Tree of Smoke

They went through it together. Storm opening the door, stepping well out of the way, and standing absolutely still. Trung stepping forward, pulling the trigger, taking three steps back.

They heard the street door open downstairs. Mr. Jimmy’s mouth also opened. Trung attempted to smile reassuringly and stepped into the hall. At the bottom of the stairwell the travel broker who owned the building stood reaching his hand to the wall switch. The hall lights came on

fitfully. Trung said, “Good evening,” and the man raised his hand both in greeting and farewell and stepped out and shut the door.

Dusk had come. Trung lay the bulky weapon on what was left of the mattress and lit the lantern and turned up the hissing gas so the wick flared white-hot.

“Mr. Jimmy. I go.” The idea seemed to puzzle the sergeant deeply. “I go out.” “You’re going out?” “I go. Yes.” “Well, what’s on for tonight, man? Is there a mah-jongg tournament

we just can’t miss? Because this is not the time for excursions.” “Mr. Jimmy. I food. Hunger.” “Stay here. I’ll go.” “Stay here. I go.” “Jesus Christ.” “I come back.” Gingerly Trung pointed at the sergeant’s wristwatch. He

moved his fingertip over its face to indicate thirty minutes. “I come back.” “This is bullshit.” “No, Jimmy.” A great storm of frustration brewed inside him. In Viet

namese he said, “I need to get out. I need to think. I need to breathe. I need to go. I need to move.” He seized the bulky weapon and reinserted the magazine, pulled the slide to bring a round into the chamber, ejected the magazine, loaded into it the spare round, and reinserted the magazine. Cradling the weapon in both hands, he presented it to Mr. Jimmy, who set it down on the mutilated bed before pointing at his watch.

“Thirty minutes?” “You wait.” The American took a billfold from his hip pocket and gave him sev

eral bills. “Get cigarettes. Marlboros. Real Marlboros.” “You wait.” “Real Marlboros. Don’t bring me no fake Marlboros.” “Marlboros,” Trung assured him.

On the street Trung kept close to the buildings, but after crossing at the corner he walked openly. What use caution?

Hao had betrayed him. Or Hao had saved him. Or both. Under the circumstances it wouldn’t get any clearer than that.

When he reached Anh Dung Street he stopped a vendor for a pack of Marlboros, the good ones. The American wanted the good ones, he understood that much.

In the café he sat at his usual table. It wasn’t the old Chinese man tonight. It was some woman instead, nearly as old, maybe the wife. “Noodles, please,” he said, but she shook her head. She didn’t speak Vietnamese.

All right—he didn’t see any noodles. Let it be rice again. He went to the counter and pointed to the kettle of rice on the stove, pointed above it to the teapots on a shelf. She nodded some kind of assent, and he took his chair again.

He watched people passing on the street. Surrounded by souls he didn’t know he woke to the world in its true scale, not a room with a window that looked at a wall, but an entire world in which he was lost. Whatever the details of the situation, whatever the nature of the problem, whoever had let him down, he was lost.

And to think how careful he’d been, and how pointlessly. It wasn’t that he regretted the mistake. He regretted the hesitation. Doubt is one thing, hesitation another. I waited three years to decide. I should have jumped. Doubt is the truth, hesitation a lie.

The old man came into the café. “You want two Coca-Cola? And the bread?” —his usual day’s supply. He didn’t suppose he needed it, if he was about to run. Run where? Where could he go? Once there, what would he do? And why wait around to ambush the assassin? Why not disappear quickly and fight another day? Mr. Jimmy recommends fighting now—insists on it. And who is Mr. Jimmy? By appearances, an ally. And on what basis to proceed, now, other than on the basis of appearances?

But Hao—enemy or ally? Trung doubted he would ever know.

The sergeant might know, but the two of them couldn’t communicate. This led him to think of Skip Sands with his terrible pronunciation, his phrase books and dictionaries, an American he could talk to. But for all he knew, Skip Sands had arranged this. The colonel was dead; perhaps his contacts had become liabilities and were being eliminated. To seek out Skip Sands was not advisable. To trust anyone on earth was ill-advised.

He felt the weight of innumerable griefs—but so many people had just as much to carry, and even more. But this one. This one was very lonely.

The old woman brought the bowl and a teapot, came back again with a teacup and two sauces. He smelled each decanter. One was hoisin. He poured it over the rice. No sticks. He waved his hand at her and rubbed two fingers together. She brought him lacquered sticks ornately decorated. Good luck, bad luck, but hunger visits each day. He bowed his head, lifted the bowl to his face, and fell to.

Though perfectly visible in the last light, Fest stood out front of the fabric shop without any pretense. Let them wonder why. Whatever happened, this was his last evening on the post.

If the target doesn’t go out by ten or so, after the cafés have closed, if I’m sure he isn’t leaving, if I can’t get inside to wait for the man—that’s it. I won’t go in at all.

He would instead go directly to the Armed Forces Language School and report his failure and demand extraction. And if the school was closed at night—if that contingency, like so many, had been overlooked—he’d go to the American Embassy and present Kenneth Johnson’s business card to the marine guard. If they turned him away he’d take a cab to Tan Son Nhut and wait there for the first plane going anywhere.

The darkness fell, the woman who ran the shop locked the door from within and turned out the light. She must spend her nights somewhere in the squalor of the building’s recesses. He stepped farther into the doorway, and he was hidden.

The street door to the rooming house opened fifteen minutes after nightfall, and the target headed diagonally across the street without keeping to the shadows. Fest waited until the man had rounded the corner and followed at a trot as he had the night before, and did the same at the next corner, when the man turned right to head, perhaps, for the same café. At the end of the block Fest couldn’t turn to follow—the man was stopped, talking to a street boy. Fest continued across the street, heading into the tide of honking motorbikes without pausing, as he’d learned to do. They knew how to keep from hitting pedestrians.

From the other side Fest looked back. The man was buying cigarettes or gum. Then he went on into the café.

Fest turned and made his way back to the street of the rooming house. At the first patch of darkness he came to he stopped and caught his breath. He took out a handkerchief and wiped his hands, replaced it in his back pocket, and repeated the process with a second handkerchief. He drew up his shirtfront and took the pistol from the belly holster and the suppressor from his front pocket and fixed them together and took the key from his left pocket and walked immediately to the building’s front door and opened it. Locking it behind him, he pocketed the key, took the other from his right-hand pocket, and proceeded up the stairs.

His hand in its wet envelope of heat inserts the key. He opens the door and removes the only assumption left: that in thirty-odd years of life he’s learned something that will be of help in this region where the grown-ups are all dead.

Inside, the lantern was burning. A shirtless man, a white man, unmistakably American, stood beside the bed holding out a rotund package.

He’d departed from his instructions. What had he done?

In English Fest said, “Excuse me.”

Simultaneously the entire building turned on its end. The hallway’s ceiling passed overhead, the stairs rushed up behind him and struck him in the back, the street door came to a stop upside down, hanging above him.

Blows struck his chest. He had a question, but he couldn’t draw a breath to ask it. The street door above him flew open, and a person was sucked up through it into the enormous darkness beyond. Something unbelievable began to suggest itself.

Approaching the corner of his street, Trung noticed a man on a motorbike stopped there, one foot on the pavement, his machine idling as he watched something over his shoulder, in the direction Trung himself was going. Trung rounded the corner cautiously.

In front of his building stood several men all shouting at once in Chinese. He stayed on the opposite side. In the first alley he passed, a few locals attended to small tasks with studious preoccupation. He saw no children among them. Down the block, more stopped motorbikes, peopie looking back at his own front door, which lay open. Among the men gathered around it he recognized the building’s owner.

He walked past rapidly, glancing across the street only once to see a man flung out on the stairwell as if he’d fallen backward, one arm twisted under him and the other reaching out behind. Trung had seen corpses. The man was dead.

The man wore a white shirt or perhaps a blue one, soaked now with blood. As far as he remembered, Mr. Jimmy wore a bright flowered shirt and in any case had been bare-chested when Trung had left him. He couldn’t risk slowing his pace to see better. He kept walking, absolutely without a destination.

Sands sat at the dining table of a villa with its rent most probably in arrears, finishing a fine lunch prepared by servants he couldn’t pay, and considered that if he still had a job his salary would never find him. And that these were his smallest problems.

When he heard a vehicle in the road he stood up quickly. A white Chevrolet Impala stopped out front, Terry Crodelle at the wheel.

Crodelle rolled down the car’s front windows six inches or so, probably to let the breeze through, and got out. Today he wore civilian garb, including a yellow cardigan sweater, and he carried a briefcase which he switched from hand to hand while removing the sweater and tossing it onto the front seat and kicking shut the driver’s door. Sands watched him coming alone through the gate and considered that from the loneliest outpost on earth Cao Quyen had become the Crossroads of the Far East. In his manner of mounting the granite step onto the porch, clutching his briefcase, and peering at the house, Crodelle projected some of the doubt and hope of an insurance salesman.

As Sands pulled aside the netting for him, all uncertainty dropped from Crodelle’s face. Immediately inside he stopped. “The prey in his lair.”

“You want a drink or something?”

“Put me where there’s a breeze.”

“There’s a veranda out back, but I think it’s still getting the sun right now.”

“Right here’s just fine.”

In the parlor Crodelle set his briefcase on the coffee table and sat down in one of the big rattan chairs. “Maybe a large glass of cold water. I don’t want to lose my cool.”

“Reassuring news.”

Sands went to the kitchen and found Mrs. Diu seated on a stool with her feet on the rungs shelling snow peas into the lap of her skirt and tossing the rinds in a galvanized tub. That’s the kind of work he wanted. “Will you make us some tea and sandwiches, please?” She scooped the peas from her lap onto the counter while Sands poured a big glass of water from a pitcher in the fridge. Dread weakened his hands. Water splashed on the tiles.

Crodelle didn’t look over his shoulder as Sands came back into the

parlor to sit facing him. “What’s in the briefcase, Terry? A tape recorder?” “Better than that.” “A super-miniature polygraph?” Crodelle gave him the finger. “You found me. Excellent work.” “You’ve got snitchy friends.” “You don’t have to tell me.” “Nice place.” “It’s haunted.” “It feels like it. Yeah. A little.—Jesus, Skip, what happened to your ear?” “I got beat up.” Crodelle sat back in his chair and crossed ankle over knee. ”You’re an

interesting character. I should have been visiting you a lot more often. And there’s a sense of quiet here.” “I try not to move around and break a sweat. There’s no air condi

tioner.” “Rick Voss went down in a helicopter. He’s dead.” “I know. It’s terrible.” “Thanks for your sympathy.” Quite against his will, Sands heaved a quavering sigh. “What about

Hao? Dead too?” “Nguyen Hao? Not quite.” “Listen to me, please. If he’s your guy, you’d better look out for him.”

“Hao does a hell of a job looking out for himself. A hell of a job.” “He isn’t safe, Terry, I mean it.” “Hao and his wife are on their way out of the country.” “Wow. No. Are you serious?” “What’s serious is that Rick Voss is dead. He was on his way to see you

in Cao Phuc. Now he’s dead.” Sands had no idea what to say. The pulse in his battered ear tor

mented him. The kettle began whistling in the kitchen. “So I pack up

and we go?” “More or less.” “Why don’t you have a couple embassy marines with you?” “It’s not a pick-up. If you had a phone, I could’ve just called you and invited you in. Look, Skip,” Crodelle said, “I’d like you to send the ser

vants home.” “Their home is about sixty feet away.” “Just so we have some privacy.” “Their home is a little building right out the back door.” Crodelle merely stared at him. “Can we get some tea and sandwiches first? She’s making them now.

Are you hungry?” “Sure.” “They’re good. She cuts the crust off.” “Just like the Continental.” “Yeah, man. You can get crust if you want it—” “No, thanks.” Mrs. Diu was already bringing the plate of sandwiches. Skip leapt up

and went to get the tea. When Mrs. Diu joined him in the kitchen he

said, “Now I’d like you to take the rest of the afternoon off.” “Off?” “Yes, please. We need the house to ourselves.” “You want me to leave?” ‘Tes, just—to the house. I’m sorry, just go home.” “You don’t want me to clean the lunch?” “Maybe later.” “Yes, sir.” “I’ll clean it up.” “Okay.”

“It was very good.”

She left by the back door. Sands placed the sugar bowl, spoons, two cups, and the teapot on a tray with handles too small for his fingers and brought it all into the parlor to find Crodelle staring at his plate of crust-less sandwiches. He hadn’t touched them. “It’s just the local tea,” Skip said. “No milk today.”

“You don’t have milk?” “I mean it’s just the weak stuff—you know. Watery. The way they make it.”

He poured tea and watched Crodelle devour several sandwiches in two bites each. He realized he was sitting forward tensely and sat back and pretended to relax. He checked a midwestern impulse to urge on his guest more sandwiches, and more—chicken, pork, a little butter. “Good bread,” his guest remarked. Neither spoke again until Crodelle had wiped his hands on a blue linen napkin.

“I believe,” Crodelle said, “your last words to me were a question as to

the location of the JFK warfare school.” “Fort Bragg. Yeah. It came back to me.” “I’m with the Fourth Battalion. MOS training.” “And MOS, what’s that?” “Military Occupational Specialty.” “Well then. Who do you train?” “Guys. Fellows.” “Really. What’s your specialty?” “Psychological Operations.” “Captain Terry, you seem a little miffed with me.” Crodelle smiled, but only slightly. “So we couldn’t interest you in a

polygraph.” “No. I would have lied on the control questions anyway.” “Why would you do that?” “Just to mess up the first-round results.” “Skip, you’re not expected to behave when we’re questioning you as

you’ve been taught to behave when being questioned by the enemy. We

are not the enemy.” Skip said, ” ‘Enemy’ is no longer a term I’d use in any case. Ever.” “Why not?” “It’s just stupid, man. Have you looked around yourself lately? This isn’t

a war. It’s a disease. A plague. And that was my preliminary round the other day, with the phony polygraph. And this is the second round. Correct?” “No. Incorrect. This is just a pick-up. Sort of. I mean, it’s just time for

you to wrap up here, that’s all, so I’m here to get you.” “Then why are we sitting around?” “Intellectual curiosity. It’s always my downfall. Who was the colonel?

What was he doing? I mean, his little article was an act of professional

suicide, but the assertions are hard to refute.” “Voss told me he wrote most of it.” “The ideas came from the colonel. The semi-treasonous ones anyway.” “He was a great man,” Skip said, “and he wasn’t in any way trea

sonous.” “We all want to believe that, Skip.” “He was a force of nature, Terry, and now he’s gone. I’m confused and

you’re confused. He’s suddenly absent. It’s disorienting as all get-out.” “Then let’s orient ourselves, Skip, and deal with the colonel’s mess.” “You misunderstood him completely.” “Oh no you don’t! — you don’t turn this into a movie about Walt Whit

man or somebody—the shortsighted, narrow-minded boobs lynching the golden-boy visionary. You don’t turn this into the crucifixion. I’m asking you who was this guy, and you’re singing a bullshit movie theme song.”

“Hold on, hold on. I’m just trying to tell you something you don’t understand. I knew him all my life, and I swear to you, Crodelle, the colonel was exactly who he looked like. He really was this madman flying a plane with one wing blown off and smoking a cigar and laughing at death and all that. But he had this second side. He wanted to be intelligent, he wanted to be erudite, he wanted to be the suave bureaucrat. I’m surprised he didn’t take up smoking a pipe. He wanted to intellectualize, he wanted to monitor information systems, he really—somewhere inside him was this librarian, hidden away.”

“And that’s the part that fucked things up for us, Skip. Let’s deal with

that part.” “Deal with it?” “Come on, Skip, come on, work with me. We need to get everything

back under the light. The colonel didn’t share. He didn’t lend his efforts to the general endeavor.” “So?”

Crodelle poured the dregs from the teapot into his cup. “Look, Terry, am I supposed to be getting something right now? Be

cause I don’t.” “I want to ask you about these files.” “They’re right upstairs. Take ‘em.” “Really?” “Yeah, take ‘em. They’re shit.” “You realize at this point you don’t need to lie.” “I realize. The files are upstairs. The files are worthless. That is the

absolute truth.” Crodelle relaxed, as if perhaps he believed. “The guy was really

something. Really something.” “Yeah. Yeah. He was a lot of things.” “How did he characterize his relationship with John Brewster?” “Brewster?” “Yeah. I’m curious. How were their relations?” “Strained. Brewster had some concerns, and put him behind a desk.” “Hah! Concerns?”. “About his health.” “His health. You mean about his heart, and his drinking, and his ten

dency to suddenly slug people in the jaw.” Skip said, “His heart?” “Isn’t that what killed him?” “I have no idea how he died. I heard he was assassinated.” “I’ve heard all that nonsense too. The colonel threw a coronary up

stairs at the Rex. In the swimming pool. Or in the restaurant or some

where. Anyway, he didn’t go down defending the Alamo.” “Oh-oh, wow.” “What.” “You’re Brewster’s boy.” “I resent that.” “Yeah, but I repeat it: you’re Brewster’s boy. Brewster wants to look at

the files before anybody else finds out about them. Right?” Crodelle smiled. “Don’t leer at me like I’m an idiot, Terry.” “I can’t help it.” “This isn’t about any crazy unauthorized op. This is just about a bunch of note cards that might make somebody look bad. Somebody

who probably hasn’t done anything to worry about.” “That’s nonsense.” “Yeah, it is, it certainly is. I mean, considering the fucked-up nature

of the files. But that’s what’s going on here, isn’t it? Jesus Christ. Come

on, let’s look at them.” “Yeah?” “Come on.” Crodelle followed him up the narrow stairs. This time of day the

villa’s upper regions trapped the heat like an attic. Sands pointed at the spare room and opened his own bedroom door to get what they might of a breeze. Crodelle stood looking into the spare room. “Where are they?” Sands pushed past him and raised the lid of one of the footlockers.

“Cleverly hidden.” “That’s them?” “They’re all in alphabetical order. And cross-referenced. Go ahead,

look up Brewster.” “Come on. If the old man was serious, they’re coded.” “It’s not in code. Look up anything that might cross-reference with

Brewster. Place names, something like that.” Crodelle raised the lid of another and stared down into it. “You’re

willing to turn these over to us?” “Do I have a choice?” “Let’s load these babies in the buggy. If we stack things properly, we

can get them all to town in one trip.” “To the Language School, or where?” “The MAC–V compound. Tan Son Nhut.” “MAC–V’s not there anymore.” “There’s a little facility there.” “Oh, fuck,” Skip said. “What?” “I’m not going anywhere with you.” Crodelle looked at him with raised eyebrows, and Sands gauged the

redhead’s size, considered taking a page from Jimmy Storm’s book and throwing an uppercut into the man’s middle, just below the sternum, but thought against it. Having recently lost one fight, he didn’t feel like starting another one.

“Hang on,” Skip said. “I’ll get dressed.”

He went across the hall and into his own rooms, and Crodelle followed him and watched as he changed his shorts for long slacks, put on socks and shoes and a shirt. What else? He wouldn’t be returning. On his dresser, a stack of photos from the Philippines. He put half a dozen in his pocket.

From his dresser drawer he took his watch, his passport, and his.25caliber Beretta. “Shit,” Crodelle said. “Never happen.” Sands pocketed the passport, put the watch on his wrist, and stepped

forward and put the gun against Crodelle’s forehead. “Okay, okay, okay. Is the safety on?” “No.” Sands tried to think. “Here’s where it gets tricky.” “Just put the safety on, and step back, and let’s talk.” “I do all the talking. You do what I tell you. I don’t have to shoot if we

do this right.” “I’m with you,” Crodelle said. “Stand there.” “I’m standing.” Crodelle stood very still with his hands raised to the

level of his chest and his fingers splayed. “Just put the safety on, that’s all

I ask.” “Not one more word.” “Fine.” “I mean it. Sit in that chair.” Crodelle drew a chair from the tea table and sat. Sands opened his

dresser’s top drawer and with one hand pulled out socks and underpants, feeling for his first-aid materials. He placed several rolls of gauze bandage on top of the dresser. “Stand up. No talking.”

