I Am the River Read online

  Broussard looked up at the tent roof. The moth was gone.

  Willie Render entered the tent, walked right past Darby and grabbed his pack. “Come on, Crayfish, we gotta go.”

  Render called Broussard “Crayfish” because Broussard was from Louisiana, and apparently everyone from Philadelphia, where Render grew up, was entirely certain that people from Louisiana, and especially the bayou, ate crawfish for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, excepting Thanksgiving and maybe Christmas. Broussard didn’t have the heart to tell him that it was “crawfish,” not “crayfish,” because he knew from firsthand experience that things were different up north, and the truth wasn’t always clear about how things happened down south.

  John McNulty, a pie-faced, packing-plant white guy from Chicago built like a loaf of Wonder Bread, had giggled about the nickname, muttering something about being a “bottom feeder…hiding under rocks.” Render had threatened to kick his dumb cracker ass, so McNulty kept his giggles to himself. Being six-two and built like a middle linebacker—a position which he did in fact play at St. Joseph’s Prep and two years at Temple before being drafted by Uncle Sam after blowing out a knee and a suspicious registration error at the school—got people into line double-quick, even dumb, pie-faced crackers like McNulty. Established lines broke down during war, and the laws of the jungle came back into play when all the blood leaking into the jungle was just as red and just as scared. Pure Darwinism, from the officer class on down. Probably from higher up than that.

  Broussard looked through the tent opening, out into the swirling dust and noise sweeping the clay skull top that that made up Con Thien. “What are they?” he said, thinking of giant pink moths, hovering above the tents and ammo dumps, sucking up the insides of each structure with a long proboscis.

  Render clamped his hand on the top of his helmet, fighting against the rising wind that blew through the hooch. “What?”

  Broussard pointed outside, to the noise and swirl. “What’s coming?”

  Render laughed, the sound of it drowned out. “Our ride,” he shouted as he stepped out of the tent.

  “To where?” Broussard said. No one had told them their mission, nor who was their CO. The men had been muttering about it the last two days, in between talking shit and reminiscing about home, but all anyone—to a man—was told was to wait for their ride, and get on when it arrived. Broussard had assumed it would a truck, ferrying them to some shit job in the rear created to keep the castoffs occupied until the war was over. Why else was he let out of his cell back in Quang Tri?

  “Does it really matter?” Darby said, fully dressed and geared up. How did he do that so fast? He clapped Broussard on the shoulder and peeled back a diseased grin of graying teeth crowded between tight lips. “You got somewhere else to be?”

  Darby and Broussard jogged out of their tent, lugging their packs and rifles. Render, McNulty, and Jorge Medrano, proud son of the San Joaquin Valley, were waiting by the edge of the LZ, enveloped in purple smoke gouting from a signal grenade, whipped crazily by the gusts. They all held down their helmets and looked up, as three helicopters dropped from the sky at twice normal speed. A pair of Hueys flanked a CH-47 Chinook like sparrows fussing after a gliding hawk. All of them were painted black, and had no markings or numbers on the outer hulls.

  The Chinook and one of the Hueys leveled off twenty feet above the ground. The remaining Huey dipped to the LZ, blades still spinning, landing skids barely touching the ground. The side door opened, and Render led the four others to the empty fuselage. Broussard couldn’t take his eyes off the Chinook waiting above them, its heavy bulk motionless and imposing. It was an impressive machine, long and rounded, like a killer whale on land, insides hollowed out to fill with every sort of promise of death. Its doors remained closed, windows blacked out. Broussard wondered what lay sleeping inside its stomach.

  Broussard climbed in after Medrano, and before he could find a seat and strap in, the chopper was gaining altitude. He fastened his safety belt and looked down at the fire base below him. A dozen GIs moved like lazy beetles over the top of the raw hilltop sticking out from the surrounding jungle like a Franciscan skull, denuded of bamboo by machete and Ka-Bar. Broad backs filled sandbags, dug 40x40 foxholes that would someday probably save their lives, burned trash in fifty-five-gallon fuel barrels cut in half, smoked cigarettes and adjusted the M110 eight-inch howitzers choppered in months ago to provide fire support for terrified grunts humping through the jungles below in a ten-mile radius. None of them looked up to watch this strange array of unmarked helicopters and their confused passengers leave them behind, almost as if they were never there. Ghosts passing through.

