Monkey Hunting (8 page)

“To you a son will be born,” she foretold. “He will rule over many people with the sun on his shoulder. But you must leave him after one month. This is the will of your ancestors.”

Soon after Lu Chih-mo was born, my mother-in-law paid me handsomely to abandon their home. I left without apologies and took a train to Shanghai. My breasts were painfully hard, leaking with unsupped milk. How often I have suffered this decision! I tried to banish thoughts of my son, of his baby fist around my finger, of his involuntary smiles when he slept. His face was so pale, a mysterious little moon. I thought I would be pleased to leave him, to seek my freedom. Instead I swallowed my bitter heart again and again.

I almost returned to Lu Chih-mo on several occasions. I bought tickets on trains I never boarded, imagined flying over this scarred, warring land to find him playing with a length of knotted string beneath the pines. I thought of stealing him, of bringing him back with me to Shanghai. But I realized that it would be easier for me to see heaven than to see my boy again.

In Shanghai, I was fortunate. I did not hide my gender and still the foreigners hired me, thanks to Professor Hou’s kind words.

I teach Chinese classics and modern literatures. My students are the children of diplomats and industrialists: French children, English children, children of wealthy Chinese families, too. I pretend to be a widow. I pretend to be childless. And so people do not concern themselves with my life.

Monkeys

CENTRAL HIGHLANDS, VIETNAM (1969)

Rabo mono amarra mono.

Domingo Chen was on night watch. He volunteered for it often, preferring darkness to the day’s uneasy camaraderies. He sat behind his mound of packed red clay, his M-16 oiled and loose in his hands, his flak jacket scrawled with BINGO. A sickle moon played hide-and-seek through the jungle canopy. There were no stars. No way to read heaven with any accuracy. He might have loved this sky in another time, from another perspective.

Domingo listened to the rumble of nightmares from the foxholes, men crying out in their sleep, fear pulling wires in their throats. Lately, there’d been drowsy talk about how the snub-nosed monkeys started howling when the weather shifted, how the peasants hunted the monkeys and sold their skulls as war souvenirs. In Cuba, Domingo recalled, the
paleros
had coveted the skulls of Chinese suicides for their curses and spells.

The day had been hell. During the hot, lacquering afternoon, Danny Spadoto had been blown apart by a booby trap, as though no more than a vague idea had been holding him together. Spadoto had been a superb whistler, a genius with puckered lips. After several beers he would take requests, could do Sinatra’s “September Song” note by perfect note. He’d been a big guy with beefy, fluorescent cheeks; a happy guy, even in war. Domingo wondered whether Spadoto had been happy because he’d known a lot more than everyone else, or a lot less.

At lunch they’d switched C rations (his pork slices for Domingo’s lamb loaf), and Spadoto had offered Domingo the address of the guaranteed best lay in Saigon.
Hair smells like goddam coconuts,
he’d promised, letting out an awed whistle. Domingo had stared at the scribbled information: Tham Thanh Lan, 14 Nguyen Doc Street. Two hours later, he was shaking Spadoto’s torso loose from a breadfruit tree. Domingo had understood then that he would spend the rest of his life trying to walk normally again, trying to lose his slow-motion, anti–land mine strut.

In the afternoon, cutting through a vine-choked path, the rain coming down rice-sticky, the platoon had stumbled onto a field of white flowers. Domingo had sniffed the air. It smelled sea-brackish, although they were nowhere near the ocean. The Vietnamese scout, a square-faced man everyone called Flounder, said that the flowers bloomed once every thirty years. To see them, and in such profusion, meant excellent luck. To everyone’s surprise Flounder began eating the flowers, which were salty and curiously thirst-quenching. Salt of the jungle.
Sal de la selva,
Domingo translated to himself, and put one in his mouth. Then a quiet euphoria settled over him until dusk.

Domingo absently rubbed the magazine of his M-16 as he stared into the haze of the jungle. The slow stain of night seeped into his skin. He thought of how his hands hadn’t been his in nearly a year, how they hadn’t touched a conga or loved a woman in all that time. How mostly they’d just scratched insects from his skin.

Soon it would be the first anniversary of Papi’s death. Domingo had visited his grave in the Bronx before leaving for Vietnam. He’d sprinkled the plot with fresh water, burned incense and a handful of new dollar bills, left a crate of fresh papayas he’d bought at a Puerto Rican bodega. He’d given away everything of theirs except for a pair of spectacles that had belonged to his great-grandfather, Chen Pan. Domingo promised himself that he would return in a year to complete the traditional rituals. But only fear, he knew, made promises.