Crodelle stood. Holding the gun against his spine, Sands pulled the chair closer to himself. “Sit down.” Crodelle sat. “Cross your arms behind the chair. Open your mouth. Wider.” He jammed a sock into Crodelle’s mouth. Pulling the clasp from the roll of bandage with his teeth and managing as best he could with one hand, he wrapped Crodelle’s face and neck with the gauze and then girded him around the chest, going around him several times until he’d reached the end of the roll and pinned his arms behind him to the back of the chair. With one hand he was able only to make a rudimentary knot. He felt apologetic about his materials. An electric lamp cord would have been just the thing. Not possible in a house out past the power lines.

Crodelle seemed, by the pattern of his agitated breath, to attempt some commentary on the process, which Sands repeated with two more rolls in order to bind each of Crodelle’s legs to a chair leg, providing the commentary himself: What are you doing? What comes next? How do you tie a Green Beret to a chair with gauze and no tape? You’ll have to tie a knot. Don’t you need two hands to tie a knot?

“I’m putting the gun on the dresser while I get you tied down tight,” he said. “You can try something and see how it all turns out, or you can sit still.” Crodelle made no movement while Sands used two rolls to tie his wrists together and secure his arms to the back of the chair with a proper trucker’s-hitch knot. Sands knelt in front of him with the four remaining rolls and tied each leg firmly in place as tightly as he could without concern for his prisoner’s circulation.

Without speaking to Crodelle he left the room to find some packing tape across the hall. When he returned Crodelle hadn’t, as far as was discernible, made any movement to escape. Sands wound several yards of tape around his mouth, chest, and legs, covering the knots he’d made. “I’m taking the files downstairs. I’m going to be up and down the stairs and I’ll be checking on you. If I think you’ve been fooling around here trying to get loose —I swear to God, that’s it. I’ll kill you.”

On his last trip up the stairs he leaned close to Crodelle’s ear, breathing hard from his exertions, and said, “I’m going to burn the colonel’s files. Do you know why?” He paused, as if the redhead might answer through a suffocating inch of gauze. Crodelle only kept his eyes shut and concentrated on breathing through his nostrils. “No? Well, think about it.” The speech disappointed him. He left the room feeling embarrassed and went out back of the house to Tho’s burn pile, where he’d assembled a mound of cards and papers five feet in circumference, perhaps, and a couple of feet high at its peak, a paltry monument, he thought, to the work of two of his years and God knew how much of the life of Colonel Francis Xavier Sands. The breeze blew strongly, and some of the note cards fluttered away to land in the creek.

He was out of matches before the pile had caught. He went into the kitchen for something more incendiary and heard Crodelle upstairs thumping around on the floor overhead, progressing over it, perhaps, in the manner of a monkey hopping on its ass. It didn’t matter.

He carried a full box of matches outside and went past the burn pile and shouted for Tho, who came from his house barefoot, in long pants and a T-shirt. “Mr. Tho, where’s the kerosene?”

“Kerosene? Yes. I have.”

“Get the kerosene, please, and burn those papers.”

“Now?”

“Please, yes, now.”

Tho went to the side of the house and came back with his battered

two-gallon can of kerosene and doused the pile while Skip knelt and struck matches at its base. The fire blazed up, and he stepped back. He stood with Tho and watched a minute. Across the creek and downstream a ways, above the coconut palms and papayas, gray and brown smoke also rose from some neighbor’s pile of trash.

Jesus, he thought, what a fool that old man was.

Tho went for his rake. Skip returned to the house.

He was astounded to find Crodelle in the kitchen, still in the chair,

bent forward, his hands free, cutting away with a bread knife at the windings that still bound his left leg. Sands dug in his pocket for his Beretta and pointed it as Crodelle stood up. Immediately he sat down. “You don’t have to shoot me! You don’t have to shoot me!” “Do you know what I’m doing? Can you smell that smoke? I’m burning the files.” “This isn’t about the files! Goddamn, man. You don’t have to shoot anybody.”

“What happens if I don’t?”

“I can pretty well assure you that’s the end of it. I want to move my hands. I want to rub my legs. They’re dead, you cut off the blood. Jesus. What a fucking asshole you are. Go ahead and shoot me. I’ve got six thousand dollars for you. Fuck you.”

“You’ve got what?”

Crodelle leaned forward and spat bloody drool onto the floor. “A really fucked-up thing has happened, Skip. A BND operative got X’d the other day in Saigon. A man named Fest.”

“For God’s sake,” Sands said. “I know that guy.” “Dietrich Fest?” “Not by name, but I met him in the Philippines. And I’m pretty sure

I saw him at the Green Parrot—the same day I met you.”

“Well,” Crodelle said, “it’s a screwy deal. It blew up. We should have stopped it, but things develop a momentum. And it was a legitimate VC target.”

“Oh, shit. Trung Than?” No answer. “Trung killed the German?” “Your unauthorized double.” “So where is he now?” “Who.” “Trung Than, goddammit.” “Wandering the earth.” “Alive.” “That’s the assumption.” “Jesus. A man without a country. How must he feel?” “You tell me. About like you do.” “And going after Trung was your affair? Your responsibility? Who ran

the operation?” “That will never be known. All that will ever be known is—you

caused it.” “Where did the authorization come from?” “Authorization is a concept. Not always concrete.” “So it’s about renegade ops after all. Yours and mine and everybody’s.” “We all messed this thing up. But you’re the one looking at prison.

Prison and disgrace. Have no doubt of that, Sands. When somebody starts an investigation, you’re the one guy we’re all willing to point to. So how’s this for an idea?—go away.”

From behind the house there came the sound of an animal yelping. Sands tried to ignore it and get the situation in his grasp by jabbing the gun in Crodelle’s direction, but he felt helpless. “Are you bastards going to get me out?”

“No. You have a passport. I give you the cash. Hop a plane.” “Jesus Christ! A plane where?” “The money’s in my briefcase.”

The yelping out back had become a screech, drawing nearer. Through the frame of the screen door Pčre Patrice came into view dragging the dog Docteur Bouquet by the ear and calling out above the dog’s protests. “Skip! Your dog! Your dog, please!” He opened the door and dragged the animal inside with him.

“Give him to Tho.”

“Tho says to put him in the house.” Taking in the kitchen festooned with streamers of white gauze and the two Americans, one gripping a pistol, the priest took a deep breath. “Tho says to put him inside the house.” He let the dog loose and it ran off and scrabbled up the stairs. The little priest had not released his breath. He reached backward as if to push open the screen door behind him, but his hand didn’t actually contact its object, and he stood holding his arm out as if it provided him balance. “He is not a problem, but he might attack my chickens there. It’s better to keep him here.” Perhaps because his voice seemed to have stopped the progress of a tragedy, he continued. “I had a dream about you, Skip. You were not in the dream, but it was a dream about the President of the United States. Usually the French, the Americans, the Communists—they don’t come to the world of dreams. They go there, but they don’t believe in it so they are just only ghosts.” A form of hysteria seemed to rise in him as he spoke. “I will tell you what happened to a man of my home village named Chinh. He left our village when his father died and creditors took his land. Chinh became poor at that time, he became destitute. He had to go away to travel on the coastline and if possible learn to fish. It was a desperate journey because he had no money. He slept in the bush as he traveled. One night Chinh had a dream telling him to sleep in the Catholic churchyard of a certain town. The French were there. The outpost commander found him and turned him out. But Chinh says, I am asleep here because a dream told me to come. You are a fool believing in a dream, this is what the French commander says, don’t you know we all dream each night? Last night a dream told me in fact that seven pieces of gold are buried beneath the biggest banyan along the river—do you think I went digging? Don’t make me laugh. And he drove Chinh from the town. On his way downriver Chinh found the biggest banyan, dug all day around the base of it, and found seven gold coins exactly. He returned to my village and lived prosperously. This is a true story. I told it to a French priest. He said it was a lie. He said Chinh stole the money and explained it with a dream. But, however, I pointed out that Chinh lived long and prospered. A thief who lies and steals cannot prosper from the money he stole. The story is quite true. A few years ago Chinh died, incidentally. Sick people come to his grave to be healed, especially people with some malaria.”

“Thong Nhat.” “Yes.” “Stop.” There came a silence, the first the room had enjoyed since the priest

had entered. “Skip,” the priest said as if touching on a matter of explosive delicacy,

“something is wrong.” “Jesus H. Christ,” Crodelle said, and began to laugh. “I’m sorry about the excitement, Nhat. Will you do me a favor?” The priest seemed unwilling to answer. “There’s a briefcase on the coffee table in there. Will you bring it to

me, please?” “Of course. But I’m worried about you today.” “Where am I?” Crodelle said. “Where in God’s name am I?” “Nhat, will you get me that briefcase?” Skip watched the priest move cautiously into the parlor to stand be

fore the coffee table touching his hands together at the level of his breast

and wondered if he was praying. Crodelle, still laughing, spat on the floor again. “Are you all right?” “Minimally banged up, just minimally.” “Tell me something. If you’re willing. How did you get down the

stairs without breaking your neck?” “I hopped and hula-ed as far as the staircase and fell over sideways

and slid down. Sort of.” “And not a bruise. No Purple Heart.” “I believe my right shoulder was briefly dislocated.” “Good.” “I need to be sure you understand this business about the BND man’s

murder. Do you get it?” “Sure. I’m the fall guy.” “You’re Lee Harvey Oswald, baby.” Pčre Patrice had found his strength. He stood beside Skip holding out the briefcase with both hands. Skip set it on the counter and thumbed

the button, and the brass clasp snapped open with a shudder. “Whose briefcase is this?” “All yours. Complimentary.” The briefcase held only an empty manila folder and a sheaf of U.S.

currency circled by a red rubber band. Doubt and fear possessed him suddenly. “So you, what—stuck your hand in your pocket and out comes a wad

of getaway money just like that?” ‘Tes, indeed. Chopchop. We’re very efficient.” “Not too often, Crodelle. Mostly you’re incredibly inept. And stupid.

Why didn’t you just come in and say, Here’s the situation, and hand me the cash?”

“Well, you seemed completely in love with this idea that your silly files are the reason for everybody’s breakfast. I kind of hoped we could let it go at that.”

Sands held his hand out. “Give me your car keys.” “Never happen, son. You don’t get a vehicle. I’ll take you.” Leaning toward Crodelle close enough to breathe in his face, Skip

placed the gun’s muzzle against Crodelle’s knee. “Three—two—one—” Crodelle slapped his pants. “Right here.” “Let’s have them.” Crodelle turned over a single ignition key wired to a paper tag from

the embassy motor pool.

With his free hand Sands reached into the briefcase and pinched a half dozen twenties and shook them loose from the stack and laid them on the counter. “This is for Tho and Mrs. Diu,” he told the priest. To Crodelle he said, “I’m going out the door. If I even think you’re moving around in here before I’m down the road, I’ll come back and shoot you. Happily. I mean it, Crodelle. It would make me happy.”

He left by the back door as Crodelle called after him, “I don’t care about your fucking happiness.”

As he started the ignition, Pčre Patrice came out by the front way. Sands reached his left hand out the window and the priest took it and said, “It’s too late for traveling. Near the Route Twenty-two it’s a critical area. You know this.”

“Thon Nhat, it’s been good knowing you.”

“Will you come back?”

“No.”

“Yes. Perhaps. Nobody knows.”

“All right, nobody knows.”

“Mr. Skip, until I see you again, Fm going to pray for you each day.”

“I appreciate it. You’ve been a wonderful friend.”

He engaged the clutch and set off bumping over the rutted road. In the rearview mirror he saw Crodelle join the priest to stand out front of the villa’s gate with his arms crossed on his chest and his legs in the at-ease position, projecting an air of defiance and nonchalance.

Beside him on the seat he found Crodelle’s yellow cardigan sweater. He threw it out of the car, rolled up the windows, and turned on the air conditioner.

Worl d Children’s Services had rules, procedures, requirements, including a bimonthly visit to Saigon for Reports and Recommendations. In the hostel on Dong Du Street if the frolic of the later hours didn’t wake her then the moaning of dawn prayers from the mosque would manage. Tonight the horns and go-go music turned her out of bed.

In these damp nights the temperature of human breath she felt a moldering and sleepy grief born, she was convinced, of self-infatuation— a slow, hot, tropical self-pity. She needed to turn outward, to find others, she needed her duties in the countryside! Or she’d sink. Rot in the underneath. Be devoured by this land. Flower up as new violence and despair.

Here in the city the empty striving compressed itself into a solid thing, and she longed to give herself up to a monstrous suffering, wanted to be torn by every pain.

She started across the street, stepped back for a little Honda pulling an eight-foot-long trailer heaped with cheerful fresh produce. In the city too many of them kept their headlamps switched off. Go-go music boomed from a doorway behind her. She needed a cold drink, but in there it was ten degrees hotter and full of twenty-year-old men on fire in their souls. She went inside anyway. The tavern stank of beer and sweat and bamboo. She clutched her purse tightly and swiveled toward the bar through the crowd of men.

A couple of women danced on a stage hardly bigger than two soap crates. “What’s yours?” a GI said to her at the bar. With the red light of the stage behind him he had no visible face. “You there—pretty lady.” A youngster’s voice, but the crown of his head was bald.

“Pardon?”

“What’s yours? Because I’m buying.”

“I wouldn’t mind a beer. How about a Tiger?”

“Coming at you. Don’t go away.” He moved sideways behind the men at the bar in pursuit of the Tiger. Kathy looked left to see a little harlot resting her elbow on the bamboo bar, her hip cocked, silver smoke rushing from between her lips. But—wasn’t it Lan? But it couldn’t be. But it was. “Lan,” Kathy called, but Lan couldn’t hear.

Kathy walked over. “Hi, Lan.”

Raising her cigarette to her face, Lan moved to a barstool just vacated. She’d assisted Kathy her first year or so in-country, at Sa Dec, then trouble had called her back home, the relocation of her village, and now she sat with a stare and a red mouth and her legs showing up to the crotch of her panties. “How are you, Lan? Do you remember me?”

The girl turned to speak softly to the bartender.

“What you want?” the bartender said. Kathy didn’t know how to answer. The girl—was it somebody else, not Lan?—swung around and leaned her elbows back on the bar and stared at the GIs who danced in the crimson glow with frail women, clutching them tightly to their chests and hardly moving.

Kathy’s own GI was back. “Honey, I’m getting the beers,” he said. “Don’t you believe in me?”

“I’ll be right back.” Holding on to her purse with both hands, she skirted the dancers and went outside. The damp stink of the street felt fresh now. She walked a few paces and entered a café and sat down. Drank two beers one after the other and turned her chair with its back to the wall and asked for a third. From her purse she took her notebook, flopped it down in the stains and grease, and found a pen. Sitting sideways at the table, one hand resting on the page, she wrote:

Dear Skip, Ho-ho-de-ho-ho. That’s what my Dad used to say when he was drunk, or tipsy. He didn’t get drunk. Not even tipsy, just

The mamasan slid over in her flip-flops and said, “You waiting for the

bus?” “There’s no bus this time of night.” “No bus now tonight. You take a taxi.” “Can’t I stay? May I have some tea, please?” “Sure! Sure! Take a taxi later, okay?” “Thanks.”

happy. Sociable you know. So much for the family history. Next up I’ve got a few opinions for you.

Opinions concerning America’s enlarged adrenal cortex and its sacramental lie. Dear Skip: You’d best be careful now of your human heart or you’re liable to break it permanently. Lending your efforts to the cruel mad devastation here.

You may find no place of repentance though you seek it carefully with tears. Where is that from? Somewhere in the Bible. There I go again! Carefully with tears.

The day I left Damulog with Timothy’s bones I saw you at the spring having a bath.

— She’d gone to say goodbye to him as she headed off for Davao City and then Manila. From down the dirt lane she’d seen him come out of Freddy Castro’s three-story hotel, walking through the yard in zoris and checkered boxer shorts, carrying a white towel over his shoulder and a saucepan in his hand. She’d left him to his bath, had headed for the entrance of Castro’s to say goodbye to the family, but had heard the cheering voices of little children and gone after all into the small glen to see Skip Sands bathing before a crowd of urchins. The pipe came from a rock and spilled its water into a large natural basin and the children, perhaps three dozen, had arranged themselves around it as in a small stadium, in the arena of which the young American soaped himself and poured water from the saucepan over his head, chanting back and forth with his wild audience:

“WHAT’S YOUR FAVORITE SHOW!” “THE SKEEP SANDS SHOW!”

“WHAT’S YOUR FAVORITE SHOW!”

“THE SKEEP SANDS SHOW!”

Kids all around you, making them laugh. That was kind of a golden

era.

She put away the pen and paper and drained the bottle and returned to the club.

With three beers in her head the ruckus seemed more uniformly unintelligible and pointless. The woman who might have been Lan wasn’t there, only the skewed off-speed voice of Nancy Sinatra and these chirping whores and bullshitting men of the infantry all at least as woozy as herself—as tipsy as herself—as happy.

“You were gone long enough!” It was the same bald GI.

“I’ve been here all along.”

“Really? Never happen!”

She went around him to stand so his face caught the light. He looked vacuous and friendly. He might have been a noncom, but he wore civvies, and it was only a guess. He didn’t want anything from her. If he wanted a woman there were women all around him. He told her as much. He had a woman in Pleiku. He paid her an allowance. She wasn’t a prostitute. She was his girlfriend. Her family had been killed, all but one nephew who’d been left with only half a face. The boy’s brain was damaged. There was a concrete cistern out back to catch the rain. Sometimes the kid climbed up on the cistern, nobody knew why, and fell off and hurt himself. Several families lived in the building, a glorified hooch, but it had two stories, and stairs leading up outside, stairs of rough lumber without a railing, hardly more than a big ladder. At night the boy had to be tied by his leg to a nail in the floor because he wandered, he walked in his sleep, he could pitch over the side and break his neck. Well, you were sad about the kids for a while, for a month, two months, three months. You’re sad about the kids, sad about the animals, you don’t do the women, you don’t kill the animals, but after that you realize this is a war zone and everybody here lives in it. You don’t care whether these people live or die tomorrow, you don’t care whether you yourself live or die tomorrow, you kick the children aside, you do the women, you shoot the animals.

I970

H e crouched by the window and listened shuddering to the sound of ripped high-voltage wires out there stroking the darkness, humming closer and farther, feeling along the darkness after fear. The voltage sucked along the shaft of fear toward any heart emanating it and burned the soul right inside it. That was the True Death. Thereafter nobody lived in that heart, nobody saw out of those eyes. The stench of such burning floated in and out of the room all night.

As soon as a little daylight came up, the flies started taking off and landing around the room. The radio on the windowsill said, “I’ve got the guys here today from the Kitchen Cinq. You’ve heard the music of the Kitchen Cinq, known primarily for their ‘happy sound.’ Fellas, what about the name? Where did the name come from?”

“Well, Kenny, the name was brewed up for us by our manager, Trav Nelson. And we just kind of liked it, so—”

“And how about the way you spell it? C–I-N-Q, that’s unusual.”

“That spelling means the number five in the French language. And there are five of us, and the way it’s pronounced in French you say ‘sank.’ And we’re all from Texas, so we pronounce it kind of like that too— ‘Kitchen Sank.’ “

“And you’re known for your ‘happy sound.’ ” “I’d say that’s just a result of various personalities, Kenny, because we’re all generally pretty happy folks.”

“And I’d be happy to talk all day with you, but we’re gonna say goodbye, stay happy, and thanks.—The Kitchen Cinq. Five happy guys. This is Kenny Hall and the ‘In Sound,’ for the Military Radio Network.”

“So long, Kenny, and thanks to you too.”

“Let’s get back to the music.”

He let the music play.

“What’s burning?” he asked, although he knew.

