Once We Had a Country (12 page)

“Then they load you in a truck and send you down Highway One. It’s a real nice stretch of road: no jungle, no villages, because they’ve all been ploughed under to fuck up snipers. Just mud and rubble on either side, and any slope dumb enough to be out there is target practice.” Another change of angle, this time back to the frontal view. As Wale talks, the camera moves in on him. “It’s right about when our boys are being driven down Highway One that they start thinking of some mighty convincing reasons not to be there. Because people who look American aren’t supposed to be fighting anymore, right? If you’re sent out on patrol, it’s only because ARVN has fucked up again. And the guys humping it in the jungle with you are a real choice bunch. Either they’re the ones who avoided the draft till now and are pretty freaked out at the idea of being shot at, or they’re the nut jobs who keep re-enlisting and somehow aren’t dead yet.”

His gaze drops and he leans forward in his chair. “You tell yourself all sorts of things. You grease a woman by accident and think, well, she won’t get raped now. You grease a nine-year-old boy and think at least he won’t have to grow up in this place.” He closes his eyes. “You figure they don’t even mind dying the same way Americans mind it, because most of their family’s dead and their rice paddies are bombed to hell and there’s nothing to look forward to but more of the war, so how could they see death like we do?”

Maggie speaks in the background, and Wale shrugs.

“You said you wanted to hear it all, didn’t you? I’m only talking about this stuff for you.” He reaches up to touch the dark forest of his beard. “At least I know who I am. Some people, they’d rather wait all their lives to be told whether they’re in the red or the black. I know what I deserve.”

The camera’s tight against his face now, so that even his chin is out of view. At a turn of his head, the shot becomes disorienting. There’s a cutaway to the trees in the orchard through the window. When the camera returns to him, he has stubbed out his cigarette.

“I pissed off some people by refusing to do more Special Forces stuff, so they wouldn’t even let me serve in my buddy’s platoon. You don’t want to piss off the boss men over there, Maggie—you’re liable to take some friendly fire in the back of the head. That’s when I decided to split. It involved certain evasive strategies I learned in sixty-five. Like I said, I’m not going to talk about that.” His free hand goes back to rubbing his beard. “Spent a bit of time hiding out—maybe sometime I’ll tell you more about it—but long story short, I made it to a pay phone in Saigon, called Brid, and she told me about your little plan for reinventing Paradise up here. The way things had been going, that sounded pretty good to me, so I aimed to catch the next freighter back to America.” He starts rolling another cigarette. “The night before I was going to ship out, though, I got a bit sloshed. Bad timing, because that’s when the army caught up. Somebody at the bar must have ratted. When they found me, I was out cold, shit-faced in the john.” He fumbles with the rolling paper
and tobacco spills across his lap. “Fuck!” Angrily, he wipes it from his jeans. “Even once they had me, I wasn’t too worried, figured I’d find a way to bust out. Except then they stuck me in the hole.” He shakes his head as though this was a humorous turn of events. “You know about the hole, Maggie? No, well, maybe you can imagine.

“At first, they said I was looking at five years of hard labour. Turned out worse than that, because then someone checked my file and connected me to a certain guy from Special Forces, somebody who’d gone freelance and started running opium. He’d made a reputation for himself leading a merry band of rip-off artists all over that part of the world, mostly with CIA approval, but somebody in the army must have had enough of him, because they put the squeeze on me. The interrogating officer was a real son of a bitch.” His voice drops in pitch and volume. “He worked me over pretty good.” Wale touches a place near his belly, smiles, and tries to laugh, but his throat seems to close on him. His hands fold into one another; the fingers twitch. When he resumes speaking, the camera has caught him at a different angle and there’s something drained from his words, as if a part of him has gone and not come back.

“By the time they transferred me, it was the end of May and I’d seen better days. Just me in a jeep with a couple of MPs, but I wasn’t in shape for any fancy tricks. No court martial either. They were moving me to a place where they could spend some more time with me, private-like.” He takes a long pause. “That guy who worked me over, he said he was going to be there. He said he’d see me again.” The
leaves on the trees through the window are still now, and shadows are beginning to creep along the wall.

