I Am the River Page 5
The jellied gasoline burned off, leaving a roiling cloud bank of smoke that blended back into the dark as the light below faded. The tracers were gone.
Darby howled like a wolf. The airman slid the door shut again and stared at Darby through his polarized glasses.
“It’s a new world, brothers. A brave new world,” Darby said. “Grab a gun or get the fuck out!”
9. The Floating City
I walk out of the storefront and enter the fast-moving current made by a stream of motorbikes and odors and noise. The now-familiar stew of fish sauce, cigarette smoke, and rotting garbage spills out of alleys with hoarse shouts and Hong Kong club music. The canals are choked with trash and human waste. The streets are filthy. And still they come, just like I did, pouring into the Klong Toey slums from failing farms in northeast Thailand to the buzzing hive of corrugated shacks and wet markets, working where they can find a need, making and selling whatever they can, including drugs to the tourists and flesh to everyone. A floating mass of pure, naked humanity, where anyone can hide.
In my pants pocket—lighter now, with the jellyfish gone—is the payment for the Chinese doctor job down on Yaowarat. A little cash and enough lightly bruised chemical agents to get me by until they think they’ll need me again. They don’t use me all the time, because I stand out. I’m “a blinking sign,” as the ex-VC general turned drug smuggler noted through his sneering interpreter, flicking open his fingers over and over again. Not many of my kind in Bangkok. Not many of my kind anywhere on this fucking planet. Monster hunted by a monster. Drop of ink in the Yellow Sea. More like brown among brown, beans and rice and beans, but no one sees the world like that.
Just like so many of the residents, the heroin flows down into the city from the mountain country, too, turning dry and white in hidden labs dodging one American government agency while sending smoke signals to another, keeping an eye on the political winds but knowing that a customer will emerge from the skirts of Lady Liberty sooner or later. The amphetamines come from India and an unregulated factory pumping out the same sort of legally acceptable narcotics that would get you locked up if called by another name, or possessed by a different hand.
I’m fading, spent from the stress of the doctor job, and need to get back to the cave and measure up the right temperature screwball to calm my brain but keep me awake. Israel Broussard needs to take his medicine. That’s how I live, and survive. Cotton in the ears, and toothpicks between my eyelids, just like in the cartoons. I’d lose my shit without this, and the Triad knows it. Evil motherfuckers. They know everything, down here anyway. More than the government, that’s for sure. It pays to have eyes and ears among the people instead of inside clean glass buildings far removed from the realities of the world.
But they took me on when I was living in an alley, curling up between trash bags, slapping rats away from my sleeping face. Recruited me, instead of the other way around. These killers thought I was a killer, too. A great killer of men. Black American Killer GI, butcher of the yellow man. But I’m not black, I’m brown, and they aren’t yellow, they’re brown, and I’m not a killer but I’ve killed brown men, which made me a traitor. Maybe I was being paid for treason. Thirty pieces of silver by a number of different names.
These days I’ll kill anyone, regardless of shade or hue. That’s what Black Shuck has done to me. How he’s done me. It’s my real boss, that evil cosmic hound, not that tin-pot general, who’s just a tool in the Great Machine. It’s Black Shuck who turned me into the animal it used to be and maybe still wanted to be before crossing over and becoming something else. Echoes of a past life left after the transformation. Jealousy and yearning all at the same time. Animals breed animals even when the animal is no more. Don’t need chickens or eggs in the place where it comes from. Maybe it’s always been like this, and doesn’t know any other way than waiting and tracking and pouncing. I don’t know a motherfucking thing, other than the platoon of bugs crawling up inside my skin, and the terrible feeling that I might fall asleep standing up, and then face Black Shuck in the street, totally exposed, with plenty of tunnels down.
People give me room as I walk on my way, keeping the feet steady, the organs properly aligned. They know whom I am, most of them. They know what I do, and what I will do. To them, I’m just another imported killer. If they only knew the real score, that the only person I can’t kill is myself, because I know where I’ll go, and what will be waiting for me there. They’d understand, of course, because they know what else is out there, beyond the rotten water and decayed cement, past the jungle and heavy clouds always threatening rain. They know how other things pass over and take up residence here. I never did before, not being a churched-up boy and not allowed to go into the swamp where I would have learned all about what was really out there, but I sure as shit know now.
I’ll live as long as I can, and do what I need to do in the meantime.
It’s what animals do.
Survive.
It’s what animals who have never been animals do.
Endure.
I turn on my homing beacon and follow the current flow back to my apartment, head down, weaving through groups of expats, squatters, and day workers gathered at sidewalk noodle stalls. Drinking beer and smoking cigarettes and talking shit while slapping down tiles in games of tam cuc. Even though they know me, no one looks at me down here. I never could figure out if that was natural or by design. Could have been orders from the Triad that always filtered down and out into the street, up into the ramshackle slums, and into the temples, police stations, and government offices. Maybe I was a ghost already and didn’t know it, pantomiming a life to keep me from falling back into the void where it waited for me and me alone.