“I don’t want you to mention burning ever again. You’re on that

twenty-four hours.” “Very good.” “It’s the fucking punk, man, the Mustique. You gotta know that’s all

it is.” “Got it. Mustique.” “The fucking green spirals they set on fire for the mosquitoes? Some

body’s burning it downstairs. Okay?” “Okay.” “Okay, James?” “You’re doing fear,” James warned him. “Hear the hum?” “Oh, man.” “Vanquish fear.” Joker sat beside him on the bed. “I think I have to say this: you are fucking fucked-up, man.” “Giant discovery.” “Well, I mean —can’t you cool it down?” James shrugged. No profit in continuing this stupid little conver

sation. Ming came in from another universe somewhere and said, “You want

noodoos?” “No, I don’t want no fucking noodles.” “Can we go noodoo place?” “No, I said no. You think I want to watch a pack a Gooks eating with

their faces?” “I need some money, Cowboy.” James said, “Goddamn slippery fucking wiggly fucking noodles.” Her stare was like a lizard’s. “Gip me money, Cowboy. Tell him gip

me money,” she said to Joker, “my sister is so hungry, and her stomach is hurting.” Joker took the little girl on his knee and said, “You’re just as pretty as two new aces.” The kid said something in Gook and Ming answered in English: “He

kill some people.” James told her to quiet her kid down. Ming said, “Boo-coo fuck you,” and took the kid outside somewhere. Joker said, “That ain’t her sister.”

“She says it’s her sister.” “It’s probably her kid.” “Either way it ain’t no thang.” He stood and walked over and un

zipped his fly and made water into a blue chamber pot with red flowers on it in the corner. There wasn’t any indoor plumbing. He didn’t see where she made water. When she wanted to piss she went downstairs someplace.

Joker said, “Let’s go. Listen to me, man—Cowboy? Cowboy? —I

know how this shit goes.” “I gotta believe you.” “There’s a difference between downtown and the bush.” “Whichever one, it ain’t real life.” “I didn’t say that. Will you listen to what I’m saying? You can’t come

downtown no more.” James headed for the door. “Take the wheel, baby! I got no hands!” It was dark, but it wasn’t that late. Joker watched over him while they

walked a long way to the Red Cross and stood in line a long time. When it was James’s turn on the telephone, Joker left him alone while he talked to his mother. He’d hardly said hello before regretting he’d called. She sobbed in torment.

“We haven’t heard from you in I don’t know how long. I don’t know

if you’re alive or dead!” “Me neither. Nobody does.” “Bill Junior’s gone to prison!” “What’d he do?” “J don’t know. A little of everything. He’s been there almost a year,

since last February twenty.” “What month is it now?” “You don’t know what month you’re in? It’s January.” She sounded

angry. “What are you laughing over?” “I ain’t laughing.” “Then who was it just now laughing in my ear?” “Bullshit. I didn’t laugh.” “Don’t use that toilet-talk on my telephone.” “Don’t it say ‘shit’ somewhere in the Bible?” “Get your tongue out of the toilet. I’m your mother telling you. Your

mother who doesn’t even know where you are!”

“Nha Trang.” “Well, thank the Lord,” she said, “that he delivered you out of Vietnam.” Now somebody laughed. Possibly himself, though nothing was funny.

Early in the morning of February 20, 1970, Bill Houston cruised in a state-owned van with two corrections officers and three other miscreants down Route Eighty-nine toward Phoenix, having served twelve months of a one-to-three-year sentence of incarceration in the Florence prison, not at all clear in his mind as to why, exactly, he’d been jailed, or why released. Apparently since the day of his homecoming from the navy a pile of charges had stacked up: a term of probation for stealing a car, a suspended sentence for assault, which meant getting into a fight when cops were around to arrest you for it, and a warrant out for failure to appear on a shoplifting charge; and then the theft of a single case of beer, twenty-four cans, had crashed it all down on his head. Drinking, strolling through an alley off Fourth Avenue, he’d seen the rear door of a tavern propped open by a delivery of Lucky Lager, and he’d taken a case off the top. This was supposed to be his lucky beer, but it had brought him horrible fortunes. He’d been two blocks away, waiting at a DON’T WALK sign like an honorable citizen—shifting the case from his left to his right shoulder, and plotting where to find refrigeration for these things—when the squad car caught up to him. A couple of hearings, a month in County, and off to live behind walls fifteen feet high.

Heading for prison one year ago, carried in perhaps this very van with these same officers toward the just reward his mother and teachers had promised him, he’d felt excited and grown-up. Was it true they tried to stab you and rape you in the joint? Then why hadn’t he seen such stuff in the Maricopa County Jail? Not that he worried. He’d never lost a fight in his life and looked forward to beating up as many people as tried to make a punk out of him. On the other hand, these were killers and such, and they had nothing to do but exercise and train in there, if that’s what they wanted. Best to keep his head down. Learn a valuable skill. Maybe he’d take up leather tooling, belts and moccasins, cigarette cases. After all, he was known on the street as Leather Bill. Did they let you make sheaths for knives? He had doubted the possibility.

Assigned to the medium-security barracks, he found the inmates no meaner than those he’d bunked with in the sheriff’s jail and the food a little better. They had a quarter-mile track for running, as well as an extensive set of weights. His second day there he played left field in a ball game and drove in two runs and hit a homer. Nine full innings—only eight men to a side, but they had all the equipment, including headgear for the batters and full protection for the catcher.

By the third month inside he felt at home. From this distance, the things he thought he’d miss looked small. His jobs had demanded his soul and in return had given him poverty, the women he’d dealt with had quickly turned to irritants. Liquor had brought him high times but propelled him often into the arms of the police. Among free citizens his stomach had ached constantly. He hadn’t felt like swallowing anything but booze. But from the day of his arrival he was hungry and focused like a hound on each coming meal. He put on fifteen pounds, all muscle — push-ups and sit-ups every morning, fifty of each. Four days a week he lifted weights. On Saturday afternoons he boxed, and a couple of former pros had taught him that brawling was an art. His wind was good, and he could take a punch. He was the best Bill Houston he’d been since he’d left the navy.

Westward now, home to Phoenix, back the way he’d come. The rising sun at his back, he sailed toward a life he couldn’t imagine. They’d given him the phone number of his parole officer, a check for twenty dollars, and the clothes he’d been arrested in thirteen months before. He surveyed the road ahead, the desert frozen in morning light, flat and green after the winter rains, the highway black and perfectly straight through the van’s front window, and felt an adventure moving beneath him, as when he’d watched the southern California coast growing insignificant from the railing of his first cruise at age seventeen.

In Phoenix he entered the first bar he found and got with the first woman who was halfway nice to him. She said she was an epileptic, and that seemed about right. Every couple of hours she took a pill, a downer, Seconal. She had several bottles of them all to herself and claimed they were prescribed. It took her only two beers to get tipsy. He had to talk to her for a long time.

They ambled along the streets. She wanted him to walk on the outside, the curb side, because, she insisted, if he put the lady on the outside that meant he was pimping her. She seemed to know all about that, but she didn’t ask for money. When they went up to her room in a hotel overlooking the Deuce, the neighborhood around Second Street, it turned out her Seconal was undependable. In the night the bed started shaking. He said, “What is it?” She said, “I had a seizure.” She seemed confused about who he was. He said, “Is there any beer left?” They’d bought only one six-pack; he found its cardboard carrier flattened under his naked ass. “I’d better go see my family. I just got out of prison,” he said.

The night had cooled off. He walked through the Deuce. He would have sat down for a nap, but by now the dawn was near, the pavement had grown chilly, and the bums who’d slept on the sidewalk with their heads resting on their arms were already stirring awake, commencing to walk through the silent streets without a destination. Bill Houston joined the parade of souls waiting for the sun.

He walked himself sober and stayed that way until after his first meeting with his parole officer in a building downtown on Jefferson Street, abstinence from alcohol being a condition of his early release. No one was checking, however, and he soon fell back into his old ways, pulling himself together on Tuesdays for the weekly confrontation with the man who could send him back to prison with a phone call. His PO, Sam Webb, a portly young citified rancher type, who called Houston “a downtown cowboy,” got him employment as a trainee. Two months into his freedom Houston showed up for the meeting with whiskey on his breath, but Webb only sneered at the offense. “I could get you jailed for the weekend,” he said, “but they’d just let you go again. They need the cells in Florence for the meaner boys.”

Houston finished his training and began drawing full wages. He drove a forklift at a lumberyard, the biggest such concern in the Southwest, it was claimed, not counting California. All day from massive trucks to massive sheds he moved tons and tons of puke-smelling fresh-cut boards, and he never built anything but rectilinear stacks, and little by little he dismantled them. Others put the wood to use. He just watched it go by. Hardly socializing though drinking plenty, staying out of trouble, living almost as a solitary, feeling reluctant, somehow, to become himself again, he worked at the lumberyard well into the spring until his longer and longer absences rendered him nearly useless, and they fired him.

Th e mission had made sense until it had been accomplished. They’d turned up nothing. They sought a secure place to spend the night. An encampment of Special Forces had turned them away. In all likelihood, the presence of Special Forces alone had cleared the area of activity, but no one had been briefed as to their presence. On the basis of obsolete intelligence the six Lurps had dosed up and fared forth when they should have been sleeping in Nha Trang. The mission made no sense.

The incident was more of an assassination than an ambush. For the last half kilometer James had taken point. The night was starless, but the darkness knew what it knew. He followed it. After a few hundred paces more the darkness would widen and they’d have reached a place they knew about where they could break and wait for dawn, possibly call for extraction.

A gun opened up behind him in three short bursts. He fell and crawled back the way he’d come, but stopped a few yards along because his life forked sharply leftward exactly there. Leaves fell down on him as the others returned fire. Feet pounded on the trail. A grenade banged into the trees and he jammed his face into the dirt as it exploded. He rolled left into the bush, following the lifeline, and looked for flashes from across the trail. Nothing. The firing had ceased. The screeching of insects had stopped. The moment was strong and peaceful. The air had ringing depth. Every last particle of bullshit had been incinerated.

He slithered forward through the exhilarating lacerations of the bush until he heard one of his own crawling on the trail, and clicked his tongue. He heard a moan. He smelled shit. The moaning rose to a song but drew no fire.

“Man down! Man down!”

“On the trail! On the trail!” It was Dirty’s voice. James heard boots on the trail and fired three covering bursts and stopped. A man squatted over the wounded one.

“Grab an ankle. Let’s go.” “Fuck it. There’s no cover.” Joker strolled up the trail as in a public park. “It’s over.” He put him

self at the trailside with his gun at the ready. “It was just one fucker is

all.” “Bullshit.” “I saw every flash. I never looked down.” Dirty said to the hurt one, “Look here, look at me!” “I can’t see nothing but bullshit.” “Bakers!” “Who is it?” “It’s Dirty. It’s me. Don’t shut your eyes!” “Fuck, I’m not in the world, man. I’m not.” “You’re here. You’re okay.” “I don’t feel it. It’s bullshit.” “You’re here.” “I don’t feel the world, man.”

“His eyes are empty.” Dirty leaned close to smell for breath. “Fucked,” he said. “Good and fucked.”

All five of them were here now. James took point again and each of the others took an arm or a leg and dragged Bakers’s corpse to the clearing they knew of three hundred meters down the trail,

lag his ass. “He went from the feet up. He died right out of himself.” “But I like what he did, man. He stayed himself.” “Yeah?” “He didn’t bug and turn into a little child, man,” Dirty said. Dirty

himself was weeping. James hadn’t known Bakers too well. Gratitude and love filled him that Bakers had eaten it instead of one of the others. Especially himself. “We’ll catch somebody from one of these villes and make the mes

sage known.” “Fuck the dinks. It’s them Green Berets. Do you believe that shit?” “No, I do not.”

“If they’d let us in their perimeter, this man right here would be alive.

This man would be laughing.” “Let’s call and get him out.” “Not yet.” “Dirty, man, it’s over, man.” “Leave that radio alone.” Dirty thumbed his selector loudly. “Si, senor! I will not touch the fucker.” “Who’s coming with me?” Dirty and Conrad went hunting, and the other four stayed with the

corpse. “This guy died because those fuckers wouldn’t let us in their perimeter.” “Next little Beanie I see in town, I’m gonna follow him around till I

can stick him in his fucking back.” “Let’s call a strike on their cowardly asses.” James squatted with his back against a tree trunk and rolled a smoke

with some grass in it. Licking the paper he could taste the gunmetal on his fingers. He stood up and lit it as the others bunched around him to hide

the glow. “Did you hear what he said about bullshit? He knew. He knew.” “His back’s blown out anyway.” “Good for him. Otherwise it’d be life in an electric chair. That’s the

sentence, man. You motorvate by blowing in a tube.” “It’s lower down than that. He’d have his arms.” “I wouldn’t use no wheelchair. I’d swing around by a harness in the

ceiling.”

James left them and sat against the tree again. He didn’t want to talk about such things while his brain ballooned and finally cooled off. He put his head back and looked at the sky. Darkness, nothing, the pure nothing, just quiet electricity. The soul of everything. “I don’t believe that shit,” he said.

“Them little Beanies got every corner of their program stuck down

real tight.” “They don’t do shit. Got zero in their sacks.” “Let’s call in a strike on their cowardly fucking asses.” James said, “Come here,” and the others came close and squatted around him. “I need me a Chinese grenade. Soon as I get me a Chinese

grenade I’m gonna frag those motherfuckers into dead red meat.” “Tonight?” “Right as soon as I get one.” “Conrad’s got one.” “I know.” “Let’s put some smoke in their night. Take out about twenty a those

motherfuckers.” Conrad appeared among them as silently as a thought. “You back?” “Just me.” “Where’s Dirty?” “He’s got a woman.” James stood up. “Let me have that han’gernade.” “What.” “You know what I’m talking about. That Chinese thing.” “I’m taking it home.” “Home where?” “Home home.” “Fuck home.” “For a souvenir.” “You can’t take a han’gernade back to the world.” “Well, fuck. Anyway.” “I’ll get you another one.” Conrad carried it in his breast pocket. James reached in and wrestled

it out. “You coming with me?” “Where to?” “Back to where them Beanies are taking a snooze.” “No shit?” “No shit.” “I will if you wait around for the interrogation.” Dirty came back escorting a small naked creature into the field of

James’s night-vision as into a circle of firelight. She had a shiny lower lip that stuck out as if somebody had just called her a bad name. She seemed angry enough to kill, if she’d had a weapon in her hands. They held her down and the others took turns with her, but Dirty was already done and James wanted to keep himself mean for his personal Zero Hour with the Green Berets. When the others were finished she no longer needed holding down. James fell on his knees and put the point of his Bowie knife against the woman’s belly and said, “What’s your rank, sojer? You ever been showed what to do with one a these, sojer? You ever seen one before, sojer? What’s your rank, little sojer? What are you looking at? Do you think you’re my mother? You’re my mother, but who the fuck is my father?” He interrogated her until his hand was too weak to keep hold of the hilt.

Phoenix seemed to Bill Houston a much bigger city these days. Suburban developments had scattered themselves out across the desert. The traffic was fierce. Many mornings the horizon lay under blankets of brown smog. Whenever it all weighed him down too heavily he took a line and a couple of hooks and sat by one of the wide irrigation canals where catfish waited in peaceful ignorance of the twentieth century. He’d been told they came down from the Colorado River, and he’d been advised to use chunks of frankfurter for bait and a plastic bobber to keep his hook just touching bottom, but he didn’t have a bobber, not even a rod or reel, and he never had any luck. It didn’t trouble him. Waiting and hoping, that was the point, watching the water pass through the ancient desert, considering its travels. Often Houston stayed late spying on the folks who arrived and went in that lonely place, until he was able one night to surprise three hippies doing a dope exchange and rob them of three hundred fifty in cash and a brick of Mexican reefer wrapped in red cellophane. Staring at his trembling machete, the boys told him it was mediocre Mexican dope, regular quality, nothing special, but he could certainly have the stuff. He let them keep it, though he might have found a way to sell it himself. There was a line. He’d bully young kids and he’d steal from them, he might even have stabbed one if he’d had to. But he’d never deal drugs.

Near closing time he stood on the sidewalk in front of a bar’s open doorway bathed in its warm liquor-breath, the country music from inside getting at him, cutting him. A little man came out swearing and trying to close the gaps torn in his T-shirt by an assailant. A skinny rat, too old to be fighting, with a bleeding mouth and one eye swollen shut. He smiled like a punished child. “This will cure me. This is the end.” Many, many times Bill Houston had promised himself the same.

Captain Galassi expressed concerns about James’s self-esteem, which he pronounced self-steam. He wasn’t a boy-captain, he was the real thing, here since ‘63, field-commissioned and all that, but he’d let himself develop a concern for James’s self-steam, and expressed it, while Sergeant Lorin sat nearby with his fists on his thighs, expressing nothing.

“What’s your first name, Corporal?”

UT 77

James.

“I’m going to call you James instead of Corporal, because you’ll be a civilian here pretty quick. And anyway, in my eyes, you are no soldier. You got anything to say to that?”

“No.” “They beat you up real bad, didn’t they? They fucked you up pretty

good. Do you think you’re gonna get a Purple Heart for that?” “I already got one. And that was bullshit too.” “See, James, those are soldiers. Those are fine men. Matter of fact,

my sister married a Green Beret. They know what they came here to do, and they’re getting it done. They know who the enemy is, and they’re not gonna kill their own people. They’re people who if their own people try to fuck them up, if an American tries to fuck them up, even throws a grenade in their lap, they don’t kill that American, because that American is not their enemy. They just fuck him up some, because that American is a fucking son of a fucking bitch.”

James made no comment. “Beat you like you deserved. Are you still pissing blood?” “No, sir.” “Can you take solid food?” “I don’t require no food.” “Are you gonna tell me you didn’t toss that item?” “I didn’t throw any grenade.” “Fucker just plopped down out of the sky.” “I don’t know fuck-all about no grenade. I’ll tell you this about them

Green Berets: they’d as soon leave their people out in the bush to get killed when people ask can we stay in your perimeter. And one of our

guys did get killed. Did she divorce him?” “Who?” “Your sister.” “That’s none of your business.” “What’s your first name?” “That’s none of your business too.” “Okay, Jack. You ain’t no soldier to me either. Not if you back them

piece-of-shit Special Forces against your own Lurps. Fuck you, Jack.” “You know what I think? I think the sergeant and I are gonna take

you out back and work some shit on you like the Green Berets.” “Some Green-Beret-style shit,” Sergeant Lorin said. “I’d just love it. Let’s go.” “Apologize to the captain.” “I apologize, sir.” “Apology accepted. James, I think you have lost your control and

your ability to reason in this difficult atmosphere of the pressure of war

fare. Don’t you?” “I think that’s real possible.” Captain Galassi lit up a Kool. The Quonset hut’s air conditioner

didn’t filter entirely the smells from outside, good American smells, grease, frying potatoes, frying meat, reasonable-smelling latrines, not latrines full of slopehead dink Gook shit. Captain Galassi exhaled a cloud of smoke and overlaid the smells.

Screwy Loot would have offered him a Kool. James wished himself back in the days of old Screwy Loot, when the officers were the only crazy ones.

“Can I smoke, sir?” “Go ahead.” “I’m fresh out.” “Then I don’t think it’s gonna be possible.” “Then I won’t.” “What twisted you? Did you take a lotta Ell, Ess, Deeeee, boy?” “I don’t use no drugs. ‘Cept as indicated.” “Indicated by who? Your dealer?” “By the requirements of the mission, sir.” “You mean speed.”

“I mean what I said, is all.”

“You mean you’re a little Speedy Gonzales. Are you aware how fucked you are? You have long-range reconned straight out beyond the borders of sanity. You gotta go home.”

“I just signed on another go.” “You won’t be staying. I don’t want you in my war.” James said nothing. “The knees of your pants are a mess.” “I’ve been digging, sir.” “Or knee-walking drunk on Trang Khe Street four nights ago.” “Four nights ago? I do not know, sir.” “How come you don’t go to the Midnight Massage no more with the

guys?” No answer. “You got yourself something steady. Little steady woman on Tranky

Street. Were you on Trang Khe Street four nights ago?” “I think so. I don’t know.” “Were you?” “I think so.” “Or were you on patrol.” “I don’t know.” “What happened.” “When? On Tranky?” “On the patrol where a woman was murdered, you fucking mur

derer.”

James suddenly hated these two sonsofbitches because if they were going to go ahead and do this he should have been given a chair, and a cigarette.

“What happened to that local, James?” “Anybody got wasted they were hostiles, is all.” “Were you on that patrol?” “No.” “Four nights ago?” “No.” “No? Address me as sir.” “Who snitched us?” Sergeant Lorin said, “None of your business.”

