The Fear Artist

22

The room is a faded green not found in nature, pale and spectral in the overhead fluorescents. All the way around the room, about three feet from the floor, are tiny, grimy handprints, hundreds of them, as though left by an army of invisible children. They seem to jump and twitch in the lights’ flicker.

Sitting on a pillow, Rafferty can’t keep his eyes off the handprints. He keeps asking himself where the children are.

The sobs have subsided to irregular gasps and sniffles. The two women lean against each other, a limp pantomime of grief. The older one has collapsed against the younger, her arm thrown heavily over the other woman’s shoulders. And yet it seems to Rafferty that the older, with her terrible, devastated eyes, is the one who is recovering more quickly. In the last half minute or so, her hand has grasped the loose fabric of her pajama-style trousers and formed a fist around the cloth. Ming Li sits on the floor in front of them, face submissively down, her little MacBook Air closed to hide the screen shot of the newspaper from Cheyenne. She keeps her eyes on the floor, giving the women the invisibility they need to recover themselves.

The older woman coughs, so suddenly and loudly that the younger one flinches. She says, without lifting her head toward Rafferty, “How you find us?”

“My sister,” Rafferty says with a nod at Ming Li. “She followed you when you left the shop.”

Ming Li says to the older woman, very formally, “I am sorry.”

“No matter,” the woman says. “Name you, child?”

“Ming Li. This is my older brother, Poke.”

“We’re both sorry,” Poke says. “Sorry to bring you terrible news.”

“Twice,” says the older woman. She sniffles percussively. “My name is Thuy. This girl is my daughter, Jiang.”

Jiang, who is in her forties, shakes her head in the negative, although it’s hard to tell what she’s objecting to.

Rafferty says, “What was Helen’s name?”

“Bey,” Thuy says. “Means ‘baby.’ ” She coughs again and says, “Baby sister for me.”

“The man who was killed,” Rafferty says, “gave me-”

“Billie Joe,” Thuy says. “Billie Joe Sellers.”

“Well … um, Billie ran into me-”

“Billie Joe,” Thuy says.

“The last thing Billie Joe did was stick that ticket in my pocket.” Rafferty tugs at the edge of his pocket. “It was very, very hard for him to do that. He didn’t have any strength left. But he did it because he wanted me to have that ticket.”

“Stop,” says the younger one, Jiang. She releases a sharp barrage of Vietnamese, and when she stops, Rafferty tells the rest of the story.

When he’s finished, Thuy puts her hand across her mouth, as though trying to hold something in. Her shoulders shake several times, and she sniffs twice.

“That night cops came to my apartment and dragged me down to an interrogation room. I saw a man there, an American.”

Thuy could be made from stone, but Jiang’s eyes widen. She glances away quickly and translates.

“I’m going to tell you what he looked like,” Rafferty says. “He was short and-”

Thuy says, in English, “Red.”

The rain hid them when they came.

The monsoon had hit with fury that year, rain so thick, so dense that people disappeared into the gray, two or three meters away. The rains dragged an unusual cold front behind them, and for people whose skin was always wet, the cold seemed to reach straight through and scrape at the center of their bones.

All the huts leaked. It was a season of dripping water. The rice was rotting, and green mold grew on clothes that were folded and stacked. The paddies had overflowed the dikes so that water ran ankle-deep through the mud street of the village.

They sat in the huts day and night and shouted at each other over the rain. The hut that Thuy and Jiang shared with Bey had a corrugated tin roof the rain struck like hammers. The hut had belonged to Thuy’s husband, but he’d gone to fight against the Saigon government and the Americans, and he’d been killed in an ambush only thirty kilometers away. He’d been nineteen when he died, and she’d been seventeen. She’d been carrying the child who her mother, who was never wrong about a baby’s sex, had assured her would be a girl. Bey and Thuy’s mother was dead now, but Thuy had her daughter, whom she named Jiang.

