A River in May Read online

  As soon as the new officers arrived, they were ushered into Cale’s office for an introductory talk. He started off by saying that he had no wife, no family, no friends – and that was the best way to be. ‘I see,’ he went on, ‘that none of you rabbit-hung studs ever been to Vietnam before, so you don’t know how horny you can get when you got a permanent hard-on and there ain’t no place to stick it ‘less you’re some kind of pervert that gets turned on by body count hangin’ in the wire. But it don’t matter, you just do the job you been trained for. Your needs don’t matter. Now, some of you little sodomites may have a reg’lar piece of tail back in the so-called world. You may even be married to it. And she probably told you – with tears running down her cheeks, all smearin’ her Jezebel make-up and rouge – about how faithful she going to be while you in Vietnam. That is one steamin’ load of bullshit. Human nature ain’t like that – healthy young tail need it just as much as you do. Jody’s probably been around checkin’ out the situation already, and it won’t be long before Jody’s shaftin’ her up one side and down the other. That just human nature. But, gentlemen, that sort of thing just don’t matter. You just do the job you been trained for and that’s it.’

  While Cale was speaking, Lopez noticed a copy of a Roadrunner cartoon under the glass cover on his desk. In the colonel’s cartoon, however, the coyote had finally turned the tables. His front paws were grasping Roadrunner’s neck and his disproportionately huge penis had skewered the bird, almost splitting it in half. The caption read, ‘Take that, you bastard.’

  ‘Now it just so happens,’ Cale continued, ‘that the people you replacing are not doing the jobs which they were trained for. This may be because they got killed or hurt real bad or stepped on their dicks.’ The officers had been conditioned to believe that ‘stepping on your dick’ – being relieved for incompetence – was an even worse fate than death. ‘So finally, gentlemen, don’t let any of these things – as far as can be prevented – happen to you. Writin’ a certain sort of letter makes me feel rotten as hell. Maybe I’m just selfish, but I want you guys to spare me that particular feeling. So be careful.’

  Cale ended the talk abruptly, said he was late for a meeting with his Vietnamese counterpart. Lopez wondered if this was an excuse: he thought he could see the tears forming in the corners of Cale’s eyes. As they filed out Travis whispered to Lopez, ‘Do you think Rastus writes his own scripts?’

  ‘At least he can write, you racist gringo asshole.’

  Travis obviously knew he meant it and looked a little speechless. Lopez was usually ‘one of the guys’ – but sometimes he reacted badly to racist remarks; sometimes there were even fights. Travis took Lopez by the arm. ‘I’m not a racist – you ought to know that.’

  Lopez smiled. ‘You think I give a fuck?’

  ‘Sometimes I think you do.’ Travis answered. ‘But then again, sometimes I really don’t know what’s going on with you at all.’

  It was still early evening when Lopez heard rumors that one of the new officers was already missing. Earlier he had seen the adjutant running around asking, ‘Any of you guys seen Lieutenant Whiteford?’ There hadn’t been any enemy action, he hadn’t been taken prisoner; it was just an accident. Someone later said that they had last seen Whiteford on the beach fooling about in the breakers on an inflatable mattress. The current must have swept him out to sea.

  The company commander called in a helicopter equipped with a Xeon spotlight capable of throwing a million candle-power of light for almost a mile. All night long they heard the sound of the search helicopter beating up and down the coast. At first light Lopez and some of the others heard they’d found the body rolling in the surf near Monkey Mountain on the northern end of the peninsula, and ran up the beach in the early dawn to see. ‘So stupid,’ whispered Travis. ‘So fucking stupid. He only just got here.’ The body was fish-belly white and there were crabs clinging to soft puffy tissue that had already become frayed by their hunger. This was a truth long lost to North America and Europe: that humans are meat.

  Later that morning Lopez went swimming, but it didn’t feel right – he couldn’t help but think that the sea was tainted. The sea near Da Nang wasn’t translucent like the sea at Nha Trang; it was brown gray like the Atlantic.

