A River in May Read online

  Finally, a marine gunnery sergeant acknowledged Cuc’s existence and shouted back, ‘Hey, gook! Slopehead! Wanna Coke?’ The American gave Cuc his first contact with the western world by throwing a half-full can of Coca-Cola at him and hitting him square on the side of the head. Too terrified to dodge it, Cuc at first thought he was bleeding, but it was only the sticky brown Coca-Cola trickling down his neck.

  The convoy passed and all was suddenly and strangely still. Cuc squatted in the dust of the road, weeping with exhaustion and humiliation, and lamenting his decision to leave Son Loi. He was on the verge of turning back when a jeep appeared. Cuc waved and shouted – it stopped. An American smiled a flash of perfect teeth and greeted him in fluent Vietnamese. Cuc had just met the senior advisor for Quang Nam.

  Over the next few weeks Cuc was interrogated, assessed and made to swear an oath of allegiance. He was ‘a good catch’ – strong, intelligent, adept at handling weapons and equipment. He was selected for the elite Kit Carson Scout program where the best defectors were trained as scouts to serve with the Americans, just as Apache and Sioux warriors had scouted for the US cavalry in the last century.

  Ho Cuc was assigned to an American airborne infantry battalion where his expert knowledge of mines, booby traps and guerrilla tactics saved dozens of GIs from being killed or maimed. His bravery won him an American Bronze Star, and he was shown off as a prize defector whenever VIPs visited the division HQ. On one occasion, Cuc even appeared on US national television with a Republican senator. The senator, attired in flak jacket and helmet for the TV cameras, was a notorious hawk who believed in more bombing including tactical nukes. He also believed that the Vietnamese had to ‘stand up for themselves’ and picked out Ho Cuc as a prime example of one who was doing just that. The television screens showed the senator with his arm around Cuc, describing him as ‘a brave young Vietnamese who had chosen freedom.’

  A week later the airborne battalion’s luck ran out in a big way. They had been lured into attacking a ridgeline at Dak To. The North Vietnamese allowed them to pass through well-concealed positions before attacking them from behind. The battalion was trapped in a well-planned crossfire and decimated. Ho Cuc was written off as missing, presumed dead.

  FRANCIS LOPEZ WOKE an hour before dawn and watched the light creep in through the frayed curtain. He was hung over and wanted to get drunk again: it was the only way to cope with being at his step-parents’ home. At first light, Lopez dressed and went down to the jetty. He found raccoon tracks just above the high water mark; they led up the beach to where a lightning-split oak leaned over the bank. Tom, his adoptive father, always kept him informed about the raccoon: she had a den and cubs where the river had eroded a cavern under the tree roots.

  Though it was mid-May, it was too early in the morning for dragonflies, but there were whippoorwills calling from the wood, and a hummingbird in the marsh. Lopez thought that Stormy Petrel looked low in the water, so he jumped on board to pump the bilges. The tide was full and the river a mirror. A yellow perch hovered near the weed bank and further out, towards the point, a school of alewives rippled the water. He wanted to slip Stormy Petrel’s moorings and sail out, away from Rideout’s Landing, into the broad bay, past the white clapboard lighthouse on stilts, past the islands and down into Virginia. The rivers and bays, he thought, had always been fresh and wonderful. Nothing ever went wrong out there.

  Lopez went back to the house. Tom used to call it ‘the tomb’: it was too big to heat in winter and always seemed damp and cold. He went into the studio and sat at the big roll-top desk where Tom did the farm accounts. He started to write a farewell letter – but then he stopped and looked at what he’d written. It was so, so stupid; it was fantastically awful – melodramatic ‘to be opened only in the event of my death’ crap. Unless one does manage to get killed, he thought, letters like this prove pretty fucking embarrassing.

  He tore the letter into tiny pieces and instead doodled a cartoon on the blotter of Tom’s Hampshire boar holding trotters with a sow and singing:

  Pour voir la vie en rose

  Je n’ai pas besoin de grand’ chose…

  Lopez knew that Rosie was proud of his being good at French. He drew a picture of a bridge and sketched in the two pigs leaning over the parapet and captioned it:

  Sous le pont Mirabeau coule la Seine

  Et nos amours…

  Lopez added a few swans to the river and a spying periscope. It felt good to be doing something stupid. And silly things like that made Rosie happy, showed he wasn’t being morbid. He knew that after he was gone, Rosie would date the drawings and put them in her diary for safekeeping. She kept everything.