Now only women, children, and old men lived there. But some of the village’s men-and women, too-had fought and been captured and had been made to talk before they died. In Saigon’s eyes the place was a nest of traitors, and in the end they paid for that.

It was very late. The village was asleep, and the rain had driven even the dogs inside, so there was no warning when seven heavily armed men came up the path: three Americans and four Vietnamese troopers. The Vietnamese were scum, tattooed and drug-raddled, released from the worst of the city’s prisons to earn their freedom by killing the men and women who were trying to reclaim Vietnam for the Vietnamese. It took the team only a few minutes to kick in the village’s doors and drag the terrified people out of their houses and into the downpour, making them squat in a dark field of mud at the edge of town.

There they waited for hours as the rain pounded down, all sixteen of them: eight grown women, six children, and two very old men-one of whom was crippled-cold and shaking. Their muscles cramped as two of the uniformed Vietnamese troopers systematically found and shot every dog in the village and tore most of the huts apart, looking for arms.

The leader of the group was an American, short even by Vietnamese standards, with hair the color of fire. He paced in front of the soaking, terrified villagers, shouting and cursing at them as one of the Vietnamese troopers tried halfheartedly to translate. It would have been clear even to someone who spoke neither Vietnamese nor English that the translator was putting no effort into his task, but the red man never slowed the flow of words. A demon controlled him, pushing him from one fury to another: He screamed at the villagers when he learned there were no young men there, he slapped the ear of one of the Vietnamese troopers for accidentally getting in his way, he raged at the skies and the trees. When a buffalo emerged curiously from the rain, he shot it for no reason at all.

Where were the men? he wanted to know. Where were the men? The more he raged, the more his rage grew. He grabbed a sopping, sobbing child of five by the arm and hoisted her in the air, demanding to know who the mother was. The dangling child was Thuy’s daughter, Jiang.

Thuy instinctively began to stand, but Bey pulled her down and rose instead. For years afterward Thuy was ashamed that she’d let her sister face the beast.

The red man, still holding Jiang in midair, called Bey to him like a dog, pointing at her and then at a spot in front of his feet. He made her kneel there and demanded to know where her husband was and where the weapons were hidden, and when she couldn’t give him the answers he wanted, he pulled a short, ugly gun and aimed it at Jiang as she twisted and kicked in his grip. When Bey said again that her husband was dead and there were no weapons there, the red man swung the back of the hand with the gun in it at her jaw and hit her, and she’d gone down on her side with a splash, and he’d thrown Jiang at her.

And then, as Thuy watched Bey creep back to the circle of squatting villagers, trying to quiet the sobbing Jiang, the morning sky began to lighten and three young men-boys, really-blundered down the path and into the village, having heard nothing over the rain’s roar. They were just children, boys of twelve and fourteen from the next village, but they tried to scatter when they saw the soldiers. The red man shouted at his Vietnamese troopers, and within moments the boys had been brought back, their hands tied.

The red man stood them about a meter apart near the tree line, and one of the Vietnamese troopers pulled an automatic pistol and pointed it at the forehead of the boy on the left. The trooper was only a few paces from the boy, and he held the gun steady, obviously waiting for instructions. But the red man turned his back on the trooper and the boys and left them standing there, motionless, to walk toward the field where the villagers squatted or knelt.

He walked among them, zigzagging between them, the only person standing. Most people kept their faces down, not wanting to attract the demon’s attention. From time to time, the red man would pull someone to her feet and ask questions, but he was never satisfied with the answers, and he ordered each of them down again. After a few minutes of this, he stood still, looking at the ground, and then he cleared his throat to spit, just missing one of the village’s oldest women. He raised a hand and pointed it at one of the other Americans and then pointed to the nearest hut-one they had left standing-and the American picked up his pack and went to the hut. The first thing he removed from his pack was a spool of thick cord. Barely visible through the curtains of rain, he began to circle the hut, paying out the cord and looping it through the bamboo uprights on the walls.

