For the Sake of All Living Things (57 page)

“My father used to worship the rain,” Vathana murmured. “Because it renews the land. Here it only makes mud.”

“Is there someplace we can go. I...I...want to talk. It’s kind of American of me, I know, but I’d prefer to talk alone.”

Vathana smiled, assented. Then her face tightened. An image of a dark assaulter ripping her, clutching her, flashed in her mind. Sullivan was sunshine in darkness, winking, momentary, soon to withdraw and leave eternal night. “There’s a place by the river,” she whispered. “Let me tell Sophan.”

Vathana had been ordered, for the protection of her brother and the camp, to become the American’s consort. This was terrible. She was the mother of two children. To lie with a long-nose, a fire-haired
phalang...
Society in Cambodia, in the camp, was closed. This was scandalous. She was ashamed. But, too, there existed a pang, a need, a growing attraction and infatuation beyond what was forced upon her.

For an hour they sat, talking quietly, fishing in the dark Mekong with hand lines and hooks baited with
parhok
, small pieces of pickled fish.

“I don’t know what’s happening.” Sullivan’s voice was thick with concern. “My country’s lost its, ah...I don’t know. Does it make any sense to you if I say it’s lost its masculinity?” Vathana sat very close to him. She leaned, pressed her shoulder against his. “Between men, when there’s friendship, each man gives the friendship his best. It doesn’t make any difference if one can give a lot and the other only a little. It’s as though what’s given is multiplied.”

Again Vathana swayed into him. “Yes,” she said. “That’s like all friendship.”

“Maybe. But...” He paused. “Masculine-feminine friendship is different.” Sullivan jerked on the fishing line then let it fall again. He wasn’t sure he wanted to go on. He didn’t want to build a wall between them. “I’m talking countries here,” he said. “Masculine and feminine traits in nations. If one gives in a feminine way to one in a masculine stance it’s like adding pluses and minuses. The given isn’t multiplied. It’s neutralized. When my country gives in a masculine way the given is multiplied. When it gives in a feminine way it negates what the receiver puts up. It’s apron-string giving. I’ll give you one hundred APCs if you’ll love me. I’m at the tail end of it. I’m the guy who says, ‘Colonel, you told my country you’d do this and this if we put ten thousand rifles in your hands. Now I know you got the rifles so let’s see you show your love for me.’ Somebody in Washington defines the ‘this and this.’ Maybe ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ aren’t the right words.”

“John, why is it you choose to work with Khmers? To fight beside Khmers?”

“Why? Vathana, I wish you could see it. There are some good troops here. Some good leaders. Some of these guys can fight. I know the American press is full of stories about FANK corruption, FANK incompetence, but...I wish I could show you. The garrison at Takhmau was hit by the NVA 12th Regiment and they waxed the Commies’ asses....I mean....”

“It’s okay.”

“There’s this one guy up in Baray, Lieutenant Bousa. He’s really good. There’s a major at Chamkar Luong on Highway 4. When his troops aren’t fighting, and they’re the best in the South, they’re in the paddies his uncles and father had. They’ve got a truck farm there that feeds the whole battalion and their families.”

“A farm of trucks!?”

Sullivan laughed. “I guess that doesn’t translate, eh? A big vegetable farm. They have paddies and fishing boats. Some commanders charge their troops for rations. They get terrible soldiers. Major Preap’s are great. I’d fight with them anytime.”

Vathana leaned into Sullivan again. He put his right arm around her. Very lightly he hugged her. Visually, in the darkness, she was but a silhouette against the Mekong. He squeezed her gently. She turned her face up to his. Suddenly it hit him. He didn’t know if traditional Khmers kissed. He wanted to kiss her. Instead he repeated with concern, “I don’t know what’s happening. My country’s...They think”—he slipped the fishing spool under his left leg—“they can bomb without complete intelligence, without follow-up by skillful infantry maneuvers...” Vathana placed her left arm around his back and snuggled against him. “You can’t drop an arc-light on a village because there’s a T-54 parked on the green.” She leaned against him and he lay back. Sullivan watched a mosquito alight on her hair. He reached up and gently pushed it into flight. About them the earth’s surface lay black-and still. Slowly, quietly, they hugged, kissed, embraced more and more passionately. Across the river, deep in the swamp, a firefight erupted then faded.

Afterward they talked again.

“You have only one sister?” Vathana lay with her head on his chest.

“Um-hum. Your family’s large?”

“We’re scattered,” Vathana said. “Most of my family is in Communist areas.”

“By the border?”

“In the North. Do you know Stung Treng?”

“Only from maps. It fell before I got here.”