  Rosie Ardagh had gone to a lot of trouble to organize her adopted son’s life and education. She had arranged the lycée exchange in Paris, and later his year at the Sorbonne. His fluent French was tangible proof that she had accomplished something, that she had civilized him. Learning Spanish, on the other hand, would have been a sign of regression, of ingratitude even. Rosie had envisioned him becoming some sort of genteel professor or diplomat bouncing back and forth across the Atlantic. And then he had spoiled her silly dream. He had spoiled everything, forever. And Tom and Rosie had forgiven him. And he couldn’t bear it. So, unable to live with that terrible forgiveness, he was running away from it, knowing that they would forgive that too.

  Lopez stared out the window and tried to make his brain melt into mush. He held his head in his hands: he could feel the soft tick of his carotid pulse. ‘They love me so much,’ he said to himself. ‘They need me.’ The day was starting to get warm. In the honeysuckle the bees were going berserk pillaging pollen.

  Lopez looked around the studio and remembered why he hated it so much. He and Ianthe used to call it ‘the dead brats’ room’. The disrespect was a childhood dare thing started by Lopez. But Ianthe’s eyes watered and her lip always shook when she called it that, for one of the ‘brats’ had been her father. All the photographs, the sports trophies, the scrapbooks, the newspaper clippings and the other relics of those lost lives were there. Maybe, he thought, that was why Rosie’s paintings were so depressing. She ought to work someplace else. Lopez used to hate being alone with the ghost sons. He could feel their presence, and was even afraid to turn around too quickly lest he should catch one of them smiling and staring at his back. And there was always this dull musty smell: the stale perfume that clings long after the party’s over, the scent of wilted funeral flowers.

  A photograph of Arthur, in a gilt frame, stood on the baby grand next to a silver salver of dried rose petals. Arthur looked more corpulent and affable than Peter – there was even a hint in his face of something voluptuous and carnal. Rosie never said much about Arthur, even after the secret was out. At least he’d done what pleased him. Maybe that was why the eyes in the photograph looked sleepy – but the mouth beneath the moustache seemed cruel, perhaps sadistic. It was the younger son, Peter, for whom Rosie truly and passionately mourned. There was a photograph of Peter on the writing desk, about to take off from an airfield in Suffolk, giving the thumbs up from the cockpit of his plane. He was a celebrity hero even before he died and his photo had appeared on the cover of a national magazine.

  Lopez found Peter’s scrapbook in the desk drawer and turned to the final page. The newsprint cutting was yellow and brittle. It was from a local English paper that described the explosion as ‘the largest ever to have shaken the British Isles’. Eighty-nine buildings were damaged by the blast, including the church of Holy Trinity, Blythburgh, which had all its windows blown in. Lopez closed the book and put it back. Ianthe had known the contents by heart: when she was young she had read all the articles over and over again so that she could recite them from memory like the Hail Mary or the Apostles’ Creed. It had been her only way of connecting to her father, all that was left of him.

  Peter had volunteered for a secret operation to attack the sites that were launching V1 rockets at London. Conventional bombing had had no eff
ect on the V1 sites for they were protected by concrete fifty feet thick. The plan involved packing a B-24 Liberator with twelve tons of high explosive. The idea was for Peter and his co-pilot to get the bomber off the ground, point it in the right direction and then parachute out. The pilotless plane would then be flown by remote control until it reached its target. Something, probably an electric fault, had blown them up fifteen minutes into the flight – right over the garden.

  The coincidence was so bizarre and so cruel that Lopez wondered if there really was such a thing as a family curse. Ianthe’s mother, three months pregnant, had been sitting in her garden enjoying the late afternoon August sun when the father of her child disintegrated to atoms in the sky above her. The casement windows were blown in, and for several seconds afterwards there was a gentle patter of white ash, all that was left of Peter Ardagh. Lopez reckoned that the whole thing – so freakish and gruesome, like someone tipping a loved one’s cremation urn over your head – must have deranged Peter’s fiancee. When the baby was born she christened her Ianthe – the code name of the very mission that killed the father. The poor woman never did get her marbles back. Instead there was a lot of drink, a lot of men and even more self-loathing. When Ianthe was three her mother walked into the sea at Walberswick with a bottle of gin in her hand – and Tom and Rosie, as usual, picked up the pieces.