Rafferty says, “Did you hear his name? The man with the cord?”

Thuy says, “Eddie. Red man call him Eddie.”

At the name Eddie, Ming Li’s eyes swing to his, but she says nothing. She wraps her arms around her upraised knees and turns back to Thuy. In this room she’s the obedient child.

Rafferty says, “Sorry to interrupt.” He has never been less sorry to interrupt any story in his life.

Thuy had been looking at the red man through a haze of terror, without seeing him clearly. Now, as he passed her on his way toward the trembling boys, she saw the things that were hanging around his neck, thick and meaty as a string of sliced dried fruit. And she smelled the odor of death they trailed.

He turned his head and glanced back at her as though her thought had touched him, but he kept moving until he reached the boys. He stepped up to each of them in turn-their eyes following him the way they’d have followed the movements of a cobra-and lifted the thick, black hair from the sides of their heads. When he’d done it to all three, he waved two of the Vietnamese troopers over and had them hold up the boy in the center, and then he drew a short knife and sliced off the boy’s left ear, as easily as Thuy might slice crackling from a roast pig. The boy let out a wail, his knees folded beneath him, and he went down. The troopers picked him up, one by the shoulders and one by the feet, and held him so that his head was lower than his feet, as a ribbon of blood ran from the place where his ear had been, mingling with the rain as it fell. When he came to, shrieking and wailing, and they put him down, the boy couldn’t stand. He was crying like a small child. One of the troopers pushed him to his knees, between the two standing boys, whose faces had gone blank, motionless.

Thuy knew they were waiting to die.

The red man put the ear in the pocket of his shirt. The pocket was already mottled with the rust brown of old blood. He wiped the knife on his pants and put it away. He didn’t have to look down in order to slip it into its sheath.

The third American had stayed apart from the red man and the others, keeping an eye on the villagers. His eyes came again and again to meet Bey’s eyes, and then Thuy’s. He’d looked away when Red cut the boy’s ear off. Thuy thought she saw disgust in his face.

The red man stepped up to the boy on the left. He held his left hand in the air, like someone who is about to signal a group of men to move forward. The boy looked at the center of Red’s chest, unwilling or unable to meet his eyes. Red shouted, in accented Vietnamese, “What’s the name of your village?”

The boy hesitated, and Red said, very loudly, “Too slow,” stepped to the left, and lowered the upraised hand. The trooper shot the boy through the forehead, the bullet pulverizing the back of the boy’s head and lifting him off his feet, throwing him backward. By the time he landed, the red man was in front of the second boy, the kneeling boy.

He said to the boy, “Did you see that?”

Thuy could see the boy say “Yes,” although she couldn’t hear his voice. He was swaying on his knees, forward and back, and he’d clasped his bound hands at chest level, fingers interlaced in a position of prayer. The shoulder beneath the remains of the sliced ear was pink with blood, diluted by rain.

Red said, loudly, “Good. Fast answer. What’s the name of your village?”

The boy shouted the village’s name, his voice breaking at the top of his range.

“Quick,” Red said. “Who’s the highest-ranking cadre in the village?”

The boy opened his mouth, and Red, without waiting, dropped his hand, and the trooper fired. The boy fell flat on his back. His knees, which had been folded beneath him, came up for an instant and then sagged sideways. Thuy found herself staring at the soles of his sandals, so worn down that she could see his pale heels peeking around them. Then the rain began to fall more heavily, and she couldn’t see him so clearly.

The third boy was screaming names as fast as he could, incriminating everyone he could think of. Red slapped him, and he stopped as quickly as if he’d been shot, too, his eyes closed and his mouth still open. Red said to him, in Vietnamese, “Wait.”

He turned to the third American and shouted, “Sellers! Move them into the hut.” He waved one of the Vietnamese troopers toward the man named Sellers, and the trooper walked around the squatting villagers, swinging the barrel of his automatic rifle from side to side as people cringed away. Then Red and two of the troopers took the boy who was still alive into the trees, and Thuy could hear the shouted questions.

