Little Saigon

Chapter 19

Through the screen door, Frye could see his brother sitting on the couch. The room was dark, but a soft light played off Bennett’s face. There was a tall glass in his hand and a bottle of gin on the table in front of him. A movie screen was set up in front of the TV. A carousel projector sat beside the gin bottle. Bennett looked up, his eyes all wrong. “It’s late. Even Michelsen and Toibin are asleep.”

Frye stepped in. “Need to use your shower.”

“What happened to you?”

Crawley appeared from the kitchen.

“I found out where they first took Li. Where Eddie went. There’s a tunnel under the Dream Reader’s.”

“Jesus!”

Frye plodded to the bathroom, stripped and showered, put on some clothes that Donnell brought in. He looked at himself in the mirror. He had never looked so pale and drained in all his life. Li. Xuan. Eddie. Duc and the third gunman. The smell of death was so strong on him he got back in and showered again. He stopped when the hot water ran out.

There was a glass of ice waiting when he came back to the living room. He poured on the gin, sipped, and sat back. He told them about footprints on his floor, the mud on Li’s clothes, her song about the tunnel, his realization that she had been taken underground first. He told them of the trip down, every stink and horror still fresh in his mind. He told them he’d promised Minh to say nothing.

“Didn’t you call Wiggins?”

“I thought Minh would handle it better. He’ll tell the FBI soon enough, earn the points.”

“Me and Donnell spent the whole night at the plaza, asking people if they’d seen any new faces in town. If one gunman was an outsider, maybe more out-of-town people are involved.”

“Luck?”

“Zip. We’ll try again in the morning.”

Frye looked at the movie screen.

“I’ve been looking at some old stuff, Chuck. Absence doesn’t make the heart fonder, it just fucks it up.” Bennett drank from his gin. He looked at Frye a long while, then down. “I think about her every minute. Her face gets blurred and turns into something else. I’m trying to get a grip on it again, little brother. Pictures of me and Li. Want to see?”

Bennett had never once in twenty years showed him a candid picture from his seventeen months of war. A story here and there, a snippet, a recollection. A lot of nothing, Frye thought. Bennett slurped down more gin. He picked up the control. The projector fan eased on, and a slide rotated into place: Li and him standing outside a nightclub. She was dressed simply in a Western-style skirt and blouse. Bennett was in his dress uniform. It was night, and the club lights down the avenue were dense and bright. Bennett was smiling, his arm wrapped around her. “Saigon, March ‘seventy. I’d been in-country for seven months. I’d known Li for four.”

“You look happy.”

“Weirdest thing in the world, Chuck, to be happy in a war. Here’s some earlier shots.”

He flipped back. Shots of the 25th Infantry Headquarters at Dong Zu — ”Tropic Lightning,” said Bennett — a sprawling complex of one-story buildings and quonsets. A swimming pool. A golf course. Jeeps and grunts everywhere. Pictures of Benny and Crawley playing basketball.

Bennett stopped at a picture of a plain quonset surrounded by DO NOT ENTER signs. A guard stood out front. “Interrogation Central,” he said. “We called it Spook City. Between the CIA guys, the PSYOPS flakes and the civilian ‘reps’ who came and went, it was one weird fuckin’ place. There were cages inside, and rooms with a foot and a half of soundproofing on the walls so the screams wouldn’t get out.” Bennett’s head wobbled a little as he stared at the screen.

“What did you do there?”

“That’s where prisoners went before we shipped them south. That’s where I worked sometimes. Hell, that’s boring. Look, here’s Li. First one of her I ever took.”

The picture showed Kieu Li sitting on a stone bench in a courtyard. Frye noted the plantation mansion, lost to vines, in the background. Li had a worried look on her face, not sure how to react. Then a shot of her and Donnell. Then of her and a young Vietnamese man dressed in U.S. Army fatigues. He looked at the camera with a quiet arrogance.

“Huong Lam,” said Bennett. “The man you asked about.”

“Looks like a kid.”

“Seventeen. Same as Li.”

The next picture was of the three of them standing outside the cottage. They had their arms around each other. The jungle had practically choked the old colonial building. Frye could see a guitar propped against the wall.

Then a close-up of Li. Frye quickly saw the same things in her that Bennett must have: a simple beauty and dignity, a composure born of acceptance, a natural gentleness that emanated from her. He could see her strength, too, inseparable from her as water from a river or heat from fire. It’s what she needed to get through — he thought — the psychic national currency. Spend what you need to survive, and save what you can. Li, at least, had enough of it.

“She tell about that place in her story to Smith?”

Frye nodded, transfixed by Li’s face. “Sort of.”

“Beautiful little place. Not so big as the Michelin Plantation or the Fil Hol. Right in the middle of Three Corps Tac Zone, which was squat in the middle of the Viet Cong. Fuckin’ COSVN was less than a hundred miles northwest. It sat out in the middle of that jungle like a temple or something. Got run down after the French were kicked out, used for a bunch of different things. I used it to debrief Li. Was close enough for us all to get to, remote enough so we wouldn’t get seen and shot at.”

