A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain (38 page)

Frank kept his face out to sea and he shrugged. “Sure I do. But sometimes it just gets so goddamn silly.”

Vinh laughed, and it was a deep, appreciative laugh. I couldn’t believe my good luck. All these two men had to do was sit down in the shade for a couple of moments and the first things out of their mouth let me find what I was looking for. “You’ve got it there, Frank,” Vinh said. And I understood that however foolish Frank could appear hanging on so hard to the Vietnam veteran part of himself, however embarrassing it might sometimes be for Eileen, he certainly hadn’t given in to the light and lively and less filling and soft as a cloud and reach out and touch someone culture that America had to offer. All the things that I had a sweet tooth for, my husband couldn’t stand, not this man who’d been through a war and survived, the man who’d made his way in a strange land. And here was another man as uncomfortable with all that as Vinh was. Sure, these two could be buddies for a week. I fancy myself an observant woman, and there it was at last for me to see, as I sat on a crumbling boat dock at the foot of the set of one of my favorite movies.

Well, that was a relief, I thought. I even turned to Eileen and said, “There’s got to be more to the place than this.”

“Of course. Through the trees you can see buildings up there on top of the hill.” Eileen turned her attention to her husband. “Honey, get us up to the top.”

“The stairs lead nowhere.”

Then I remembered the water runoff we’d passed. “I saw a place to go up,” I said.

Frank and Vinh slapped their knees in acceptance and we all got up and I walked point this time, leading everyone back along the seawall to the cut in the trees and that groove coming down. “We can go up here,” I said.

Vinh stepped in front of me and looked up the hill and said, “Okay. If you have to do this.”

“There’ll be no T-shirts at the top,” I said. “I bet I can promise that.”

Frank laughed and it looked like he was going to make a move past Vinh to lead the way, but Vinh started up the path too quickly, getting out in front, and Frank hustled to follow. I looked at Eileen and we both watched the men jockeying like this for position, and then she rolled her eyes at me. We both offered the other the opportunity to go next—I wasn’t all that eager to be near them, now that I thought I understood. But Eileen finally insisted the hardest, and I went up the rut before her, the hillside squeezing at my hamstrings. I climbed with my face down for a while and the water runoff widened, turned into something more like a path, and there were even a few flat stones along the way, like the cast and crew had used this same way up the hill.

I finally raised my eyes and the two men were about thirty meters ahead, moving pretty fast, Frank still behind. I stopped and watched them and I don’t know why I noticed it, but they were remarkably quiet. They were traipsing up among dead leaves and twigs and such and yet I didn’t hear them at all. There must have been something in the way they were moving that made me sensitive to this, because somehow I knew it was on their minds as well. They were a little hunched and alert and they moved without any wasted motion, not even bobbing up and down. Then they reached the top of the rise and stopped and Frank came even with Vinh. I followed the turn of their heads and off to their left I could see a small, one-story brick structure without a front wall. They cocked their heads and looked into the gaping concrete rooms.

I put my head down and strained at my tight legs and went on up, conscious now of how much noise I was making, crunching leaves and scraping on the flat stones. I’d always wondered what it was like when Vinh was with his company out patrolling or whatever they did in the jungles. I felt suddenly like I knew. When I got to the top of this rise, I was surprised to find the men gone. The path continued on ahead, through a little open meadow, and then began to climb again. I could see along it far enough to know the men hadn’t gone that way.

I flexed my legs to try to stretch out my muscles and I looked around. The two men were nowhere to be seen. The two side-byside concrete rooms gaped open to me and I glanced down the path and Eileen was struggling up, making a last effort, and then she was beside me. “Where are they?” she asked.

“I don’t know.”

“Frank?” Eileen’s voice quavered into the still, hot air and there was no reply. There was just the sound of the distant surf, coming from over the hill ahead of us, and the buzz of some insect whisking past and then away.

I was curious about this little building. It was too basic to be anything used in the movie, and then as I approached, I noticed an inner wall of tiles and the stubs of old shower heads. This was in the left-hand room, and I stepped into the room to the right as Eileen called out Frank’s name again. The walls here were covered with graffiti, the profuse linking of names from floor to ceiling. Ramon and Maria, Ed and Mary, Sigmund and Katherine, on and on, a swarm of lovers touching letters, stuck by arrows, bound in by ragged marker-pen hearts. I saw a flash of color out of the comer of my eye. It was through the back window, beyond a row of low bushes. A red shirt slipping past in the trees, and I looked closer just in time to see the black shirt following.

“They’re out in the back,” I said to Eileen.

“Frank,” she called again.

“Yes, Eileen?”

“Where are you?”

“Here I am.” The voice was coming around a comer of the little building now and I looked again at all the names, running my eyes quickly around and around the wall packed with true love, and I wondered how many of these couples were still in love right this moment.

“Vinh and I were exploring out back.”

“You having fun, sweetie?” Eileen said, and there was no ridicule or irritation in her voice. It was like she was indulging an active child.

I stepped out of the lovers’ room and I thought it was a shame that the front wall was broken down and the place smelled of mildew and stone dust.

Frank did not answer Eileen’s little motherly question. Instead he turned to my husband and said, “You keep pretty good noise discipline there, Vinh.”

“Perhaps you drowned out my mistakes.”

“You weren’t hearing any sounds out of this troop either,” Frank said, and his voice rasped a bit from Vinh’s sharpness.

“Can’t we go on?” Eileen said, pretty sharp herself now. “This isn’t really part of the set.”

Both men looked to the path tracking up and over the hill and I could feel the tension between them. Frank turned first and moved off pretty fast, and I was surprised to see Vinh follow just as fast.

