A Trip to the Stars (66 page)

Two significant facts, however: from those crumbs Ivy and I deduced that it was her uncle who had accosted my mother at the Fleischmann Planetarium. He was the man in the white suit whom I had repeatedly murdered in my dreams. When I discovered that my mother had promptly gone on to abandon him—just as she had abandoned all of us—I didn’t feel quite so murderous anymore. For my mother, he had been an intermediary, not a great passion. The other fact, even more important perhaps: it was from me that Ivy learned our mother was still alive.

For a while Ivy came to Reno pretty regularly and we would talk,
and soon she became friendly with my father. Their link? Their mutual hatred of that same uncle of hers and Bel’s; he was also their guardian—Nilus’s brother, Junius Samax.

It was through Ivy that, quite accidentally, I met Bel. I went to Las Vegas once to meet Ivy and, to her consternation, while waiting for her in my car on the road to the Hotel Canopus, ran into her sister. Bel and I knew of each other, but only through the filter of Ivy, so when we actually met, the shock of our mutual attraction was that much more powerful. I fell in love with her at first sight—just as I did with you, at a time when I thought I could never again love anybody like that.

Ivy knew at once what happened. Like a lot of people, she knew all about love from the outside in. What I didn’t want to see then is so clear to me now: Ivy was the most jealous person I’ve ever known. And the most effective, when she wanted to be, at concealing the venom that fueled that jealousy. From that day onward, after seeing Bel and me laughing together beside my car, she evidently began working overtime at how she could get at us. She felt me pull away from her as I grew closer to Bel, and she obviously knew I was hearing about the side of her she had kept under wraps, her cruelties to her sister, her cold rage. For better or worse, I had seven years with my mother before she disappeared; Ivy had had a few months. How much crueler that had made her, and how much colder, I could only guess.

Soon enough I found out, when she got her opening and struck out at Bel and me in one quick stroke. An opening I gave her.

Feeling particularly strung out one night when I was holed up in Colorado, unable to get hold of Bel, I opened up to Ivy, who had answered the phone in Bel’s room at the Hotel Canopus. I told her everything that had happened at the ravine. That I was at my wits’ end. I begged her to get hold of some cash for us.

Instead she made sure that Bel and I never saw each other again.

And months later—with how much pleasure I can only guess now—it was she who told me that Bel had died.

If Ivy knew Bel had given birth to a child, she never let on. Maybe she kept it to herself as yet another form of revenge. Early on, I knew that Bel had not told Ivy she was pregnant. In fact, she had done all she could to conceal her pregnancy. But somewhere along the way Ivy had found out. To me, she backed up Bel’s story of a miscarriage. Not,
of course, out of loyalty to Bel, but because it served her own purposes, to manipulate and keep us apart. One thing was for sure: in the end, Ivy knew that there was no way Bel and I were going to Mexico or anywhere else. Bel was too sick to travel, even to Colorado. So long as she was weak and bedridden, it was too dangerous, especially since I had to be prepared to light out on very short notice.

In the meantime, Ivy not only kept putting me off about the cash she had promised to scratch up, but she fed my paranoia about the police. Telling me how they had been poking around, looking for me, questioning people. All lies. The police had never been looking for me. They didn’t find Dupont’s body for months. And I wasn’t a suspect when they did. At the same time, colluding with Bel, Ivy didn’t let me know how sick she was.

Again, it was Canopus who told me that in the end, when Bel couldn’t hide her pregnancy anymore, she hid out in a rented bungalow in Paradise, south of Vegas, until she gave birth to a child, which soon afterward she put up for adoption. He didn’t know when or where, exactly. Nor did anyone else who might have cared, so far as I knew; her uncle Junius, for example, didn’t even know that Bel and I had had a relationship, much less a child. The last time I talked to Bel was in a prearranged call, from one gas station pay phone to another, in February, 1956, nearly five months after we’d fled the ravine. With trucks roaring by on the interstate, and heavy static, I could barely hear her. I told her soon she would be well enough to travel to Mexico. Yes, I’ll be ready, she said through an ocean of static. Then we were cut off.