Frye looked at the slouching wall, clenched by vines. The fountain was in the foreground. Then a shot of Huong Lam, Bennett, and another Vietnamese man. Bennett had a bottle of champagne in his hand. Around Lam’s neck was the silver wave necklace that Frye had made for his brother.

Bennett drank down half a glass of gin. “The other Vietnamese guy we called Tony. He was Lam’s liaison. Never could get rid of him when there was a camera around. That necklace meant a lot to Lam, because he knew it meant a lot to me. What’d you make that thing out of, Chuck?”

“A quarter.”

“Nice work. Must have taken forever to file out that little wave.”

“Washington’s head is the top of the curl.”

“On patrol, Lam wrapped it in tape, so it wouldn’t jingle against his crucifix. He was a... weird guy. He was, like, half civilized and half savage. I never saw anybody fight with such a vengeance as him. You couldn’t tire him out. He’d take chances you wouldn’t believe. If we found tunnels, he’d go down. Most of the Vietnamese, they were too scared of those things. Not even Tony would go down there. We found a new hole one time, outside An Cat, hidden under a bunch of brush. Li’s intelligence told us where it was. We stood around for a minute while Lam got ready. He stripped down to just shirt and pants, took a knife in his teeth, a flashlight in his left hand and a nine-millimeter Smith in his right, and went in. We had tons of tunnel gadgets sent to us. Special shot-pistols, and headlamps like miners wear, radio transmitters that would strap to your back with the mike taped to your neck so your hands would be free. Lam never used that shit. All he had was a silencer for the pistol, because down there, a pistol shot could just about deafen you. He wouldn’t take a radio because things were too intense to be talking back with us. He wouldn’t smoke or drink or chew gum when he knew he was going down, because you really need your nose. Lam told me he could smell the Cong down there in the dark. Actually smell them. And he said he could feel them too, like sonar or something — he could feel their eyelids opening and closing, their muscles getting ready to move, their thoughts echoing off the tunnel walls.”

Frye could feel it himself, the solid darkness closing around him like fingers of a huge fist, squeezing his fear together, compacting his terror like a press.

Bennett drank again. “Thirty seconds later we heard three muffled shots. That meant he’d found another trap door. He’d always fire off three quick rounds through it before he went in. Then, two more of his shots, and one of theirs, way louder. Contact. After he got deep enough, we couldn’t hear much of anything. We’d just wait and hope he’d show again.”

Bennett stared at the picture of Lam. “He always would. They’d booby-trap those tunnels like crazy. They’d use snakes and spiders, spears and stakes, one-shot traps that would take your face off. They’d set crossbows in the walls and a trip wire in front you couldn’t see. They’d use fucking Coke cans to make grenades and fill them with rocks and broken glass. You set off one of those in a little tunnel and you were meat. One time he found three rats tied to a stake, and a vial and syringe not far away. He brought one of the animals out and we tested it — bubonic plague. The fucking VC version of germ warfare. Or they’d build a false wall and wait behind it. You got close enough, they’d whack you out with a fucking spear. They’d hide a claymore near the entrance ‘cause they knew when someone went down, a bunch of us would stand around and listen and watch. When the tunnel rat went in, the Cong would detonate the mine from inside and blow off the people above ground. But Lam, he was hip to all that shit. He knew. Sure enough, he came out all bloody and grimy. He’d found three VC and wasted them all. Lam didn’t say much more until later. He was too scared to talk. But when we got back and his nerves settled, he told me what went down. Turned out that time that there were four VC — all women. He’d taken out three and just couldn’t waste the last one. She was backed against a wall, not even bothering to hide anymore because she didn’t have a weapon and she knew he was gonna kill her. Lam just turned away and let her be. That’s what I mean about him being half civilized, too. He’d be unbelievably cruel, then do something like that. Lam had his own channel. Hell, we talked about everything. Looking back, I know I told him some shit I shouldn’t have. And he used it against us later.”

Bennett drank again and considered the picture. “He fooled us all, right up to the end.”

Another shot of the plantation, this one apparently taken by Houng Lam. Bennett and Crawley hugged Li, while a grinning Tony edged into the far side of the frame. The next picture was of Bennett and Li, crammed into a booth in a bar. Crawley sat beside her and three other soldiers were pressing into the shot, all drunken smiles. Frye noted a familiar face, far right.

“The Pink Night Club at the Catinat, Chuck. Helluva place. Li got a few gigs there. I got her an apartment on Tu Do Street in Saigon just a few weeks before I got blown up. Look at this one! That’s Li and Elvis Phuong. Great singer, that fuckin’ Elvis. He sings at the Wind sometimes. Li did a set with him and the band and Elvis backed her up. I thought she’d come unglued she was so nervous. Everybody loved her. She had that something about her. Now check this! There she is on stage.”

Li stood, mike in hand. Frye could see the muscles in her neck straining beneath the pure white skin. She had on a black miniskirt and a pair of matching boots.

“Nice, Benny. Burke Parsons, on the right?”

Bennett nodded and drank again, shaking his head. “Burke was CIA, so our paths crossed and we hung out some. He came and went. That was the spooks.”