  But the group of South Vietnamese ARVN troops who were hunkered down by the perimeter, squatting in their own holes and listening to a transistor radio, all looked up as the helicopters rose into the sky. Before the side door slid shut again, each one of them raised their left hand and made a gesture with their fingers. Broussard couldn’t make out what it was at first, thinking it was a middle finger picked up through contact with the Americans. As the door sealed shut, Broussard realized they were crossing their fingers, which meant something far different in the land of the Blue Dragon.

  5. Night Man

  The outside knocks at the door. The door is thin, but holds, at least for now. The knocks have saved my life. The door only saves my dignity.

  I can breathe again. My lungs unfold and my arms and my legs come back to me while my brain waits and my heart remembers its rhythm. And still the knocks come at the door. Steady, not any harder or softer. Now that my life is saved, now that Black Shuck has been chased off by an intrusion from the outside world over which it has no domain, my fear shifts to those knocks. It could be anyone, but worse yet, it could be someone who can drag me from my cave and throw me into a hole, without my medicine, with only violence and sleep as my eternal sentence. Violence and sleep. The violence of sleep until the day I stand on the brink of the abyss and am carried away into the forever dark with it dragging me there by my ankles.

  A hand knocks again. A small hand, by the force of it. I would leave these knocks alone, but I know they won’t go away, and the racket will draw attention from those other kinds of eyes that are more than willing to snatch me up and put me in a cage. I’ll be goddamned if I ever let that happen.

  I let my feet find the floor, knowing that it’s probably still covered in water of an endless depth that will swallow me like it tried to swallow my bed, weighed down by the hound. I step anyway, because I have to get off this raft, and toes come into contact with the dust and the damp. I stand, the wounds on my chest felt but invisible to daylight eyes. Mosquitoes circle silently in the air, just like in the jungle. They’re not as big here, and they refuse to bite me, holding back their malaria and meningitis. Maybe it’s the medicine in my brain, or the dreams in my head. Either way, they leave me alone, waiting for me to invite somebody else into the room so they can have their way.

  The knuckles continue to rap at my door. This isn’t going away. None of it, not even the mosquitoes.

  I walk jungle-quiet to the door and listen. No voices, just the knocks. I peel back the locks, turn the handle and open the door. A withered old woman stands just outside, her granddaughter next to her, holding her hand and holding her up, as the old woman is near collapse from age or grief or some combination of both that keeps old people going long after they should.

  The granddaughter looks vaguely Caucasian, hazel eyes imploring me to let them in and give them peace. Another abandoned legacy from the war, this girl, left like a valley crater or rusting M48 tank. The girl and her grandmother are Vietnamese, cut deep by war—refugees just like me.

  “Night Man, hep us, okay?”

  She speaks pidgin English that an outsider would think was probably gifted to her by her G.I. father. But I know that wasn’t the case. She never met her daddy. Never knew his name or his face. He left or died before she was born, early in the back-story days of the war.
Probably a contractor or CIA trainer, leaving behind one more colonial flag buried in the clay. Her English comes from pirate American radio and British Invasion records.

  I look down at the girl, barely in her teens. She’s skinny but certainly thicker than any other girl in her family or on her block, with what was probably Scandinavian stock that filled out her hips and lightened her hair to a shiny bronze instead of a silken black. She’s an outcast just as much as I am, which makes her suited to life down in the Floating City. No child, your daddy never saw you born, never held you up like the gift you are.

  “You hep us, okay? We pay.”