“There are many small villages in the hills and along the rivers. My father’s village is Phum Sath Din. On the Srepok.” Vathana hesitated. “ ‘They,’ ” she purposefully left it indefinite, inviting inquiry, “have told me my brother, Sakhon, at my father’s request, has been moved to Kratie.”

“That’s held too,” Sullivan said. She felt wonderful on him. “Your father must be a strong man to be able to let his son go.”

“He used to be very traditional, very religious. Always he read the scriptures.”

“My father used to make us, my sister and me, read the Bible before dinner,” Sullivan said. “One passage every night.”

“He too must have been very religious,” Vathana whispered back. She kissed his ear.

“It wasn’t so much that.” Sullivan ran his hand over the smooth skin of her hip. “It was his way to teach us to think. We’d read the passage, then all through dinner we’d talk about it. What did it mean to us? What did the nuns say it meant? I remember one passage.”

“Just one,” Vathana kidded him, and snuggled in closer.

“Oh, lots,” he responded seriously. “But I was thinking of one. It’s from Matthew. Jesus said to his disciples, they’d asked him why he spoke to the people in parables, and he said, ‘Because it has been given to you to know the mysteries of the kingdom of heaven, but to them it has not been given. Seeing they do not see, hearing they do not hear, nor do they understand.’ ”

“Are you certain, Mister Sullivan, you are not Buddhist?” Vathana giggled then turned mock-serious. “You sound Buddhist. It’s written in the Dhammapada, ‘If a fool be associated with a wise man even all his life, he will perceive the truth as little as a spoon perceives the taste of soup. If an intelligent man be associated for one minute only with a wise man, he will soon perceive the truth, as the tongue perceives the taste of soup.’ ”

“You know, I used to think Buddhism was all this mystical stuff and Christianity more down-to-earth. Never mind that. It’s me. I feel like I’ve been given to know, not the mysteries of heaven, but the mysteries of hell.”

“Perhaps it’s because you are an intelligent man.”

“But they’re intelligent too.”

“Who?”

“Why is it they see but don’t see? Why don’t they understand?”

“You mean your people?”

“Vathana, it’s as plain to me as the freckles on my nose.”

She rubbed her nose against his. “They’re very plain.” She giggled.

“Saint Paul said, ‘Always learning, they are never able to come to the knowledge of the truth...they will not progress...their folly will be manifest to all....’ They study. They write. They’ve
no
idea what’s happening. When will their folly be manifest? Is it going to take a bloodbath for them to wake up?”

“John L.,” Vathana whispered in his ear. “Love me again. You cannot enlighten a fool.”

After they loved again and Sullivan lay on his back with his head in the gentle fog pillow of postejaculation, Vathana massaged his forehead. “You are too young,” she said softly, “to have such furrows.” He opened his eyes. She looked down into his face. “How did you say it? ‘I could gobble you up.’ ” She opened her mouth wide, placed her teeth on his forehead, gently raked the skin, half eating him, half trying to dislodge the pain and worry. “What would happen if we did nothing?” Vathana said in altered tone. “Really. What would happen if there were no you, no me? If John L. Sullivan and Cahuom Vathana did not exist? If we left Cambodia and moved to...to Paris?”

“Well,” Sullivan said, wrapping his arms around her, twisting her down and nipping her nose, “well, first off, they’d come get me and toss my young ass in jail for being—how can I say it?—absent without leave.”

“Truly, John,” Vathana said.

“Truly,” he whispered back. He ran kisses lightly down from her ear, down her neck to her shoulder. He felt the chain which she wore, ran a finger under it as if it blocked him from feeling all of her. Vathana lifted the statuette and rubbed it on the back of his hand. “What’s that?” Sullivan whispered.

“A charm,” she whispered proudly. “From my grandfather’s tooth. My father gave it to me when I married.”

Sullivan fought a sudden twinge of revulsion, an urge to retract his hand. For a quick moment he felt repulsed as if she’d said the Buddha was fresh feces from a hepatitis-ward latrine. He repressed the urge and gently grasped the carved figurine. As he held it, rubbed its smoothness between his fingers, a feeling of the tie to the ancient Wheel of Life rose in him, spread through him, finally reaching expressible thought. “It’s very beautiful,” he said.

“Truly?” Vathana giggled. “Would it be beautiful to you in Paris? Would they really throw you in jail?”

“You mean”—Sullivan flopped back onto his elbows and looked into the night sky—“in Paris. Not here. Hum...I think it would still be beautiful. Paris. Would your camp run without you? Could this stinking city survive without its Angel? Would any more or any fewer weapons be stolen or misused if I told Mataxis I wanted out? God, at least that damned
Sun
reporter’d be off my ass. I was with a FANK unit...I flew up to Kompong Thom last month. The place...the whole city is fortified but there’s something crazy going on. I was thinking after...I was with the unit at Kilometer 19 near Vat Bakheng.”