“Somebody’s a liar.” “Somebody’s a liar about what?” the sarge said. James waited for the captain to speak. “Did you do this?” “I don’t know.” “You don’t know? Goddammit, man, you will address me as sir.” “I don’t know, sir.” “Did you do this, or not?” “I don’t remember which night was what, sir. I think I drank too

much beer last week.” The sarge said, “Had him a wicked jag on.” “Do you like beer, James? Well, there isn’t any beer in Leavenworth.” “Have you been there?” “Don’t sass me.” “I got friends there.” “Don’t sass me.” “Apologize to the captain.” “I apologize, sir.” “What did you do to that woman?” “She was VC.” “Bullshit.” “She was a VC whore.” “Bullshit.” “She’s a whore, and this is a war. Sir.” “Don’t tell me what this is. I know what it is. I think.” “So do I.” “Do you intend to do a fourth tour?” ‘Yes, sir.” “No, sir. No more for you.” “Sir, I’ve got patrol at seventeen hundred.” “Patrol? Jesus Christ. Number one, we don’t send guys with their ribs

taped up and their arm in a cast out on patrol.” “It’s a sling. It ain’t a cast. It comes off.” “Number two: We don’t send civilians out on patrol.” “I ain’t a civilian.” “Well,” the captain said, and such anger gripped him that he slurred

his words, “do you mind if I tell you that if you’re not a civilian you haven’t heard the last of this? I’m gonna take stock of this, I will get back to you, you haven’t heard the last of this. I will get back to you. Maybe a lot of people will be getting back to you. Maybe the whole army will be getting back to you.”

“I don’t think so.” “You don’t think so? Are you being insubordinate?” “I’m just saying something.” “What are you saying?” “I don’t know.” “What are you saying?” “That you think you’re gonna get back to me, but I don’t think

you’re gonna get back to me, because she was a whore, and this is a war. And that’s what happens, because this is a war, because this is not just a war.”

“Well, which is it? Is it a war, or is it not just a war?” “I’m just telling you.” “You little punk. I was in this war before you learned to jerk your

meat. All right?” “All right.” “All right,” said the captain. For thirty seconds they just stood there

doing nothing. James said, “Sir, Captain, I gotta go, I gotta boogie.” “No, James, you don’t. Jesus Christ. Patrol?” ‘Tes, sir.” Captain Galassi stood up. He stepped smartly to the door of the

Quonset hut, grasped the knob, and opened it wide. Outside, the dust, the noise of trucks, helicopters—a heavy, gray day—”Sergeant,” he said, “speak to this man.” He left and pulled the door shut behind him, leaving things relatively quiet again under the air conditioner’s hum.

The sarge sat down at the captain’s desk and offered James a seat. But not a cigarette.

Lorin said, “You could’ve wasted as many as four of those motherfuckers.—Well, I know, the only one got hurt is you.” After a while Lorin said, “But this business with the woman.”

“Shit goes on all the time.” Lorin just looked at him. Stared at him. Said, “James.” “What.”

“No. You tell me what.” James said, “I mean, where did this shit about a woman come from,

what is this shit doing in my movie?” “You like your movie?” “It’s kind of like where I have these sensors. And the minute the shit

starts my mind snaps on in Technicolor. Like I have these sensors.” “So you just want to keep on keeping on?” “Yeah.” “Watching your Technicolor movie?” “Yeah.” “Till you eat shit and die?” “Yeah.” “Right there I kind of agree with you, James. I don’t really think it’s

highly advisable to turn you loose on the United States. I’d say keep you right here till you get killed. But if it ain’t bass-ackwards, it ain’t the U.S. Army, is it?”

“We do it all in the dark, Sarge. Mistakes get made.”

“Yeah, they do. But this little mistake with the woman is traveling right straight up the captain’s ass. And then with the fragging thing, you’re sticking out all over.”

“Can you spare me a toke?” “In a minute. I’m telling you something.” “Okay.” “So I think it’s the real deal, Cowboy. I think you’re gonna have to go

home.” “Home?” “Home where you came from.” “I don’t know what to say.” “Say you’re a mess.”

1 m a mess. “If you don’t want a ticket out of hell, then you ain’t regular in your mind no more, are you, sojer?” “If you’re talking, I gotta listen. You always did have your finger right

smack on the thing, man.” “Uncle Ho done died, buddy. You won the war. It’s over.” “Yeah?” “Pack up. Go home. Right now.”

“Now?”

“Absolutely. Get to Tan Son Nhut and get on a MAC flight and go. Just go. I’ll furlough you, and after you’re there we’ll work all the paper to make it permanent.”

The sergeant took out a cigarette. He offered James one and lit both out of a matchbook from the Midnight Massage. He said, “It’ll be honorable.”

“What will?” “The discharge.” “Oh … Yeah. Honorable?” “Honorable Discharge.” “If you say so.” “I say Honorable. And I always will.”

In the middle of June, Bill Houston bailed his brother James out of jail. James had reached Phoenix a couple of weeks before but hadn’t gotten in touch with anyone until he’d been arrested for simple assault, and then he’d called their mother. As James came out past the bailiff’s desk, he was smiling. Otherwise he looked sketchy, like something might get him from behind.

“First of all, I ain’t smiling because I’m proud. I’m smiling because

I’m glad as hell to get out.” “You’re lucky I had a few bucks.” “Sorry for you spending it this way.” “Usually I’m on my ass, but lately things have been breaking a little

different for me.” “Looks like you put on a little weight.” “Well —I was in Florence.” Out on the street James ducked his head and squinted against the

light. “I appreciate this, Bill Junior. No lie.” “Family better count for something. Because nothing else does.” “You got that right.” “You ready for a burger?” “Does the Pope wear a dress?” James expelled a wad of tobacco from

his mouth and it bounced on the pavement like a small turd. “How much did you pay the bondsman guy?” “A hundred. And if you don’t do right and show for court, I owe him

a thousand.” “I’ll do right.” “I kind of hope so.” “I’ll pay you back the hundred too.” “Don’t sweat it. Just when you can.” Bill Houston reached his right hand cross-draw to dig in the left

pocket of his jeans for the keys. “You got a car.” “Yep. It’s a Rolls.” “No shit?” It was an old Lincoln with a hood like the deck of an aircraft carrier.

“Yeah, it ain’t a Rolls. But it rolls when you push on the gas.”

He took James to a McDonald’s and got him three of the biggest they had and two chocolate shakes. James ate fast and then sat there with his arms crossed on his chest, mad-dogging everybody.

“Hey.” James belched loudly. They talked about their mother. James said, “How old is she, any

ways?” “She’s fifty-eight at least,” Bill said, “maybe fifty-nine. But she seems

like she’s past a hundred.” “I know. Yeah. She does. She has for a long time.” Bill said, “So —I’m called Bill Junior. But did something ever occur

to you? It occurred to me a long time ago.” “What.” “There ain’t no Bill Senior.” An old man at the next little table asked them: “How old are you

boys?” They looked at each other. The old man said: “I’m sixty-six. You

know—Route Sixty-six? Like that. Sixty-six.” “Fuck yourself,” James said. Bill Houston observed James dipping snuff. He took a wad from the

tin, shoved it down inside his cheek, shut the lid, wiped his fingers on the underneath of his pants leg.

“The bondsman said this was the fourth time in two weeks the cops rousted you for fighting, so they finally had to charge you.”

“That what he said?”

It pissed Bill Houston off, it irked him unreasonably, that James would playact an old soldier, as if he’d explored some mysterious region and been tortured there.

“You want another burger?”

“I’m all right.”

“Really? You’re all right?”

“Yeah.”

“The evidence is pointing the other way.”

Th e day after James got out of jail he went to a small office where a fat, sad man helped him fill out some forms. He said the checks would start in about four weeks if everything didn’t go too wrong. The man told him about a place downtown that might give him further benefits, and James went to see about it, but they wanted him to stand in line there and fill out more idiotic forms.

For several days he was permitted to stay in a hostel on the east side, on Van Buren Street, the street of outlaws and whores, thirty blocks from where his mother had lived before he’d left for Southeast Asia. Perhaps she still resided there.

In the mornings he set out walking, rarely stopping. To the west lay factories and warehouses. In other directions the city gave way to suburban tracts, empty desert, or irrigated farmland. It was early in the desert summer, hot, but dry. He wore a straw cowboy hat and kept the sun behind him all day, asking in restaurants for water. When it came down ahead of him he turned and went the other way. Only half of him was plugged in. The rest was dark. He could feel his sensors dying.

James didn’t get in touch with Stevie. She came to see him just before he left the hostel for good, and they went out for drinks, but he railed at her so unflaggingly in the Aces Tavern that the bartender shouted at James to leave, and Stevie stayed, saying that she’d seen what he wanted to show her and that she got the message and refused to go anywhere with a man who repaid her kindness with curses and abuse. As the bartender strong-armed him into the night James looked back and saw her crying, swaying in the light of the jukebox. Thirty minutes later Stevie found him standing in front of the state insane asylum at Twenty-fourth Street, looking in through the barred gate at the wide lawns, which in the illumination of the arc lamps looked uniformly silver and magical. She’d finished crying. She told him she couldn’t stop loving him. He swore to her he’d get a job.

He’d made it out of the war with just short of four hundred dollars cash. He rented an apartment in a plywood sort of building called Rob Roy Suites and bought a Harley in many pieces which he commenced to assemble in the living room and knew he’d never complete. He hated his neighbor across the court, a diesel-dyke with a bad mouth. You could tell she used to be sexy but had always hated men. James didn’t know what to do. What did these good souls want you to do? Most evenings he went to a bar just a few blocks down the street where you could almost always get into a fight, or he drank port wine from plastic cups in places full of ripped-up old alcoholic men. He waited for his checks to start. When they started, he bought a Colt.45 revolver, a real six-shooter. He was pretty sure he would eventually shoot the woman living across the way but he felt there was nothing any human power could do about it.

After a month at the Rob Roy Suites he moved to the Majestic Palms Apartments on Thirty-second Street half a block above Van Buren. Each morning he sat by the shadeless window naked, jiggling his knees, and watched a tremendously fat black guy in a circus-tent T-shirt cross the street from wherever he dwelt and open up the Circle K on the corner.

James walked the neighborhood and passed the slack whores on the bus stop benches and shouldered past the old crones taking their minuscule paces forward through the intersections and observed the Mexican women in their tall spiked heels and tight pink pants, who looked for sale but really weren’t.

He sits at a bus stop. He drags on a Kool. He spits between his feet. In his fingers he holds the neck of a half pint of Popov vodka, his head bowed low under the crashing irrelevance of these millions of monsters and their games.

An older guy sitting next to him with a newspaper open across his knees, reading in the glaring sunlight, squinting, began to curse these people undermining the military effort in Vietnam. “Those boys are doing right. They’re our boys. They’re doing right,” he said. James felt as if he could sure use a cigarette, and said so. “I don’t smoke,” the man said. “Don’t even drink coffee. I was raised as a Mormon. Yep. Raised as a Mormon. But I don’t believe in it now. You know why? Because it’s phony.” James repeated he’d like a cigarette, and the man got up and walked away. And a dog came along and stopped and looked at him and James said, “You got a face, buddy,” and he scratched its ears and he said, “Yeah, buddy, you got a face.”

One night in the Aces Tavern he ran into his older brother Bill and Bill’s old friend Pat Patterson. Patterson had just come out of the Arizona State Prison in Florence, where the two had been acquainted. He was a slender, erectly postured young man who looked like he’d landed here intact from the rockabilly fifties, his hair combed in a ducktail and his short sleeves turned up above his triceps, and his collar turned up too.

Bill explained to his brother a little bit about prison: “You got your guys, and they got their guys, depending on your skin color. It’s not about right or wrong. It’s who’s who—who’s the people next to you. And you owe them.”

“I know about it.”

“I know you know about it. You sure do. You’ve had experience on both sides of a gun.”

“It never happened.”

“But what I’m saying—you must’ve had a lot of experiences.”

“It never happened. It never happened.”

Bill Junior turned his glass in his hands and frowned. “It kind of rubs me wrong how you act, James.” He cleared his throat, made sure the bartender wasn’t looking, and spat on the floor. “Like, ‘James is back in the world. And the world is a big old zit so James wants to piss in its face.’ How long are you going to stay an asshole?”

“Till something convinces me different.”

Bill drained his glass and got up and wandered out the door.

Patterson said to James, “Here’s a question for you: Is this the Aces Tavern as in, Man, I got four Aces? Or is this Aces Tavern as in, This tavern belongs to a cat named Ace?” He pointed to the barmaid, saying, “She’s a young, hot little machine.” James agreed she was little, but she was long past young. The flesh under her arms wobbled as she plunged beer mugs into the sink and shook the drops out and placed them on a towel. James pointed it out. “I ain’t watching her arms/’ Patterson said. “I’m watching her ass wiggle.”

“I better go see what Junior’s up to.”

“Fuck that boy. He’ll be just fine.”

James went out on the sidewalk, but Bill was gone. There was only a young man out front bothering the citizens who passed, trying to sell the shirt off his back. James retreated into the Aces and rejoined Patterson, who asked if James had a gun, and James said he had one.

“Wadn’t you a Lurp over there in the Vietnam?”

James said yes.

Patterson intended to rob a casino some folks ran in an isolated house out near Gila Bend and wondered if James would like to make some money. Patterson explained that robbing a casino out in the desert, in the night, would have some of the quality of warfare. James said, “All right.”

They’d been told the patient was a child, but he was a grown man in his thirties, Vietcong, probably. At this point the men who’d brought them to the patient described him as a farmer who’d unearthed an unexploded artillery round. From the nature of the injury—one arm mutilated, the rest of him apparently shielded —it seemed likely he’d meant to salvage the device in order to turn it against its American manufacturers. How the patient had sustained his injuries made no difference to Dr. Mainichikoh, and certainly Kathy didn’t care. With the doctor, in his Land Rover, she got around the villes more freely than she might have if she waited to go with any of the WCS teams, and by her assistance as his nurse she paid her fare. Among the villes Dr. Mainichikoh was known as “Dr. Mai,” which, with a certain upward inflection, could mean “Dr. American,” and today this had led to confusion —Kathy, clearly the Anglo, was presumed to be the physician, and the villagers took the little Japanese man accompanying her to be her nurse. Mai made no attempt to disabuse them except by seizing the situation and giving orders. She liked working with him. He was resourceful—a requirement, given the lack of resources—and good-humored to the point he seemed quite insensitive to grim facts. She understood he was rich, from a Tokyo import-export family. Whether they did business with Vietnam she didn’t know.

The two men who’d conducted them here had established a kind of facility shaded by a canvas tarp. They had the patient laid out on a bloodstained table of boards and lumber rounds and told Kathy they were ready to sterilize the implements immediately. As Dr. Mai began his examination they began to grasp his true role, and they asked him if now they should get the fire going. He told them yes, right away.

Amputation had been pretty well completed by the injury itself, but the forearm remained connected by a bit of bone, muscle, and flesh below the elbow. On a day so hot and without instruments to measure at what point on the limb arterial deficiency had begun, determining what to take and what to leave was guesswork, but Dr. Mai had a deep faith in his own ability to judge the extent of devitalized tissue. “He can keep the elbow,” he said. “It’s a small explosive. If it’s a land mine, well, you’d better take the whole limb, isn’t it? Because it’s going to die.” She might have argued that since this was the patient’s only chance for surgery, higher was better and maybe the whole arm should go, but Dr. Mai wasn’t addressing her. He talked to himself habitually, always in English. “This man is quite strong. A good one. Not even in shock.” The patient stared straight up at the canvas sheet protecting them from the sun and seemed determined not to lose consciousness. A dozen or so shrapnel lacerations on his face and chest had already been excised and sutured with tailoring thread. One, on the cheekbone, had just missed taking his left eye.

They had only Xylocaine, but the doctor cheerfully effected an axillary block of the brachial plexus and went to work while Kathy dabbed away the sweat on his face with a bandanna sterilized in rubbing alcohol.

The patient’s two comrades squatted by a tree not far off, ready to fetch whatever might be needed, as if they had anything to fetch. The man’s family kept out of the way in one of the hooches, all but a toothless mamasan who enacted a ritual of private significance only a few meters away, out in the relentless sunshine, in the smoke of the charcoal fire and the steam from the pot where the instruments boiled: a dance of ominous hesitations, and sudden leaps, and arabesques. Dr. Mai permitted the display without comment, and Kathy welcomed it as boding well for the patient. The idea that among the ragged, the crazy, the whirlyeyed, the frothing-at-the-mouth, among the sideways, among the murablers, shufflers, laughers, a bit of loving scrutiny would turn up the blessed poor in spirit, the burned visionary, the holy vagrant—she’d always entertained it, this romance.

Dr. Mai lifted his machete from the cauldron and poured half a quart of alcohol all over it and said, “Banzai.” Kathy laughed and pulled back the skin in the direction of the elbow. “In the time of your Civil War,” Dr. Mai said, making the initial cut and beginning to work circumferentially through the first layer of flesh to the fascia beneath, “amputation was a very gruesome business to perform. Now we can be optimists.”

“My Civil War?” she said. “Do you mean the American Civil War?” “Yes.” “I’m from Canada,” she said. “I’m Canadian.” “I see. Between the Union and Confederate.” “The Canadians weren’t part of that war.” “I see—Canada.” “You know I’m from Canada.” “Yes. But I thought Canada is from the United States.” “We’re north of there.” “So often north, south. Not so often east and west civil war.” She released her grip on the skin, and when it retracted Dr. Mai,

pressing down with his palm on the blade’s back and rocking the handle up and down, cut through the fascia and the first layer of muscle, and as each layer retracted he cut through the next. Wherever he encountered a blood vessel Kathy clamped it with thread. With her hands she applied upward pressure on the proximal muscle stump. After the deep muscles had retracted the doctor took his saw from the cauldron and went at the bone while she irrigated the site with saline from a large syringe.

The doctor brushed the severed arm from the table onto the earth between his feet and picked up the bandanna and wiped his face, while one by one Kathy pulled the major nerve stumps forward and cut them as high along as could be reached. One of the arteries still bled, and she tied it off again.

She cleaned and repacked the implements while Dr. Mai took the crazy old woman’s hand and danced a little jig with her. He’d made a good concave stump—he was an excellent technician and had a genuine medical sixth sense—but Kathy wondered if they should have left so much of the arm. In fluent Vietnamese the doctor instructed the patient’s companions in caring for the stump and preventing retraction of the skin by the use of adhesive tape and an Ace bandage. He just wasn’t equipped to plaster-cast the arm’s remainder and fashion a ladder splint and stockinette and wire retractor and all the rest, but it didn’t matter. One look at the patient’s face told you he’d survive. Kathy had seven onequarter-grain syrettes of morphine in her kit and left them all with him because you could see this man would survive.

Dr. Mai stepped to the Land Rover and took his canteen from the front seat and enjoyed a long drink and brought it back to Kathy. She declined.

“I don’t see you drink enough water, Kathy.”

“I get plenty.”

“You’re well adjusted to the tropics. How long did it take you to adjust?” “I lived in the PI a couple years before I ever came here.” “You’ve been here five years, isn’t it?” “Five years. Almost.” “Yes. How long will you stay?” “Until it’s over.”

O n a sunny November morning just two weeks before he went away to prison, James married Stevie at the courthouse.

His family came to watch. In a churchgoing dress with puffy shoulders, his mother looked like the Okie she was. Brother Bill wore a white sports coat over a white T-shirt, and as the family all stood before the magistrate he sweated as if he were on trial, while young Burris smirked and giggled like a girl, and resembled one, too, with hair grown almost to his shoulders.

Stevie’s parents believed she was marrying a criminal. At first they made promises to attend, but in the end they stayed away.

As the newlyweds left the courthouse the groom could see the Deuce, the section of Second Avenue where the bums rolled in the gutters, and beyond the Deuce the neighborhood where he lived.

Afterward they barbecued small sirloin steaks in South Mountain Park. Bill Junior got red-eyed drunk, and Burris, who might have been fourteen but looked no older than eleven, smoked cigarettes openly. Their mother stayed off in a corner, ready to preach at all who’d listen, or rehearse the family’s tragedies.