  Sometimes, when Rosie was a bit drunk, she used to sway back and forth, telling people that Peter had been headed for the White House and would have beaten Kennedy for the Democratic nomination in ’60, and would then have ‘absolutely clobbered that shit Nixon.’ It was at times like this that Lopez had hated Peter. He hated him because he had tried to be like him – tried to replace him – and failed. Later, hate turned to disdain. Then to pity. Peter had been strong, brave and loyal, but his fresh honest face showed nothing of furtiveness and complex duplicity. In the end, Lopez began to feel superior: he was sure that he knew things, was conscious of a world, that neither son had ever imagined. To be fair, he knew that Rosie and Tom had never expected him to replace their sons or to be a ‘grateful’ child. They let him keep his birth name, Lopez, not wanting to steal that faint fragment of his lost past. Lopez knew the Ardaghs wanted nothing in return – but they didn’t know, could never have imagined, that he would take from them the last precious fragment of their own beings, their own blood.

  Lopez knew that his adoptive home was beautiful: the mellow eighteenth-century brick, the purple shadows of oak and walnut trees, the river in spring a virginal white corridor of dogwood blossom. But he also knew that the beauty was the corrupt, too-honeyed beauty of a place that lay under a curse. The land was cursed because it had been stolen from one people and then enriched by the slave labor of another. The dead sons were not the only ghosts in the shadows of Rideout’s Landing. At one time, this knowledge would have liberated him, saved him. But now he was one of the ghosts himself, part of the blood tragedy.

  There was a clunking noise from the corridor as ‘Sambo’ struck the hour. Sambo was a nineteenth-century clock cast in the shape of a Negro minstrel. The clock face was the base of the banjo, and the minstrel’s bulging eyes rolled to their whites during the hourly striking. The clock was an heirloom kept as a joke. One of Ianthe’s classmates from Smith had found it offensive – ‘Hey, Ianth baby, you have to get rid of that thing. It’s so racist!’ – but it didn’t bother Lopez: he loved the clock and as a child had been endlessly fascinated by the rolling eyeballs. For a while the minstrel was his best friend and he used to tell him all his secrets. He remembered that day – the worst day of his life – when he had pleaded silently, ‘Oh Sambo, my old pal, please make your hands go backward. Please, Sam, please…’

  He had learned, too late perhaps, that Tom and Rosie’s love was perfect and unconditional – that forgiveness, no matter how much he betrayed them, was always there. Lopez was moved by their love, but knew he couldn’t return it. He wondered if he could ever give anyone the sort of love they had given to him. And indeed, he thought, why should he? He had never asked to be translated into their world, to lose the austere pride of a mestizo’s poverty. It wasn’t all his fault.

  And he knew that their world was far from ideal – it was decayed and wilted. It was only by returning after so long away that Lopez saw the house as, he imagined, others must see it: the frayed Indian carpet, the rotting curtains, the walls stained with smoke and damp, and the harsh clash of Rosie’s abstract expressionist canvases with everything and with each other. Her clock – all their clocks – had stopped ticking a long time ago. Lopez looked at the photographs for one last time: Arthur, Peter – and Ianthe, wearing a plain white blouse, her thick chestnut hair brushing her shoulders, her arms full of books, her first day at college. He gently brushed his fingers over the photo, as if caressing her. ‘Now you’re a dead brat too.’

  Lopez pulled his hand away as if burnt and wiped the tears away. He nearly upset the silver salver of pot-pourri. On impulse he emptied the pot-pourri into the fireplace. The dried petals had lost their color and scent decades before. He picked up a poker and stirred the dead flies, fragments of moths’ wings and brown rose petals into the cold oak ash.

  THE WEEK BEFORE LOPEZ LEFT for Vietnam seemed to be permanent night. Now it was the night of departure, an unreal sick-inducing California night. It felt like their removal, their expatriation, was so shameful that it had to be done under cover of darkness. Complete nausea. The officers’ club at Travis Air Force Base was the worst example of Hollywood kitsch that Lopez had ever seen: pink flamingos, black vinyl furniture, cocktail swizzle sticks and pilots who looked like Dean Martin. Just as he thought he really was going to be sick, he found another Tequila Sunrise floating in front of him. He looked up and saw Garcia Vargas smiling at him like a nurse handing out medication at Spring Grove. ‘Get that inside you, chico.’

