The Lotus Eaters: A Novel (14 page)

Waiting for the transport, Helen fumbled with her newly acquired cameras, which were fancier than the simple Instamatics she was used to. "Would you show me how to load film in these?" she said quietly, her eyes downcast.

Darrow was speechless, with no choice but to comply. He showed her basic photographic technique in the fifteen minutes it took them to load supplies.

"Where's Linh?" she asked, trying to act casual.

"He's taken off for a few days. Personal stuff."

The helicopter hovered above
the ground, and the soldiers jumped and ran; Helen also jumped and ran, the soft, dull ache of the jump inside her ankles, the small bones and ligaments crushing against one another. They ran to a berm of reeds in front of the swampy marsh and crouched down on the dry land behind, waiting for the next helicopter to unload. It wasn't until the last soldier got off that sniper bullets started hissing through the air. "That's not supposed to happen," she said, as the last helicopter bucked up like startled prey, nose dipping, then disappeared over the trees.

"Shut up," a soldier hissed.

After the shudder and roar of the helicopter, the land sounded hushed and peaceful except for the percussive, insect whine of bullets past her ears. Her field of vision was reduced to the few feet between her and the berm and the tops of the far-off trees. The heat burned through her clothing; pebbles bit into her down-turned palms. The danger seemed unreal, like a movie, like being out on training maneuvers, a bored rifleman shooting blanks from behind a tree. Her heart thumped hard against her chest at the idea that there was a real live enemy hidden in front of them.

Lieutenant Colonel Shaffer crawled over to her. "Stay flat and stay here. We're going toward the tree line."

Darrow moved forward with the rest of the men, entering the waist-high marsh. She saw him as if for the first time, the truest image she would ever have: a dozen men moving out single file, visible only from the waist up, only packs, helmets, and upraised weapons to identify them; a lone bare head, an upraised camera. After he forgave a ninety-five-dollar debt to get her on board the plane, he treated her like a stranger, which hurt her feelings though she understood its necessity. Darrow turned his back on the safety of the rear position, on Helen, on thoughts of Saigon and possibly America; his whole attention directed toward the depth of the marsh, and the further depth of the jungle, the war, the secrets he still had not found. Not yet understanding what drove him, she already respected it. She felt stupid with fear.

Raising her head, she saw that the trees were eucalyptus, lined like the windbreaks back home between the citrus groves. The familiarity of the trees, malevolent in this setting, doubly disturbed her.

Home. She longed for the clean quiet of her mother's house, the mildew smell of closed rooms from being so close to the beach. All those surf days of beating sun and rolling water, dried out and happy, licking her child's lips of salt, of ice cream. The crowded boardwalk along the beach, the pink-burned tourists and the tanned locals, giggling with her friends over the browned, lean torsos of older boys playing basketball, always shirtless, always ignoring them. Walking past the restaurants with their unfurled umbrellas, their white tablecloths, and cheap bottles of wine on the table to entice customers, the waiters leathery and bored.

Her mouth was dry, air scraped the shallows of her lungs, as the reality of where she was took hold. Shivering from the foreign rush of terror, she felt a warm, wet sensation, and burned at the realization that she had peed herself. She pressed her cheek into the dirt, the lip of the helmet--a man's small but still too big--cutting into her ear. The sharp scent of burned grass combining with gunpowder and the sweetish smell of her own urine shamed her.

Nothing had prepared her for the smallness of the action. The moment-to-moment boredom. Intellectually, yes, there were people on the enemy side trying to kill them, American men might die, but that was all television stuff. Being on the flat land, pricked by the dying grass, the idea that she herself could be the target of a bullet became real. But the whole time she lay there she mostly fretted over the embarrassment of wetting herself, solving the problem by spilling the water from her canteen over part of her pants.

Minutes passed. She heard a cry in front of her. A soldier had been hit in the thigh. Helen crawled up to the group as the medic bandaged him and gave him a quick prick of morphine. Movement was better than paralysis. The boy was lying on his back, wild-eyed and jabbering.

"He's fine, mostly nerves," the medic said, shrugging. "First time out."