The wedding didn’t change much. James kept living in his apartment and Stevie stayed on at her parents’ while James dealt with charges of aggravated assault and armed robbery. He’d pled innocent and made bail, but soon he’d appear again before the judge and change his story and receive his sentence. Not much doubt attached to his prospects. Nevertheless, his court-appointed attorney insisted on taking the process through all its steps in order to get the best deal from the prosecutor. James and the rockabilly Pat Patterson had done all right to begin with, but their luck had run out and the police had arrested them without incident outside a tavern about an hour after their fourth robbery. Patterson, a parolee, had gone directly back to Florence.

On this, his first felony offense, and thanks to his war record, James could expect to serve no more than three years, probably more like two. Stevie swore she’d wait. James might have run away to Mexico, but he was tired, very tired.

Four days from sentencing, four days from prison food, ten days married, and still never having tasted a meal cooked by his wife, James went looking for breakfast on South Central Avenue. He sat in a diner among a handful of demented customers, a man grimacing, another man swearing, and ordered an egg. The chubby probably Chinese proprietress stood by the register having breakfast, eating her oatmeal out of a coffee mug. She tore off half a slice of bread in her teeth and gnashed it down, carrying on with a full mouth in what she must have thought was English, but James couldn’t understand a word—she had that whining, nasal way of talking. Suddenly he very vividly smelled and tasted Nha Trang.

He was distracted by the man in the booth next to his table, who sat sideways with his legs out in the aisle. “I am all souped-up on speed. Yes,” he said very quietly, “I am a speedy little boy.”

“Fm not in the shape of mind to find that interesting,” James said.

“You know where I was seven hours and twenty minutes ago? I was home. You know where home is? San Diego. Know what I was doing? Standing in front of a mirror—full-length mirror, okay?—stark-naked, with a.357 in this hand, holding it to my head just like this. Fm gonna shoot myself. Do you believe me?”

James put his fork down.

“Yeah. Had a little problem with the gambling. Little? Fuck. It took every fucking thing I owned. Wife. Kids. House. Fm bankrupt. She got the house. And a million years of payments on it. Fuck. Ready to blow my brains all over my sister’s bedroom. Yes indeed. Fuck yes. But I didn’t want my sister coming home to a mess like that—or I didn’t have the balls to shoot myself, let’s admit it. So I’m thinking I need to come up with a way of ending this horror show that’s quick and painless and they won’t know I was the one who did this to myself. So I got dressed and I decided here’s how I’ll go out, I’ll get in that little foreign job, little VW bug, small car, sister’s car, ain’t my car. So I got in it and fired it up and headed east on Interstate Eight, my friend, out of San Diego, and I put on my high beams and I told myself the first semi truck flashes his lights at me I’m gonna swing into him head-on, take myself out kamikaze-style. And I had both hands on the wheel the whole way, man, didn’t take my hands off except to scratch my nuts or thumb the cap off a bottle of bennies and shake a couple more down my throat. And I tell you what. That whole ride, three hundred and fifty miles at least, nobody once flashed their lights at me, sir, not one person, there was not a single incident of anybody flashing their lights at me. And that’s a miracle. It’s a miracle I’m sitting here alive. I don’t know what it means. But I’m alive. That’s all I know. And I don’t know anything more on this earth except that. I am alive.”

He didn’t appear to be on any kind of bennies. He looked very calm and stayed quite still, with his right leg draped over his left knee and his hands clasped gently before him on his thigh. His eyes were red, but they brimmed with the light of love. He ordered white toast without butter and tore small pieces from it and fed them between his lips. Struck a match and lit a cigarette and tossed the matchbook onto his plate.

James said, “Took you a suicide run.”

“Yeah. Sure did.”

“I been on a couple runs like that.”

“Yeah.”

“Hey. You still got your gun? You want me to shoot you?”

The man looked dapper in a tweed sort of sports jacket over a thin beige sweater, pale blue pajama bottoms, and flimsy cloth house slippers. He took a reflective drag on his cigarette. “I left the gun at home,” he said.

Bill Houston took his brother James out for a talk the day before his final court appearance. He invited him to a coffee shop rather than a tavern; James had better understand the matter was serious. “Look, you never know. All I know is you want to stay out of max, because somebody’s always cutting up in there, and they’re always locking you down. So while they have you waiting for classification, talk about your education constantly. Any counselors, those guys, anybody like that talks to you, you say ‘education, education.’ You want to finish high school, you want to learn a skill. Just talk about stuff like that, and they’ll put you in medium. Medium is where you want to be. It’s more relaxed. People aren’t so crazy. You’re on the yard just about anytime you want. It’s good. Believe me, you don’t want max.”

“Who all’s in there?” “Where? Medium?” “Florence. Anywheres, medium or max.” “Well-lots of folks.” “Is the old man in there? Your father?” “He ain’t my father. He’s your father.” “Whoever’s father. He in there?” “Yeah. He’s over in max. No. I think he got out.” “You pretty sure about that?” “Yeah. I think he got out. She quit visiting, anyways.” “She don’t go no more?” “Not since I got out. Far as I know. So her husband must be some

where.” “Where?” “I don’t know. Somewhere else.” Bill left his younger brother with a final handshake, not sure he’d got

ten himself across succesfully, and headed downtown to check on work at the day-labor office, or hang around the park. The desert autumn had come, time for pruning the orchards. He watched men cutting away at the olive trees along the avenues with moaning chain saws and felt it all happening inside him.

He wished for a motorcycle. Wondered if stealing one was difficult. Walked around looking for one outside the taverns, then inside the taverns for happy hours and deals on port wine. As a vintage, port was nobody’s favorite, but people forced to consider these things, like himself, had calculated that it offered the highest proof per penny. “Thick and sickly sweet,” a middle-aged woman said, toasting him sadly. “Not you!” she said. “I mean the port. It’s sweet. You look sour. I’m sour too.” Her problem was, she told him, that her son-in-law had died in Vietnam. Houston said he had a brother just back from there. “No. Really? Come here,” she said, “I gotta make an introduction,” and led him by the hand to a booth to meet her daughter, widowed by the war after a long year’s separation from the boy she’d married only a week before he’d shipped. He’d been killed near the end of his tour. Houston looked at wedding photographs. Not his idea of a party. The ladies bought a round. The young widow drank too many beers, but rather than breaking down crying, she told how she’d cried at her young husband’s funeral, was glad she’d cried, had been afraid she wouldn’t be able to cry. She’d spent these last ten days since the news had come in a state of relief. Now she wouldn’t have to welcome him home and get to know him all over again. In her husband’s absence, she’d changed a lot. She hadn’t known what to do about that. At the funeral they’d presented her with a flag folded into a triangle. “Yeah, I got a flag.”

“No shit. A flag? Oh, you mean an American flag. Old Glory.” Houston had his leg pressed along the length of her thigh.

“Well, they don’t call it Old Glory, do they? It’s something else.”

“It’s something else, I think. Yeah.”

“The Stars and Bars or something.”

“My little brother was over there. Infantry. Won himself a Purple Heart.” “Really? The Purple Heart?” “Sure thing.” “What happened to him?”

“He stepped on a booby trap in a tunnel. One of them punji sticks.

Or he ran into it or something.” “Wow. Gee.” “It couldVe been worse. Them little VC make some wicked-ass

booby traps. His was just a bamboo sliver, really. But it’s a wound. It’s

worth a Purple Heart.” “So, wow. Was he a tunnel rat?” “I don’t know what he was. He ended up with the Lurps. Man —

I used to hold him down and drip spit on his face. You know—drool it

and slurp it back.” “Eew!” said both women together. “That’s how us sailors handle them Lurps.” “Eew!” “Yeah. Ain’t that the shits?” “My husband divorced me,” the mother said. “That feels the same as

if he died. Except they don’t give you a flag, and I still think about killing

him every day.” “Is that your dad she’s talking about?” Houston asked the girl. “According to the doctors,” she said. As soon as her mother got up to visit the bathroom Houston said,

“You want to go to a sleazy motel and watch some TV or something?” “If you got the money, honey, I got the time.” “Look here. See what this is?” “It’s a Kennedy half a dollar.” “That’s it, my life savings. I’ll stick it up my ass for fifty more cents. I’ll

break a bottle over my head.” “I got the money, honey. I’m getting war insurance.” The girl leaned against him and touched her fingers lightly to his

chest hair. The desert nights dipped well below fifty Fahrenheit, but Bill Houston went bare-skinned under a black leather jacket. His name on the street was Leather Bill. The rest of his wardrobe were jeans and boots wrecked by the abrasions of life.

“Better find the exit before Mom comes back,” the girl said.

When he opened his eyes in the morning, it developed she’d found the motel’s exit sometime earlier. A man with a mission would have rolled out first, and gone through her purse. Instead he’d snuggled down in dreams he couldn’t remember.

He’d lived almost twenty-five years, his hardships colored in his own mind as youthful adventures, someday to be followed by a period of intense self-betterment, then accomplishment and ease. But this morning in particular he felt like a man overboard far from any harbor, keeping afloat only for the sake of it, waiting for his strength to give out.

When would he strike out for shore? When would he receive the gift of desperation? He stayed under the covers in the chilly, Lysol-smelling room until the management knocked on the door. He asked for ten minutes, showered, and went back to bed to wait for the knock that meant business.

Jame s had a roommate, another veteran, a biker named Fred, and Fred’s Harley, which occupied most of the living room. James noticed one day that his friend hadn’t been around in a while, maybe in as long as a month or even two months, and as a way of summoning him back, if he was still alive, James perpetrated the mystical sacrilege of straddling Fred’s Harley and turning the ignition key. Three kicks and it started explosively and sat beneath him growling and shuddering. He let out the clutch and it leapt straight into the wall and he found himself lying beneath it on the living room floor. He could hardly get the machine upright on his own—too much drinking and too much sitting around; he was a mess. No wonder he lost so many fights. But he enjoyed losing, enjoyed a sort of righteous lethargy while he curled in a ball and somebody kicked him in the head and back and legs, enjoyed lying with his face in his own blood while voices cried, “Stop it! That’s enough! You’re killing him! You’re killing him!” because they were wrong. They hadn’t come anywhere close to killing him.

1983

H ao brought the New Straits Times to the kitchen table and turned off the small electric fan in order to read. It wasn’t, Kim understood, the fan’s noise that disturbed him, but its interference with the pages. Each evening he sat here with Dr. Bourgois’s morning edition of the New Straits Times, parsing out the news in English in his underwear, and, on Thursday or Friday, the doctor’s Asiaweek as well. What was the point reading the newspaper each day in a place not your home? Even if you lived there? She didn’t mind if he reported to her certain miscellaneous events, but she’d forbidden him to mention news of any obscene Malaysian celebrations. Kim was made uncomfortable by the Islamic influences around them, the crying of the mosques and the public ceremonies of circumcision for thirteen-year-old princes. However, this place suited her. Her vigor had returned—as if from her teens. Dr. Bourgois treated her with free medicines from his hospital, and Kuala Lumpur was full of Chinese herbalists who kept her in health. Several promised immunity to everything. She didn’t want it. If illness didn’t kill you, you died of bad luck.

Her husband stopped reading and raised his face to her. He reached for his empty teacup and looked down into it, as if a sudden need to examine it had stopped his reading.

Kim said, “What is it?”

“Nothing.”

“It’s something. Don’t say it’s nothing.”

“Someone from Saigon.”

She stood behind him. He covered part of the page with his hand, and she reached over his shoulder and moved it away. “The Canadian?” “An American.” “No. It says ‘Canadian.’ I can read ‘Canadian.’ And ‘Benęt.’ ” “He’s not Canadian. And that’s not his name. But I remember him. I

knew him.”

“Where? Here in Kuala Lumpur?” “Back home.” “Then don’t think about it.”

Don’t think about it? But I do. I think about luck … sorrow … gratitude… all mixed in a poison. And we drink it.

Luck and the sacrifice of others had brought them to live here in the servants’ quarters behind the house of the physician from Marseilles. Kim did the laundry and sometimes went about the doctor’s house dusting things, as she’d done all her life, though the doctor had other servants for that; and Hao drove the car. He took the girls to and from school and to piano lessons and dancing lessons. The young girls went to the American School and spoke very good English. With the parents Hao communicated in French. Dr. Bourgois walked a few blocks each day to and from the hospital where he worked as an administrator. Hao drove the wife to shopping, to the bridge club, and to the bookstores. All thanks to luck, and the sacrifice of others. But some of those others hadn’t, themselves, chosen sacrifice. He’d chosen it for them. And there came sorrow. The trick he’d played Trung Than—the lowest thing he’d ever done. Yet not at all difficult. The Americans had made it easy. His most terrible crime, and where had it led? The Americans had thrown Trung into a prison camp and he’d come out a hero of the cause, with a house in Saigon and membership in the party. Historians came asking for interviews. Good for Trung. He’d dodged the wind. And Saigon was Ho Chi Minh City.

Some of those others had chosen sacrifice willingly, however, with the strength of their hearts; and there came gratitude. For the colonel. For the infantryman who’d thrown his helmet over the grenade and then himself over the helmet. And for the other Americans who’d helped them get away. The Americans had remembered, had kept their promises to him, and even to his country. They hadn’t failed to keep such a promise. They’d simply lost the war.

And tomorrow, or the next day, he planned to tell Kim he’d had word from their nephew Minh—this through a Vietnamese family who ran a restaurant in Singapore, longtime emigrants who’d set a worldwide network going to make connections among scattered clans. Minh had survived—who knew what troubles he’d survived?—and lived close to Boston, Massachussets. Minh had located relatives in Texas who fished in the Gulf of Mexico, and they might be persuaded to help their Cousin Hao and his wife reach America. And there, again—luck. He’d chosen the right side. Lucky life!

His wife had started the gas, and the kettle trembled on the stove. He hadn’t noticed. He’d thought she was still behind him, studying the face in the news.

She brought him the teapot. “What does it say?” “He’s in a lot of trouble.” “Is there anything you can do?” “No. I knew him, that’s all.”

1/8/83 Dear Eduardo Aguinaldo, You may have already gotten a letter from me. But assuming you haven’t:

My name is William Benęt. They call me “Skip.” You, in fact, called me “Skip.” Do you by any chance remember me? Let’s just say I’m not the person I was back then, and leave it at that. But do you remember me?

I live a good deal in Cebu City. Lived. I haven’t been there for two years, approximately. Around there they know me as “William Benęt, the Canadian guy.”

I have a family in Cebu City, a woman wife and three kids. Not a legal union. Look in on them, will you? Wife’s name is Cora Ng. Her cousin owns the Ng Fine Store near the docks. The cousin can find her for you. Last time I checked I owned two buildings in the neighborhood. Cora can tell you which ones. She understands cash better than she understands real estate, so maybe you’d be good enough to handle the sale for her and see that she gets the money.

I know it’s been a long time, Eddie. I know I’m imposing, but I don’t know who else to ask. All the people I know are crooks, just like me.

If this is one of two letters you’ve received, forgive me for contacting you twice, but I’m not sure which one will reach you. It’s no trouble for me writing an extra letter, I’ll tell you that. I spend my time here writing letters I don’t know how to address. The conditions are tolerable, washing up from a community bucket, eating rice with bits of fish, no maggots, the water tastes fine. It isn’t exactly a Japanese prison camp in Burma. Remember The Colonel? Compared to his stories of “Kilo 40,” this place is an afternoon at the Polo Club.

If you happen to run across any of our bunch from back then, I want you to tell them the Colonel never died. His body died, but he lives on in me. As for the ewes folks who claim he never physically died and he’s running around Southeast Asia with a dagger in his teeth and waving a bloody cutlass or something—they’re wrong. He’s definitely deceased. You’ll just have to take my word for it.

These charges against me are going to stick. Whether they hang me or just keep me, I won’t be running around loose in SE Asia again for quite a while. So see to my family, will you, old boy? Your old Pal, Skip (William French Benęt)

That he should mention the Polo Club! The letter came among a batch Eddie had taken to the club to peruse over lunch—an airletter, written in a very small hand and postmarked Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Charges? Hanging? For what? Eddie had heard nothing about it. He had a friend at the Manila Times who could perhaps see about all this. And the colonel, alive? He’d never had any report to the contrary, never any word of the colonel’s demise. He wasn’t in touch with any of “the bunch” from back then, but surely he would have known if the colonel had died.

How often he’d thought of Skip Sands. How seldom he’d done anything about it. He’d made no attempt to track him down. He associated Skip with the murder of the priest along the Pulangi River in 1965, by far the worst thing he’d done in his life, and the circumstances, war, duty, good intentions, made no difference.

Eddie left his table under the awning near the swimming pool and strolled through the restaurant to the bowling lanes. The man knew his shoe size without having to ask. A couple of kids bowled in the center lane, not doing too well with these duckpins, half the size of tenpins, and a ball without finger holes, held in the hand, hard to aim, and prone to little effect on the targets. After each turn a boy dropped from the darkness above the fallen pins to capture and resettle them. As a teenager Eddie had flung the ball hard and sent the pins flying in hope of catching one of those kids in the head with one, but they knew the game and stayed clear.

Eddie bowled a line in the low nineties, not unrespectable for duckpins, and drank 7Up and grenadine as he’d done when a boy. Six weeks ago, after a debauched New Year’s Eve, he’d sworn off liquor.

He went up the stairs and through the lobby to the intercom and buzzed Ernesto in the drivers’ shack and stood out front waiting. The grounds and the drive of the Polo Club hadn’t changed in decades, and beyond the grounds, in the subdivision of Forbes Park, all was still well, but beyond Forbes Park chaos waited. The quarantine of beautiful lawns and stately homes was massed about with the choking city. He had plans to relocate. He was rich, he could go where he wanted. He only lacked an idea where.

Imogene wasn’t home. The children must be out of school by now but off visiting, or looking for trouble.

In his office upstairs he sat at the desk, his chair turned toward the window, and cradled a cup of coffee in his hands. He didn’t like coffee. He just drank it.

“A letter has come.”

“What?”

Carlos, the houseboy. The formerly beautiful Imogene preferred he

say “servant.” Carlos placed the envelope on his desk. “It comes from Mr. Kingston. His driver brought it in the car.”

Kingston, an American, lived nearby. The letter, he saw, came from Pudu Prison and was addressed to Eddie care of Manila’s Canadian Consul. Kingston had clipped to it a note reading, “This was given to me by John Liese of the Canadian Embassy. I believe it’s for you —Hank.” The connection, Eddie guessed, was that Kingston did a lot of business with Imperial Oil of Canada, and Sands was masquerading as a Canadian.

12/18/82

Dear Eduardo Aguinaldo:

Mr. Aguinaldo, my name is William Benęt. I’m currently in prison in Kuala Lumpur, awaiting sentencing on gun-running charges. My solicitors tell me I should expect to hang.

Mr. Aguinaldo, I’m dying and I’m glad. I imagine you at the big window of a high-rise above the smog, looking down on Manila floating like a dream in the fumes and smoke, a jowly guy no doubt, big paunch, a guy I don’t know and who possibly doesn’t remember me.

But I’m writing to you because you’re the only one who can deliver a message for me to the Eddie Aguinaldo of eighteen years ago, the young Major who fought the Huks and dated rich young mestizas and who played Henry Higgins in “My Fair Lady”—do you remember?—and was the best thing in it. I’ve got nothing to say to anybody else. Nothing to report to the denizens of this era, the heirs to our lies. So I’m writing to Eddie Aguinaldo. The kindhearted Eddie Aguinaldo who took the time and the risk to send me a warning against the danger I’d already dived into in Cao Quyen in Vietnam, the soul-dissolving acid guys like me immersed ourselves in while we politely covered our mouths with handkerchiefs and complained about the DDT and the herbicides while our souls boiled away in something a lot more poisonous than poison.

I hope it surprises you to learn I lived in Cebu City from ‘73 to ‘81. Since then I’ve been nowhere very long-term until just a few months ago, when I was arrested in the Belum Valley, on the Malaysian side of the Thai border. The wrong side, believe me, to get arrested on.

I’m currently in Pudu Prison in Kuala Lumpur. If your travels happen to take you out this way in the next few months, stop in and say hello. It would be nice to see a familiar face. You can gather I’ve come to end my life under a cloud. This has been embarrassing. Or it should be. But I don’t feel particularly embarrassed.

Sincerely, Skip William French Benęt

He looked again at the first letter:

.. They call me “Skip.” You, in fact, called me “Skip.” Do you by

any chance remember me? Let’s just say I’m not the person I was

back then, and leave it at that. But do you remember me?

