If You Lived Here (33 page)

“What’s you name, fella?” He bent toward me to ask. His breath on the back of my neck smelled of cigarettes and garlic.

“Martin,” I told him.

“Marty!” he said. “You know Marty Kansas? Big guy, Marty Kansas?”

It was awkward to turn around and talk to him, so I just shook my head. “What’s your name?” I asked, yelling into the wind.

“Charlie!” he answered, letting out a cackle. He spoke in distinct syllables, rather than words: Cha-Lee. Ma-Tee. Kan-Sa. I leaned my head back, cocked to the side so that he could see the edge of my smile. Charlie. Very funny.

At the end of the bridge, he made a sharp turn to the right, heading up a road that followed the river. The street here was quiet, lined with shady trees leaning out over the water. “You Yankee, Marty?” Charlie asked.

I shook my head. “Aussie?”

“I guess I’m Yankee,” I said.

Charlie gave my shoulder an appreciative shove. “America. Beautiful America,” he said. We arrived at an intersection and turned down a wide commercial road that led away from the river.

Danang wasn’t what I expected. For one thing, it was filthy. I’d never imagined that a city could be that dirty. Open sewers ran along the sides of the road, full of knotty plastic bags, dead rats, the rinds of watermelon. Mangy dogs roamed the sidewalks, nosing through garbage and fighting each other over food. Children, wearing nothing but tattered underpants, raced barefoot through the sewers in the same way that Abe and Theo used to run through the waves at Wrightsville Beach. The place smelled like gasoline and rotting fruit.

The city was clearly poor, but also surprisingly peaceful. If you’d just landed in Vietnam from Mars, you might not have known there was a war going on. Cars and trucks, buses and bicycles filled the streets. Shoppers crowded the stores. Mothers perched on the front stoops of their houses, nursing their babies. Old men sat on lawn chairs, drinking tea and watching the traffic. I might have forgotten the war altogether were it not for two things: the military vehicles and the refugees. The military vehicles were loud, and the refugees, well, it seemed like every out-of-the-way corner was full of them. Whole families sat sheltered inside abandoned concrete pipes. Children slept on cardboard spread across the grassy medians of the road. Unlike the busy city dwellers, the refugees didn’t do anything at all. If they were awake, they just sat there.

The streets all seemed the same. Most of the buildings were two-story concrete structures, newish but not pretty, painted pastel pinks and yellows, and tinged, already, with mildew and dirt. Shops filled the bottom floors. Upstairs, the balconies were cluttered with potted plants, bicycles, folding chairs, and laundry drying on lines. We passed a large open-air market, and the women selling fruit out on the sidewalk motioned for me to come over. Charlie hummed “Big Old Jet Airliner, Don’t Carry Me Too Far Away.” We moved very slowly, slower than I could walk, but I had never ridden in a cyclo before, so I thought this speed was normal. After passing the market, we turned off the main

road onto a side street, then turned down another one, then another one. We kept turning. We passed a florist. A pharmacy. A few dress shops. A tailor sitting at a sewing machine right out on the sidewalk. A florist. A pharmacy. A few dress shops. A tailor on the sidewalk. That’s how I realized that Charlie was peddling me around the same block again and again.

I turned around. “What about my city tour?” I asked.

Charlie grinned. He leaned forward. His sweat splattered my face. “You want see Cham Museum?” he asked.

I nodded.

“You want see Danang Cathedral? Cao Dai Temple?”

“Yes,” I said. I’d seen the names in the Rec Facility guidebook. “Five dollar,” Charlie said.

I looked at him. “What’s the three-dollar city tour, then?”

“This!” Charlie grinned, as if it were the punch line of a joke. One eye was watching to see how I’d react. The other eye looked unconcerned.

I leaned back in my seat. We passed the tailor one more time. “Take me back to the base,” I yelled.

“Five dollar,” said Charlie.

Now, on our fourth rotation, the young woman at the florist’s waved. Behind me, Charlie’s breath sounded wet and heavy. I tried to remember the survival tips I’d learned in basic training: maintain rational thought, consider all your options. But I didn’t even know if I was in danger. Was this guy VC or just any old lunatic? Either way, he sat at the perfect angle to slit my throat. Quickly, I glanced around. I’d never been lost in a foreign city before. I had no idea what direction the base lay in, and no idea how to ask directions in Vietnamese. On the other hand, five dollars equaled half my spending money for the week, and I wasn’t willing to fork it over to a thief.