“When we stopped for gas, it was pissing rain. Made them sloppy. They took turns guarding me while the other one used the can, and I guess they thought they were being careful, but the smaller one ended up with a good knock on the head. After that, it was just a lot of running. The other guy couldn’t go after me with his buddy out cold, and over there the army has better things to do than chase after deserters.”

He talks more easily now. “Next day I was on a container ship to San Francisco. Once I got there, I hitched to Buffalo, thinking the whole time about ways to cross the border.” He grins to himself. “Had all sorts of crazy schemes, but turns out I just swam across the river. Not even half a mile, not much current, no patrols. The water was warm.” He sounds baffled by the ease of it. “It was weird, swimming in the middle of the night. There were all these stars reflecting around me like I was in outer space.” He squints as if seeing it again before him. “I’ll tell you, I’ve crossed some borders in my time, and this was no border.” He reaches out toward the camera. “Then my hand touched something solid”—he draws it back with startling speed—“and I screamed. Scared the bejesus out of me.” He laughs. “Turns out it was the shore. I’d made it across and not even realized it. I walked the rest of the way.” He speaks these last words and falls silent, seeming once more in the thrall of the river’s darkness. Eventually he looks back to the camera.

“So that’s it,” he says. “Now I’m a family man up here with the Eskimos and beavers and you college-educated
types.” He raises himself a few inches from his seat. “How’s that for you, sweetheart? Got everything you wanted?

“Oh, right, my buddy in Vietnam. Far as I know, he’s still over there. Last I heard of him, he hadn’t even seen any action. Apparently he was having a real good time.”

At first, as Wale speaks, Maggie isn’t listening properly. She’s concerned that Brid will turn up to watch, and that by making comments she’ll ruin the whole thing. Maggie keeps an eye out for her while worrying over the composition, the changing light, the angle of the next shot. It’s only when he breaks off that he draws her full attention.

“What is it?” she asks. “Don’t stop, you’re doing great.”

“I’m talking to a machine. I want to talk to you.”

“Oh. Okay.” A part of her can’t bear the thought of just sitting there, but when they start again, she tries to react visibly to his words. Then she begins to hear what he’s saying about the war, about killing women and nine-year-old boys, and she grows more certain that she doesn’t want to listen. To distract herself, she fiddles with the zoom, trying to concentrate on matters of technique. When he speaks about how the Vietnamese treat dying, though, she bursts out, “You can’t really think that.”

A moment later he has his head in his hands and the cartridge has run out. For a second she wonders whether she should go to him or reload. Then she’s putting her arms around him, but it feels like a mistake. Not knowing what else to do, she keeps holding him and finds herself taking the measure of his back, his different scent, comparing his
muscular torso with Fletcher’s lanky one. There’s something wrong with her. She isn’t a good person.

“I don’t think we should film any more,” she tells him.

“No, it’s all right.” For a while they sit there hanging their heads. There are distant voices that sound like Pauline and Brid in the orchard. “Come on,” says Wale, pointing to the camera. “Let’s get this over with.”

Reluctantly, but also with relief, she goes back to load a new cartridge.

He talks of his desertion, his capture and escape, his journey to the farm. When he finishes, she turns off the camera, the cassette recorder, and the lamp she has used to light his face, then gathers the cord for the microphone. There are half a dozen cartridges scattered on the floor where she dropped them. She collects them into a paper bag.

“What will you do with those?” he asks, still sitting in his chair.

“Don’t know. What would you like me to do?”

“Whatever you want. I don’t care.”

By herself in the playroom later, as she arranges the cartridges with the others to be dropped off at the Virgil grocery store for development, his question returns. What’s she going to do with them? And not just with them, but with all the reels she has accumulated? Remembering the editing machine that Fletcher bought, she decides she needs to start piecing them together into a longer film before they become too unwieldy.

There’s a certain pleasure at the thought of lodging herself in the playroom with the machine and bringing order to things. Probably Wale would say it’s just another
version of her hiding behind the camera. But she remembers his composure while he talked, then his racked body in her arms, and she realizes that if some people hide behind the camera, others hide in front of it.

