Trinity Fields (31 page)

As the fingers tightened he resigned himself to the worst. He knew what would be in the man's other hand. And in his own he held nothing with which to protect himself but a gun whose two spare clips wouldn't give him even two dozen rounds. —The last bullet's for yourself, the pilots always joked. Shoot, get it on, get it over with.

Then it was all movement. He twisted around toward the one who had him in his grasp, and let out a guttural, weird howl. Ire, terror, frenzy, an elaborate weave, no language, just noise, or this cluster of such unlikely noises, bound into a single cry, and though it was not loud (terror imprisoned much of the air in his lungs), it was compelling because so peculiar.

Neng Kha Yang locked his hand over Kip's mouth, and whispered, —You no shout, no shout.

—What the fucking, goddamn it, Kha Yang.

—Quiet, you be quiet, Tan Kip.

Kip's finger eased forward off the trigger. His barrel was at Kha Yang's temple. He stared with wild eyes at Kha, and said, —Where the hell you been?

Kha Yang's English was a little better than that of many backseaters but he still communicated with gestures and the few dozen words necessary to his job. —Here, he said.

—It's almost morning, argued Kip.

The Hmong hesitated.

Kip pointed to his watch, then to the brightening sky.

—Where you been all night? All night you've not been here.

Kha Yang shook his head and frowned. —I here, night. You here, sleep.

—Where are we? he asked.

—We here. They know.

—Who knows? Bad guy knows?

—No, they know.

—Our people know.

—Yes, our people.

The downdraft began to buffet through the grasses and a gust now and again carried with it a light spray of rain. Our people might know they were here but so did the enemy. He was out there, the enemy was, and Kip had learned to think of them as him, as not the
bad guys
, which was what everyone called them —not Viet Cong, not VC or Charlie as over in Vietnam—but the enemy, one body made up of thousands of youthful enemies, boys and men and women and girls, and to Kip melded as if into a single organism, regenerative and apparently ineradicable. Having grown up where there were no mangrove channels or tidal pools, Kip had only read about the sea star and how if it lost one of its rays, it simply generated another. He was like that, the enemy. And he was out there now.

The first time Kip had seen him dead up close, his youth and beauty were arresting. He turned the frail body over not with the tip of his boot but with his hands, less an act of reverence, more curiosity satisfied, because yes he wanted to
touch
the thing. It was featherlight, this corpse, and upon its visage, astonishing tranquility. Genderless, the delicate neck, his eyes moist and contoured like a sunflower seed, the cheeks pronounced and lips apart, the look on his face of modest, languid surprise. As if to be no longer alive was unexpected.

That was not quite a year ago, and Kip had seen so many of the boy's comrades since then that their beauty and adolescence he had come to take for granted.

And, yes, he was out there now. Kha Yang, whom he watched in a very loosely focused sort of way, betrayed no nervousness about their vulnerable situation. He was armed but must have known as well as Kip that if the enemy wanted to take them, Kha Yang could not prevent it.

—Why don't they move? Kha Yang's comrade asked.

Kha Yang looked into the south skies and listened for friendly air. The sun was coming up, or had already come up, and the heavy mists wore a pearlescent glow. The earth was fragrant, smelled of sweet feces and of jism, fecund as the scent of intercourse. The grass rattled and sang, but it was just dumb grass now. Where was everybody? What was going on here?

—Why don't they move? he echoed himself.

—You are hurt? his companion asked.

Kip couldn't tell. He must have been, mustn't he, but it was beyond knowing.

They hunkered down, silent, and waited. No sooner had it begun than the rain seemed to end. Kip may have dozed again, he could not tell wakefulness from dream, and didn't care to distinguish them. No point to it at that moment. He knew that should the need arise for him to burst into consciousness, he would.

Kha Yang clicked his tongue then. Kip admired his adjunct for these tics. Kha Yang was simple, in his way, readable. Kip listened, too, for that's what the clicking tongue was meant to communicate.

Air was off to the south, very low. And he heard now, from another direction, up above the cloud cover, a T-28. No, not one but two of them. In the southern air was what sounded like a Jolly Green Giant. It was about to happen, it was going to happen, Kip thought.