“Take me back to the base or I’ll have you arrested,” I said, using my harshest military bark.

Charlie shoved my shoulder. “Five dollar or I keel you,” he said.

Then he laughed. “Ha! Ha! Funny?”

I don’t know if I can explain how I felt at that moment. I can only

say that the world around me broke apart. Everything looked distorted, as if I were gazing out through a shattered window. Even my body felt like it didn’t fit together properly. I couldn’t move.

I might have sat like that the rest of the afternoon, but then Charlie shoved me again. The gesture pushed me forward, changing the vehicle’s balance and dragging the metal frame against the ground. “Hey, fella! Sit!” Charlie complained. His tone had shifted. He didn’t sound menacing so much as whiny.

At that moment, without thinking about what I was doing, I pushed my hands against the armrest and leaped toward the pavement. With the sudden shift in weight, the cyclo reared back, and the metal rim slammed against my shin. I felt my legs come out from under me as my shoulder twisted to absorb the fall. I landed on my side. Pain shot up my leg and across my back.

Charlie’s good eye glared down at me from the cyclo. He began to yell in Vietnamese. I couldn’t understand anything but “dollar,” “city tour,” and “Yankee,” but it sounded vicious. People came out of the dress shops to look. Charlie gestured wildly. I pulled myself up and began to limp away. He turned his cyclo around and followed me, peddling against the traffic, yelling and pointing at me as he rode. I ignored him. I looked down at my hip. The muscles throbbed with pain. My shirt had a rip along the right sleeve. I didn’t know if I was walking toward the base, or farther away.

“You pay money!” Charlie yelled. A military jeep slowed down to look at us. Five South Vietnamese soldiers were crowded into the vehicle’s open seats, their rifles pointed into the air. One of them asked a question. Charlie, speaking in Vietnamese, pointed to me, then to his cyclo.

“I’m not paying you a damn thing!” I yelled at him.

The soldiers looked at me, then back at Charlie. The driver said something that made his colleagues laugh, then he gunned the engine and sped away.

Charlie was quiet for a few seconds, then he screamed, “I call police!” I kept walking.

By pure luck, I ended up back at the market. With Charlie still yelling and causing everyone in the vicinity to stare, I ducked inside. The sound of Charlie’s voice grew weaker behind me. I looked over my shoulder. I could see him perched on the seat of his cyclo, unwilling to abandon it, but screaming down the aisle anyway, as if he expected me to turn around. I hurried on into the market.

I wandered for a long time. In the depths of the dark building, the air was stale and at least ten degrees hotter. My blue jeans felt like damp cardboard against my legs and my shirt stuck in patches to my shoulders. I walked down an aisle lined with meat vendors. Slabs of pork and beef lay in pools of blood on wooden tables, dotted with flies, stinking of decay. The vendors sat on stools a few feet away, smoking cigarettes, playing cards, or napping. As I passed, a few looked at me, gestured toward their wares, then gave up. It was too hot to do anything energetically. Sweat dripped into the corners of my eyes. I was thinking about Britt’s Donuts out at Carolina Beach. Crunchy on the outside and light as air on the inside. On a summer night I could eat a dozen, and wash it all down with a quart of milk.

When I emerged from the market, dusk had fallen. Lights shone inside the buildings, and street vendors had lit candles next to the little wooden display cases holding their goods. I walked down a side street hoping to find my way. None of the buildings looked familiar, but they didn’t look unfamiliar either. Inside the homes, on TV, a man read the evening news. Women squatted in front of stoves, stirring food in large, smoking pans. The scents floating through the doorways were succulent and indistinguishable. For a moment, I forgot where I was going.

Around that time, I spotted Avery. Maybe I’d started hallucinating. I don’t know, but I had the sensation that I was floating, that nothing around me was real, and that I wasn’t real either. The sight of him made everything clear again. He was sitting at a table on the sidewalk, looking down at a chessboard, his back as butler straight as ever. His chess partner, an elderly Vietnamese in pale blue pajamas, leaned so close to the board that, if he’d breathed too heavily, he would have knocked over the queen. Neither of them saw me.