Their departure left the American who was wiring the hut-Eddie-and the trooper he’d called to assist him, plus the man named Sellers and the fourth Vietnamese trooper, who was shouting for everyone to get up.

The man named Sellers put up a hand, and the shouting trooper went silent. Sellers stood there, glanced again at Bey, and then kept his eyes on the hut until the man who’d been laying the cord backed out of the door. The man with the cord said something in English, and Sellers nodded at the trooper, and the trooper began to shout orders again. The man who’d been laying wire backed off, trailing some other kind of cord toward the trees. The trooper who’d been working with him came out of the hut and followed him, stepping carefully over the cord that had been laid down.

Sellers made scooping motions with his hand, meaning Get up, and the villagers did. Their faces, as far as Thuy could see, were empty. They’d seen what had happened to the boys, and they knew these were their last moments. Two women went to the old men and helped them up, one staying beside the crippled man so he could use her as a crutch. Three other women brought the children together into a silent group. Somebody began to weep, and then there were three or four of them, and someone else-a bossy woman named Ngoang, whom Thuy had never liked-called, but not unkindly, for them to be quiet and to remember that the children could hear them. The sobbing stopped, and slowly the group was herded toward the hut.

Thuy felt a touch on her shoulder and was startled to see Sellers right behind her. He glanced at Bey and said very quietly, in barely understandable Vietnamese, “Your sister? Her child or yours?”

Thuy said, “Mine.”

Sellers said, “Fine.” He looked over at the trooper, who was shouting at the women shepherding the children, telling them to hurry up. Then he said, again quietly, “Nod if you understand. You and your sister and the baby. Stay near the door. Right at the door. Do you understand?”

“Yes.”

“When you see me, you come fast. Understand?”

“Come …?”

“To me. Fast, as fast as you can. Tell your sister. She should be holding the child.”

He was getting the tones wrong, muddling the words, and Thuy said, “What?”

“Sister hold child,” he said, his eyes flicking back and forth over the group. “Stay by door.” The trooper was holding open the door of the hut, motioning people inside.

“Go on,” Sellers said to the women who were nearest them and grabbing the back of Thuy’s blouse to slow her. “Let them go,” he said softly. Bey lagged, holding Jiang’s hand, looking at them questioningly. Then Sellers released Thuy and brought up the rear as the villagers crowded in. One woman turned to try to break for freedom, but Sellers shouted and fired a shot over her head, and she wailed in terror and got back into the group.

That cry was a signal: Suddenly everyone was weeping and calling out, and Sellers and the trooper were motioning the remaining people in, sometimes grabbing and shoving them. The rain was hammering down now, and as Thuy and Bey and Jiang were pushed into the hut-the last villagers in-they smelled wet cloth, sweat, and shit; someone, or several someones, had fouled themselves. The door was swung closed on them, the hut so full that the door hit Thuy on the back, and something was thrown across it or against it to keep it closed.

The woman Thuy had never liked began to pray. Others joined in, some praying to the god of the Catholics and the others begging Buddha for mercy and courage.

Outside, Sellers shouted, “Okay. Give us fifteen seconds to secure and get clear.”

Then the force of the rain tripled, and all the water that heaven held seemed to pour itself over the hut. Thuy tried to push at the door, but it was jammed from outside, and then, over the roar of the rain, Thuy heard a sharp sound and something heavy falling, and a moment later the door was yanked open and Sellers was standing there, the Vietnamese trooper slung over his shoulder like a bag of seed.

He grabbed Bey and yanked her to him, and Thuy picked up Jiang and followed, and as the villagers surged forward, Sellers threw the dead trooper at them and stepped back, but two children came flying through the air, literally thrown at him, and he stepped aside to let them pass and slammed the door, and Thuy and Bey grabbed the children and watched openmouthed as he propped a pole against it.

