The Deep Green Sea (19 page)

And then we're farther out of town, heading for where Long Binh must've been, a massive Army base camp out northeast of Saigon, the place we all passed through on the way into the war. And there are billboards: an enormous display of a piece of PVC pipe, a giant tube of some Hong Kong toothpaste, and a billboard that pleads,
GOLF VIETNAM
.
And then there's a turnoff to the place where a sign says they're building the Vietnam International Golf Club. I try to figure how far we've come, to see if they're building that right there on the doorstep we used for all the guys to come and fight in Vietnam. But I don't think the government that has filled Tien with all those little riffs of ideology would have the sense of humor for that.

I think of her. I look. She has her face turned to the rush of countryside. A flooded rice paddy now. Women out there in conical straw hats bent into their work, up to their ankles among the low green plants. And a boy near the road on the back of a water buffalo. I look to the high­way and I swerve around a pothole as big as the buffalo's head.

But being on the road is good. The road rolls, even if you've got to dodge and honk and give way. Your life passes. You get through the hours you wouldn't know how to get through if you were sitting still somewhere. And I must have missed whatever was left of Long Binh because we're going through a town called Honai and there was nothing like that between Saigon and the camp. We're crawling again, but still moving. Four Catholic churches almost one after the other. And no pictures of Ho out here. It's a country I don't expect.

Then the road again and rubber trees, a plantation, the quick run of the even, deep rows of trees, their white trunks all with the same dark slashes, and a grave out there, a little stone monument in the trees. I follow it with my eyes and I see Tien again and she's looking, too, turning to see the tomb. I think to speak to her. At least to explain my silence, though surely it's best for her, as well. It's a kind of touching, our talk. This trip is hard on her and I'm very sorry for that. But the rubber trees van­ish and now there's a pond, and I turn to the road and it is narrowing down, and something is fitting together in my head and Tien slides away from me once more. The pond—I look again before it's gone—the pond curves away from the highway and out to the north and it's shaped like a sickle blade and the sun flares there and is gone and the pond is gone and I know the place. Ahead, the road has narrowed but tree lines have taken up, maybe a hundred yards back, on both sides.

And suddenly this feels like the place. I have never re­membered these things—the rubber trees, the curving blade of a pond, the narrowing of Highway One—even in my dreams of that day. But now it's clear. I slow down, I draw off the road, the shoulder is narrow, but I squeeze far over, the wheel bucking a little in the uneven ground, and I stop.

“What is it?” Tien says.

I get out of the car. A truck flashes past, ragged and Army green, and its horn blares and Dopplers away down the road. I look and it's full of hay but it's still a deuce-and-a-half, a truck from some old convoy, and I know where I am, I feel sure I know, and a cluster of motor­bikes races by, a voice floating out, shouting, meaningless words. I start across the road. Hurrying before another truck coming from the north. And I'm off the road and the truck's draft buffets me and I wade into the scrub growth and I stop and he could have stood right here.

I turn. I stand just as he stood, the blond guy with the missing arm. I wait. The sounds from the highway are faint now. I wait for something to clarify itself. I try to see him again. It's been a year or more since I've dreamed about him. But when I did, he was very clear. And two years before that, clear. But he's dim now. How odd, to find this place because of new memories, restored ­memories—the pond, the plantation—but now that I'm in the place again, the man who made all these memories important has faded. I can't see his face anymore, it's all darkness, as he looks at what's happened to him. He's an outline, blurred by the sun.

I lift my hands. I stare at them before me. My two hands. And then I look across the road. Tien's face floats there in the window of the car. She has slid across to the driver's seat so she can see what it is I'm doing out here without a word of explanation to her, and her eyes are clear from this place where I stand, dark and steady on me, and I feel her on the palms of these hands. I am in Vietnam, the place where I went to war for my father. I saw an image here, in this very field, an image that clung to me not by its horror or its strangeness but by how it fit all that I had felt till then and all that I would feel for years after. And it's gone now. Gone. And in its place is this image across the road. The face of this Vietnamese woman, watching me, waiting for me, she has opened her body to me, and in it, this other image dissolved. A great dark mass erases her face, the flash of a truck, and for that moment he's there again, like the flare from the first rocket in the attack, his face calm except for the knot of puzzlement in his brow, and the truck is gone and it's Tien instead. Puzzled, too, I know.

I move through the scrub, onto the shoulder, I look and a Lambretta is coming and a motorcycle and to the right is a provincial bus, bright yellow and green and people are clinging to the doors and hanging out the windows and my legs don't stop, I can't wait to cross to Tien, horns cry from both directions and I rush now, hard, I feel the wisp of a flap of a woman's ao dai across my back from the motorcycle and the grille of the bus bloats near me I feel it on my face and I lunge and it goes by trailing voices and I stumble in the uneven earth and I fall, palms and knees going numb and then my chest in the brush.

She
is beside me. Her hands on my face, on my back, my arms, touching and moving, and her voice is with them. “Are you all right, my Ben? What is it, my love?”

I'm sitting now, brushing at my chest, and she takes my face in her hands, her touches are like kisses, like we're kissing, and for the moment it's okay, for the moment there's nothing of my fear, only this release of the boy in the field, only Tien's hands on me. I take one of them and turn it and I kiss the palm.

“Oh my,” she says.

“I'm sorry,” I say.

“What was that about?”

“The kiss?”

“I hope I know what that was about. The other.”

“I remembered something.”