  She holds up a covered bamboo basket. They never bring any cash. They bring trade. Food, family heirlooms, a chicken raised in their kitchen. The purest Triad heroin in the world, that would go for a cool grand in New Orleans or Harlem, but is cheaper than cooking oil in this neighborhood. Even with my employee discount, I can always use a little more junk, one half of an equation that has kept me on the edge of the abyss for going on four years. But she brought a basket, probably filled with something rolled and baked and totally worthless to me. I need cash, and I need sweet and sour white powders, and I need answers, and none of these things are standing in my doorway today.

  The girl points to her grandmother. “See her dreams, Night Man. You tell.”

  Người đêm, they used to call me, before. When I first stumbled down the street below and climbed up into my cave. Người đêm. I could barely get my tongue around it, even in my head. The older Thai, and the Vietnamese who never went back home even after all of us left, would mutter more quietly in French, putting a name to the man who had lost his. “Homme de nuit.”

  Night Man.

  A legend had wrapped itself around me, just another dark fairy tale of the Floating City. People told me about it, the ones who could speak English or whatever passed for it. I never asked, but they’d tell me anyway. They said that my body turned brown like a rotten fruit when I died, digesting itself, and that I didn’t know I was dead. Others said that I was once a brilliant white—my hair, my skin, my eyes, my heart—but I’d spent too much time on the Other Side, was dipped too long into the abyss, and now I was black inside and out.

  Night Man, they call me. The transformed freak who can see their dreams, read their future, find the lost souls.

  “You go…” The girl pushes on the old woman, who doesn’t move. “Insi.”

  The old woman, who doesn’t know any English, who won’t lower herself to speak what French she does know, gets her toothless mouth around the word in her ancestor’s tongue. “Người đêm.”

  I close the door on them both.

  6. The Weight of Paper

  I sit in the soft chair, sinking half a foot. The doctor is positioned behind her desk, hands folded under her chin, and looks down at me waiting below her like a scolded child.

  “I’m Dr. Massaquoi,” she says, making it a point to mention her name so that I pick up on the Creole vibration that maybe wasn’t expressed in the caramel color of her skin, the freckles that ease back from her cheek into the particular curl of her dark brown hair. Cutting that skin are the lenses of her glasses that reflect the light from the desk lamp, hiding her eyes. I need to see her eyes so I know what I’m dealing with, but that glass won’t let me. An air-conditioning unit hums in the corner, cooling the room to the temperature of a morgue. Framed photos cover the walls, showing another doctor also wearing glasses standing next to other men in full military uniform. All of their faces look the same. I can’t find the face of Dr. Massaquoi anywhere.

  At the front edge of the mostly deserted desk is an egg-shaped paperweight, veined with a stringy blob of pink matter encased by heavy, bubbled glass.

  “What do you see?” the doctor asks.

  “A jellyfish,” I answer.

  Dr. Massaquoi waits for me to continue, but I don’t, because there isn’t anything else to say. She waits for a few seconds more, then a full minute. This is the game. I want the whole thing to be over with, so I pick up the paperweight and look at it closely.

  “A jellyfish trapped in a bubble of air. Suffocating because it can’t breathe like we do.”

  I look up at her and it’s not her—now a different doctor from a different time. It’s the man in the photos who looked just like everybody else.

  “Just what happened out there, Specialist?”

  I remember where I am, where the River has dropped me this time. This is my debrief after Signal Hill, when my eval report took a mortal wound from which it never recovered.

  The doctor chuckles, leans forward and holds out his hand, palm up. It’s not shaking. Why would it? The man hasn’t seen or done anything his entire life aside from sitting behind desks and staring at people, making them feel small in tiny soft chairs. I put the heavy glass into his hand, dropping it a few inches. Can’t take the weight. He carefully replaces the paperweight on the edge of the desk, settles back into his chair and regards me again, but I know he can’t see me. No eyes behind those glasses.

  “What happened out there, Specialist Broussard?” The voices of the two doctors have combined into one, musical and deep.

  I look up, and it’s Dr. Massaquoi.

  “Why are you here, Specialist Broussard?” she asks.