It didn’t matter. What was real and what wasn’t stopped having any meaning a long time ago. I didn’t know shit other than needing to get back to my four walls, fill my own sandbags and dig my 40 by 40, because the mortars were coming, forming up in the corners by the ceiling and arcing down to my bed. “Tube!” they’d yell, when the shell left the cylinder in some secret mortar position. “Tube!”
I think of Black Shuck and cross my fingers. I’ve been among the Vietnamese long enough to know that it doesn’t mean good luck.
10. The Mirage at the End of the World
With a controlled drop, the choppers shed altitude fast, handing it off to the slow rising sun as an even trade with the break of dawn over the eastern mountain range.
A layer of fog gathered below the clear brightening sky as the aircraft descended. Underneath the foam of mist, small points of white flames outlined a circular LZ large enough to accommodate the three helicopters.
The Chinook touched down first, coming to a soft landing inside the circle of C4 burning inside tin ration cans, joined by the two Hueys. Pilots and the five soldiers exited the aircraft as a crew of Hmong militia members emerged from the bushes, dressed in loose-fitting wool tunics and pants, stepping quickly in their tire-rubber sandals. They hauled long rolls of green netting and threw and draped it over the choppers, concealing the killer whale and its two identical escorts into shapeless lumps not much different from the landscape in less than a minute.
Broussard took in the base, which was entirely unlike the location they’d just left. Instead of being situated on a hilltop, it was cut out of a depression in the earth that resembled a crater left by a meteor impact a million years ago, poking a secret hole into the furred skin of the jungle. Trees rose up on all sides except to the south, where a vast granite cliff rose up through the fog and into the clear sky, absorbing heat from the rising sun the men couldn’t see down in the mist. There were two bunkers overgrown with living vines and saplings, not cut branches. The larger of the two bristled with radio wires and UHF/VHF mast antennae surrounding a large metal dish painted matte black. No foxholes broke up the ground. No perimeter razor wire, machine gun positions, or artillery units. Whatever this place was obviously didn’t fear attack or value a defensive posture other
than remaining invisible from above. This wasn’t a fire base. It was for something far different, and it had been here for a while.
“Where the sam fuck are we?” McNulty said, putting to particular word what everybody was thinking.
“Gentlemen.”
The unfamiliar voice turned each head to discover a man walking from a doorway that seemed to materialize from the granite backdrop of the base. He was tall, farm-boy white, with shiny, almost playful gray eyes that added a youthful quality to the handsome collection of wrinkles etched deep by years of squinting into foreign suns. Eyes that took in too many secrets, which seemed to amuse and sadden him. His uniform was pressed olive drab, without patches or markings of any kind. The forearms poking from his tightly rolled sleeves were stained with a random smattering of old tattoos picked up at unpronounceable outposts before any of the men before him were born. Near his wrist, broad and faded green, was a silhouette of a raven.
The man stopped and clasped his hands behind his back. His expression was friendly, but grim. “Welcome to Echo Site 66.”
The men exchanged glances.
“Where are we, sir?” Render said.
“We’re exactly where we need to be, Sergeant Render. The true front line.”
“Which is?” Darby said.
The man turned to Darby. “Which is, Private Darby, the Royal Kingdom of Laos.”
The men looked at each other again, this time with expressions ranging from shock to fear.
Darby smiled, knocked his helmet back from his eyes. “Well, I’ll be goddamned.”
“Begging your pardon, sir,” McNulty said to the man, a touch of a Chicago accent hardening all of his r’s.
“Yes, Private Second Class McNulty?”
“Well, sir, we’re not supposed to be out here. Sir.”
“Is that right?”
“Uh, yes sir. I mean… Ain’t we?”
“I have a secret to tell you. Can I trust you with a secret? Can I trust all of you?”
No one responded. You never trusted anyone in Vietnam, especially the ones who insisted on it.
The man nodded, sensing the mood. “I get it. Believe me, better than most. But let me tell you this, from someone who would know: Trust is important out here, on the true front line. It’s probably the most important thing, aside from dry socks. We’re all we have now. We’re it.” He let this linger, as much out of staging as out of necessity. “I apologize if that comes as a surprise, which I have no doubt it does, but in times of war, no situation is concrete, no tomorrow set in stone. The only certainty we have is in ourselves, and our devotion to one another in the service of a cause. Does this make sense?”
The men nodded, some in spite of themselves. What else were they going to do? They were way, way off the reservation, with no feasible means of getting back.
“So I ask, can I trust all of you? I’m not asking you to trust me, not yet. But can I trust you?”
“Yes sir,” they all said in unison, with varying degrees of enthusiasm.
“That’s good. That’s what we need, as we go about our business.” The man began to pace slowly, digging into his thoughts, stopping occasionally for emphasis. “You see, I’m in the business of secrets. It’s what I was trained to do, and I’m just a byproduct of my environment, shaped on the anvil of experience and training. This mission and its conception is a byproduct of my environment. Do you understand?”
“Yes sir,” Broussard said. He deeply understood the transformation of environment. It was what brought him across the ocean, and to stand in front of this man in an unmarked section of Laos.
“The secret I have to tell you is this: We are supposed to be here. We, meaning us.” He gestured to everyone. “This squad. Us.” He pointed out into the jungle, to the south. “They aren’t supposed to be here. They. Them.”