—That one had come addressed to Eduardo Aguinaldo, Forbes Park, Makati, Rizal, Philippine Islands. No house number, no street address, but it had found him. And his name wasn’t Eduardo. His name was Edward. As a kind of mockery between chums, Skip had called him Eduardo. Skip had mocked himself as well. Maybe under the Latin influence, in these islands named for a Spaniard king, he’d cultivated a silly mustache, and Eddie had called him Zorro. Certainly he remembered the young American with the crew cut and the mustache.

He stood by the window of his office and looked out on the pool, the bathhouse, the acacia dropping whirling blossoms on the lawn, and wondered if his happiest times hadn’t come in his teens, when he was down here in Manila on holiday from the Baguio Military Institute, running wild in a city without limits; and in his mid-twenties, those patrols in the jungle with Skip Sands, the man from the CIA.

His window fronted none-too-sturdy-looking high-rises veiled, as Skip said he imagined, in fumes. Once the places with better views had looked out on fields of high coarse elephant grass, dirt roads, open spaces with a few tall buildings. The Rizal Theater had been visible from two miles off. All his life he’d lived in Forbes Park. At the edge of a burning field once he’d found a dead dog with newborn pups at her teats, and he’d taken the minuscule beasts home and tried to nurse them from an eyedropper. That’s who he’d been once.

Recently he’d been struck with an idea for a wicked lampoon of My Fair Lady—a one-act, The Wedding Night of Liza Doolittle and Henry Higgins, with off-color lyrics set to the familiar melodies of “The Street Where You Live” and “I’ve Grown Accustomed to Her Face.”

The trouble was that in this cultural environment such a show would be, like Liza Doolittle (as he imagined her for the purposes of this entertainment), unmountable. And for the same reasons: conformity, prudery, feminine cowardice. He felt himself unsuited for the climate of his times. He could only stand outside and laugh at his own class, the educated emulators of British and American manners—his wife, her father the good senator, all those people—a light scum of gentility floating on a swamp.

And everybody else, all his fellow Filipinos: a lot of superstitious maniacs, miracle-seekers, statue-worshippers, stigmata-bleeders, berserk flagellants running on Good Friday through province after province with dripping, self-inflicted wounds while others came out to beat them with sticks or soothe their gashes with water hurled from old soup cans, and a man in Cotabato Province who had himself crucified annually before his weeping neighbors in a church.

Skip Sands to the gallows. Me too.

Why the jolly hell not?

He thinks, Fm a jolly good fellow and an unhappy man.

Approaching the steps to Kuala Lumpur’s Old High Court on the day of sentencing, Jimmy Storm looked up toward the second story and saw a number of women in bright dresses—secretaries, maybe—picnicking on a balcony, taking lunch with their rice bowls in the laps of their bright dresses. As they fed themselves they held the bowls up close to their faces, conversing, laughing, sounding almost as if they sang to one another.

On the top step he paused. He didn’t know where to go. He consulted the day’s printed agenda in its glass case while dropping his cigarette and grinding it out under his shoe, and then pushed through the great wooden doors of the Old High Court—Moorish in its architecture, tropic Colonial in its spacious interiors, resonant and shadowy, dwarfing and cooling the concerns of those who came here.

He took a seat in the rearmost pew of Courtroom Seven, where at

1:00 p.m. a Chinese gun dealer named Lau would be sentenced. Then, at 2:00 p.m., the prisoner calling himself William French Benęt.

One yellow fire extinguisher. Twelve overhead fluorescent lights. A sign in Malaysian or whatever they spoke— DI–LARANG MEROKOK—which he took to mean “No Smoking.” Eleven wall-mounted electric fans, should the central cooling fail. Storm doubted it ever would. Everything worked perfectly in Kuala Lumpur. People seemed competent and agreeable.

At the front of the courtroom, a lawyer in a gray suit sat at the defendant’s table and examined the evidence against his client, spinning the cylinder of what appeared to be a Smith & Wesson Detective Special, cocking back the hammer and taking aim, for an empty, meditative moment, at the elevated bench from which, according to the agenda out front, Mr. Justice Shaik Daud Hadi Ponusammy would momentarily preside.

Except for Storm, the lawyer had the courtroom to himself. He aimed the pistol at the court secretary’s empty desk, in particular at the sign on it reading DI–LARANG MEROKOK. He pulled the trigger, and the pin snapped.

Lunch was over. Storm heard footfalls echoing through the building. He stood up and went to a window with a view down into the driveway, where a blue van was arriving now from Pudu Prison. Lettering on its flank read POLIS RAJA DI MALAYSIA. Among the half dozen Chinese and Malay prisoners he could easily pick out the false Canadian Benęt, his face looking white and small in the van’s back window.

Storm took his seat again. A few people had scattered themselves among the pews by now, a half dozen reporters and a couple of spectators. The court’s secretary came, and one security guard; and then Benét’s barrister, Ahmed Ismail, entered the courtroom. He looked soft and favored, with the big, wet eyes of a child, arranging his papers before him in the shadow of the judge’s looming bench. Very plush purple curtains covering the rear wall gave the courtroom the air of an old theater, and for a moment Ismail looked like a schoolboy, absurdly dressed in a black three-piece suit, coming to see a movie.

A staircase led up from the lower floor directly into the prisoner’s box in the middle of the Old High Court, so that climbing it the accused, Lau, a Chinese boy looking around himself wildly, suddenly surfaced in the midst of his dilemma.

All stood for the entering Mr. Justice Ponusammy, who positioned himself behind a large ceremonial mace that rested on his desk. The prisoner leaned on the railing of his box, supporting himself with both bound hands.

All were seated.

They ran the court in English. The prisoner’s lawyer explained his client didn’t speak it and would use an interpreter. The boy had been convicted of dealing in firearms and of possessing a large quantity of ammunition. The judge went over the submissions, the precedents, and all the rest. The small man interpreting for the prisoner seemed nervous, sitting on his wooden chair beside the barrister and jiggling both his knees violently. When the judge addressed him he jumped up, and the prisoner also rose, though nobody had asked him to.

On hearing of his arrest, the Chinese boy’s mother had killed herself by swallowing insecticide. “He does not yet know,” his lawyer told the judge in English. The Chinese boy stood there oblivious. His interpreter failed to translate. “He will soon know, and that will perhaps be his biggest punishment.”

Justice Ponusammy never once looked at the prisoner. He gave him six years and six strokes of the rattan cane, and three more years for the ammunition.

During the break, while they waited for the prisoner Benęt to be brought up, Storm went forward and approached the lawyer Ismail. “My name is Storm.”

“Mr. Storm. Yes.”

“Your client. Benęt.”

“Yes.”

“Is he coming up?”

“Yes, in five minutes’ time.”

“Can you give him a message for me? A message from Storm?”

“I think I can, yes.”

“Tell Benęt I’m completely capable of everything he fears.”

“Tell him I’ll be at the prison tomorrow. Tell him it’s Mr. Storm.” “Is it a metaphor?” “Tell him.” When Storm had found his seat again in the back, the lawyer was still

watching him.

Ismail turned away as his client Benęt trudged up the stairwell from below them with his hands cuffed before him. He was in fact, and as Storm had believed, William Sands.

Like the previous prisoner, Sands supported himself on the railing of the prisoner’s box as the judge entered and everyone stood up.

Sands still wore the short hair, and the mustache —no longer silly or affected, but long and derelict and grandiose, accentuating his sadness. His cheeks needed a shave. He wore a shabby blue sweater against the chill of central air-conditioning and seemed to be feeling somewhere between sulky and comatose. He was skinny and hollow-eyed and looked like he might even have a soul.

As soon as they’d all seated themselves again, the prisoner resumed his mindless down-staring. His head hanging. Really motionless. Slumped. Staring at his own face reflected in a cup of bitter karma.

For three-fourths of an hour the judge read words from a stack of documents, going over all the ins and outs, deliberating aloud to himself, from the sound of things. The Chinese youngster just sentenced had run guns for William French Benęt; so had many others. The judge went over the list of counts on which Benęt had been found guilty here. He referred to the prisoner as “a major dealer in illegal arms; a scourge on our lives; a trafficker in our very blood.”

Storm realized the back pew was the wrong place. Nothing prevented him from getting up and sidling along the rows until he sat right behind the prisoner.

Sands turned around at the disturbance. Saw Storm. Recognized him. Turned away.

The judge looked small behind his gigantic desk. He called the prisoner “an imposter and a psychopath.” He ordered the prisoner to rise and sentenced him to be bound with rope, flayed with a cane, and hanged by the neck until he was dead.

They had the Old High Court tricked out like a state capitol. But two blocks away was Little India, where Storm had taken a room. He walked upright through crowds kowtowing at his feet in the streets while public address systems screeched the Islamic afternoon prayers. Wild streetside commerce: a soothsayer lying on the asphalt on his back with a black kerchief covering his face, mumbling predictions. His partner chanted over a collection of rust-colored human bones, including a cranium, arranged on a red scarf around a white hen’s egg. They were peddling tiny charms made out of gold foil from “555” cigarette packs and dirty string. The partner lifts the lid on a box, a six-foot cobra rises up, flaring its hood. He backs the cobra down with one of the powerful charms, dangling it in front of the reptile’s hissing face. A man nearby displays a pile, a good five pounds, of teeth he’s yanked successfully. They’re all here from the demented corners of the Far East with their straw mats and immortality pills. Various elixirs for enlarging the human penis; also, for the same purpose, a somewhat frightening-looking device of belts and rings. And photo albums showing cases that have responded. Herbs, unguents. Concoctions of every sort. Medicinal roots preserved in glass jugs, floating like amputations.

He entered a small clothing store. Its atmosphere almost unbreathable with incense. Impossible to move in here without rubbing against the silk, the rugs. Outside, the mosque still shrieking. The Hindu women standing still and looking at him. Beautiful. Three of them. One stared hard and must have been the mother.

“I’m here to see Rajik.”

“Mister is waiting,” she said.

“Through here?”

“Yes. Again. Like yesterday.” Yesterday? Her fantastically lovely face, and a deep coldness behind it. He hadn’t seen her yesterday.

He passed through a curtain of painted beads, through its depiction of the god Krishna among bathing virgins at a waterfall, and into darkness.

“Come there … It’s fine … Just here.”

“I can’t see.”

“Wait for your eyes.”

Storm moved with care toward Mr. Rajik’s voice and sat on a cushion on a stool.

Mr. Rajik raised his hand to pull a string and ignite a constellation of dim Christmas lights behind him. He was an ordinary-looking Hindu man at a table with a tea service, no expression on his face. “I’ll just make a few inquiries. Will you answer?”

“Ask me and see.”

“In the period of the last week, or even a little longer … have you looked at any time to the place where your shadow would be seen, and yet you saw no shadow?”

“No.” “Have you seen a black bird?” “Thousands. The world is full of black birds.” “And one that you noticed in particular? Because it didn’t belong

there —I might give you the example of a bird inside a house, or a black

bird perching on your windowsill. A sort of thing such as that.” “No. Nothing like that.” “Have you seen something—any kind of object, any kind of… Again

I’ll use an example: You crumple up a piece of paper, and it resembles someone’s head. Or a stain of some discoloration on the floor— something that resembles someone’s face, the face of someone close to you in the past. Have you seen a thing like that in the last couple of weeks? A thing that suddenly showed you the face of someone close to you?”

“No.” “I am going to say a prayer for you. What will the prayer be?” “You tell me.” “No, I can’t be the one to tell you. It’s not my place. It’s your place to

tell me what you would say if you spoke to God.” “Break on Through.” Mister was going to do a silence thing now. As if he didn’t speak

English. “I can write it down for you.” Mister reached up and turned out the small lights. His hands rustled

among his pockets and he struck a match and lit a stick of incense. The dark curved like a tunnel around them, like solid walls. Very sweaty nauseated hit now. “Gots to go, man, if you want to be fucking with me like this.”

Mister blew out the match. Nothing now. “Your eyes.” In twenty seconds the tiny red ember on the incense became visible, and the little eye that went with the voice, or the nose—this thing was the face, it was all he could see, and it was talking. “To break through—you are saying as through a boundary.”

” ‘Break on Through/ it’s a song. It’s my philosophy, my motto. You ask me for the word, that’s the word I’m gonna have for you. Break on Through.”

“Come back tomorrow.”

“That’s what you said last time.”

Mister spoke without urgency, very gendy. “Have I asked you for any money? Do you feel I’m not to be trusted? So I say to you, come back tomorrow. I can’t give you today what I don’t have today.” “Yeah. Yeah. Do what you have to do. Yeah.”

As Storm came within a couple of meters of Pudu Prison’s massive sheet-iron gate, he felt the heat of the morning sun banging off it into his face. The guard at the entrance slid a panel aside and peered at Storm out of the dimness of his cubicle, stared at his letter of introduction, which was in English, and made a phone call. Storm waited in the street for several minutes before the guard opened the man-sized metal door in the concrete wall.

A tall youth in civilian dress led Storm through the courtyard, where two dozen guards drilled for parade in green and purple uniforms. Ugly bastards. But soon they’d hang Skip Sands, so here’s to them.

Storm stood outside the warden’s office with the letter identifying him as a journalist named Hollis, the name on his Australian passport. A letter calling him a journalist wouldn’t do him much good. He understood that. Storm had attached to it a note of his own, explaining to the warden that he also represented a charitable group and wanted to visit the prisoner strictly as a humanitarian, not as a reporter.

Manual Shaffee, director and warden of Pudu Prison, greeted Storm cordially. “I apologize once again very much,” he said, “for our policy which prevents me from allowing you inside the prison.” But Storm was already inside, here in Shaffee’s office with the pictures of the nine sultans overpowering one wall, the air greenly lit by one circular neon tube overhead.

Shaffee was a little fat man of Indian descent with the pie-shaped and mustachioed face of a cartoon rodent and a jacket frogged with gold braid, and five different medallions on each mortarboard epaulet. Also, on his chest, ribbons. The impression he conveyed was one of idiotic sweetness.

“Are you a Muslim?” Storm asked. “No.” Storm said, “I myself am a Christian, sir.” “So am I!” the warden said. “I am converted. Believe me, I don’t like

to hang people.” “Please give Mr. Benęt this note, okay? I talked to his lawyer already,

and I think I saw the prisoner give me a nod at the sentencing.” “It’s completely against all regulations.” “I’m here in a humanitarian role. I’m asking you as one Christian to

another.”

The warden insisted Benęt would refuse him in any case. He pronounced the prisoner’s name as Benny. “Benny wants no visitors,” he told Storm. “Benny was even rude to the Canada consul.”

“What about his family?” “Nobody comes. Canada is too far.” “Make sure he understands I’m the guy who talked to his lawyer. I

think he’ll see me.”

“But Benny won’t see you. I can only keep telling you that. Benny spit in the Canada consul’s face. Doesn’t that lead you to some conclusion about Benny?”

“I’m pretty sure he’ll see me.” “He has refused all visitors. Otherwise I could help you.” But having fixed on this strategy, having made it Benét’s refusal rather

than his own, the warden now felt compelled to make Benęt prove it.

“If you will please wait,” he said, and dispatched a guard to talk to the prisoner. The warden lit a cigarette while Storm listened to the guards drilling out in the courtyard, in unison slamming their rifle butts down on the cracked concrete.

Sands and the guard stood together outside the door. Shaffee beckoned them with a tortured look.

Sands-Benét came in barefoot, wearing shorts and a T-shirt. And it was nice to see him looking so bad, wrecked in his eyes and skinny, nice to see him looking like a prisoner.

“Can I talk to him by myself?” “No.” “Five minutes.” The warden’s face shut, and Storm dropped it.

Storm said, “How’s life?” “Boring, mostly.” “Do you smoke?” “I finally took it up.” “You got any cigarettes? These Malaysians smoke Three Fives, I

think.” “Yeah,” Sands said. “I’ll give a couple cartons to the lawyer.” “Thanks.” “He pretty good?” “Good enough to get paid while I dangle.” “You understand the deal here. I’m just a humanitarian, a fellow

English-speaker.” “I get it.” “Benny’s consul came to see him,” the warden said, “and he spit.” “You’re my first visitor.” “Try spitting at me.” Sands stared at his bare feet. “Warden Shaffee’s a nice guy,” Storm said. “That’s why he’s letting

me talk to you. He wants to make sure you’re comfortable.” “The thought of getting out of here would comfort me.” “Not possible, man. You’ve been found guilty and sentenced, and

there’s no fooling around here. Eighty-three people have been convicted

under the new gun laws, and eighty-two have hanged.” “I know the numbers.” Storm asked: “And how do you feel about hanging?” “No comments!” Shaffee said, though nobody had asked him. Benęt shrugged. “Hey, at this point, it’s okay by me.” “No comments,” Shaffee repeated. “But I am a Christian. I think you

know my answer.” Storm took a step closer to Benęt. “It’s time to think about your soul.” “Don’t be daft!” “I’m offering you a chance to clear your conscience.” “I haven’t got a conscience,” Sands said. “So hanging doesn’t make you shit?” “I’ve lived too long already.” “What about Hell, you fuck?”

“We’ll have time to discuss that later. You and I. Lots and lots of time.” “Benny’s got books. He has all kinds of reading matter. He has a

Bible,” the warden said. Sands stared at his own ugly bare feet and spoke very softly. “What did he say? What was that?” the warden said. Storm said, “Tell me who to see.” “For what.” “Old Uncle.” “He’s dead, man. He’s dead.” “Yeah? So were you, supposedly.” “And soon I will be again.” Shaffee’s unease was palpable now. He indicated the guard: “I have a

witness. I am nearing retirement in a few months. I could get in a lot of trouble.” But he did nothing to stop this. He seemed incapable of the slight rudeness needed, at this moment, to enforce prison policy.

Storm stepped closer. “Will you pray?” He bowed his head. “Dear Lord,” he said loudly, and then more softly, “I know you’ve got family in the PI. And I can find them.”

He stepped back and watched the prisoner shake like a toy until even

the stupid warden noticed: “He’s sick? What’s wrong?” “It’s the power of his conscience,” Storm said. “Here,” the warden said. “Sit down. Yes. The struggle.” Now Warden Shaffee and Storm stood there like a couple of prison

ers, and it was Sands sitting in the warden’s chair.

Sands gripped the edge of the desk with both hands and looked back and forth from one hand to the other. “Ju-shuan, or something like that. He runs a trap up in Gerik. They call him Mr. John, or Johnny.”

“Give me directions.” “You don’t need directions. He grabs every Euro who comes off the

bus.” “And he’s the man to see.” “If you feel the need.” “See him for what?” the warden said. Not that he didn’t get it. He got

it, he got the whole thing, but he just wouldn’t let himself see he’d made a mistake. Shaffee had already failed to prevent this conversation. The best he

could hope for now was to dominate it. “The two Australians who were executed got no help from their embassy,” he remembered now. “We’ve had a lot of foreign prisoners—drugs traffickers and those such people,” he said. “I’ve never seen an embassy take so much interest. The Canadians are very helpful to Benny. Benny’s got books, things like that.”

“You’re gonna hang,” Storm told the prisoner, “but life goes on and everything plays itself out. Inside of every cycle is another cycle. You know what I mean?”

“I hear what you’re saying, man. But I don’t know what you mean.” Storm leaned close over Sands and said, “It’s just a machine.

Relax.” “As long as you leave my family out of it.” Shaffee said, “We are civil servants. Please. We have our rice bowls,

we want to keep them filled.” “You’re not who you think you are,” Storm said. “You’re dead inside.” Sands said, “Look, whatever kind of revenge you want—you’re not

gonna get it.” “Things have to play themselves out.” Sands stood up. “We didn’t pray.” He beckoned him close. The warden said, “I am a Christian too. An Anglican. I pray for

Benny. He’s a bit psychotic. Depressed. But he’s more cheerful the last few weeks.”

Sands bowed his head, almost touching his brow to Storm’s, and hit him with an uppercut below the sternum. Storm’s legs gave in and a lot of tadpoles raced around his field of vision. He said, “Yow, daddy.”