  ‘Go ’way, I’m drunk enough already.’

  Vargas ignored him and set down the drink.

  Earlier in the evening, Lopez and the other officers had been full of bravado. But as departure time approached the mood changed. It was no longer a joke: they really were on their way to Viet-fuckin’-nam. There were eighteen Special Forces lieutenants in the replacement levy. A few months ago, while still in training, they used to joke about the casualty statistics: it hadn’t seemed real then. Once, when an instructor had warned them that one in three could expect to die, the class of trainee officers burst into laughter: ‘Uno, dos – tough shit, Travis!’; ‘Ah mah Gawd, ah doan wanna die!’ – and so on. And half the survivors could expect to be crippled.

  Most of the instructors at Forts Benning and Bragg had been maimed, often hideously. Lopez wondered if they had been selected for their shock value, to make the young lieutenants ‘get real’ about war. They flaunted their wounds with the professional pride of self-mutilated medieval beggars. He remembered one especially twisted captain who seemed to get an almost sexual kick from telling them about the wounds and deaths that were waiting for them: penectomy, colostomy, castration, amputations various including full hip disarticulation. The captain’s own wound was from a bullet that had entered the top of his wrist and then ploughed the length of his arm, shattering his elbow and blowing a jagged hole through his upper arm the size of a baseball. The bullet had gouged a ridge between his forearm bones so deep you could roll golf balls down it. The arm was a hideous useless thing that stuck out from his body like a coathanger with a claw on the end. He couldn’t use it or hold anything with it. Lopez wondered why he didn’t have it amputated and replaced with a useful hook. Maybe that would have been too final, too much of a goodbye.

  It was going to be awful, obscene. And yet Lopez had volunteered for the whole business: infantry, airborne, Special Forces. He wished that he could explain it to someone. But he couldn’t explain it to himself. It was irrational, a drug, a compulsion, an escape. But it was also penance, atonement. And only he knew for what. He finished off the tequila.

  Vargas handed hi
m another, and breathed in his ear: ‘Hey, chico, you ever been to California before?’

  Lopez shook his head.

  ‘My dad used to work in the fields around Soledad as an illegal, before he got some forged papers so he could get a job in the canning factory. That’s some shit, isn’t it. Him needing papers?’

  ‘Why’s that, Garcia?’

  ‘Because California used to be Mexico till the gringos stole it.’

  ‘So what?’ said Lopez.

  ‘I’ll tell you “so what”, my little chico who can’t speak ten words of Spanish. If those richies back East hadn’t adopted you and the immigration cops were to walk in that door, they’d deport your ass. But don’t worry, chico, you got the right papers, so they’re going to send you to Vietnam instead. Hey, d’you know the difference between a gringo and an onion?’

  ‘No, Garcia, what is the difference between a gringo and an onion?’

  ‘Cutting up a gringo doesn’t make you cry.’ Vargas laughed so hard he spilt tequila all over his uniform.

  ‘That – is – bad,’ Lopez sighed.

  He closed his eyes. There was a vague memory of incense, candles, a still brown face in an open coffin in a church in Vera Cruz that they said was his mother. So long ago.

  It was nearly midnight when they boarded the flight. People formed their own seating groups according to rank and units. A lieutenant sitting behind Lopez was returning to Vietnam after a couple of weeks’ compassionate leave. His wife’s brother had been killed in the la Drang and his parents-in-law had asked him to accompany their son’s body back to the States. Lopez wondered why America was a country of ghouls: embalmers, escorted corpses, the high altitude danse macabre over the Pacific. He found such necrophilia weird. A death like Peter Ardagh’s – complete obliteration, so clean, so final – was the best way to go. He woke up Vargas and tried to talk to him about it: ‘What’s the point of embalming all these dead guys and sending them back twelve thousand miles? Why don’t they just bury us where we fall? Who the fuck wants to be pickled and slung back through the stratosphere? We’re not fucking Egyptian pharaohs.’