“Which way you pointing?” Darby asked.
“To the south, Private Darby, where our country has set up shop to build factories instead of finish lines. Long-term housing instead of forward operating bases deep within the heart of the enemy, to destroy their capacity to wage war and their will to continue. So the south, Private Darby. I’m pointing to the goddamn south.”
Darby took a drag from his cigarette, nodded, and smiled. “That’s what I figured.”
Render looked at Broussard, who looked back at him, wide-eyed. Neither had ever heard any military man speak this way, and certainly not a white one. This was the kind of talk you’d hear from the Black Power brothers, late at night or away from the rest, when the smoke filled the air of the tent and the hooch was passed around. It was heresy, spoken by a commanding officer, and gave them all a jolt of adrenaline.
The man looked up at the sky, squinting at something the rest of the group couldn’t see. “Let’s take this inside, shall we?” He gestured to the bunker, and the men walked to it single file, just like good American soldiers.
11. Public Toasts to Private Wars
Augie Chapel couldn’t take his gray eyes off the wall. The men in front of it—stars gleaming on shoulders and bars weighing down chests, drinking and laughing like this was an oyster brunch at the Old Ebbitt Grill—held the life and usually the death of hundreds of thousands, potentially millions, in their hands, and Chapel couldn’t stop staring at the wall behind them.
It wasn’t the wall itself, but the Martinique wallpaper coating it. The pattern was a series of repeating banana leaves, gently rounded and loosely arranged, with space to move through and see through in between. Lots of white space to contrast with the vivid green spotted with yellow tuffs. Chapel had seen it before, in the Beverly Hills Hotel when he was meeting a Hollywood producer to advise on yet another ridiculous film about the whip-smart intelligence community foiling yet another plan by the Commies. It looked like the backdrop to a Bel Air garden party, not a jungle.
But this was Okinawa, the island nation conquered by the last great empire conquered by the Yanks, and this wallpaper was as non-native to this country as a Vietnamese jungle would be, or the men sitting in front of the sanitized representation of one. Brigadier, lieutenant, and major generals, mixed with admirals of the fleet, vice, and rear variety. Ladder-climbing men of past wars and current politics who would never have to descend into the stinking, devil-haunted Indochinese wilderness where there was no repeated pattern, only chaos and waiting death and wet and rot and mud soaked in blood and soaking through sun-bleached boots to destroy feet and make the mere act of walking a living hell. No strategically placed white space to peer out onto the other side and the bright, clean salvation from the green hell. These red-faced, gossipy men would never be forced to experience how the Ong Thanh jungle smelled and the sounds it made when your ears were listening for any clue as to what your fate would be one second into the future. Their wars were different. Every war before this one was different. It demanded a special sort of thinking, and none of them had it.
These men didn’t belong here, and neither did this wallpaper. Both were an abomination.
And yet Chapel couldn’t stop staring at it. It fascinated him. A fascination with the abomination like Conrad wrote about. His heart of darkness lay in Africa, but there are many hearts beating inside many shades of darkness, and some blacker and colder than anything a writer could possibly conceive or, heaven forbid, personally experience and live to put down on paper.
“Augie, you grouchy sumbitch, you haven’t even touched your drink.”
Chapel looked at the man and his crew cut, the only thing that tied him to his soldiering days in the European theater, when he had done a good job, and had his heart in the right place. These days, his heart was descending into a pool of fat growing north from his belt line.
He placed his index finger on the side of his sweating glass of Irish whiskey, easy on the ice. The brigadier general snorted, shook his head, and downed his scotch, as if to show Chapel how it was done. Once the diapers come off for good, everything in a boy’s life comes down to a dick-measuring contest un
til the day that boy dies.
The men resumed their conversation about women or baseball or some weird mixture of the two. He couldn’t really follow it, especially since he’d noticed the wallpaper. He traced his finger around the top of his glass, feeling the coldness and the blunted edge smoothed out for his protection. Chapel wouldn’t start drinking until he’d had his say, but that moment hadn’t yet happened. He’d flown in to Kadena Air Base and walked along weirdly suburban, American-style sidewalks and carefully arranged city blocks to discuss strategy for the conflict in Vietnam with all the top brass, to offer his asymmetrical ideas to fight and win and most importantly end what had rapidly become an unorthodox war between a nation too powerful to do what it had to do and a populist insurgency that would do whatever it had to do to transform its own country. That was his specialty, and Chapel had honed his talents by fighting battles around the edges of wars and underneath the covers of nations. He was an alchemist tasked with fusing spycraft with battlefield machinery, and he was very good at what he did. That was why he was sitting at this table in Okinawa, sharing the same rarified air with men who outranked him by a measure of fleets and battalions. But so far, they were the only ones talking, shouting about body counts and media reports and political backchannel bullshit that had nothing to do with winning the war and everything to do with winning the public perception battle back in the States. With jockeying for the next promotion, the senate seat that waited for any war hero brave enough to mount a campaign. They were analyzing, adjudicating, and executing a war on ledger sheets while men were tearing each other to ribbons over five yards of jungle mud.