Domingo tried to conjure up images of his father. Papi on the banks of the Río Guaso, guiding Domingo’s fishing pole. “Hold the pole steady,
mi hijo.
Wait until the fish rises to the bait.” His father’s fingers folding the edge of a dumpling or deveining a mound of shrimp. Those same fingers massaging Domingo’s scalp “to make your brain work better.” Papi’s blue (always blue) guayaberas swinging loosely on his skinny frame. The high sheen of the American shoes he’d bought at the naval base. The babyish way he’d suckled his cigarettes.

Then came the images Domingo found unbearable to consider. Papi trembling at the edge of the subway platform, wearing his white linen suit. The approach of the man in the red shirt (that’s what the police report said—all details but no explanations) to ask him the time. The bearing-down metal of the south-bound train. South, Domingo thought, the train was going south.

Death had tempted his father like a sudden religion, come wearing a shirt of fire. Domingo pictured the expression on Papi’s face as he flew onto the subway tracks, flew high and unwaveringly and believing—what? Everything Domingo had done since had been filtered through that look.

Papi had taught him that the worst sin for a Chinese son was to neglect his dead ancestors. Domingo remembered the story of his great-grandfather, who’d hidden in the woods after escaping the sugar plantation. When his mother had died in China, her ghost had crossed the Pacific, soared over the Rockies and the Great Plains and down the humid thumb of Florida to Cuba, looking for her son. She’d become a jungle owl and followed Chen Pan for nearly a year, fussing and hooting and disrupting his sleep. She’d even made him stop casting a shadow.

Could this, Domingo wondered, happen to him? He lit a joint and watched the shadow of his hand cupping the flame. If there was no shadow, he reasoned, there’d be no body and he’d be dead.

Domingo leaned against a sandbag and examined the barrel of his rifle. He hadn’t used it much, giving away ammunition to his more trigger-happy buddies. Besides, his ears bled whenever he shot it off. His biggest fear was that in the heat of a firefight, his fellow soldiers would mistake him for a Viet Cong and shoot him dead. Enough of them were suspicious of him to begin with. With his heavy accent and brown skin, how could he be American?

In Cuba, nobody ever asked him where he was from. If you lived in Guantánamo, you were usually from there, several generations back. Everyone knew who you were. That didn’t necessarily mean they were nice. Domingo’s childhood nemesis, Héctor Ruíz, used to taunt him, saying his Chinese eyes tilted everything he saw. Domingo was smaller than Héctor, but he fought him every time. Now he wondered whether Héctor wasn’t right all along: that his world was intrinsically askew.

Tonight the lieutenant had canceled the regular helicopter so as not to call attention to their jungle camp. Why stir up unnecessary dust? To him, choppers were good only for bringing in ammunition and food or hauling the men out when things got nasty. The lieutenant wanted everyone lying low, too, despite the pressure from headquarters to pile up enemy casualties. The men were grateful for the lieutenant’s good sense. Nothing worse, Domingo agreed, than an officer who actually liked his job. Same went for squad leaders and grunts.

So far, Domingo had been lucky. In May he’d stormed into a temple with two soldiers and found a wrinkled monk bent in prayer, his teeth wired to a statue of the Buddha loaded with explosives. Domingo was standing a few feet away when the monk blew up, but he barely got scratched. After that everyone took it as fact that he was freak lucky, his instincts antennae-fine.

Domingo had had so many close calls—the dud hand grenade that had landed at his feet, the malfunctioning booby trap, the sniper’s bullet deflected off the rim of his helmet—that other soldiers began clinging to him like plastic wrap. It got so nobody dared cross a rice paddy dike without checking with him. Domingo kept his great-grandfather’s spectacles in a buttoned-up pocket of his flak jacket. He suspected that they were his charm.

But how long his luck would last was a matter of heavy speculation. Lester Gentry, who’d been a runner for his bookie father in Brooklyn, took odds out on Domingo every day. Domingo even placed bets on himself now and then. If, in fact, he was invincible, he wanted some of the action. A month ago Lester had machine-gunned an old woman and two little boys in their hut, the rice still warm in their bowls. Since then, Lester distracted himself by betting on how long Domingo would live.

Last week Domingo and he had managed to capture a VC, hands up, along with his Russian pistol, some salted eggplant, and a twelve-year-old French pornographic magazine. Upon closer inspection, they found that the prisoner was barely fifteen, stringy-chested and half eaten by fire ants. He’d been living underground for a year, he confessed in his fractured English, crouched in the dark. A paperback of inspirational verse by Ho Chi Minh was stuffed in his back pocket.

Domingo had climbed into the boy-soldier’s hole and felt oddly at home there. He’d found a few scraps of paper covered with poems. One was called “Nuóc,” “Water,” which he knew also meant “country.” He’d wanted to keep the poems, maybe translate them in his spare time. But the lieutenant had ordered him to turn them in with the maps and other military debris. Domingo liked to imagine Army code breakers racking their brains trying to make sense of a Vietnamese love poem.