“You can’t-” she began, but he snatched up Jiang and another child, Jiang over his shoulder and the other child under his arm, grabbed Bey’s hand, and said, “Run,” and they were charging through the rain toward the tree line, Thuy hauling the second thrown child behind her, all of them going in the opposite direction the red man and the others had taken. The rain was so heavy they couldn’t see six feet in front of them. From that direction there came a single shot, probably the third boy going down, and just then they reached the tree line. Sellers put Jiang down and opened his mouth to say something.

But the hut blew, an eruption of orange flame and a bottomless whump, so loud that Thuy thought the wave of it might knock her over. When the sound had died, Sellers was thrusting the children at them and waving them away, saying, “Run, run, run,” and then things began to land around them, crashing through the leaves of the trees, and Thuy saw they were flaming lengths of wood and palm fronds and pieces of people, badly burned and barely recognizable, and she picked up her child and pushed the others ahead of her and followed her sister into the forest. Another, smaller explosion made her turn her head, and something full of bright fire was blown into her face and into her widened, terrified eyes.

“Your sister led you out?”

“Bey and Jiang,” Thuy says in English. She shifts back to Vietnamese, her daughter translating as she goes. “They each took a hand. We were slow, and I couldn’t stop crying, but no one came after us. Later Billie Joe said they went looking for the missing trooper. Troopers ran off all the time. Murphy wanted to kill him as an example to the others.”

“Are they still alive?” Rafferty asks. “The other two children?”

Thuy says, “Yes.”

“I don’t want to know where they are. Could you find them if you needed to?”

“Of course. They became our children that day, Bey’s and mine. Jiang’s brother and sister. We could never lose them.”

“So Sellers came back to Vietnam-”

“Twenty-two years later. In 1997. When Americans were welcome again. We were living in the same village, or the same place anyway, since nothing was left from the first village. The government assigned us a bigger house because of the children and because of my injury. They made me into a hero, as though I’d been fighting instead of running for my life.”

Jiang finishes translating and speaks for herself for the first time in half an hour. “No,” she says, “you were running for my life.” She rests a hand on her mother’s shoulder.

“He found us. Bey recognized him the moment she opened the door. He had been preparing for the meeting the whole time he’d been gone. He had learned to speak Vietnamese almost perfectly, he had learned how to propose marriage. He formally apologized to us for the people he left in the hut. If he hadn’t done that, he said, the red man-Murphy-would have known, because there would have been no body parts, and we would have been caught. Everyone would have been caught, everyone would have been killed. He said he traded the people in the hut for us. He said he had to choose between many of us dying and all of us dying.

“He stayed near the village for a month in a small hotel, but he came to us every day. On the fifth day, he asked Bey to marry him. He said he’d thought about her-” Thuy’s voice breaks, and she passes a forearm across her face. “He’d thought about Bey every day since he left Vietnam. Every day. He … ahhh-” She sniffs again. “He showed her pictures of his house. He proposed very formally. But Bey said she had to stay and take care of me.”

“And I said I could take care of you,” Jiang said. “Not that you need to be taken care of.”

Ming Li says, “Aww,” and wipes her cheeks.

“She said yes. How could she not say yes? He’d saved us. He could have been killed himself. Murphy would have blown him to pieces if they’d seen him helping us, but he did it. So she said yes, and he said he would work things so she could go to America with him. Because they were married, right? And then he told us he had a way to get Jiang and me out of the country when he came back in four months and that we should let him do it. We should go wherever he wanted to put us.”

Knowing the answer, Rafferty says, “Because.”

“Because Murphy had probably learned we were alive. Because he had become very powerful. Because some reporter had written about our village from an interview he did with one of the Vietnamese troopers, and he’d said there were survivors. Because the story of the village was being denied. Because the truth of what happened could destroy Murphy. Because Murphy would be coming for us.”