“You remembered to run in front of a bus?” She pinches both my cheeks at this, like a mother scolding a child. I am surprised at the comfort I feel from this gesture.

Her hands retreat. I look into her eyes. They are steady, soft with what I know is her love for me.

I say, “I left you without a word. I wanted to explain.”

“You would have much to explain if you died there. I would interrogate you very sharply, Benjamin Cole.”

“Do that again,” I say.

“What?”

“Pinch my cheeks when you scold me.”

She cocks her head at me, smiles that half-smile which was my first vision of her.

She lifts her hands, twists at my cheeks, though the comfort of this is gone now. She says, “My father is jeal­ous enough as it is. Imagine if he had to share my shrine with you.”

I lift my own hands, cover hers. She flattens her palms against my face. We stay like that until a motorcycle brats past and voices cry out at us. She does not show even a flicker of recognition at the words, but she says, “This is a public place, my Ben. And this is not part of our tour package, these caresses.”

Our hands fall. I climb to my feet. I look once more across the road. The place is bland, a ragged field, distant trees.

I feel her draw near me. “Ben,” she says softly.

“Yes?”

“Should we go on? Or go back to a private place?”

I look at her. For a moment all that had been set aside. And even now the desperateness is gone. But when she asks the question, something of the darker question remains. “Did you tell me Nha Trang has a lovely beach?” I ask.

“Yes,” she says. “There are private places on the South China Sea.”

“We'll go there. Maybe just for the beach.”

She does not speak, but I hear a sound from her, a soft thing, a flow of her breath that I wish was on my naked chest.

We move to the car and when we are inside, seated side by side, and my hand is about to move to the keys in the ignition, she says, “So what was it you rushed into the traffic to explain?”

I have no words for a time. I wait. I squeeze at the steering wheel and wait. Finally I say, “The past. I'm trying to let go.”

“This is very good,” she says. And her hand steals across the seat and touches my thigh and then retreats again.

It is not clear to me what we are to do after Ben tries to let go of some part of his past there on the side of the road. It is not clear to him either, I think. So I try to make myself slow down. I feel very much like a new socialist woman, an equal worker in the new social order, which means to me you can touch your husband when you want to and you do not have to wait for him to decide this. But I must consider his feelings, too.

I have thought
husband
. I cannot stop a smile at this
word. I am telling myself how I should slow down, and
even in the telling, I am going very fast. I watch out the
window and I think that in Nha Trang, by the sea, in the wind off the South China Sea, all the spirits of the past
will be blown far away and Ben and I can find a place alone together.

For now, I keep my hands in my lap and my eyes out the window. Perhaps I doze. I have not slept well for these three nights and my eyes grow heavy. Along the side of the highway women have spread out rice to dry and then it is manioc root drying there, the white chips they use for flour, and then it is coffee and now I know for sure I have slept, for we are passing the Long Khanh mountains, past Xuan Loc, a town which I have missed, which was a battlefield where our nationalist forces had many victories, and on the side of the road the dark brown beans are laid out to dry and the smell of the coffee fills the air.

I turn my face to Ben. I watch him for a while without him knowing. He is very intent on the road. His hands on the wheel are large, my truck driver's hands, which know my body, which are part of my own body. There are shadows flashing over us. I look outside and we are running beneath eucalyptus trees, lining both sides of the highway, their bodies white, their thin arms drooping like mothers mourning, and beneath them some little girls in white ao dais are riding bicycles. Ben is driving slow now among these children.

It leads me to speak whatever I can find to say, just to touch him with my voice. “These are eucalyptus trees,” I say. “An oil comes from this tree that we use when we are sick.”

He does not seem to hear me at first. I watch ahead and we pass the last of the girls on bicycles and then an oxcart and we are free also of the trees and I do not expect any words in return now, but he says, “There are eucalyptus in California, along the highways to break the wind.”

These words make me as happy as if he has suddenly kissed me. But still, I can hear his voice working hard in order to speak. I watch a spot in the sky, out ahead of us, near a grove of cashew trees. It seems to be a great bird hovering, hanging motionless against the sky. We near, and the bird moves to one side and then jerks back to the other, and I know it is a kite. There is a child, invisible to us, beyond the trees.

“Tien,” Ben says, low. “I'm sorry if I'm quiet. I've driven half my life, nearly, and it has always been in silence.”

“I understand,” I say.

We pass the cashew trees by. The sky is empty now. I take this explanation as an act of love.

He says, “There's a quiet place in me, since I stopped by the road. I want to keep that. I want it when we reach the sea.”

“Yes,” I say. “It is a good thing, this silent time.” I struggle with my hands, to keep them where they are, in my lap. They obey this time. I try to find that quiet place in me now, too.

And so, together, Ben and I become the landscape rush
ing past us. Red soil and the smoke of brick kilns and piles of brick along the road, and roof tiles. And in Phan Thiet, TV antennas on bamboo poles and in the air the smell of nuoc mam, our wonderful fish sauce that they make in the town, and then, beyond, the salt flats with their little
levees of tan mud and great squares of sea­water and the piles of white salt taller than a man, and then paddies again and the smell in the air of rice hay burning and swarms of ducks grazing the wet fields after the harvest, and then coconut trees and then the Truong Son mountains to the west. And the mountains slide over and squeeze us next to the sea. And the sea is there for Ben's eyes, our first sight of it together, the South China Sea, sudden and vast coming out from behind the dunes and bright from the sun, and it is the dark green of the finest jade.