The rain began suddenly, igniting a soft rustle in the trees. The mountains murmured in the distance. Domingo took off his helmet, still tied with branches from the afternoon’s patrol. The damn thing distorted every sound, felt like a block of concrete on his head. He was dead tired and sweating heavily.

Between the humping and the night watches, Domingo hardly slept. At least it was better than dying unconscious. When his time came, he was determined to meet death head-on. If he were really lucky, maybe some distant relative would kill him. He’d heard that Chinese advisers were all over the VC. Still, he hated the theatricality of dying here. The sudden, light-suspended buoyancy. The senseless grace of blood. Shins protruding from mud-stuck boots. The colorful mess of intestines. Who’d told him that men killed whatever it was they came to fear?

When Domingo had gone for R&R to China Beach, he’d slept solidly for five days. He’d skipped the surf and the steaks and the whores, mostly rousing himself to drink pineapple juice and pee. In the evenings, he’d smoked Buddha weed or a little raw opium until his brain uncoiled sufficiently to sleep some more. His dreams were hazy and oranged, like rotting film. He couldn’t remember a single one, only their persistent grinding light.

All the men there had just wanted to get back to the World. One guy from Arkansas fantasized about dying in his sleep, his family gathered around him, loudly grieving; a rosy, erotic death with pinup angels escorting him to heaven, sucking his dick along the way. Domingo didn’t understand this hunger to grow old, this clinging to life as though anyone owned it outright. Besides, who would want to live so long when you could die dancing or go up in flames?

His last night at China Beach, Domingo had hung out by the jukebox with the black Marines, drumming along on the tables and doing his Otis Redding imitation (“I’m a Changed Man,” “Groovin’ Time”). Then he’d returned to the jungle, refreshed, for another killing round.

Domingo looked out at the damp horizon, imagined death coming toward him from the trees. He pressed his thumbs on his eyelids and willed himself to see in the dark, like the vampire bats in the caves outside Guantánamo. It was rumored that the bats stuck themselves to the jugulars of sleeping horses and cows, guzzling their meals of blood.
One wing soot, one wing death,
the
guajiros
would say.

After all these months, what could he believe anymore? What could never happen happened every day. Men blown out like matches. A split second cleaved living from oblivion. Once in the interrogation hut, Domingo saw the lieutenant plunge a knife into a prisoner’s thigh and slash him down to his knee. He still got no answers. The prisoner was old, in his forties, lean as a kite. The old ones, everyone said, were the hardest to break.

Now all Domingo knew was this relentless feeding of death, as if feeding it were a specialty of the poor, like playing the congas or tending water buffalo. In-country, the motto was simple:
There it is.

Last Christmas Eve his platoon had gotten caught in a firefight outside Pleiku. Six men had died in five minutes. It’d been raining so hard and out of season that their socks had rotted inside their boots. The sun had been off brooding in Cambodia. Leeches had feasted everywhere. Domingo’s feet had festered so badly he could’ve scraped off his soles with a fingernail.

He remembered the Christmas celebrations when he was a kid, the pig roasting in the open pit, the fat dribbling from under the crackling skin.
Noche
Buena.
After the Revolution, pork was hard to come by and people made do with scrawny chickens and yams. Only Mamá hadn’t seemed to mind. She was the first to volunteer for everything, cutting sugarcane until her hands blistered and her ankles swelled with chigger bites. She never forgave Domingo for going fishing with his father on the first anniversary of the Revolution. Instead of joining the parade of his classmates with their paper flags, he’d sat by the Río Guaso waiting for the tarpon to bite.

When Papi had been arrested on charges of anti-revolutionary activities, Mamá had refused to come to his defense. She’d testified against him, reporting that he’d trafficked in contraband (a few packs of cigarettes here, a case of condensed milk there, just enough to get him in trouble). Then state security agents had tried to recruit him, but Papi refused to help. (Everyone knew that there were insurgents in the Escambray Mountains, plots to kill El Comandante, a flourishing black market in foreign weapons.) And so he was sent to the psychiatric hospital in Santiago.

Domingo had hated visiting him at the asylum. Patients caterwauled out the windows and defecated in the hallways. They bludgeoned each other with their plastic food trays. In his father’s ward, rusted buckets overflowed with vomit and shit. It was no secret that his wing of the hospital was dedicated to political prisoners, although a few lunatics were sifted in for appearances’ sake. Most of the men were ordinary, like Papi, except for their hatred of El Comandante. It was this that had qualified them for special revolutionary treatment: psychotropic drugs, electroshock therapy, beatings by the criminally insane released in their ward.