  It reminded Lopez of a trip to Cape Hatteras with Tom and Rosie and Ianthe. It had been early May, the weather fresh and crystal clear. He and Ianthe went walking along the dunes and noticed some fishermen gathered around something that had washed up. Lopez thought it was a plastic buoy: it looked round and beige colored with brown blotches. They continued walking, turned around when they got to the new inlet where the ocean had broken through into Pamlico Sound during Hurricane Hazel, and walked back the way they had come.

  There were a whole lot more people there, and a North Carolina State Police car stuck in the sand with its wheels screaming and spinning. Lopez remembered one of the police shouting, ‘Curtis, you done sank the goddam thing in up to the axle.’ He went to help and so did the fishermen and they finally managed to push the big police Pontiac back on to the hard track. Then Lopez saw the ambulance, behind a dune, and got there just in time to see the buoy – it was on a stretcher and strapped in a canvas sack by then – being loaded into the back of it. He asked the driver what had happened. It was a little boy, about eight years old, but no one knew who he was or how he had died.

  Lopez came back and told Ianthe. She winced and grabbed his hand. They walked on a good distance, maybe two miles, and didn’t say anything. Ianthe was crying. And there was nothing there except clean May morning sun and sand and marram grass dunes and the bright glossy Atlantic. ‘Let’s swim,’ she said. She stripped naked first – she was completely unselfconscious about her body, her innocence knew no prudery. Lopez kept his underpants on and followed her into the ocean: he looked at her hips and realized that she was turning from a waif into a woman. It frightened him. The water was still cold from winter, and much saltier than the tepid Chesapeake. The Atlantic rollers were like houses.

  They came out and lay in the dunes to dry. He tried not to look at her body, but noticed that her eyes were shut and she was breathing hard. He left her to catch some grasshoppers in the dunes. When he came back, she was sound asleep. He dropped a grasshopper between her breasts. She still didn’t wake. He noticed how the pale green of the grasshopper blended so naturally with the pink and brown of her nipples and breasts. The insect – une sauterelle, he translated to himself – drew itself up to spring away. She opened an eye. ‘I’m cold,’ she said.

  ‘Maybe you should get dressed.’

  As they walked back, Ianthe started talking about the dead boy, fantasizing that he had been their son – his and hers. Lopez thought it was sick and perverse, and wanted to tell her to shut up, but knew she wouldn’t. She started talking about the funeral, what sort of flowers they would plant on his grave, how they would invite his school friends back to the house to share out his toys, all except his favorite little red fire engine which they would bury with him. Lopez tried to put his hand over her mouth, but she pushed him away and shouted, ‘Don’t take him away from me.’ Later, she wrote a haiku about the boy; Lopez had kept it ever since. He still carried it in his wallet as a talisman – not for luck, but for remembrance:

  Dream-bright river, May.

  Our son rows a wooden boat.

  Spring-no-sorrow-time!

  THE NEXT MORNING Lopez left Da Nang on the helicopter that went to Nui Hoa Den twice a week. There was no other way to get there; the land routes were all cut off and there was no place for a fixed wing aircraft to land. The helicopter flew a few miles out to sea before banking south to follow the coast. In the distance, the jagged peaks of an offshore island showed through the morning sea mist. Near the mainland shore were many small round fishing boats bobbing in and out of their drift nets. The beach was continuous white sand and behind the beach were salt pans which stick-like figures under conical hats were scraping with wide rakes. The land behind t
he salt gatherers was sandy and desolate in some places, but – where the sea had broken through – there were villages on stilts and children tending flocks of ducks.

  When the helicopter reached a point where the sea was stained beige by silt flowing from the river mouth, it banked inland and began to follow the course of the river. A coaster was taking the tide to Hoi An, a busy traffic of sampans scattered like pieces of bark by her wake. Hoi An was the provincial capital and dominated the delta like a Mediterranean fortress town. According to Lopez’s briefing folder, the Portuguese landed there in 1535, and made lots of money selling Western weapons and military advice to the Nguyen to help them in their insurrection against the Trinh.

  The helicopter had to fly high to avoid anti-aircraft fire, but Lopez could still make out the leafy squares and walled gardens of Hoi An, as well as a pagoda and a white church, and civil servants in white shirts leaving their offices for lunch. The town seemed a perfect self-contained pocket universe – neither East nor West, just itself. Something about it reminded Lopez of Camus’s La Peste.

