The Price of Blood

63

When it was dark they rubbed on mosquito repellent, picked up their tools, and walked down to the beach. Like the flute player’s march, the night was older here, blacker. Looking up, Broker did not know the stars. A steady breeze came off the sea.

Trin stamped a circle around the shovel and pulled it from the sand. A lopsided moon delineated their faces. Trin drove the shovel into the sand.

Broker hefted the mattock and gauged the ache in his taped thumb. He swung into the packed sand and grunted. He’d be all right.

Besides the sea, the only sounds were the thud of the mattock loosening the sand and the sigh of sand on steel as Trin’s shovel moved it aside. When they had made a hole six feet in diameter they both worked on their knees with the short shovels. Sweat and sand made a sodden paste of Broker’s T-shirt and their breath came in short, regular bursts. Giddy, Broker imagined a grown elephant frozen, tusks extended, in full rampant charge just below his feet. He calculated the circumference of a B-52 crater, about thirty-feet across. Poof. A powder of crimson ash would sprinkle down on the South China Sea.

“Remember how Jimmy loved booby traps?” said Broker.

“Dig,” said Trin.

After a while they passed a slippery water bottle and fell back, resting their dripping backs against the damp sand. Shoulder deep in the pit and bugs had started to find them. Trin reached up into his bucket and jammed a bundle of incense sticks into a shelf of sand. Lit them. The smoke sought them out and curled, tickling their drenched bodies, and seeped into the dark.

Broker wondered if Mama Pryce was really down there, below his feet, and if he could read smoke after twenty years.

It was getting impossible for both of them to work in the pit. Trin stayed in the hole. Broker lowered a bucket on a rope and hauled out loads of sand. The hole was now six feet deep, narrower at the bottom. Trin had hacked a place for the lantern and looked like a copper cave dweller toiling in the weak light.

Exhausted, they took a break and staggered down to the sea and fell in. Back on the beach, they sat, gobbling the rice balls Trung Si had prepared for them as they dried off. Washed them down with bottled water.

“Beach could have shifted,” said Broker. “It could be anywhere.”

“Start another hole,” said Trin.

They were getting slap-happy. But they started a second pit. It was close to midnight. They had been digging for almost four hours. An hour into the second site Trin decided to return to the first pit. Broker resumed hauling up the buckets.

Ludicrous. The waves breaking on the sand chanted, cynical-Yo ho ho and a bottle of rum. Broker dug on the desperate word of a dead man who his whole life had loved to play jokes. The veins had turned to acid wires in his arms, his tendons were yanking out of his joints; fingers were webbed, cramped, fusing together.

Trin had stopped digging and sprawled back on his haunches, arms dead at his sides. Spent. The pit angled now, back toward the three graves like evidence of slipping focus. The walls kept caving in. The lantern sputtered and died. Trin refilled it. Broker sprawled with his head hanging over the edge.

“I think we’ve had it,” said Broker deliriously. Below him, Trin giggled. Broker pushed up on his elbows and rolled over and stared up at the stars. Low in the south he thought he saw the Southern Cross.

He’d always been a working-stiff existentialist. Attuned to the buttons and unbuttonings of the absurd. He and Sisyphus were asshole buddies. Digging up beaches, pushing boulders. Same same. Just keep moving it down the line. He fumbled for a cigarette. His cramped fingers snapped the fragile paper cylinder. Shreds of flying tobacco tickled his nose. His Zippo spun from his grasp and dropped into the pit.

Trin giggled louder. Broker heard the Zippo click open, heard Trin thumb the wheel. A flicker. Flame danced in the hole.

Broker hunched his head. Something flew out of the pit. It fell into the sand at his feet with a heavy thud. His hips and lower back protested, but he forced himself up. Carefully. His spine was a balancing act. A precarious stack of rocks. He crawled for the object. An oblong piece of wood. Dense. Intact, with screws in it.

“Huh?”

Trin giggled again.

Broker pawed for a flashlight and switched it on. He saw fragments of stenciled letters under a coating like a transparent tar-like substance, crusted with sand. Numbers: 155.

“Wha?” he muttered, pawing at the panel of wood.