The soldier's lips twisted in sarcasm. "They say that to anyone who isn't dead."

"What's your name?" Helen touched the boy's hand.

"Curt."

"Shut up, Curt," the medic said. "We should call you Yellow."

The bullets stopped, and half an hour later the patrol was back together, waiting on an opened dirt road for an evacuation helicopter for one wounded. The thick marsh slime dried stiff and dark on their fatigues in the scalding air. Helen's own darkened pants went unnoticed. Against regulations, soldiers took off their flak jackets, smoked cigarettes, and wrung out socks while they waited.

Helen joined a group sitting under a tree. She took off her helmet. In herpanic and then relief that the encounter was over, she realized she hadn't shot a single frame, had, in fact, forgotten all about the camera. Years later, her biggest regret was not taking the shot of Darrow in the marsh. It remained the one image etched in her mind, perhaps because she did not have the film to refer back to. Once a picture was taken, the experience was purged of its power to haunt.

Curt was talking and joking too loudly. Lieutenant Colonel Shaffer told him to keep it down. "It's not a goddamned party that you're going to the hospital."

"Oh, yes it is," Curt mouthed behind his back.

"That was a nothing." Darrow crouched a few feet from Helen and took her picture. "How'd it go, Prom Queen?"

She wiped her face and made a grimacing smile. "All right." The way he looked at her, she knew he guessed that she had frozen.

"More excitement than we expected. It's cleared till it's not, till it is again. End of lesson today. Take this ride out."

"No!" If she left now, it would be empty-handed, without a single exposure taken, the risk all for nothing.

"No bodies in the tree line. That means they retreated, probably back to the hamlet, waiting for us. It's no longer Peace Corps stuff."

"I can handle it."

"Enough for today. I'm asking, but Shaffer will order you."

Helen braced herself as
the helicopter pitched, then rose. She crawled, crablike, along the corrugated metal floor over to Curt. Away from the other men, he looked even younger--clear blue eyes slightly dilated from the morphine and a child's rosy lips.

"Looks like you and me got a ticket out of there," he shouted in her ear above the roar. "Aren't we smart?"

"You wouldn't believe how I worked just to get here."

"What's wrong with you?"

She shrugged. "Where're you from?"

"Philly."

"I'm from Southern California."

"Oh man. When I get out of here, I'm going straight to Hermosa Beach and learn to surf."

"My brother went there all the time."

"Is it great?"

"Surfing capital."

She thought of the water off the pier back home, how one day she finally couldn't bear sitting on the beach with all the girlfriends. She had paddled out on a borrowed board to hoots and howls from Michael and his friends. She had tumbled in the surf, frightened, pounded against the sandy bottom again and again, but she wouldn't stop trying. The first time she got up on the board and saw the beach ahead of her, she had felt invincible. Everything had happened so fast during the firefight and now her failure was settling in.

"I can't wait," Curt said.

"Do you want me to take your picture? I'll send it to you."

"Okay."

She picked up her notebook and as she wrote his dog tag number he grew quiet.

"You promise you'll send it? Maybe to my parents in case I'm not around."

"If it's in this book, you'll get the photograph." Helen talked briskly, pretending she had not heard his last words. "They'll send it to your local paper. You'll be a hero back home."

"Fuck the people back home. This wound'll be patched, and I'll be back out in the boonies in a few weeks. I promised myself I'd go out and kill me at least one dink before I left here." He leaned back, and they both remained silent the rest of the way.

When she returned to
the hotel that night, she took a long, hot shower. Her first action after returning from the Cholon apartment had been to throw her copy of
The Quiet American
in the wastebasket, but her room boy, a small, thin-shouldered boy with the long eyelashes of a girl, dug it out of the trash and put it back on the table. Inconceivable to him that a perfectly good book would be thrown out. Now he knocked and gave her a note from Robert that a group of them was having dinner at the hotel dining room and inviting her. She couldn't face them down to night, especially not after the afternoon's disaster. She looked at the boy. "I'm done with the book. Would you like it?"

"You sell." He gestured with his hand, and she was struck by the grace of his movement.