  After Hoi An, the river became narrow and serpentine as it twisted through the flat coastal strip between the mountains and the sea. The land was a spider-web of paddy fields and hamlets with thatched roofs. Some of the larger villages still had French colonial buildings with bright red roof tiles. Lopez saw a hamlet where the thatch was burning beneath a towering plume of black smoke. It looked almost nuclear because of the way the air currents sucked up the greasy oily smoke into a mushroom cloud. The door gunner shouted into Lopez’s ear above the noise of the rotors to say that a Phantom jet had been shot down from there the previous day and both crew killed. A pair of fighter-bombers were exacting retribution: as soon as their bomb racks were empty, another pair would take over and then another, until five o’clock in the afternoon when the officer’s club bar began serving half-price drinks for Happy Hour.

  The scenes of devastation got worse as they flew further inland. It seemed to Lopez that awful things had happened. The land became a wasteland mangled by tank treads and pockmarked with craters fetid with pus-yellow water. The paddy dykes were broken, the fields abandoned and reverting to scrub, and blackened hulks of burnt out tanks, armored personnel carriers and crashed aircraft littered the valley.

  The foothills finally began at An Hoa, the district capital. It was a bleak place: nothing but trench lines, sandbags, watchtowers and bunkers. An Hoa had a Marine battalion and an artillery battery. It was the last outpost before Nui Hoa Den. It was where Lopez’s team were supposed to retreat if they got overrun.

  After An Hoa the river twisted into the green shadows of the Annamite Mountains and the countryside was beautiful again. The ravage of war was less evident. There were no tank tracks in the mountain jungles and the thick green foliage of the mountains was more resilient to bombing than the fragile farms of the coastal plain.

  The pilot climbed to 10,000 feet to get beyond the range of the .51 caliber guns. The altitude made the air cold and Lopez, dressed only in a tropical uniform, was freezing. All the helicopters had been stripped of panels and doors so people could get in and out quickly, and they were as open to the elements as World War One fighter pilots in biplanes.

  Three minutes later they were above Nui Hoa Den. From two miles up the camp was an insignificant sand colored scratch on a mountaintop. The helicopter dropped quickly, then banked tightly twice around the camp. Lopez watched the pilot shake his head at the co-pilot: they looked angry. The door gunner shouted in his ear that there was no one on the landing pad to guide them in with a smoke grenade. ‘Incon-fucking-siderate,’ he said. ‘Always the same shit with this place.’ After one more circle the pilot shrugged, the co-pilot nodded and they landed anyway.

  The engine was shut down and the rotor blades, after a few pirouettes, became still. There was utter silence. It was midday at the end of the dry season and the place was as dead as a stone. The scraped earth was yellow and baked hard by the sun. The only signs of life were two pairs of eyes staring out of the shadow of a bunker entrance like the eyes of desert reptiles hiding from predators underground.

  The stasis was finally broken by the noise of a truck banging over the ruts and potholes of the camp. A two-and-a-half-ton truck appeared, driven by a black American stripped to the waist, his body well muscled and gleaming with sweat like a sleek middleweight in the seventh round. The truck ground to a halt by the helicopter pad; the driver jumped down and shook Lopez’s hand. ‘Lieutenant Lopez, sir, welcome to Nui Hoa Den. I hope you like it here and don’t step on your dick like the lieutenant we just got rid of.’

  ‘I’m not going to. Who are you?’

  ‘Sergeant Calvin Jackson, sir, junior weapons NCO.’ Jackson then looked around furtively, as if he were about to make a guilty admission. He looked at the ground and whispered, ‘Lieutenant Lopez, would you give me a hand, please?’

  ‘Sure, with what?’

  ‘Follow me, sir, and I’ll show you.’

  He led Lopez around to the back of the truck. There was a large lumpy object covered by a poncho. Jackson drew the pins from the tailgate, let it drop and flicked aside the poncho. ‘That’s Sergeant First Class Monroe, he’s the senior weapons NCO.’

  Lopez tried to hold his breath, but it was too late; he’d already breathed in the stench. The body was bloated and distended. The lower lip had split and Monroe’s features, originally African, had puffed out into plump oriental roundness like a black Buddha. The dead man’s camouflage uniform seemed several sizes too small; the fabric was stretched taut around the swollen flesh like the skin of a cooked sausage.