Popping at every periphery. Resistance from the ground had begun. Tracers lit up the fog like a false dawn. Flak fire from the gunners' nests on the near hills. Blasts, and snapping from a gatling gun festooned the soft wind. The enemy had not bothered with Kip and Neng Kha Yang because the enemy wanted more from the situation, wanted to take out a chopper if one arrived to evacuate pilot and his spotter from where they were pinned down. This tactic was nothing new over in Vietnam but the enemy here was often too disorganized and dispersed to employ sophisticated strategy. But here it was, going on. The T-28s were pounding positions just north and east now, plummeting forth from the cloud base to rain fire not a quarter kilometer away. Kip and his backseater hugged the earth as their own position was strafed. High and wide the barrage poured in so that it appeared they would be cut off from the rescue chopper, but then there was a break in the action. The lead T-28 had swung around to unload the balance of its ordnance, and after a series of profound explosions, punctuated by secondary blasts which indicated to Kip that an unfriendly position had been hit, there was first a riveting flash of silence, then the conspicuous, horrid sound of engine trouble. Kip took the chance of divulging his location to some sniper who might just be waiting for him to make a mistake by raising his head to see the plane forfeiting altitude, veering in a lazy course out away from the heavy forest toward this open pitched field, and before long a parachute burst into view. Most of these T-28s flown by the Hmong were antiquated and had no ejection system, so it was a promising sign that the pilot had managed to pry his canopy open and scramble out. At least he wasn't dead yet, though floating under his idle chute, he would be easy prey in the gunsight of anyone who wanted to pick him off. The second T-28 dove through on a final strafing run, and hell broke loose again from a more distant enemy perch. The parachute disappeared over a rise downfield.

Time fractured. The grass was flattened by the density of the downthrust wind off the chopper blades. There was shouting, and he was lifted by several arms, carried to the platform, and no sooner were they aboard than the chopper dipped, then banked hard, rolling him over on his back. A medic was asking him what was wrong. He shouted over the din, —Forget it, I'm fine. Kha Yang sat on heels next to him studying the quick landscape that tumbled behind, and knew better than to contradict Mr. Kip. He understood, too, why Kip had warded off medical attention. Having worked so hard to get detailed up in Long Tieng, he didn't want to risk being medevaced down to Udorn or worse yet, out to the Philippines. The breed of soldier who sought out an injury by which to rotate home was not one who ended up in Laos, and certainly not as a member of the Raven outfit. Just the opposite. These came to work. Kha Yang knew that if they got out of their present situation within the week, Kip would be back in the air, back on mission.

The fire was more sporadic now. The chopper dropped, hovered. The door gun was rattling away all the while the Hmong pilot from the other plane was hauled in, unceremoniously, by the collar of his flight jacket. He was breathing, but his leg was a mess, must have been hit on the drift down. Kip and the man—both on the metal floor of the chopper, a chaos of vibration, its floor violent, which now was taking on velocity—locked eyes, and seeing the other give him a thumbs-up just before he passed out, Kip managed, —I owe you, then himself closed his eyes to retreat back into his head.

Sometime before they reached Long Tieng it came to him. That line. Came to him in the midst of a litany of promises he was making to himself that he would never be downed again, and that if he did, he wouldn't call in help but get himself out of the jam on his own. What came to him was he remembered that the contemplation of Incapacity and Prudence was one of Blake's proverbs.
The Marriage of Heaven and Hell
. A proverb in fact from hell.

His eyes opened and he saw his finger caked with blood. He should have known it wasn't dew he'd tasted back there lying on the grass. A broad smile broke across his face, and he thought, Proverb from hell, wasn't that just too perfect for words.

Kha Yang looked at his partner and shook his head. —Tan Kip, he said. —What so funny you laugh?

Kip closed his eyes and said, —You are funny, Kha Yang. You are making me laugh.

—Tan Kip, Kha Yang mused. —Tan Kip, he crazy sometimes.