Finally Ivy assured me that she had gotten five thousand dollars and a pledge of secrecy out of the old lady who ran her uncle’s hotel. She sent me a check, but it was no good. I nearly got arrested trying to cash it at the bank in a town called Chiba, but I talked my way out of it. When I called Ivy about this, from another town, the sweat was pouring down my back. She heard me out, never denying anything or apologizing. She just waited, listening, and then put a knife through my heart.

Bel is dead, she said. Just like that. She died last night. In Paradise.

I didn’t care about the check anymore. About the police or anything else. I’ve never been much of a drinker. But I started drinking that day, alone, in Vega, Colorado, and I kept drinking, and I drove
around as fast and hard as I could for two days and nights, trying to get myself killed. Except when you’re trying like that, you need some luck to get killed. Instead, I found myself sick and hungover in Boulder and the next thing I knew I had enlisted in the Air Force. You told me how you joined the Navy after the spider bit you, when you were at the end of your tether—it was something like that for me.

In fact, joining the Air Force probably saved my life. It certainly changed the course of it completely. And that’s what I wanted, if I wanted anything. Before I knew what hit me, I was stationed at a base near Bremen, in northern Germany, in the middle of winter. Two years later, I entered officer training school, specializing in navigation.

I never saw Ivy again, or my father. I don’t know any more now than I did then about where my mother Stella ended up. When I asked Canopus how he had come by his information, he just smiled and said he used to know people who knew such things—or something to that effect. Vague as he was, I believed him. For though he was motivated by vindictiveness (if he couldn’t hurt my father or Bel’s uncle, both of whom he despised, at least he could hurt me) and greed (promising that, for a modest amount, the secret of my having killed Dupont was safe with him), my gut tells me that Canopus didn’t invent the story of Bel’s having given birth to a child. From afar, I hired a detective to check the adoption agencies, but with so many agencies and so much confidentiality to cut through, a blind search was nearly impossible. So if such a child is still alive, I don’t see how I’ll ever cross paths with him. The trouble is, I don’t see how I’ll ever cross paths with you, either. And that is the fear which weighs heavily on me each day now.

16 October

As soon as I was on my feet again, Ji-Loq took me to the longhouse at the center of the village to meet the Bru elders. The village which was my home for so many months consisted of several dozen bamboo houses built in concentric circles in a clearing surrounded by dense forest. The design of the village was patterned after the heavens, which the Bru saw as a gigantic circular web in which the stars had been caught, like flies.

Like all the houses, the longhouse rested on six-foot stilts, protecting
it from flash floods at that time of year. Protection from spirits came in a different form: as is customary in Bru villages, all the windows and doors were on one side of the houses—in this village, the western side. The Bru believed that evil spirits were only able to approach a village from one set direction, so they put access to their houses on the opposite side.

The interior walls of the longhouse were adorned with crossbows and the painted skulls of water buffaloes. The principal constellations of their zodiac were outlined in red chalk on a wooden disk fastened to the ceiling: a rat, a hawk, a scorpion, a fox, a tiger, and of course a water buffalo. At the center of the room, around a low fire in a circle of mud-bricks, a group of old men were sitting on thatch mats, smoking short clay pipes. They all had heavily tattooed faces and lizard bone earrings. In the corner, with his back to the others, a one-eyed man was squatting on his haunches mixing herbs in a wooden bowl by tallow light. He was the shaman, and he always wore only a loincloth and a blue hat. He never spoke to me or looked me directly in the eye. Beside the fire a green liquid simmered in a metal vat. This was reimu, the rice wine which as a visitor I was expected to drink before I could address the elders. The wine was sour and made my throat close up, every time.

In the amalgam of pidgin English and Vietnamese with which we communicated, I told the elders I appreciated all they had done for me, but that I needed to get to Quang Tri, and then Saigon, as soon as possible. I had waited for Nol to return and serve as my guide, but Ji-Loq told me he had rejoined his
FULRO
unit in Laos, near the Thai border, and would not be returning anytime soon. The fact I had saved his life was between him and me, so far as the elders were concerned. They had their own interests at heart, and their own plans for me. As I was about to find out.