"You sell, keep the money," she said.

He looked the book over carefully, gave a tender shrug.

"On second thought, leave it here to night. Take it in the morning." Although she had read it at least a dozen times, she longed to lose herself in it to night, to rest in Fowler's certainties or Pyle's innocence. To counterbalance the uncertainties of life with the sureties of a book. She had always been an avid reader, but as an adult her reading habits had changed, and only after she had reread a book many times did she claim to begin to understand it.

Her head ached. She had been lying paralyzed in a field earlier that day and now stood in this room the same night, and the two parts were not meant to fit. She slipped into slacks and a loose cream blouse. At first she put on loafers but decided instead on suede pumps. Impossible to be alone on such a night even if it meant joining Robert and that ambivalent crowd. Her saving grace was that only Darrow had witnessed her failure. She poured herself a glass of water and her hand shook as she raised it to her lips. The old-fashioned ceiling fan shuddered above her head. She stared at the shabby bedspread and remembered the glare of the sun on the paddies, making it impossible to see; the fields bleached by the fierceness of the sun. The only vivid color she could recall the red of blood on the young soldier's thigh. Darrow's point, of course, that no matter what group she traveled with, one went out alone, hand in hand with only one's own fear.

Michael. Determined to follow in their father's footsteps. To outdo him if possible. Graduated with honors. He could have done anything, but he wanted only to be in the elite corps. Because Dad wasn't. Her father would have been dismissive of what she was doing, unless, of course, she succeeded. But Michael would have been bemused and not surprised at all at his big sister, always trying to play catch-up.

She drank down the glass of water and poured another. The niggling humiliation that she had not snapped even a single picture. The second glass of water gulped down so fast it dribbled down her chin and onto her blouse so that she had to change again. When she finally managed to make her way to the hotel dining room, she couldn't hide her disappointment that Darrow wasn't there.

Ed, the straw-haired man from the previous night, grinned. "So how was the maiden voyage out, love?"

She said nothing.

"It's always a bear, the first couple times," Gary said.

"Maybe next time you can bring film," Ed said, laughing.

"You don't need film where you go, Ed," Robert said. "Everyone knows the inside of your girlfriend's thighs."

The table broke up in laughter. Helen ate quickly, not tasting her food, then excused herself. Had they known because she didn't make the rounds of the wires to sell her pictures? Or had Darrow told them?

Robert went after her and stopped her in the lobby. She had gone out with Darrow and returned with no pictures, and he hoped that mortification would give him back the upper hand. Time to hang on a man's arm. He had decided to pretend the previous night, and his defeat, had not happened. "Are you okay?"

"I need sleep is all." She needed so many things, putting any one thing into words seemed inadequate. "I failed."

"It's not a place for a woman. I'm just grateful you came back whole. I'll check on you in the morning."

She was so relieved to get away, she gave him a kiss on the cheek. He backed away for a moment, startled, then moved closer.

"Should we have a drink?"

"I need to rest," she said.

Robert stepped back into the restaurant, stopping at the entrance to light a cigarette. He hadn't taken her for the sort that fell for a guy like Darrow. Usually his women were the type who for one reason or another couldn't ask for much. With her intelligence, she must guess the string of women that Darrow discarded. The gold band on his finger a kind of shield against commitment. He watched Helen in the lobby, fumbling through her purse. He would take her down Bourbon Street; they would laugh and dance all night. He liked her. A possibility for that house in his mind, filled with children. But Helen didn't move toward the elevators; instead she left the hotel and waved down a waiting cyclo. Of course, he thought, he could be wrong.

At the meeting place
of silk and lacquered bowl streets, Helen found the moon-shaped entrance of the alley, still puddled from the rain, retracing her path as if she could return to the time before her failure that day. Reckless, she ran through water the color of ink at the alley's mouth while men stood at the corner and stared, ran through a cacophony of incense and spice smells she could not yet name. Past stores that sold only twine. What had before seemed strange now became soothing. We are hardwired for the comfort of familiarity, she thought. Again, the airless effect of buildings so packed together, the lights within storefronts dim, darkness and closeness smothering her.