Their engagement might have been made more formal, might have been expressed with more resolve, she thought. They might as well have gone ahead and married, if they were as much in love as they told one another they were. Even before her pregnancy was confirmed she found herself regretful at not having been more direct with Kip about her dread of his leaving her with this promise, his proposal, and nothing more. Or, if not more direct, more sure
herself
of what she wanted to do, because wasn't it true that she had resisted the idea of making an “institutional commitment” as much as he? Wasn't it true that even now, as she thought about it, she couldn't with confidence remember whose somewhat cynical definition of marriage those words had been?—“institutional commitment,” like being committed to an asylum for the romantically insane? And which of them had proclaimed, with all the studied naivete of a lyricist writing a mushy Broadway musical, though perhaps without the lyricist's understanding that most musicals are by definition cheap fantasies expensively staged, that they “needn't a piece of paper to keep their love together”? Another question for them: why bother with these ridiculous French terms—fiancé, fiancée, past participles of
fiancer
, to vow, promise, trust—and all the wicked weight of history and tradition they conjure, if neither she nor Kip had the mettle to carry that weight to its proper end? He had come back from New Mexico after the death of his parents and proposed to her, had he not? And she had accepted. There was the valid excuse to delay the marriage because air force regulations stipulated only unmarried men may enter pilot training school. Training stretched over months into two years or so. But things drifted after flight school, Kip left for his tour of duty, and now, here she was, into her second trimester, this fiancé of hers on the other side of the world. Jessica could with the authority of experience shake her head at the thin innocence she and Kip had shown regarding all this. But couldn't she at the same time be grateful, if that is the word for it, that the piece of paper did not exist, given how things seemed to be evolving?

Jessica reminded herself, when these regrets crowded her head, as they did more and more now, that wartime romances—at least as she had understood them through the movies—often were fraught with problems. She remembered the Preston Sturges picture
The Miracle of Morgan's Creek
that was supposed to be a comedy but which she didn't find funny at all. It was a campy classic, and she had gone to see it by herself, in fact with the thought that it might cheer her up, or at least distract her from her own problems.

A room full of newspapermen has heard the report of a miracle. Mayhem, pandemonium, everyone talking at once. The telephone lines are singing, —Miracle down at Morgan's Creek, there's a miracle down at Morgan's Creek. What was it, what was the miracle? They all want to know. Jessica settled into the plush violet velveteen of the seat to enter into the world of Betty Hutton and Eddie Bracken. Flashback to 1943, late spring or early summer, a time when Jess was only a year old, the foliage full in the black-and-white print, the war storming overseas. The sweet patriotic youth of Morgan's Creek looking sharp in their starched uniforms, under orders to ship out early next morning, determined to have themselves one devil of a farewell ball. Betty with her bright smile and coquette's manners, and Eddie whom the service rejected because whenever he was nervous—which was almost always—he began to see black spots before his eyes. Here is the problem. Eddie loves Betty, Betty loves the boys. Betty's father refuses her permission to attend the dance, so Betty arranges to go to the movies with Eddie. But Betty is just using the date with reliable Eddie as a ruse to trick her father. Once she's left the house and is safely out of sight, she ditches her nervous suitor—tactfully telling him she will pick him up after the movie is over, and borrowing his car in order to drive to the dance. Eddie, poor fool, complies. Hands in pockets he disappears into the moviehouse.

The party. Many drunken and happy faces. Betty dances and dances the evening away with one anonymous, dashing soldier after another. Somehow during the night a group of them, boys and girls, reeling with the spiked punch, gets it in mind to drive to the nearest justice of the peace, and all get married. It is accomplished in a haze. Betty, in the morning light, still plastered, swings by the moviehouse to pick up loyal Eddie, who's been sleeping on a concrete bench. The front fender of his jalopy is bashed and the seats are bedecked with paper ribbons, decorations from the dance. Eddie, ever patient if a bit nonplussed, drops her off at home. It is only later, when Betty is recounting to her younger sister the hilarious events of the evening, and her narrative comes to the part where a bunch of them blindly drove off to get hitched, that a shadow of dismay crosses her face. She glances down at the ring on her finger and nearly faints. She can remember getting married but cannot remember her husband's name. What a fine mess. And that's not all. She soon comes to believe she's pregnant. How can she keep her father from finding out that she went to the soldier's dance after all? What is she to do? It doesn't take her long to figure out the answer. Why, she'll get Eddie to marry her, of course. Eddie will have to take the blame for this unfortunate pregnancy, but Eddie's enough a swell kind of boy to agree to a little thing like that. Eddie will understand.