Eileen cried out, “Wait for us,” and this did slow Frank down and pull him into an upright position. He glanced over his shoulder and Vinh was coming up on him and it didn’t seem fair to me for him to pass Frank while he was just paying attention to his wife.

So I called, “Vinh,” and my husband slowed and even stopped and turned to wait for us. Frank stopped as well, just beyond him. Eileen and I looked at each other and I didn’t know exactly what was in her mind, but she was obviously noticing the same odd thing going on between the men that I was. She and I took our sweet time about getting ourselves together and strolling up the path and the men were waiting, so I let myself look around.

Things were still pretty wildly overgrown, but we could see some full buildings off to our right, set on higher ground that looked back into the bay. This was the main set, I think, the hotel run by Ava Gardner in the movie.

“Isn’t that the place?” I said to Eileen, nodding to the buildings.

“Maybe so. Maybe.”

We looked around for a path going off in that direction, but the only one we found didn’t go twenty meters before it was overgrown and then just disappeared into a really nasty thicket.

“I don’t see a way over there,” I said to Eileen, and she was not where I expected her to be. I found her up the hill, at the crest, and she was looking off in the distance and she had her hands folded before her with the wind blowing her hair back and she looked very nice there, very contented. Like a bookplate I once had, a girl standing against a breeze on a hill. Books make you dream, I think it said, just over the place where I wrote my name: This book belongs to Tr
n Nam Thanh Gabrielle. I miss bookplates. You can’t hold a TV show in your hand and put your bookplate inside the cover where a girl stands on a hill dreaming of a wonderful future, just like in this wonderful book.

I glanced at the men and they were shuffling their feet and sniffing the air. I climbed up beside Eileen and the view was very nice; the bay was broad and very blue; the shore over on this side was deserted, a long curve of lacy surf. Very nice. I looked at the path and it wound down the ragged hill to a crumbling two-story brick building, though this one still had its front wall. And closer to the beach was the concrete frame of a foundation, all the walls gone from this one.

“We going over the hill?” Frank said.

It was all lovely but very lonely, too, up here. There was nothing of the movie to recognize, really. No sense of Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor ever being here. No ghosts here at all, it seemed. Just wreckage and weeds and silence. I turned my face to the wind coming in from the ocean and I stripped off a scarf that I’d used to tie up my hair and the wind blew my hair behind me, a nice feeling, I guess, though I wouldn’t kid myself or anyone else that it had any intensity, this feeling. The wind in your hair is really a thrill only for a girl who hasn’t met a man yet.

I don’t mean that as cynical as it sounds. I just felt a little let down, I guess. There was a pretty snapshot up here, but no romance. That may sound odd from the woman who found romance in the muddy water spoiling the bay, but this was the mood that had suddenly come over me. I was weary of this vacation. And the men wanted nothing more than to charge over the hill. Frank was waiting for an answer and Eileen apparently wasn’t going to give him one. I looked at her and her eyes were closed and I hoped that she was feeling more than I was.

“Over the hill,” I said, and Frank flashed past and then Vinh, who gave me a quick glance as he went by. I knew all my husband’s gestures, the subtle language of his face, all of that; I knew these things with such certainty and accuracy that it never surprised me when he sometimes seemed uncomfortable around me. But this glance of his as he went over the hill had something to it that I had not seen before and that I did not understand. Like the startled and yet fully comprehending look he might have if he and I had been standing on the edge of a cliff and the ground had just given way and he was hanging out there in the air about to drop straight down and he and I both knew there was nothing to be done about it.

If all this sounds a little odd, well, that’s the way it was. I was feeling a little odd, and I sat down. I went to the edge of the hill in a bald spot in the weeds and I sat down and I tucked my legs up to my chest and I looked for a few moments at the breakers all along the shore, but I soon turned my eyes back to the men. They were winding down the path and they were moving, I knew, like they were on some patrol in some real hot battle area in Vietnam. They were just gliding, keeping low, and they were halfway down the hill, heading toward the brick building.

All of a sudden Frank pulled up and raised his hand in the air like he’d heard something. Vinh must have been watching the path at that moment because he ran right into Frank and nearly knocked him over. They were suddenly standing chest to chest and talking fast, both of them, and waving their arms.

I leaned forward and I grunted in frustration, loud enough for Eileen to get alarmed. “Are you going to be sick?” she said.

“No,” I said, and I guess she was still looking out to sea, dreaming about whatever it was that made her close her eyes to the breeze. I wondered just for a moment if she was thinking of Frank as he once was, or maybe somebody else altogether. But there was no shifting of my attention, really. The men were arguing and I was out of earshot and that made me angry. A Vietnamese woman never curses, especially aloud and especially in the presence of some other person, but I came very close at that moment.

I wanted to get near the action but I knew I couldn’t just run down there. It would stop the words for sure. I wanted this thing to follow its own course. Then I determined to use all of my powers of observation and figure it out. And I did pretty well, I think. I started by keeping in mind the way they’d been going down the hill. Low, silently, like they were on patrol in the war. It had something to do with all that, I figured.

The men had begun to take turns talking and it was Vinh’s turn at the moment. I watched his hands. It’s hard to ruffle Vinh, but when he does get worked up, he has very expressive hands. His right hand flipped with its palm upturned at Frank as if to say, This is what you did. Then Vinh pointed up the path they’d followed. He quickly traced it down the side of the hill to show the way they had come, and then he squared around to face Frank. He raised both his hands, slowly brought them together, and then flared them out, talking all the while, and it was like I could hear him: You led us down this path and it’s the obvious place for the VC to put booby traps; I was watching the path and not you because you put us in danger by doing the obvious thing.