  Lopez hadn’t been ready for this. He felt sick. The stench hit him and hit him again – repeat waves of putrefaction. He had a weird flashback. When he was eight, Tom and he had gone to the stockyards in Baltimore with a load of pigs. It was a hot July. There was something lying on a wagon near the railroad sidings. At first Lopez thought it was a dead pig. Tom went over to see what it was and came back with his handkerchief over his mouth and nose. Lopez wanted to look, but he was quickly and firmly led away. Later, Tom told him it was a dead vagrant who had accidentally set himself on fire in a railroad cattle truck. The body had lain undiscovered for days. At the time Lopez was angry that Tom hadn’t let him look: now he knew why.

  Lopez became aware that Jackson was still talking to him, explaining that some fishermen had found the body floating down the river shortly before dawn. ‘We couldn’t fit him in a body bag because of the way his arms and legs are stuck out.’ Monroe had the posture of a frog caught in mid-leap.

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘What happened? What do you think happened? He went and got his self killed, sir.’

  Lopez put his bag and rifle in the truck, and had begun to help Jackson shift Monroe’s body to the helicopter when another American appeared. He wore a black hat, a black T-shirt and long Mexican bandit style moustaches. He nodded at Lopez, said something in Spanish, then jumped on to the bed of the truck and began to take photographs of Monroe’s body from various angles and distances.

  Jackson said, ‘Get the fuck outta here, Mendy. You got enough pictures this morning.’

  Mendy said, ‘These aren’t pictures, they’re color slides,’ and snapped a half dozen more frames before he was satisfied.

  They finally got Monroe’s body into the helicopter. The helicopter crew didn’t like it; one of the door gunners knelt down and vomited hamburger and beer on to the baked earth.

  Then Jackson drove Lopez to the inner perimeter, the camp’s American sector. There was a double hedge of concertina barbed wire, bristling antennae, and two machine-gun bunkers facing, not outwards, but – ugly and distrustful – into the heart of the camp itself. As the truck bounced and lurched across the camp, clusters of curious Vietnamese appeared, wearing flip-flop sandals and camouflage uniforms, trying to get a peep at the new lieutenant.

  The CO, Captain Redhorn, was standing on top of the command bunker with a pair of b
inoculars around his neck as they pulled up. Redhorn was a tall rangy man of twenty-six who wore thick glasses and looked like a caged wolf that hadn’t been fed for days. Lopez unloaded his gear from the truck. He sniffed his bag to see if it had picked up any taint of Monroe’s putrefaction. The camp interpreter, a Montagnard-Vietnamese half-caste with shoulder length hair, was squatting next to Redhorn holding a radio handset. A patter of small arms fire began to drift up from the river valley. As Redhorn gazed through the binoculars towards the action, he spoke to the interpreter. Lopez had heard that sort of voice before: it was that soft honeyed Southern drawl that chills the gut and makes the blood curdle. Those purring diphthong vowels were the unmistakable androgynous voice of Southern Gothic: the soft feminine tones cooed by an Alabama policeman undoing his trousers in a lonely jail or the velvet whispers of a Klansman about to wield the castration blade. ‘Tell him, Ly, that he had better bring back hands. And I don’t want to see two rights and two lefts.’ After Ly had finished translating, Redhorn took the radio and repeated the instructions: ‘Je ne veux fucking pas, Trung Uy, deux droites et deux gauches. Biet, Trung Uy, biet?’ He eyed Lopez closely and explained, ‘You need proof.’

  ‘Proof of what?’

  ‘Body count verification. That’s what the hands are for. You can’t trust these slopeheads when there are no Americans on the operation. We pay them a bonus for body count out of the non-accountable funds budget and they’ll do anything, no matter how stupid, to jack up their score. At first, I used to ask for thumbs. Big mistake. One day the slope commanding Dai Doi 107 handed me a sack half full of thumbs and half full of big toes – like I wouldn’t know the difference – wanted me to think he’d wiped out a couple of platoons. They all lie and cheat; it’s their way of life. I’ll tell you one thing that’s fucking certain: these people have no moral scruples whatsoever.’