Trinity Fields (47 page)

When he finished, Wagner and Kip rose with the others and left the square at the center of the city to walk back to their storefront house near where the Khan and Mekong rivers merged, along a road where buffalo and cattle jostled among the occasional car and playing children, across the way from a row of beautiful wats whose layered roofs swooped low toward the ground and whose doors were decorated with hammered silver. The seminars were a necessary nuisance, but far better than the reeducation camps, where many of the anti-Communists were taken for periods of time that could range from months to years to forever.

Some Saturdays were work days, not lecture days. The men were assembled down by the river and given scythes and hand sickles to mow with. Work was regarded as important a part of their reformation as listening, and so on these work Saturdays Kip and Wagner could be found along the shoals laboring side by side with other citizens of Luang Prabang, some of whom had become their friends, cutting the long grass that grew there in the soft mud.

When they learned why the grass was being cut, their resolve to create a secondary business to the tourist business they'd begun was galvanized. The vegetation was being mowed in order that government soldiers would find it easier to spot people attempting to flee the country at night, across the Mekong, as they hauled their ramshackle boat or raft down to the bank and set forth across the dark, muddy water, toward the refugee camps awaiting them on the opposite shore. It was not the government officials Wagner and Kip stayed behind to live among, it was the very people who were sometimes taken away to camps deep inside the country, those who defected in the hope of settling one day somewhere else. Just as they felt they ought to be able to live where they wanted, these people should be allowed to go as they pleased.

All right, they thought. We will mow, and we will conduct our business by the rules during the day. And at night, we will get out of here those who want to go.

The two did not begin to identify how many cross-purposes they were working at. They were now reduced—or rather, extended—to living by intuition, wits, guile, impulse, spirit. It was Wagner's potpourrism become political, and Kip rolled with it like a colored chip in a kaleidoscope.

Now they were finding their way, but back in the beginning, at the end of the war, it was clear they had a lot to learn. Neither Kip nor Wagner was much the entrepreneur. And so, before they began their tourism outfit, there came the misguided bicycle shop. The bicycle shop began as a repair shop.

Kip never rode bikes when we were growing up—he rode horses or walked. He never understood how people managed to balance themselves along those narrow central horizontals forged of metal and supported by tires thin as sausage. But in Long Tieng he not only learned how to ride, but taught himself how to repair them, and made friends with some of the Hmong children there through this skill. The bikes in Long Tieng were rare assemblages made up of different sizes and kinds, not one unadulterated. Kip, on a day when weather kept him grounded, might repair a frame with junk metal left behind by construction workers or other pilots, glue rubber to the inside of torn innertubing, and come up with an object that acted like and resembled a bike enough to make some child happy.

In Luang Prabang gas was expensive, cars exorbitant, and since even the few roads that existed between major towns in the country were damaged during the war, or difficult to negotiate during bad weather, bicycles were the principal means of travel, aside from walking. “It all made such sense. We thought we'd hit on the perfect way to make a living.”

As it turned out, there wasn't a bicyclist in the city who didn't know how to repair his own. The business went under before it was so much as up. It was then they struck upon the idea that since they knew how to fly, knew the terrain, they would go into the tourism business. The enthusiasm they felt about this maverick new venture erased all sense of failure about bicycles. They came up with a name, not imaginative but earnest, Laos Tours, and began again.

None of this capacity to keep themselves in-country came without compromise. And this is where life got most complicated. The new Republic, founded in the last month of 1975, and headed by Kaysone Phomvihane, the chief of the Lao People's Revolutionary Party, badly wanted Americans to live in Laos. When we pulled out of the war, leaving our Hmong allies, and open to revenge of the victorious Communists, very few of us had the interest or audacity to stay on. It was difficult, even dangerous for any American who had lived in Laos even as a neutral businessman to continue on after the fall of Saigon, but for an American who had worked with the CIA during the war, served with the Hmong in an effort to defeat the very people who now constituted the membership of the ruling party?—this was precarious ground being traveled. Wagner and Kip would take the risk. Why not? they figured. This was where they wanted to be, and the compromise asked of them was small.