The next picture sent a chill of sadness through him. Bennett was leading Li to a dance floor, her hand in his, her face beaming up at him, his trousers pressed tight around his good strong legs.

Bennett stared at the picture a moment. “They still itch and ache sometimes,” he said. “And my fucking knee gets sore. Remember the knee?”

“Football.”

“Back then, I thought torn ligaments were a bummer” — more gin — ”But I never complained, Chuck. And I’m not gonna start now.”

“Maybe it would do some good.”

“Fuck complaints, little brother. Fuck you and fuck me. Now here, this is the kitchen of our place on Tu Do.”

Frye’s heart sank as he looked at the screen. Li was sitting at a table with a cup of something raised to her lips, caught unaware, a look of surprise on her face. The apartment looked small and almost empty, washed in a rounded, yellow, distinctly eastern light. There was a vase with no flowers in it on the table in front of her. Frye felt an overwhelming sense of solitude in the shot — the solitude of a girl without her family, of a soldier far away from his, of a small room in a big city soon to fall. Two solitudes, really, vast and hemispheric as two halves of the earth, coming together for reasons more desperate than either of them could have known.

“Nice apartment,” said Bennett. Frye watched him wipe his eyes with a fist. “Really nice little place to be. Cost me a fortune, but Pop sent money by the pound. You should have seen her, Chuck. Sitting on the bench at the plantation with a fucking guitar. She was just a girl. It was her innocence, how simply she accepted things. Innocence isn’t right — more like faith. Yeah, faith, that was what she had.”

Bennett drew carefully on the bottle. His eyes never left the screen. When he started talking again, it was to the picture. “Yeah, you should have seen her. She was everything I thought we were fighting for. She was young and beautiful as a girl could be. She’d sing all the fuckin’ time and that voice was like heroin inside my veins. It made me feel warm and good inside. She had one of those faces that seem to have a light on behind it. Even when there wasn’t any sun and it rained a week straight, she had a glow. It was unreal, but the things I felt coming alive in me when I talked to her, they were brand-new. It was like she was a perfect animal. A perfect human female animal, right there in front of me. Everything I thought that animal should be. We connected. She picked up English fast.”

Bennett dropped the carousel controller and hooked his thumbs together, flapping his hands like wings. “She’d do like that when she saw me. Frye always came out ‘Flye,’ like a bird. I told her we could fly away from that war together someday. We did. We tried to.”

“I see what you loved in her, Benny.”

“No,” Bennett said quietly. “You don’t. She was Vietnam. Her parents came south in ‘fifty-four because they were strong Catholics. Mom died of fever; they killed her father because he wouldn’t shelter the Cong. You know what she wanted? She wanted to study music.” Bennett examined his gin, tilted back the bottle and drank. “So there she was, like the rest of the goddamned country, trying to be left alone while the Viet Cong terrified them at night and we ran the place during the day. She’s why I’m here, I thought. These are the people we came here for. We’re here to give them half a chance at running their own lives someday.

Frye watched his brother lean back and stare for a long while at the ceiling.

“You tried.”

Bennett reached clumsily under the couch cushion and brought out a .45. He almost tipped over, then righted himself and studied the barrel of the gun. “See this? I’m not afraid of this.”

“Put it down. You’re drunk.”

Bennett clicked off the safety and looked down the barrel again.

“I got soaked in Agent Orange, Chuck, and I don’t have cancer. I saw worse shit than you can dream up and I’ve never had a flashback I couldn’t handle. I had enough pain for a whole city, but I don’t shoot, pop, or snort. I drink because I always drank. I don’t even collect the disability I got coming. You know why? Because I’m one tough stand-up motherfucker, and they can keep their dollars and send ’em to someone who needs it.”

“Come on, Benny. Put it down.”

Bennett gazed through Frye. “I got my legs blown off, that’s all. But Chuck, I gotta tell you right now, if they kill her, I’m gonna blow my brains out too. That’s no complaint, that’s just what is. Without her, I’m a bunch of pieces left all over the globe. With her, I can still see why it happened and why it was worth it.”

Bennett clicked back the hammer, hooked his thumb against the trigger and rested the gun in his lap, barrel pointing at his chin. “What more can I do, Chuck? What more? I keep looking, and she doesn’t come home.”

Frye reached out his hand. “Come on, brother,” he said softly. “We’re gonna get her. She’s okay. It’s going to come out all right, Benny. I promise. Then it’ll be just like old times. We’ll eat on the island on Thursdays and argue with Pop, and Mom’ll be happy and Li can write some more songs on the Martin. Maybe you can meet this new girl — Cristobel — she’s really good, Benny. The four of us could do something. Maybe we could get the family like it was in the old days. We’ll be tight again. Come on, Benny. Debbie’s gone. Don’t you go too. That wouldn’t be fair.”

Frye reached out and touched his brother’s hand. Slowly, he eased Bennett’s thumb from the trigger guard, then brought the gun away. Bennett tipped over, burped, tried to sit back up and tipped over again. “What am I supposed to do?”

Frye and Donnell worked his clothes off and got him to the shower. Bennett slumped in the corner and stared out, a defeated soldier, while the warm water ran down him.