“Ammo case. For artillery rounds. The wood looks like it’s been treated with preservative. Creosote maybe,” panted Trin. He giggled hysterically again.

Broker crawled furiously on all fours to the edge of the hole and squinted down his flashlight beam. Trin’s eyes and teeth glowed in a mask of dirt and sweat. His right hand was snarled in metal that dazzled chrome-yellow in the electric light.

“It’s gold!” shouted Trin. He tried to scramble up the walls of the pit, one hand extended with his fistful of trophies, the other trying to clamp a long, shallow sand-packed wooden box to his side.

Broker almost pitched in. Reaching, clawing at Trin’s wrist. Exhaustion evaporated. Weight was nothing. He almost catapulted Trin and the crate into the air. They rolled over on the lip of the pit and laughed like boys. Up off all fours they danced on their knees as Trin waved his right hand under Broker’s eyes. Dozens of gold circles dripped from the damp sand in his fingers. Hundreds more winked in the sandy box.

“What are they?” yelled Broker.

“Vietnamese credit cards,” yelled Trin. “Gold rings!”

He pawed the sand in the ammo box. Everywhere his fingers moved the sand, metal gleamed. “Thousands of gold rings.” He plucked out a thin sheet, then a wafer that looked like a yellow domino. “Leaves,” he said. “Taels. There must be a hundred pounds of gold in this box!”

Suddenly Trin went rigid. “Listen,” he hissed. They killed the flashlights. Broker strained his ears. Trin’s eyes bulged. Mercury saucers in the dark. Instinctively they both hunched forward and absurdly threw their arms protectively around the heap of gold. A distinct, sharp clacking, above them, on the slope, by the graves. From a carefully stored inventory of nightmare sounds, Broker specified: the click of bamboo on bamboo. VC semaphore in the night.

Trin’s chest heaved in relief. “Trung Si signaling. He’s coming in.”

Gingerly, they struggled up on rubber knees. The darkness shuffled above them and the old sergeant swung down the beach on his crutch. The hunting rifle was slung over his shoulder.

A moment of sheer paranoid panic that was as old as pirates and buried treasure and betrayal knifed Broker as Trung Si unlimbered the rifle. But the old man was just easing his back. Trung Si muttered to Trin.

Trin began to laugh and then he cupped his hand over his mouth. In a quiet controlled voice he said, “He could hear us yelling halfway to Quang Tri City. He says we should shut the fuck up. Sound carries out here.”

Grumbling, Trung Si braced on his crutch and lowered himself to the edge of the pit. Carefully he laid the rifle and the crutch across his lap. He massaged his leg. Trin switched on his flashlight and played the beam across glitter at his feet.

Trung Si coughed and hawked a wad of phlegm. Then he put a cheroot-looking cigarette, rolled from raw homegrown tobacco, to his lips. He took a cheap plastic lighter from his tunic and lit the fag. He blew a stream of smoke and grumbled something.

“What?” asked Broker.

“It’s a saying,” said Trin. “You find gold, you pay with blood.”

“Back home we call that a curse,” said Broker. The intoxication had subsided. He squatted and sifted his fingers through the golden trinkets. “Rings?”

“People don’t trust banks or currency; those rings are the basic denomination. Easy to carry. We don’t deal in dong for big items, it’s too clumsy. A television set is, say, eight gold rings.” He picked up the tael. “Ten gold rings.”

“That’s today,” said Broker. “The stuff we’re looking for was buried twenty years ago.” Broker shook his head. “This isn’t it.”

“So? It’s loot. A lot of robbery took place on the roads when the war ended. It’s gold,” protested Trin. “That’s only one box. There’s lots more…stacks.”

“The pieces I saw were bigger.”

“You saw?”

“Yeah, at Cyrus’s house in New Orleans.”

“You never told me-” Trin moved closer.

“I’m telling you now. A lot bigger, about six, seven pounds, with Chinese writing on them.”

Trin seized Broker’s elbow. “Writing?” The flashlight illuminated their faces from below, pocketing their features. Halloween masks.

“Chinese characters, you know…” Broker made a tangled ideogram with his finger in the dark.

“Fuck me dead,” gasped Trin in perfect sixties slang. He leaped back into the pit.