Shaffee helped to hold him upright. “Are you sick? What is the prob

lem sir?” Neither the prisoner nor the visitor bothered replying. The pause in communication seemed hard on Shaffee. He had to

talk. “The Red Cross gave us the kind of report I would call useful. Yes, we have areas in this prison to be improved. Hygiene, diet, I appreciated their suggestions. But not the Amnesty International! For instance we have Chinese gangs. If we don’t lock up the members without bail, they’ll be out where they can reach the witnesses. The people making the report for Amnesty International didn’t understand this. They gave us a very bad report. So you see why we don’t want reports. Why should we allow it? We don’t want you if you are a humanitarian,” he said. “We don’t want you if you are a journalist. You are not a Christian. I know what a Christian looks like because I myself am already a Christian.” This speech had given him strength. “Get out!” he cried. He turned to the guard: “Yes! This man is not permitted here!”

Thirty minutes later Storm was eating a rib-eye steak in a place with bamboo décor but with an Anglo name —Planter’s Inn Pub—listening to a wrenchingly beautiful lament played on native flutes which slowly became recognizable in its sadness as an old Moody Blues tune: “Nights in White Satin.”

He’d already tried Phangan, the low-rent druggy island resort east of Thailand—but that one flopped. A lot of retrograde hippies with melted eyes, rip-off Indian ganja freaks, various bits of psychedelic European burn-off. Airheads. Just air. He couldn’t deal with them.

This after his escape from the Barnstable County Jail in Massachusetts: one day a door had simply stood open—surely the Agency’s doing, and likely the colonel’s—and he’d walked away.

This after the great sea battle, the only firefight of his life, in which the Coast Guard had sunk his boat and many tons of Colombian ganja, and shot one and drowned another of his crew of three Colombians.

In Bangkok he’d heard the colonel might be buying and processing raw opium in the region. He moved down from Bangkok where the whores were friendly and zoned on chemicals to Kuala Lumpur where the whores performed with the bloodless efficiency of automatic shoeshine machines. Kuala Lumpur, a name somehow connoting limpness and no warmth, like Cold Lump. A decaffeinated town, clear, acrylic brains, the precise opposite of Phangan. Air-conditioning that could reasonably be described as brutal, everybody seemed to have a respiratory condition. Very Western, very modern, kind of an Asian Akron, Ohio, with cut-rate prices, tropical fruit, and everybody driving on the left … He’d seen the photo of William Benęt in the New Straits Times and had realized that along the way a sort of psychic and spiritual gravitation had guided his every footstep and that he had bested the Assassin, survived the Smugglers, transcended the Prison, wandered among the Fools, and that he would confront the Hanged Man or the Betrayer— Sands would be revealed for what he was —and that the colonel was now possible.

Storm stayed in Kuala Lumpur long enough to get a tattoo and make sure Sands really did hang. He stayed at a spittoon for humanity in Little India called the Bombay, just over a money changer’s. They gave him a small blue electric fan and a white towel but no soap. He could listen to seven radios at once through the quarter-inch plywood walls.

The cheap hotels were short. You were always close to the street in these places, almost down in it. The whistles and exclamations, the baby-voiced horns.

The hallways of the Bombay reeked thickly but not unpleasantly of curry and Nag Champa incense. In the dawns after first prayer call he could smell bread baking on the still air. Then the diesel smoke overpowered everything, rising with the urban noise. Each cycle held another cycle. You could not break out of the machine.

He spent the mornings reading from a Bible defiled by some Muslim with a Magic Marker. Or listening to the radio. In his speeches the prime minister stressed emotional tranquillity.

Or he wrote in his notebook. Efforts in verse. He admired the poet Gregory Corso, a man who spewed out genius by the ream. As for himself, a line now and then. You can’t extort the Muses.

Or he read from his copy of Zohar: the Book of Splendor. He’d picked it up in an English bookshop years ago, in Saigon, before the fates had renamed it Ho Chi Minh City

Rabbi Yesa said: Adam comes before every man at the moment he

is about to leave this life, in order to declare that the man is dying

not because of Adam’s sin, but on account of his own sins.

—read until his focus loosened and the lines of text divided into duplicates and floated on the page.

Half awake, he dreams himself coming to the colonel at the end: and the colonel says: You know there is a cycle of imagining and desire, desire and death, death and birth, birth and imagining. And we have been tempted into its mouth. And it has swallowed us.

He imagined the look in the colonel’s eyes as he witnessed Storm breaking a cycle just for the curiosity of breaking it.

He traveled the city not allowing himself to desire the women—their silk touching past him in tight aisles, on buses, in cafés.

On his fourth visit to Rajik, the Hindu gave Storm his answer, speaking again with an immense gentleness. “You cannot be healed. You are forbidden to hope for it. You cannot be saved.”

Four days after the hanging Storm took a deluxe bus with air-conditioning and even TV to the end of the line, the end of the highway itself, in Gerik, a sizable, complicated town of wooden structures and dirt streets. It was nighttime when he disembarked. He walked among the vendors’ tables in the square where the buses stopped.

Sands had been right: immediately Ju-shuan accosted him. A squat,

heavy man. He wore shorts, a large T-shirt. Walked crab-footed in his zoris. “Hey, Fm glad you came. Call me Mr. John, okay?” “Mr. John okay.” “Want massage? Want woman?” Storm said, “Do you have boy massage?” “Boy massage? Hah! Yes. You want boy?” “Is that too twisted for you, Johnny?” “Boy, girl, fine. Anything.” “Girl is fine.” “Girl massage, fine. You gonna stay at my hotel, okay? Two blocks.

You are American? Germany? Canada? Everybody stays at my place.” “Let me get some food.” “I got food in my café.” “Fm gonna get some fruit.” Storm went among the vendors’ tables. He bought a couple star

fruits. A mango. Johnny followed him. “You want coconut?” “I’m done.” “Then you can have some dinner, and then whatever you want. I get

you the lady for the massage.” “Dinner later. Woman first,” Storm told him. As they went into Johnny’s, he pointed out to Storm the establish

ment next door. “Don’t stay in that place,” he said. “Don’t go there. It’s a bad place.” It looked pretty much the same as Johnny’s.

Johnny put him in a room with a straw tatami on its wooden floor and a Muslim toilet with a rubber hose. “Wait one half hour,” Johnny told him.

“Don’t bring me one that doesn’t smile.” Johnny brought the girl in twenty minutes. “Smile,” he told her in English. “I think I know your friend,” he said to the girl when Johnny was

gone. “Mr. John is my friend.” “I think his name is Ju-shuan.” “I don’t know Ju-shuan. I never heard Ju-shuan.” She too was Chinese. Thick of flesh and friendly. She smelled of the

joss-house, of incense. Possibly on the way over she’d stopped to pray, or

to contribute. Not, he hoped, to consult the monks as to some ailment. “You seem sad,” he said. “Sad? No. Not sad.” “Then why don’t you smile?” She gave him a brief, sad smile. Later Storm ate out front of Johnny’s hotel at a small wooden table

under an awning, on the street itself, under a paper lantern, in a storm of moths and winged termites. He shared the table with a Malaysian man who tried to talk to him in

English. “Don’t bother me now, Maestro.” “Whatever you say. I’m all yours!” Except for the small lantern over their heads and a few dim-lit door

ways, all around them was darkness—damp, warm, stinking like breath.

Out of it materialized a skinny European, a young man with an angularity both boyish and plainly British, coming at them like a horror-film mummy, his belt cinched and his khakis puckered at the waist, the crown of his head wrapped in dirty bandages.

He sat down at the table and said, “Good evening. How can I get served?”

Johnny joined them and introduced himself and ordered food for the traveler and conversed in Malay with the other man until, after a while, the other man finished his tea and left. “He doesn’t know English. He is a relative from my wife,” Johnny explained. He urged on them more bowls of rice mixed with a green lemony weed and bits of shellfish, or crisp pork, Storm couldn’t tell which. “What happened to your head?” Johnny asked his new guest. ”You’re okay now, I hope.”

The young man had been going at his meal seriously, surrounded by whirling bugs. He stopped long enough to say, “Last week I was in Bangkok, just passing through, and I stepped into an open sewer.”

He went back to his eating. He ate everything. They always did. In the Colombian mountains Storm had once seen a Brit eat cattle tripe tenderized in kerosene, eat it like a starving man.

“Pitch-black. Walking along. Right into a concrete ditch. There wasn’t a lot of wonderful stuff in there, I might as well tell you. I’ve been monitoring my symptoms ever since.” He spoke mainly to Storm. “I fainted right in the guck, with an open gash in my head. At this minute I picture an invading horde of microbes assaulting my skull. I took myself to the nearest surgery in a cab and the young nurse told me, You should carry a small light with you wherever you go wandering. A small light. She told me when I came, and again when I left with a head full of stitches. Wherever you go wandering, take a small light. Sounds rather like a line from a musical play.”

Johnny said, “I can meet you to a healer. A woman. Massage. To heal you.”

“I like the Asians,” the Brit said. “As a general thing I find I like them quite a lot. They don’t play games the way we do. Of course, I mean, they do the same things we do, but they aren’t games. They’re simply there. They’re simply actions.”

“This your first visit?”

“But not my last. And you?”

“I’ve been in and out since the sixties.”

“Really. Impressive. In Malaysia, then?”

“Yeah. The general region.”

“What about Borneo? Have you been?”

“Borneo is not good,” Johnny said. “Don’t go there. It’s ridiculous.”

“I’ve got a torch now, you can bet. And it’s no small light. Look here.” He dug a small but hefty-looking flashlight from the pocket of his pants. “Bore a hole in your flesh.” He pointed it playfully at a little child hovering at the edge of the dark. “Bore a hole in your flesh with this one!”

“Please don’t give him any coins,” Johnny said.

“No, I wouldn’t,” the Brit assured him. “I’ve got too many friends in

this town as it is.” “You have a lot of friends here?” Johnny said. “I’m just playing a game,” the young man said. To Storm he re

marked, “You see? Mr. John doesn’t play games.” Johnny asked, “Are you a sightseer?” “I am when I haven’t got thirty stitches in my head.” “You are a sightseer. I can get you a guide to the forest tomorrow.” “Give me a rest. Two days and I’m ready for Kilimanjaro.” “What about you?” Storm asked Johnny. “Do you hire out as a guide?” “Sure, if you want,” Johnny said. “But we’ll go slow, and I can’t climb

the mountain. Just to visit the caves at the Jelai River. I’ll show you the

caves, and that’s all.” “That might work out.” “There is one small mountain we must pass.” “I’ll think about it.” “The mountain is nothing. It’s just more of the same thing—up, up,

up. Are you a sightseer? Maybe we’ll see an elephant.” “I said I’ll think about it.” The young man with stitches in his head said: “I met a missionary

in Bangkok. He told me to go by Psalm 121—’I lift mine eyes unto the hills.’ I told him I’m a pagan. He insisted I read Psalm 121 every day while I’m traveling. So. Was he playing a game? Why tell me something like that?” He filled his bowl once more. Storm watched him eat.

“Because it was a message.” “A message, indeed. But who was the message for?” Storm didn’t tell him who the message was for. Johnny said, “I don’t like talking about religious things. It makes two

people unfriendly.” “No, Mr. John,” the Brit said, “we’re not going to argue, not about re

ligion. It’s too boring.” “What about a woman for you tonight? What about a massage?” The Brit looked disturbed by this talk and said, “We’ll mention it

later, all right?”

The next day Storm engaged Johnny to guide him into the government-owned forest. Three blocks from Johnny’s hotel they stepped into an open twenty-foot motorboat and were piloted up the Jelai River through a light rain by a man draped in several clear plastic bags.

“This man is from the primitives,” Johnny said. “But he is living in the city now, with us. We’ll meet his relatives, his clan. The government supports them. They live like a thousand years ago.”

They traveled upstream. The river flat, sinewed, brown. They said nothing. The outboard engine’s small clatter. Stink of its smoke. The town receded. At first, some occasional dwellings alongside their progress, then none.

Many miles upriver the two passengers stepped from the boat onto a wooden pier that seemed to serve no nearby village or any habitation at all.

“Where the fuck is he going?” They watched the boat head into deeper water and turn back downriver.

“He wants to see his people. He will be back. When we come at suppertime, he will be here.”

Storm tied a bandanna around his brow. They hefted their packs and took to the worn trail, Johnny leading, skirting frequent large cakes of elephant droppings sprouting tiny mushrooms. Somebody lived here: the wild rubber trees had been scored in spirals, and sap dripped into wooden bowls tied to the trunks at knee-level.

On the flap of Johnny’s large backpack was emblazoned an American flag. Storm watched it moving through the jungle, floating over the trail. In his own small pack he carried only cigarettes and matches and his notebook and socks and bandannas, all wrapped in a plastic bag, and a flashlight. And batteries. There was no use carrying a gun. You were always outnumbered.

The rain stopped. It didn’t matter—sweat or rain, he’d be wet. “Your name is Ju-shuan.”

“Ju-shuan?”

“So I was told.”

“Ju-shuan? That is a nonsense noise. Ju-shuan is not a Chinese name.” They were climbing, and they were breathing hard, but Johnny stopped for a quick smoke.

The trail made its way along the side of a cliff. They remained standing, looking down on the rough green canopy and the brown Jelai River cutting through it.

Johnny asked him, “What is your name?” “Hollis.” “How old are you?” “I’m forty-plus.” “Forty-plus,” Johnny said, “forty-plus.” A bit later he said, “Forty-plus.” “That means Fm more than forty.” “Forty-one. Forty-two. Forty-three.” “Forty-three.” “Forty-three years old.” “Yeah.” Johnny mashed his cigarette into the earth with the heel of his black

sandal. “I know you.” “Sure you do. And you knew Benęt.” Johnny’s eyes searched around for a lie. He tried candor: “I knew

him, sure.” “He’s dead. They hanged him.” “Of course, I know, it’s a famous case. That’s what I mean. I heard

about him from the newspapers, that’s all.” He began climbing again, Storm close behind. “Why don’t you talk? I have a lot of information about the region.

Why don’t you ask me?” “When I’m ready, I’ll ask.” After half a kilometer they stopped again to rest. The trail was narrow

here and they could only lean against the cliffside. “There is the top.

Then we’ll go down, and at the bottom we’ll find the caves.” Storm lit a cigarette. “I said seven and you came at seven,” Johnny said. “You’re very on-the-dot.” His face was not the inscrutable kind. He looked perplexed and

desperate. “That’s me.” “I didn’t sleep correctly,” Johnny told his patron. “I felt my soul de

parting from me in the night. Did you know that I pray? But in the past few days, nothing has gone correctly. When I pray, I see no shadow on the wall—but I am not superstitious.”

“You’re babbling.” Johnny pointed to an outcropping on a bluff across the gorge: “I see my father’s face in that rock.”

Storm made no answer, and they resumed hiking, Johnny still in the lead, his head turned three-quarters now at all times toward Storm behind him. “Look, I’m telling you two things,” he said as they walked. “I don’t know Benęt and also my name is not Ju-shuan.”

When they gained the ridge Johnny shed his pack and sat down beside it. “It’s too heavy. I have a small tent inside. After the caves we can camp. I have the food. Do you want some fruit?”

Storm devoured a mango and scraped at the seed with his teeth. The clouds had parted. The sunshine crashed heavily down on them and turned the canopy below a lively pulsing green and glinted sharply on the river far below. It was his first time in real jungle. He’d never seen the bush during the war except from helicopters high overhead. Spongy and multifariously green, like this, only sometimes with tracers rising out of it, or under flares at night.

“We must get a stick. If it’s too wet, we can slip going down.”

Each found a staff, and they headed down to the caves. At the bottom Johnny showed him a square-meter hole in the base of the cliff. “The natives took the boys here to be changed into men. To go inside you have to be born for a second time. You’ll see. That’s why they chose it. You’ll see. But first, are you hungry?”

They sat on a log and ate rice out of plastic baggies with their fingers while an angry monkey tossed dirt and bark down onto them from the cliff above. “It’s always good to eat,” Johnny said. “Now we’ll go inside. We must leave our belongings.”

Storm crouched before the hole. Pebbles dribbled down in front of his face—the monkey still at it up the cliff. He shone his light: the aperture narrowed within. “Bullshit.”

“It’s quite safe. No one is here to steal from us.”

“It’s a little fucking tube, man.”

“We can do it easily. I will go. It turns to the left. When you don’t see my light, you come, okay?” He went down on all fours grunting and crawled forward scraping his flashlight along the floor. Storm squatted at the entrance looking after him. In seconds Johnny’s light was gone around a tight bend. Storm followed on hands and knees. The beam from the torch in his hand leapt at the walls and flashed up at his face. After the bend he saw Johnny’s light pointing back at him. Within a few yards he had to stretch out and wriggle through the passage with his arms to his sides, flashlight directed backward, head laid flat. In Chinese Johnny talked to himself. Storm had to blow out his breath to go on, but he couldn’t see how to back out, and anyway the fat bastard had made it through and he had to stay with him—he’d do anything to keep with him and reminded himself that he didn’t care whether he lived or died. He slid face first through darkness, incredibly swiftly. Light bloomed around him. Johnny stood in a chamber whose walls lay too far off to see. With Johnny’s help Storm rose carefully from the slick floor but could hardly keep his feet under him. Johnny whispered, “Quiet, please.”

He shone his light upward. Bats covered the high ceilings like a shaggy carpet of drooping leaves. Tens of thousands of them.

Johnny snapped his fingers once, and each bat shivered slightly where it clung—the collective noise like that of a locomotive charging past. The blast died quickly, but the darkness seemed to resonate now with a certain life.

“Look where they scratched the rocks. The natives.” Storm examined a few barely discernible markings in the circle of the flashlight’s glare, nothing he could make sense of. Johnny moved his light among the vague symbols and asked, “What

does it say?” “What? I don’t know.” “I thought you knew. Maybe you know about these people from your

university.” Storm laughed. It came out of him like a shot, and the bats roared again. He clutched his light in his armpit and wiped slick goo from his

palms along the backs of his pants legs. “What is this shit?” “Yes. It’s the guano. From the bats.” “Goddamn. How far do these caves go?” “This is the only cave. We can go out the other side.” “Fuck me. You mean there’s an easier way?” “Only to go out. We have to drop out a small hole, but it’s easier than

going back. Very easy to drop. But you can’t climb inside that way. It’s

too slippery.” “Well, fuck, man, let’s go.” “This way.” Johnny moved ahead of him very slowly toward an emptiness that soon produced out of itself a wall, and next a hole in the wall

somewhat larger than the one they’d come in by. “Me first,” Storm said. They only had to duck their heads to stay moving now, but the foot

ing was almost impossible. Storm saw no bats in the passage, though their shit was everywhere.

Johnny’s light wavered and tumbled to the floor. Storm took two careful steps backward and retrieved it and found Johnny on his back and dropped the instrument beside him.

“I can’t see you,” Johnny said.

Storm unsnapped the knife from his belt and shone his own light on it. “Can you see this, fucker?” He crouched and raised the hem of Johnny’s T-shirt with the knifepoint.

“What are you doing?” He trained the beam on Johnny’s face and Johnny squinted and

looked away. “I want to know what you’re doing.” “I’m going to carve some fat off your belly.” “What are you doing! You act crazy!” In the chamber down the tun

nel the bats roared.

“I’m going to skin you bit by bit. I’m going to throw the pieces in a pile there, and you can watch the monkeys eat the pieces. Meanwhile, the ants are eating you.”

“You’re crazy!” “Assume I’m not.” “Money! Money! I can get you!” “You said you know Benęt.” “Yes, it’s bad to be executed. But you have to see it was a badness of

fate that put him there. It was a terrible position.” “Welcome to the position.” “But I have nothing to do with that!” “Let’s get back to your current position.” Johnny talked a little in Chinese, and then sounded as if he were an

swering himself. “Okay. I know. I know what you want.” “Then give it to me.” “This—please listen—this was not because of me, sir. Please under

stand.” “You’re gonna talk to me.”

“Let me shine my light.”

“Keep that thing off me.”

“Just to the side.” Johnny shone his light on the wall. He raised his head and searched very carefully for some sign of a future in Storm’s face. “Can I please say one thing to you? We are all one family.”

“Johnny. Where’s the colonel?”