Avery made a move. And then, a minute or two later, the old man countered.

“Hi,” I said.

The old man didn’t look up. Avery did, but chin first, and very grad-ually. When his eyes finally lifted and focused on me, he smiled briefly, then immediately dropped his gaze back to the chessboard in front of him. “Hello, Martin,” he said. “We’re just in the middle of the game. Why don’t you have some refreshment?”

A glass sign that said “Ca Fe” hung from a wrought-iron hook above the building. I walked inside, then took a seat near the door. The front half of the room was filled with low tables and stools of the same type that Avery and his chess partner sat at outside. The back half of the room contained simple furniture and a television showing a man reading the news, the same man reading the news on all the other televisions in all the other houses. Travel posters sporting pictures of Vietnamese beaches covered the walls, and from the ceiling hung a dozen wire cages filled with green, yellow, and ruby red birds. Sounds of fluttering, chirp-ing, and hopping filled the air. I was the only customer.

A moment after I sat down, a girl of about eight or nine came in through a beaded curtain at the back of the room. She wore a ruffled dress and green rubber flip-flops. Instead of picking up her feet as she walked, she shuffled them back and forth on the floor. When she arrived at my table, she sat down on the stool across from me, kicked off her shoes, pulled her knees up, and hugged them. Then she grinned at me. I grinned back. She looked up at the birdcages and began to whistle.

After a while, I said, “Can I get a beer?” The word was easy to remember in Vietnamese. “
Bia?
” I asked.

The girl looked at me and nodded. “
Bia
Pepsi?
Bia
Fanta?
Bia
Bud?”

“
Bia
Bud,” I told her.

She pushed herself up off the seat and shuffled back behind the curtain. I glanced outside. The opening to the street was as wide as the entire room. A retractable metal gate, which served as the front door, had been pulled open. Avery and his chess partner were sitting beneath a blue awning that stretched out over the sidewalk. They hadn’t moved.

I leaned back, let my head fall against the wall behind me, and closed my eyes. The girl’s voice, light and musical, floated in from the back room, mixing with the twittering of the birds.

When I heard her shuffling back toward me, I opened my eyes. She had a can of Bud in one hand and an ashtray in the other. She put the ashtray down on the table, then held the Bud up so that I could see it. She said a word in Vietnamese. Her grin got even wider.

I looked at her.

The girl continued to hold the beer in the air in front of me, refusing to give it up. She said that word again. She seemed delighted, but I couldn’t understand what she was saying. As if to demonstrate what she was telling me, she set a finger against the side of the can and drew a line down through the moisture that beaded it. I still didn’t get it. She stared at me for a moment and then, in a flash of inspiration, took a step closer and touched the can to my cheek. The shock of the cold metal against my skin made me gasp. Then she said that word again, even louder.

“Cold.” I laughed, and then, in almost the same breath, I started crying. I mean, really crying. It’s pathetic, but true. I must have shocked that little girl. She handed the Bud right over, which made me laugh again. Then she ran away, picking up her feet this time. I think that was the first physical contact—with a living human, at least—that I had experienced since I arrived in Vietnam.

After I composed myself, the girl ventured through the curtain again and returned to my table. She sat back down in the seat across from me and tentatively reached for the metal tab I’d pulled off the top of the beer can and left in the ashtray. With a few expert flicks of her hand, she broke the tear-drop-shaped tab off the ring, folded it over, hooked it back onto the ring, and slid the whole thing onto her index finger. Then she held up her hand and considered it as if she were a jeweler. The two of us sat there like that, beneath those dazzling noisy birds.

By the time Avery stood up, stretched his legs, and ambled into the café, the night had turned completely dark. He carried the chess set to the back of the room, opened the cabinet, and neatly set it inside. That’s when he said, “What’s gotten you so upset, Martin?”

The old man was trying to drag the table and stools in from the sidewalk. I got up to help him and, together, we carried it all inside. The old man nodded his head genially. “
Merci beaucoups, monsieur,
” he said, then he motioned to the little girl and the two of them disappeared back behind the curtain.

Avery picked up a pitcher sitting on the cabinet and poured himself some water. He walked over, sat down at my table, and looked at me, waiting for an answer. “I don’t want to go back out there,” I told him.