They travel through mountainous forest, a line of them with Yia Pao and Gordon in the middle, three Lao men ahead of them, and two white men behind. Yia Pao has been blindfolded using a strip of cloth torn from the garments of his son, while Gordon’s eyes are covered by his red bandana. Both men’s clothes are filthy from stumbling and sliding, Gordon’s hands having been bound in front of him while Yia Pao’s hold the child. The baby cries, falls silent, cries again. Their captors seldom speak, and they walk with their eyes on the ground.

As darkness approaches, they reach a place high up where the trees are stunted, the ground cover sparse, and a pair of tents has been pitched next to a campfire circle. The hard-eyed Lao guard removes the captives’ blindfolds; his companion from the riverbank enters one of the tents. After a time it grows luminous, and he returns holding a kerosene lamp that emits a low hiss alongside a stammering light.

The two white men stand off to the side, conferring with each other. One is tall and gawky, a feather poking out from his mane of dirty hair. There are patches of reddish soil on his cheeks that once might have resembled war paint but have since been smeared so that they look like the rouge of a circus clown. The other man is shorter and
older, with grey hair cropped to a brush cut. Occasionally he casts a glance at the captives, who stand silent while Xang whimpers in Yia Pao’s arms. The man with the brush cut finally points to Yia Pao and orders him taken away. The Lao men march him into the forest carrying his son.

“Where are they going?” says Gordon.

The man with the brush cut ignores the question. “So you’re a missionary,” he says. His voice has a Southern twang. “Since when did missionaries grab people’s kids?”

“The baby was in danger,” Gordon answers.

“Danger?” says the man, sounding affronted. “It wasn’t the baby that had our money.”

“I don’t know anything about your money.”

“Yeah, you’re innocent as grass,” says the man. “Just like every American over here.” He chuckles, then turns to his gangly companion. “Isn’t that right?”

“Sure, Sal,” says the other man without conviction.

“You aren’t getting out of here unless we say so,” the man called Sal says to Gordon. “You wouldn’t survive the jungle, and nobody’s coming for you. I had a word with the priest before we left the mission. If anybody asks, he’s going to say you and your buddy went to Ban Den Muong. And if we hear he’s been telling people otherwise, we’ll pay him a visit. You understand?” Gordon nods. “Now, you’re going to write a letter. A nice personal one, so people will know we’ve got you and we’re not just making it up.”

“If I write it,” says Gordon, “will you let Yia Pao and his son go?”

Sal punches him in the stomach, and Gordon doubles over. “This isn’t a negotiation,” says Sal.

“I’ll write the letter,” says Gordon, coughing. “I will. But Yia Pao—” He has to take another swallow of air before he can finish. “He doesn’t have your money.”

“Sweet that you’re such good friends,” says Sal. “I might believe you if you hadn’t snatched his kid for him.” He pats Gordon on the back as he coughs again and spits into the dirt. “That hurt? It was just a taste, okay? Remember that.”

He disappears into one of the tents. Gordon straightens while the other man watches, shaking his head as though disappointed with him. After a minute Sal returns with a pen and spiral notebook.

“You got money?” he says to Gordon. “Rich friends? Rich old man?”

“I have debts,” says Gordon. “My mother’s a widow. Missionaries don’t get paid.”

“Well, you better hope the Church ponies up for you.” Sal circles behind Gordon and kicks his feet out from under him, toppling him. Gordon lands with a cry of pain.

“Sit up,” says Sal.

Slowly, Gordon gets himself into a cross-legged position. The Lao men return from the forest without Yia Pao or his son and take up a position on the light’s periphery.

“The baby needs milk,” says Gordon.

“My friends and I need money,” Sal replies.

“If the baby doesn’t get milk, it will die,” Gordon insists.

“If we don’t get our money, you’re all going to die. My friend and I here retired early from the army, so we’re short on our pension.” He drops the notebook and pen into Gordon’s lap. “Don’t be a hero. Just write what I tell you.”

When they’ve finished, Sal gestures for him to be taken away. The third Lao man, older than the guards from the riverbank, steps forward and drags Gordon to his feet, then leads him down a trail to a place in the forest where a narrow pit has been dug. Beside it is a pile of heaped earth. Gordon pulls up short at the sight, and the guard speaks to him sharply in Laotian. Yia Pao’s voice comes from the bottom of the hole.