The chief, a wiry man with long white hair named Ren, heard me out and then replied that, with all the foot trails washed out, no one could get out of the forest during the rainy season. Not even the Bru. Furthermore, Ren added, Ji-Loq had told the elders I could read the stars, and so I might be of some use to the tribe while I was waiting for the rains to stop. I didn’t like the sound of that, and I insisted that I was trained to traverse the jungle in the worst of conditions. Go
ahead, the old man exhorted me, but no Bru could accompany me. Not during the rainy season.

And so for four more months I was held captive in all but name by my rescuers. To them my astral knowledge was magical, obviously acquired during my years as an aviator, flying among the stars. None of them had ever been in an airplane. They imagined the stars to be situated at a low altitude. They peppered me with questions about their sizes and distances from one another. Who was it who said the sun is the size of a human palm? The Bru believe the stars are no bigger than a man’s teeth. I explained to them the principle of a light-year, but the notion that starlight reaches us many thousands of years after it has been emitted was inconceivable to them. When I told Ren that the night sky is a window onto the past, he corrected me, saying, no, it is a map of the future. For the Bru, too, believe that you can foretell the future in stars.

On paper I showed Ren some of the basics of celestial navigation. He enjoyed posing problems: for example, how many stars had to be visible for me to navigate properly. He had never seen the ocean, and because he imagined it must reflect all the stars in the sky, causing endless confusion, he wondered how I could sail across it.

Every two weeks I was permitted another audience in the long-house. Each time I petitioned Ren and the others for an escort to Quang Tri, I got the same answer, politely but firmly. I was beginning to worry that when the rainy season did end, they still wouldn’t let me go. Especially when Ji-Loq let slip that perhaps before the next rainy season I could direct the construction of a wooden watchtower from which the stars might be observed more clearly. So, when I was sure I was strong enough, I took matters into my own hands. I had been telling Ren how easy it would be to cross the ocean using only a pocket compass and the stars: now I’d find out if they would be enough to help me thread my way out of the mountains through forests so dense, with canopies so uniform, that they felt nocturnal at noon.

I picked a moonless night after the rains ended. Ji-Loq had long since stopped watching over me, and Nol’s relatives, on Ren’s orders, allowed me my privacy so that I might occupy myself—as he hoped—in astral meditations. Around 2
A.M
. I slipped on my Air Force boots and vinyl poncho, neither of which I had worn since being brought to
the village, packed some dried meat and yams into a pouch, stuck a machete in my belt, and set out along one of the hunters’ trails that zigzagged across the mountain.

The village dogs all knew me, and none of them barked. The Bru always kept two lookouts in tall trees, but they were on the other side of the village. Everyone else was asleep. For a moment, as I left the last house behind, I thought I saw the shaman in his blue hat peer at me from behind a tree, but when I looked more closely it was a snake coiled around the trunk. Hours later, feeling as if I had been closely followed from that point on, I wondered whether I had been right the first time.

I traveled as far from the village as I could that first night and morning. I didn’t stop to rest until the following afternoon—and then only for two hours. Ji-Loq’s medicine, all those black roots I chewed and the white moss she kept wrapping around my slashed ankle, had done their work. The ankle had healed well. I was out of shape, but I had tried to prepare myself for my trek by doing push-ups and sit-ups and running in place barefoot in my room every night over the previous few weeks. And it turned out I was strong enough to walk at a steady clip for two hours, rest a half hour, and then continue on. In this way I crossed the mountains from North to South Vietnam in five days. If Ren sent a search party after me, I had managed with phenomenal luck (for the Bru are tenacious trackers) to elude it. More likely, knowing the deadly difficulties of the terrain, he had written me off as a goner and decided not to waste time and energy in locating a corpse.

Once I was in the South, things got a lot tougher. First, I suffered acute fatigue from hunger. After stretching out the dried meat and yams for four days, I was eating plants and roots, as I had done with Nol, and beetles from under rocks, which I had been taught to do in Air Force survival courses. Lack of food aside, the heat exhausted me, and the dampness that penetrated my bones when I was curled up on the ground at night. After a couple of sleepless nights in a row, feverish again, drenched in sweat, I was lucky I could push on. But I wondered how long my luck would hold.