To wit. Every year, in order to renew their visas, each had to write a short statement and submit it to Kaysone's people at the local office of the foreign ministry. The statement was always the same. “I regret the actions that the United States of America took against the people of the country of Laos. I will never bear arms against the people of the country of Laos.” They believed that what they'd written here was true and represented their feelings. By compromising themselves just this far and no further they felt a perfect independence from any outside authority. They were their own state now. They were citizens of their own country.

Of course, having done this, they burned bridges. Never again could either of them be granted the security clearance necessary to serve as a pilot for the United States. That was out the window. At the same time they could imagine wholly sinister things in store for them from Kaysone if they ever refused to make their annual statement—and perhaps even if they didn't. It was easy to imagine being detained at any moment, for no legal reason, or deported. A morals issue could be fabricated, a situation in which their ethics could be questioned, nothing was impossible.

“So, like I say, when we saw the bicycle shop wasn't going to work, Wagner and I put our heads together and decided that we would run this tourist service. And it worked. We opened an office, hung out our shingle, and began to employ people, friends of friends, whoever wanted work. And we began to take visitors up the river to some famous caves where you could see hundreds of carved Buddha images, the Pak Ou caves that you explore by candlelight, or to take them into the interior by plane if they wanted, up to the Kuangsy waterfall where there's this water-driven rice mill, or even over to the Plain where they could look at the solid stone jars, to ferry them around and show them how beautiful Laos was. And it was beautiful, Brice. Nothing like it have I ever seen since New Mexico. Green rolling hills punctuated by these karsts, winding rivers like endless silver snakes in these vast stretches of grass. And the people, no one like them anywhere in the world. Gentle and decent. Good working people. People who deserve so much and have got so little.”

As time passed, he tells me, Wagner became more involved in running refugees across the river to the limited freedom they might hope to find there. The long flat-bottom aluminum canoes they used to outboard up the river to the caves began now to be employed in the middle of the night, during new moon or when the sky was overcast, to transport émigrés to the far shore. Neither Wagner nor Kip went along on these nocturnal excursions—their situation was tenuous enough, they knew, and were they caught, it would be the end of everything for them—but they allowed their motormen, who had family or neighbors that sought to make passage, to use the boats, which they launched with paddles so as not to make noise.

The tourist business went better than might be expected, and the government, seeing that people were being brought in from the outside, did nothing to block their efforts. Indeed, they would fly members of the ministry from place to place when the occasion presented itself, and that same night they would come back and meet with people at a designated place, down by the river, where they'd give instructions and what money they could manage—hoping that the Thai waiting on the other bank would not confiscate everything they took with them—and hand them over into the care of their boatman, trusting that their nighttime lives would never come in contact with their days.

They walked a sharp new edge, and yet, for all the risks they now were starting to take, Kip tells me, “I can't speak for Wagner but for me I was at a real high point in my life, like when you and I crashed that car way up on the border of Wyoming.” This is what he says, and all I can think is that Kip never did stop, he did keep going. When we first left the Hill on our way to Chimayó, and went on to Taos and onward up into Colorado, and when in my youthful imagination we continued to Montana and Canada and became cowboys and later built a noble house of stone where we were going to live as lifelong pals, it turned out that Kip made it there. Not exactly where I'd thought he would go, west not north, westward like the course of civilization rolling. I think back to my own favorite line from Kip's Thoreau: “Nature abhors a vacuum, and if I can only walk with sufficient carelessness I am sure to be filled.” By then he'd become a vacuum, I could see, and was walking with more than sufficient carelessness. All that was left for him was to be filled.

Uncanny how we can anticipate the implausible. It was November, New York, a few years ago. Darker early, the lights in windows coming on along the streets. Sun cool, gusts crisp. Ginkgo nuts and yellowed leaves still clinging to their branches, but many of the other trees looking skeletal, shedding themselves for winter. Christmas was already in the air, and shop windows had been transformed from colors and themes of autumn, of Halloween and goblins, oranges and blacks, to the stock Xmas imagery of Santa and elves, reindeer and sleighs, of greens, reds, silvers. Garbage set out in molehills of dark green plastic didn't stink so under the frost, and for that we were grateful. Out came the heavier clothes, my proven tweed jackets, mufflers, the thicker socks. Jessica would already begin to wear her gloves and hats, her sundresses and light camisoles put away for winter.