“Oh, John. You mustn’t...”

“God. Those devils rose up outa the swamp. A full regiment against, I don’t know, maybe five hundred FANKs. I called in the air strikes and this son of a bitch sees me do it. Did he see fifteen hundred NVA a dozen miles from the capital? Did he see them wipe out the first line? Nope. All he sees is me on the hook with a map. I thought Mataxis would shit. If
The New York Times
hadn’t started publishing that Pentagon document I’d probably have been court-martialed for advising. Vathana, they see but they don’t see.”

“John, you take this very hard, yes?”

Sullivan rolled away from her. He propped himself up on his elbows and held his chin. “The guy paints me. He paints a picture of me and the whole team with his words. I’m working to keep these people from being slaughtered and he labels me a ‘hard liner.’ He thinks he’s some sort of antiwar idealist and I’m a warmonger. I’m some hawk psychopath. What would happen if we moved to Paris? Who knows? But if they pull all the American lunatic hawks like me out of here, it’s not going to stop the fighting.”

“Truly?”

“Yeah. Truly.”

Rita Donaldson let the heel of her pump fall loose from her foot. She and Tom Jasson were in the veranda dining room of Washington’s Chez Pasquier, sitting, reading the latest installment of the Pentagon Papers as it appeared, exclusively, in
The Times
, sitting, sipping vodka martinis, amused and simultaneously angered and frustrated by the revelations and by the
Times’s
coup.

Rita’s shoe fell to the carpet. She turned the page. The photo of a large man dressed in jungle utilities, his back to the camera, caught her eye. Tom Jasson moved his leg deeper under the table.

“Another American advisor in Cambodia...” she said. The words were unconnected with previous utterances.

“Um,” Jasson said. Her toes found his shin, slid to the side of his leg, caressed—suddenly withdrew. Jasson looked up.

“Who the hell...?” Rita said. Her foot fidgeted with the lost pump as she leaned forward, stared into the newspaper-quality photograph.

“What—” Jasson began.

“Arnold White,” she said. “Arnold...The outline credit is to...Do you remember when I got back...?”

“Sure.”

“Remember that obnoxious son of a bitch I told you about?”

“Yeah. Harvey called Chicago and, ah, what was it, San Jose?”

“He called all over. He even checked with the State Department. That bastard said his name was Jim White. Nobody had ever heard of him. Look at this.” Jasson leaned over the table. “Arnold White!?” she said.

“Ah, maybe that’s your man.”

“May...I don’t think so. Harvey checked for anyone named White. There weren’t any in January.”

“You’re really upset about this, aren’t you? So one guy was rude to you—so what?”

“He wasn’t a correspondent. He was CIA, I bet. Trying to set me up.”

“Rita? Rita, it doesn’t make...Well, you tell me. You said nothing came of it, didn’t you?”

Rita Donaldson sighed, thought, You jerk, glared at Tom Jasson. “I don’t know.”

“Look. It couldn’t have worked out better for you. You spent a lousy ten days in that hell and you got a promotion. Now you get to see Paris and cover the talks. I would have gone but my dad’s illness...”

“Yeah, I know. But you know what...”

“It should have been me,” Jasson said. “You didn’t even turn in a decent story. Who was going to read a feature on Cambodian military training? Really!”

“A lot of people read it!”

“Yeah, uh-huh.”

“You envious twit! God!” She finished her martini. “You know what? I’m going to go back.” She tapped the photo of the American “advisor.” “I’m going to go back and nail these bastards. Goddamn gall of the government and these hooligans raping that country!”

A
CHANGED NANG STOOD
amid his fighters. He had not uttered a word or moved a muscle for nearly thirty minutes and the fighters struggled to match his perfection. He did not make his mind blank, did not meditate attempting to achieve some higher awareness, but simply stood in perfect awareness of the here and now. “He who breaks first,” Nang had told the group, “will face this scarred face in full sparring, just as he who breaks first is first heard and engaged by the enemy.” The boys and young men concentrated on their breathing, concentrated on remaining relaxed. Every day they practiced being still and quiet, each day for a longer period. Never had Number Two Rabbit challenged them, never had the stakes been so high. By his countenance they knew the situation had changed, evolved. At thirty-five minutes one boy wavered. Eyes locked on him, then flicked to Nang. The teacher, leader, master did not move. As the sides had drawn tighter about Kompong Thom and American high-level harassment bombing had increased, Nang used the sanctity of the inner city more and more to train new yotheas and
chrops
and his youth corps, to train them in techniques as diverse as spying and sparring, fading into a crowd and facing enemy tanks.