  “You don’t know?” I ask in return. I know that she knows. I also know that this is just another part of the game, regardless of who’s asking the question.

  “Yes, I do know, but I’m asking you. That’s how this works. You do want this to work, don’t you?”

  “They sent me here, just like they sent you.”

  “Who’s they?”

  I don’t answer.

  “Why did they send you here?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Do you believe your superiors have a vested interest in your health, your well-being?”

  “I don’t know.”

  The doctor stares at me. The silence lasts so long that I feel like I’m going to scream if I don’t say something, so I do. “I’m not sleeping.”

  “Insomnia. They flew you here, at great expense to taxpayers, because you’re not getting your beauty rest?”

  “I guess.”

  “And what is keeping you from sleeping?”

  “I don’t like it.”

  “The question stands.”

  “I don’t feel like it’s safe to sleep.” I won’t tell her anything more, because if I dig down into the truth, the God’s honest, they’ll lock me up and pump electricity into my brain.

  “That’s a conveniently vague response, don’t you think?”

  I shrug.

  The eyebrows above the glasses are now bushy and belong to the other doctor, the man, who never told me his name because it didn’t matter to either of us. These brows crowd low over his glasses. If he had eyes, they’d be squinting at me. “You wouldn’t be trying to malinger, would you?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “You purposely didn’t engage the enemy when given an explicit order,” he says.

  “I didn’t see an enemy to engage with at the time.”

  “I see. So you’re in command, I take it?” Both of the doctors sound alike. Not their voices, or their accents, which sound totally different. But what’s underneath both reads like the same script.

  “No, sir.”

  The chair creaks under the thin frame of Dr. Massaquoi as she sits back, looking up at the ceiling, where no mosquitoes collect in silent conference, as if this place is a thousand miles from the jungle. It just might be. The River moves quickly, and nothing can stop the current. “It’s impossible to test,” she begins, as if launching into an internal monologue translated with her mouth, “or even to adequately and quickly treat, what happens inside a person’s mind, which is what I assume you’re implying. That there’s a problem inside your mind. What most military medicine classifies as ‘psychosomatic.’ Do you follow what I’m saying?”

  Oh, yes. Me speakie English real well.
“I’m just saying that I can’t sleep.”

  “Yes, that’s what you’re saying,” the other doctor says, turning in his chair. “But let’s be honest, soldier, that’s not what you mean when you say that, is it?”

  “You’re trying to twist my words.”

  “No, I’m not. I’m trying to get at the true meaning of your words, because you seem unable to provide that for me.

  I try to stand, but the chair won’t let me up. It’s so low I can’t find my feet. The carpet feels stick, wet with river water. I miss the tile of those hallways. “This was a mistake. I shouldn’t have come here.”

  “No, it’s not a mistake, and you had no choice but to come here. This isn’t the army of Specialist Broussard. This is the Army of the United States of America. You serve. They command. They snap. You dance. That was the deal, and you knew the deal before they shipped your ass eastward.”

  I grit my teeth so hard I know he can hear my enamel pop. If he does, he doesn’t let on. He steeples his fingers in front of his face like all the scientists do in the movies.

  “So here you are, sent to me in hopes of proving something that isn’t provable, not in any quantifiable way, in order to shirk your responsibilities, and abandon the soldiers in your squad. That presents quite the conundrum for the U.S. Army, doesn’t it?”

  “The soldiers in my squad are all dead.”

  Dr. Massaquoi leans forward in her chair. I can smell her perfume now, the scent of someone else. She’d never buy it herself. They added it later as a prop. “That we can’t figure out who or what your squad was or is presents quite the conundrum for the U.S. Army, as well.”

  “That to me sounds like a U.S. Army problem.”

  “But your squad wasn’t U.S. Army. Not even by the most loosely applied interpretation. This is a you problem, and will remain so until you give us some answers.”

  I look at the jellyfish again. Mush frozen in mush that hardened when it cooled. Ancient baby stuck inside a coffin egg, and we’re all gawking at it.