How I loved this time of year. When we ventured forth to walk through Washington Square our faces blushed in the bracing wind. I swear I could see and think more clearly at day, and slept better at night. August was but a bad dream with its weighty wet dead heat, its ruthless air-conditioning and allergy headaches, its sweating sleepless nights that give way, with cruel seamlessness, to work days marked by nothing but drear exhaustion. August, like a tightening belt around one's head. Everyone suffering. City of sleepwalkers as the strangest of the strange come out to prowl and the murder rate soars and the streets teem with the maniac cast of a lost, dark carnival. The streets are sunk under haze, and the haze itself is sunk under wan wen of sun. Hell weather, the dog days. It is a punishment, a curse, just as late fall is a blessing, is the most prodigal, most congenial season, even preferable to spring with its mere buds and foul mud.

It was after Thanksgiving, and I was at the height of contentment. Ariel had come by and indulged me in celebrating my favorite holiday just as we had when she was a little girl, rather than a young woman who would be graduating from college, third-generation Columbian, the following year. So it had been an old-style Thanksgiving. She and I went to the parade, commented like we always did with mock scorn at the gaudy floats and mammoth balloons, elbowed each other with shameful delight when the majorette dropped her baton, and just generally misbehaved so thoroughly that Jessica had long since given up coming along with us. Then back home to feast. The celebration of Thanksgiving had become such a ritual in our urban household, it seemed left over unrevised from the folksy postwar forties, or the more desperately traditional fifties. Here was the turkey browned just right since predawn in the oven, drumsticks proud as cannon at his sides, brimming with spiced sausage stuffing. Here were bland white crumbly biscuits that collapsed when spread with butter, the floury gravy crunchy with crisps spooned from the drip pan, the sweet cranberry sauce, the unskinned buttery mashed potatoes, the musky sauerkraut from my mother's old recipe . . . pork strips, salty and mushy, drowned in brine and laid beside the string beans. Ariel's friends sat and ate with Jessica's and mine. It had been an afternoon that left me buoyant for days on end.

The first snowfall of the season, a dusting that lay like parchment along the walks. When we went to bed, flakes here and there were trailing down through the lamplight outside the window. Jessica in my arms felt smooth and feral, her back firm against my front, both her breasts cupped in my palms, my face buried in the pale heat of her neck. The cat in a pleasant heap in the crook behind my knees, my knees pushed into the crook behind Jessica's, our legs parallel like our lives, and the whole scene as miraculous as it was mundane, the way we lay, the way my hand moved down the plane of her belly, and how my fingers pressed inside her, the joy of growing deep into her, and the gentle delirium of orgasm. Family and home and life going along, so that, when I drifted into sleep, I might never have expected what I would find there.

The nightmare was this. Jess and I were seated on a grassy knoll and we were holding hands and facing each other and she was beautiful, her hair wafted by soft wind, a fond glow in her eyes as she gazed at me. She cherished me and I her. Nothing was spoken, but the air was charged with sex, the smell of sex—briny, lush, dense—flowed from her skin and mine. Now I looked down the hillside, all grassy—it was gradual, the slope—and at the bottom there was a glassy gray sea, perhaps a harbor. Out on this sea there were no ships, but craggy rough islands came up from the water, black and white thrusting to pinnacles, piercing upward like mineral icicles. The waves curled around their bases, no shores, white. I looked back at Jessica, her eyes nodded to left, then right. Mine looked to where hers had glanced and I was astonished to see that we were surrounded by babies in a ring, each naked and seated upright, happy children with beneficent expressions on their faces. A curious sensation of liquid warmth began in my ears and streamed from inside my head down into my neck, my heart, out through my arms to my hands and fingers and down through my torso to my hips into my genitals and on through thighs into calves and feet and toes until I was a complete fountain of heat. I looked to Jessica and she was laughing now and the babies were not laughing but smiling, boys and girls, and I too was smiling and laughing. It was life and it was funny.