapping through the mud outside.

Guy rolled off the pallet and sprang to his feet beside her. Shoes scraped over the threshold, and the shadow of a man filled the doorway.

The intruder held up a lantern. The flood of light caught them in freeze-frame: Willy, clutching the blouse to her naked breasts; Guy, poised in a fighter’s crouch. The stranger, his face hidden in the shadow of a drab green poncho, slowly lowered the lantern and set it on the table. “I am sorry for the delay,” he said. “The road is very bad tonight.” He tossed a cloth-wrapped bundle down beside the lantern. “At ease, Mr. Barnard. If I’d wanted to kill you, you’d be dead now.” He paused and added, “Both of you.”

“Who the hell are you?” Guy asked.

Water droplets splattered onto the floor as the man shoved back the hood of his poncho. His hair was blond, almost white in the lantern light. He had pale eyes set in a moonlike face. “Dr. Gunnel Andersen,” he said, nodding by way of introduction. “Nora sent word you were coming.” Raindrops flew as he shook out the poncho and hung it up to dry. Then he sat down at the table. “Please, feel free to put on your clothes.”

“How did Nora reach you?” Guy asked, pulling on his trousers.

“We keep a shortwave radio for medical emergencies. Not all frequencies are monitored by the government.”

“Are you with the Swedish mission?”

“No, I work for the U.N.” Andersen’s impassive gaze wandered to Willy, who was self-consciously struggling into her damp clothes. “We provide medical care in the villages. Humanitarian aid. Malaria, typhoid, it’s all here. Probably always will be.” He began to unwrap the bundle he’d set on the table. “I assume you have not eaten. This isn’t much but it’s the best I could do. It’s been a bad year for crops, and protein is scarce.” Inside the bundle was a bamboo box filled with cold rice, pickled vegetables and microscopic flecks of pork congealed in gravy.

Guy at once sat down. “After bananas and coconuts, this looks like a feast to me.”

Dr. Andersen glanced at Willy, who was still lingering in the corner, watching suspiciously. “Are you not hungry, Miss Maitland?”

“I’m starved.”

“Then why don’t you eat?”

“First I want to know who you are.”

“I have told you my name.”

“Your name doesn’t mean a thing to me. What’s your connection to Nora? To my father?”

Dr. Andersen’s eyes were as transparent as water. “You’ve waited twenty years for an answer. You can surely wait a few minutes longer.”

Guy said, “Willy, you need to eat. Come, sit down.”

Hunger finally pulled her to the table. Dr. Andersen had brought no utensils. Willy and Guy used their fingers to scoop up the rice. All the time she was eating, she felt the Swede’s eyes watching her.

“I see you do not trust me,” he said.

“I don’t trust anyone anymore.”

He nodded and smiled. “Then you have learned, in a few shorts days, what took me months to learn.”

“Mistrust?”

“Doubt. Fear.” He looked around the hut, at the shadows dancing on the walls. “What I call the creeping uneasiness. A sense that things are not right in this place. That, just under the surface, lies some…secret, something…terrible.”

The lantern light flickered, almost died. He glanced up as the rain pounded the roof. A puff of wind swept through the doorway, dank with the smells of the jungle.

“You sense it, too,” he said.

“All I know is, there’ve been too many coincidences,” said Guy. “Too many tidy little acts of fate. As though paths have been laid out for us and we’re just following the trail.”

Andersen nodded. “We all have roads laid out for us. We usually choose the path of least resistance. It’s when we wander off that path that things become dangerous.” He smiled. “You know, at this very minute, I could be sitting in my house in Stockholm, sipping coffee, growing fat on cakes and cookies. But I chose to stay here.”

“And has life become dangerous?” asked Willy.

“It’s not my life I worry about now. It was a risk bringing you here. But Nora felt the time was right.”

“Then it was her decision?”

He nodded. “She thought it might be your last chance for a reunion.”

Willy froze, staring at him. “Did you-did you say reunion?”

Dr. Andersen met her gaze. Slowly, he nodded.

She tried to speak but found her voice was gone. The significance of that one word reduced her to numb silence.

Her father was alive.

It was Guy who finally spoke. “Where is he?”

“A village northwest of here.”

“A prisoner?”

“No, no. A guest. A friend.”

“He’s not being held against his will?”

“Not since the war.” Andersen looked at Willy, who had not yet found her voice. “It may be hard for you to accept, Miss Maitland, but there are Americans who find happiness in this country.”

She looked at him in bewilderment. “I don’t understand. All these years he’s been alive…he could have come home…”

“Many men didn’t return.”

“He had the choice!”

“He also had his reasons.”

“Reasons? He had every reason to come home!”

Her anguished cry seemed to hang in the room. For a moment neither man spoke. Then Andersen rose to his feet. “Your father must speak for himself…” he said, and he started for the door.