“Oh, for the love of God, the colonel. Yes. Tell me what you want. He’s not far. Only in Thailand, across the border. You can go straight there by the trails. Let’s go back to the town, and I’ll get you sorted out. Whoever takes the rubber trail to those villages in the Belum Valley, he can find the colonel easily. Anyone knows that.”

Storm backed off two paces and sheathed his knife. “Get up.”

“I can get up. I can do it easily!” He rose with a lightheartedness Storm recognized from having survived, himself, when he thought the Coast Guard would murder him. Johnny led the way another forty meters to a brilliant hole in the floor.

Storm dropped his flashlight through the opening and followed it, feet first, and dropped two meters down into the daytime. Johnny’s feet dangled above him and he gripped the leg of the fat man’s shorts as he lowered himself until his arms were stretched full length above his head, his hands gripping rock, and let himself fall. He smiled stupidly and shook his head.

Storm said, “Let’s go.”

He stayed close to Johnny while they made their way around the mountain and back to the place where they’d taken lunch. “Here we are!” Johnny said. “You see?” he said as if in demonstration of an important truth.

“I need a map.”

“Of course! Of course! I have maps at my hotel.”

“What’s in your pack?”

“Of course! I forgot I have a map in my pack!” He squatted and tore open the flap and hauled out his baggies of grub, a blue poncho, a three-meter swatch of colorful fabric which unrolled around him and which he explained was his blanket, and handed Storm a ragged map folded all wrong. “Unfortunately the writing is Malay. But you just want to take the rubber trail and speak to the headmen along the way. Someone will guide you.”

Storm spread the map out on the ground. “Show me.” “We will go back to town. Tomorrow you can hire a car to this place.

Then it’s no more road. The motorcycle can take you.” “Is this the Thai border?” “Yes, but here is the village you will go to.” “I don’t see a village.” “It’s there. I can’t make a mark. There’s no pen.” Storm did his best to get the map into compact dimensions and

jammed it into his own pack. “Let’s go.”

They shouldered their packs and walked. Climbing the hill they didn’t speak. It wasn’t as far uphill this way as it had seemed coming out. Storm dogged him while they passed along the ridge, and preceded him going down the other side. Even on the downhill side Johnny breathed heavily and had nothing to say.

When they’d reached the trail along the river, he seemed more certain of his position. “You gave me a concern! But we’re getting along now.”

“Not if you fucked me.” “Of course I don’t do that. We’re friends.” “Bullshit.” “I believe it! We are friends!” In a place where the muddy river ran level with its banks they stopped

to wash the guano away. “I won’t run off,” Johnny said, wading out. “So you can trust me. Anyway it’s too far to the other side. And there —I see a crocodile.”

Immediately he launched out. Storm watched him flounder the hundred feet across the water. He hit a deep spot and flailed at the current, taking buoyant leaps sideways downstream, finding his footing at last and grappling with the vegetation and hauling himself out to rest on all fours, drenched and shrunken, raising his head, gasping for breath, lowering it again. He didn’t look back at Storm.

Storm watched for only a few seconds, then turned and hurried down the trail to meet the boatman before Johnny did.

All the while he hiked downriver he asked himself: Why did I mention the colonel before he did? I gave him his cue. He might have sent me chasing anything.

He sat on the straw tatami at Johnny’s hotel taking off a sock stained brown with his own blood. He’d daubed the leech bites with river mud, but he’d missed one.

Johnny’s old woman came around the corner of the hall stirring up

the dust with a three-foot broom. “Ah! You back!” “Ain’t it the truth.” “Where is my husband?” “Still with his friends in the jungle.” “Then Johnny he staying another longer maybe?” “Yeah. Like that.”

“I get you a car tomorrow morning. You got some friend in Thailand?”

“I sure do.”

‘Tour friend is waiting.”

“It’s a definite possibility.” He stared at her, searched her face. But he didn’t feel it yet. So much closer, and he didn’t feel it. “I think I’ll change hotels,” he said.

For a dozen miles by the blurred odometer he rode shotgun in a Morris Minor. At a bridge over a river he didn’t know the name of, his driver asked for the fare and put him out, refusing further risk. The bridge’s weather-eaten boards looked rotten. Storm offered more money but the man said, “Can you buy me one new car?”

“Coward. Fuck your mother,” Storm said.

He hitched a ride atop a pile of kindling on a modified pedicab driven by an old man and pulled by an animal that might have been a donkey and might have been a stunted horse. Storm wore cutoff jeans, and the kindling chafed his underthighs. He carried nothing better in his pack, no change of clothes, only his flashlight, knife, and a plastic poncho; and his notebook and Johnny’s map. They stopped at a village two or so miles along, where Storm tried to barter with the old woodman for further assistance, but without any luck. Sapling rubber trees had invaded the roadway ahead, and his woodcart couldn’t pass. Locals came to the doorways of the hooches to stare. A man approached Storm, hesitated just out of reach, and stomped boldly forward one more step to touch the stranger’s arm. People screamed. The man turned away laughing.

Storm didn’t know how far he’d have to walk to reach the border. Less than twenty kilometers, if he read the map correctly.

The old woodman came from behind one of the hooches with a flat-faced, staring young man walking a motorbike. The boy kicked its pedal and straddled it and started off so quickly Storm doubted he expected a passenger, but he leapt on behind him anyway, shouting, “Where you go? Where you go?” It sounded as if the boy said, “The Road.” As they made for the habitation’s edge an old woman, face bursting, shouting and moaning, threw herself into the dirt in front of the bike—the brakes yelped, Storm pitched forward, his lips touched the driver’s hair. The boy stuck his legs out and tried to get around her but she spun like a swimmer, kicking in the dirt, to block his way. Storm lurched from side to side as they rolled over her with each tire in turn and she said, “Hm! Hm!” People in doorways cried out at them—people laughing—a child came out and spit at them. Storm felt the wind string the saliva out along his bare thigh as they accelerated. He clutched at leaves on a tea plant and scoured the spit away as they rounded the bend out of town. The road was red gouged mud. Sometimes a great puddle slowed them as the boy skirted it, sticking out his feet for balance.

Ahead grew mostly rubber trees. A carpet of leaves covered the track there. Light washed down among the trees. The bike thumped twice over a thick snake with brilliant bands. The road narrowed to a trail and they bucked continually over roots, the small engine buzzing like a horn, sounding that insignificant, that drowned amid all this organic life. Three hours, four hours, but they didn’t stop for lunch, or even water. Storm kept low behind the boy’s shoulders as the trail narrowed and slender branches whipped across the boy’s face. The boy wiped continually at his face and his arm came away each time bloodier. He pressed on shouting, weeping. They scraped forward almost entirely in the lowest gear. Storm smelled his rubber shoe sole burning on the tailpipe and repositioned his heels on the struts, but in such a way that they kept slipping off.

By one in the afternoon it was quite dusk in the tall woods and the road was almost impossibly glutted, no more than a path, and then they came into daylight, open spaces, gray elephant grass, emerald rice paddies. Here the path crossed a dry streambed with sheer six-foot walls. The motorbike couldn’t pass.

They dismounted and the boy ran the machine some yards off the path into the high grass and let it fall there on its side, and fell with it himself. He jumped up quickly and came away wiping at his face. Blood spiraled down his forearm where he’d gashed it badly in the tumble. He noticed his injury and smiled at Storm and then suddenly sobbed angrily. Storm took hold of his arm. “Unwrinkle your soul, man. You ain’t dead. Fuck,” he said, “it’s deep.” He untied the bandanna from his brow to bind the wound and had hardly finished knotting its ends when the kid turned to lead the way again. They clambered down one side of the creek and up the other. Storm tried him—”Kid. Kid. I want to give you money, money”—but the boy didn’t answer or pause, and they continued along the dikes of paddies and into a village where everything stirred in the afternoon wind.

On the porch of a wooden home stood a man in brown slacks and a blue shirt, like anyone on the corner of any city. “Welcome to you! Come in for some teatime and I will show you my specimens.”

“We need water.”

“Come into my museum. Please. Come.”

He ushered them into something on the order of a café without chairs, only several tables with big jars standing on them. He lifted a large one, in it a brown insect as long as his forearm, maybe, if it hadn’t been curled like a bracelet and floating in what looked like old piss. “I have quite a collection of insects. This centipede killed a thirteen-yearold boy.”

“What about some water.”

“Do you want me to boil it first? Because you are American.” His eyebrows pulled apart and crashed together as he talked. Bug eyes and fat lips. Big forehead. Except for the fat lips, he resembled one of his specimens.

“Just fill my jug. Please, I mean. I got the shit to fix it with.”

The strange man took Storm’s canteen through the doorway into his kitchen, in which a cot and stove were visible, and immersed it in a galvanized washtub and held it under. Storm followed him, twisted the dripping canteen from his grasp, and dosed it with two tabs. He screwed

shut the lid and shook it. “Fuck, Fm thirsty.” “I believe it, yes,” said the man. They stood among the specimens, and Storm drank off half in a series

of violent swallows and handed the canteen to the kid, who drank briefly, exhaled and inhaled deeply as it came away from his mouth, and grimaced in surprise.

“That’s iodine.” “Yes,” the man said, and spoke in Malay with the kid. “He will not tell me his name. That is his privilege. I am Dr. Ma

hathir. And may I ask your name also?” “Jimmy.” “Jimmy. Yes. You say a bad word a lot, Jimmy. You say ‘shit/ Isn’t this

a bad word?” “I’m a fucking foulmouth. Where do you get these jars, man?” “I am a scientist. An entomologist.” “So you shit big jars out your ass?” “Oh!—these jars. I have twenty-six of them. People sell them to me.

They realize an entomologist requires jars for the specimens. Here is a

scorpion.” “Yeah. How many thirteen-year-olds did he kill?” “The bite isn’t fatal. Only numbing you for a time. Swelling at the

site of the puncture. It’s the largest scorpion to be found in this region.

Therefore, yes, I preserve it.” “Formaldehyde, right?” “Yes. Formaldehyde.” “Is that shit antiseptic?” “Of course.” “Have you got a jug of clean stuff? This guy ripped his arm open.” “Yes, I saw that plainly.” He spoke to the kid, who held out his arm

while gently the scientist unwound the bandanna from the wound. “Nothing to it. We’ll clean the damage, and put some sutures. I can do it.”

“Medical sutures? You have the stuff?” “No. Needle and thread.” “What about Xylocaine?” “No.”

“You better explain that to him, Doc.” They spoke, and the kid continued to seem very upset. “He says he must hide the wound. His body must have no blemish.” “No blemish? Look at his face. He scratched the shit out of it banging

through the bush like he had a grenade up his ass.” “I don’t know. It’s his belief.” “He’ll get you stitched up,” Storm explained to the kid as the doctor

found his materials in the kitchen. “It’s gonna be unpleasant.”

The doctor came back dragging a bench with one hand and carrying a Pepsi bottle in the other. Between his lips he gripped a needle, thread hanging down from it. “Sit here, please.” He and the boy sat on the dirt floor and he rested the boy’s arm across the bench and lowered his suturing materials down into the bottle’s mouth. “I’m going to sterilize,” he said, and fished out the needle by its thread and immediately pinched closed the wound and ran the needle through the flesh. The kid inhaled through his teeth with a hiss, nothing more. “He is a stoic,” the scientist said.

“Can you talk to this guy? Translate for me, man.” “Of course.” “First off, who was that old woman he ran over with his motor

bike?” The two spoke, and the scientist said, “It was his grandmother.” “You’re shitting me. Who is this guy?” “He is not permitted to tell us his actual name. I know who he is. I

have heard of him. He’s traveling to a village up ahead.”

In silence, except for the boy’s hissing with each suture, the scientist finished his work. The wound was bloodless now, closed with five tight blue knots. Storm said, “That’s some number one stuff. You’re Elvis.”

“Yes. It’s good. Thank you.” The boy stood up and said a few words. “He says that from here we must walk.” “No shit? We’ve been walking for an hour already.” “Tomorrow is an important ceremony. This man has made a very se

rious bargain to participate.” “Where does this happen? He said ‘The Road.’ ” “Yes. I will write it for you. You can spell it this way.” With his finger he gouged at the hardened film of dust on his tabletop, among the float

ing monstrosities: The Roo. “I will go also.” “Can we get a car?” “We can only walk. It’s a few hours, but very easy. You see, we are on

a plain. Then we go down to the valley.” “All right, fuck it, let’s walk.” “You are going to accompany us?” “No, man. You are the fucking new guy. I’m already on this ride.” The scientist rubbed his hands together and frowned. “All right! You

can accompany us for a while, Jimmy, okay?”

The boy had already walked out the door. Storm followed, and Dr. Mahathir caught up to them on the path as it gave over again to paddies outside the village. “Do you have water in your canteen?”

“I’m half full.” “It’s enough.” The boy did not look back at them. He pulled his shirt on over his

head without pausing or even slowing down. The three clambered along at such a pace none of them had breath to speak until they’d regained the path after half a kilometer of successive dikes and ditches. Mahathir called after him in Malay with a plea in his voice.

“I have told him we must stop to rest at the next place. I think he will

allow it.” “Sefior, what is this kid up to? Ask him to tell me what he’s doing.” “He cannot answer you. From this place until we reach that place, he

must keep his silence.” “What for?” “He has a function to perform. There will be a ceremony.” “What kind of ceremony would that be, Mr. Bugs?” “It’s very unusual. It is not often to happen. I will observe it.”

At the next village they stopped outside a small wooden house and sat on two benches in the shade and drank iced tea without ice. The entomologist said, “It is a hot day.”

“Damn right.” “Here is a good place. It’s far enough for you. Can you rest?” “No way I stay here. I’m going farther than you.” “Farther will be Thailand.”

“If that’s what it takes.”

Mahathir hunched his shoulders and sipped tea from his plastic glass, looking as if it tasted bad. He knit his brow, cleared his throat, poured out the last drops on the ground, and wiped down the glass with the hem of his undershirt, making sure to keep his dress shirt clean.

They all three rose and began walking. When they reached the last house at the edge of the village Mahathir halted, wrapped his arms around himself, and said, “Excuse me, Jimmy. I think you should not go on from here. No, you must not come now. I’m very sorry to bring you here.”

The boy was getting away. “Let’s go, Doc. I gotta talk to some peo

ple.” “This is not the proper day for you to do it. Do it another day, okay?” They’d left behind them the shade trees of the village, and they passed

now among scrubby bushes streaked with rainwashed dust. “This is bad,

it’s even terrible. Yes, it’s terrible,” Mahathir said. They began the descent into the Belum Valley. “There he is,” Storm said, “there he is.” “Who is there?” Before them stretched the jungle canopy beneath which in a substra

tum invisible to the eyes of Disneyland right now MIAs were getting the

fuck tortured out of them. “Who is there?” “Let’s go. This kid ain’t waiting.” The path descended gradually, cutting along the side of the hill, or

the mountain, Storm didn’t know which it was, because even on the steep decline the trees grew tall enough to hide both the sky and the valley’s bed. After another kilometer they came onto a grassy flat. The path took them toward a clearing and some dwellings, hooches of woven straw and batten, roofed with galvanize. He heard the river somewhere and some birds or perhaps people.

“The boy will stop here. I am stopping here also.” “Where are they?” “We will go closer to the river.” A hundred meters on, beside the river, they found a couple of dozen

villagers and a burn pile nearly five meters in height and twice as wide at its base. Its preparation was apparently complete. Three women wrapped in dirty sarongs circled the edifice with armloads of dry tree limbs, inserting kindling where they could. Beyond these women, men in G-strings stood in the river up to their knees, bathing, splashing water one-handed up into their armpits and dousing their heads and swaying from side to side, bent over, to shake away the drops from their long hair.

“They’ve made the pyre.” “They’re gonna torch him.” “This boy? No.” “Then who?” —Storm wondered if it was himself. “With this fire they are going to destroy his soul.” Four men also in G-strings stood to the side acknowledging no one,

as if they waited to be photographed, as did the pyre itself, looming like a god assembled out of limbs and bones while the boy looked up at it out of his flat face.

Mahathir addressed the four. As if he’d broken a paralyzing spell, they approached, gesturing and speaking. “There is a problem,” Mahathir said, “an infestation. They are burdened and tormented by the infestation of a curse. They say if we look we’ll see the teeth marks on their possessions. What is the infestation? One says monkeys, some are saying rodents. They will not say. They are angry because of fear. They will lose everything. They will starve.”

One man came close and spoke only to Mahathir. “He says the priest is waiting in a special place. We can go see him.”

Storm and Mahathir and the boy passed through the collection of dwellings, the entomologist leading along a path to a small clearing where they found three very small hooches and one man in a G-string standing around by himself.

“Another fucker with no clothes.” “He is the priest, especially hired for this important ceremony. But don’t worry. He is a false priest. He is a charlatan.” The boy stopped walking some yards from the little savage, who

crouched as if about to leap violently into the air, and studied him. Mahathir put his hand on Storm’s arm. “Stay here. It’s not for us.” After some seconds the priest relaxed and stood upright again and ap

proached Storm and Mahathir, giving the boy a wide berth. To Storm he held out both his hands as if expecting Storm to take them, but they were filthy with mud.

“Tell him if he wants to shake, he’d better wash up first.”

“They must dig for larvae. Don’t be alarmed. It’s good protein. Better than rice. Rice gives energy, not strength. But it’s a good source of carbohydrate.”

The men by the river had worn burlap over their groins, but the priest’s G-string was woven in a complicated pattern of reds, greens, browns. Mahathir spoke to him at length, interrupting frequently. Plainly the scientist was excited.

“There is a kind of animal,” he told Storm, “a monkey. These people call him sanan. I don’t know what it means. It’s their language. They believe he is a small man, a human being. This sanan is making war against them now. One month ago, I think two month ago at least, almost one thousand of sanan came to this place and they are eating any plants to eat, and the people cannot eat and they had only some rice. And he says also one months ago these one thousand of sanan attacked the village and stole the rice and destroyed their belongings. Also, he says, the sanan bited many people and tore some babies open.” The man spoke. “I don’t know if fatally. He says they came like a typhoon. From every side. Nothing to escape.” The man pointed up the valley while speaking. “He says that a child is missing. The sanan took the child away. Another child was taken, but she was found the next morning alive. I think he is exaggerating. For a visitor they like to make it seem exciting. How could one thousand sanan live together? There’s not enough for sustenance. I know these monkeys. They subsist in a size of two dozen creatures. That’s their limit. This monkey has a white face with a lot of hair on it, white hair. He looks very intelligent, with a cruel expression at all times. He’s not a person. They think sanan is a small human. Well, this man is required to say such things. It’s how he makes a living. These people are superstitious. They will pay him. And even more to the young man.”

Meanwhile the boy stood alone some ways off. The man spoke while regarding him. “He says we must not talk to this boy because he has made a very serious bargain. Also he wants to know about you,” Mahathir told Storm. “He asks if you are a friend of the white man on the other side.”

“What other side.”

“Across the valley.”

“Fm not anybody’s friend.” “If you go there, you will be in Thailand.” “Is that a problem?” “It is another place, that’s all.” “I’ll stay here tonight.” “The ceremony is tomorrow. It must come at sunset and finish in

darkness.” “Where’s the kid sleeping?” “In one of these huts. We can stay too.” “I could use some food.” “They have nothing. But there is a store.” They returned to the village. The sun had passed below the hills op

posite. The village vendor had raised his awning and lit a lantern and stood silhouetted in its glow, the president of a few canned goods and packages on two rough shelves. Storm bought a pack of 555s and a bottle of Tiger Beer probably years old, its flaking decal barely legible. It tasted no worse than a fresh one.

“They have gathered together all their ornaments and precious stones, and they put it together with all the rubber they collected for a year, and they came and sold everything in my village where I met you. I saw their headman when he came to sell. That’s how I learned about this boy. He’s going to be paid. This boy will make a lot of money. But he will destroy his soul.”

“It’s like that all over, man.”

Storm drank his beer quickly and in the last light the three made their way back to the priest’s domain and they retired to the hooches, Mahathir and the priest each alone, while Storm and the boy shared the third. They lay in hammocks while pungent embers smoked in a stone hibachi beneath them to fend off malaria. Storm soaked his bandanna in river water and covered his face to filter the fumes.

All night the boy’s weeping ruined his rest. At dawn he left for the other side.