“Then why isn’t he here?”

“There are arrangements to be made. A time, a place-”

“When will I see him?”

The doctor hesitated. “That depends.”

“On what?”

He looked back from the doorway. “On whether your father wants to see you.”

LONG AFTER ANDERSEN HAD left, Willy stood in the doorway, staring out at the curtain of rain.

“Why wouldn’t he want to see me?” she cried into the darkness.

Quietly Guy came to stand behind her. His arms came around her shoulders, pulled her into the tight circle of his embrace.

“Why wouldn’t he?”

“Willy, stop.”

She turned and pressed her face into his chest. “Do you think it was so terrible?” she sobbed. “Being my father?”

“Of course not.”

“It must have been. I must have made him miserable.”

“You were just a kid, Willy! You can’t blame yourself! Sometimes men…change. Sometimes they need-”

“Why?” she cried.

“Hey, not all men walk out. Some of us, we hang around, for better or for worse.”

Gently, he led her back to the sleeping pallet. Beneath the silvery mosquito net, she let him hold her, an embrace not of passion, but of comfort. The arms of a friend. It felt right, the way their making love earlier that evening had felt right. But she couldn’t help wondering, even as she lay in his arms, when this, too, would change, when he would change.

It hurt beyond all measure, the thought that he, too, would someday leave her, that this was but a momentary mingling of limbs and warmth and souls. It was hurt she expected, but one she’d never, ever be ready for.

Outside, the leaves clattered in the downpour.

It rained all night.

AT DAWN THE JEEP APPEARED.

“I take only the woman,” insisted the Vietnamese driver, planting himself in Guy’s path. The man gestured toward the hut. “You stay, GI.”

“She’s not going without me,” said Guy.

“They tell me only the woman.”

“Then she’s not going.”

The two men faced each other, challenge mirrored in their eyes. The driver shrugged and turned for the jeep. “Then I don’t take anybody.”

“Guy, please,” said Willy. “Just wait here for me. I’ll be okay.”

“I don’t like it.”

She glanced at the driver, who’d already climbed behind the wheel and started the engine. “I don’t have a choice,” she said, and she stepped into the jeep.

The driver released the brake and spun the jeep around. As they rolled away, Willy glanced back and saw Guy standing alone among the trees. She thought he called out something-her name, perhaps-but then the jungle swallowed him from view.

She turned her attention to the road-or what served as a road. In truth, it was scarcely more than a muddy track through the forest. Branches slashed the windshield; water flew from the leaves and splattered their faces.

“How far is it?” she asked. The driver didn’t answer. “Where are we going?” she asked. Again, no answer. She sat back and waited to see what would happen next.

A few miles into the forest the mud track petered out, and they halted before a solid wall of jungle. The driver cut the engine. A few rays of sunlight shone dimly through the canopy of leaves. Only the cry of a single bird sliced through the silence.

The driver climbed out and walked around to the rear. Willy watched as he rooted around under a camouflage tarp covering the back seat. Then she saw the blade slide out from beneath the tarp. He was holding a machete.

He turned to face her. For a few heartbeats they stared at each other, gazes meeting over the gleam of razor-sharp steel. Then she saw amusement flash in his eyes.

“We walk now,” he said.

A nod was the only reply she could manage. Wordlessly, she climbed out of the jeep and followed him into the jungle.

He moved silently through the trees, the only sound of his passage the whistle and slash of the machete. Vines hung like shrouds from the branches; clouds of mosquitoes swarmed up from stagnant puddles. He moved onward without a second’s pause, melting like a phantom through the brush. Willy, stumbling in the tangle of trees, barely managed to keep the back of his tattered shirt in view.

It didn’t take long for her to give up slapping mosquitoes. She decided it was a lost cause. Let them suck her dry; her blood was up for grabs. She could only concentrate on moving forward, on putting one foot in front of the other. She was sliding through some timeless vacuum where distance was measured by the gaps between trees, the span between footsteps.

By the time they finally halted, she was staggering from exhaustion. Conquered, she sagged against the nearest tree and waited for his next command.

“Here,” he said.

Bewildered, she looked up at him. “But what are you-”

To her astonishment, he turned and trotted off into the jungle.

“Wait!” she cried. “You’re not going to leave me here!”

The man kept moving.

“Please, you have to tell me!” she screamed. He paused and glanced back. “Where am I? What is this place?”

“The same place we find him,” was the reply. Then he slipped away, vanishing into the forest.

She whirled around, scanning the jungle, watching, waiting for some savior to appear. She saw no one. The man’s last words echoed in her head.

What is this place?

The same place we find him.

“Who?” she cried.

In desperation, she stared up at the branches crisscrossing the sky. That’s when she saw it, the monstrous silhouette rising like a shark’s fin among the trees.

It was the tail of a plane.