The Lotus Eaters: A Novel (23 page)

A week later, the helicopter
dropped Helen and Linh off at Pleiku in the early morning. The change in geography was startling: the sultry flatness of the Mekong, with its inland oceans of rice paddies and white-hot sky, all replaced by the thinner, cooler air of the Central Highlands with its burned gold of elephant grass, olive drab of bamboo and scrub, its ancient menace of mahogany and teak forests.

Inside the military compound, a mission was being patched together to rescue an earlier convoy headed for a Special Forces camp on the Cambodian border. According to the last radio dispatches, only a few survivors were holding out.

Helen argued with the head sergeant, Medlock, a hound-faced man, and finally got permission to accompany the rescue. She felt jittery but swallowed the fear, already getting used to having Linh at her shoulder.

"You willing to share some of that?" Helen asked a first lieutenant, Reilly, sitting on an ammunition crate eating a chocolate bar.

"Sure." He broke off a piece and handed it to her. "Need my energy for this baby."

Helen nodded and put a piece of soft, melted chocolate on her tongue.

"You and I better keep our hats on." He pointed to his own hair, the color of red-licked flame. "Our heads are like target practice." He pulled out a beaten-up bush hat. "This here is my lucky one. Some shaman or something blessed it by pissing on it."

Helen gave a short laugh. "No kidding?"

"Yeah, but he said whoever wears it won't get hurt. So far not a scratch."

"Makes up for having to put it on your head."

"I got two. 'Case I lose one. You want to wear it?"

"Already have my own." She touched the bush hat that Olsen had given her, that led to the Captain Tong pictures. She stood up. "Thanks for the chocolate."

"You find me if you change your mind."

Medlock gave a shout, and Helen searched for Linh, finding him with a group of Vietnamese paratroopers. "Let's go," she said. "We're on."

He looked at her and then looked back at the Vietnamese officers. He picked up the film and camera bags and followed her. In the background she could hear snickers from the paratroopers. "We're not going," he said under his breath.

"What?"

"This convoy will be ambushed."

"Well, a chance of that. But we're going." She couldn't let on that her stomach was sour, her hands clammy. Shouldn't she be getting over this by now?

He put the bags down. "This time, no."

Helen looked back at the paratroopers and then at him. Trucks lined up and loaded with supplies; jeeps filled with machine guns and grenades. A queer, unreal look to everything, and now Linh was spooking her. "Do they know something?" she said, pointing her chin toward the paratroopers.

"Let's move out," Sergeant Medlock shouted again.

"Listen to me this one time," Linh said. He looked her in the face because this was more urgent than his politeness. "Stay behind."

"I'll look like a fool," she said. "Gary's expecting pictures."

"Be a fool then." His throat grew tight. "
Here
you listen to me.
Here
I know better."

The sergeant came toward her with a clipboard. "Adams, you ride in the second jeep."

She stood for a moment looking at the ground. She hadn't expected this--not an assistant but a babysitter. Her confidence so fragile that she was afraid if she backed down now, she would always find reasons to.

Medlock sighed. "Look, don't give me trouble about the lead truck. I need my men on that one."

Helen kept silent, Linh's eyes on her. If she let him order her around now, there would be no end to it in the future.

"Adams? Am I disturbing you?"

"I'm going to have to pass."

"Hurray, one less problem." He walked away, already forgetting them. Now that the choice had been made, she took off her bush hat and wiped her forehead, angry that she had given in, angry that she already felt the physical relief from fear. Failure pounded at her. "I doubt you would have kept Darrow from going."

"I wouldn't need to. He would know better."

"What would've he known?"

Linh shrugged, tired of the conversation. He could not endure this. He would go back and give Darrow an ultimatum--either he worked for him or no one. Certainly not this woman.

Helen glared. Without a word, she turned and stalked away toward the communications bunker. The rest of the morning she took pictures at the field hospital. Her nerves were badly jangled by the tension of the camp, the sight of the wounded, the thought of what she had avoided. Although they worked side by side, she didn't speak to Linh once. Her intuition told her she had missed something important, and far from helping her, he had talked her out of it. She planned on ending the arrangement when they returned to Saigon.

But the outgoing flights were loaded with wounded, and they would be forced to spend the night. At sundown, as she was lounging in the communications bunker reading a magazine, the radioman waved Sergeant Medlock in.

"The lead jeep set off a mine. Everyone inside got it."

Medlock shook his head, his long face even longer, and punched his fist on the table.

The radioman listened again. "Sounds like the rest of the convoy is blocked and ambushed. They want to know how to proceed."

"Damn it," the sergeant said. "Give me the phone." He looked around the bunker at the grim faces, then spotted Helen. "This is classified, sweets."

Helen left. An hour passed and the sergeant wheeled out from the bunker, short of breath. She approached him.

"The rest of the men caught it. We've got two left, hiding in the jungle."

She said nothing, tried not to think of the faces of the men she had joked with that morning. By nightfall, the radioman had lost contact, and it was concluded the two had not survived. Linh didn't stay with the Americans but went to sleep with the Vietnamese soldiers.

In the damp, stale air of the bunker, only flashlights were used for light. Sergeant Medlock sat on a crate next to Helen, hesitated, then passed her a flask; she took a deep drink. He asked why she had changed her mind about the convoy.

"I didn't. My assistant refused to go."

"Little coward saved your life. Bullheaded orders from headquarters. I grew up in the Oklahoma panhandle; worked the stockyards. Let me tell you, no difference. Waste of lives. I don't want to be giving the orders for it."

The night stretched long and bitter, her thoughts chasing from fear to self-pity to animal joy at being safe. Around midnight she left the bunker for fresh air and a smoke. She nodded to the perimeter guards and offered them a cigarette. When they hissed to her that it would attract sniper fire, the risk wasn't enough to keep her from squatting down against the sandbag wall and cupping her hand over the tip until she sucked it down to a stub.

Damp and still. Fog curled in the far-off rubber trees, overhead stars poked through the clouds, spiked and fierce.

She hated the night, the stopping of activity. Sleep out of the question, stomach churning, bowels watery. Looking around, she wondered how she had gotten there, why she needed this. Such a cliche to expose the war, or even wanting to test oneself against it. Whatever else, the place was a magnet for evil, or had they, Americans, brought it with them, like the European colonists brought pox in their blankets to the New World? Nothing she would do, including photographs, could have any effect on it. Such a nunnish urge to find purpose or clarity or even to bring ease. Since she had arrived, she had merely been running from illusion to illusion--by turns obsessed, deluded, needy, full of herself, thinking she had achieved some small understanding. MacCrae stoking her vanity, but now she was simply lonely and tired and confused.

Chilled, she returned to the bunker and lay down fully clothed on the dirty cot, boots on, cameras an arm's length away; her mind unable to stay on any one thing for long, a revving engine. At three in the morning, she heard machine-gun fire, then incoming artillery. Their own mortars began, the empty
whoosh
of the shell out of the tube, and for the next hour there was the regular pounding of guns, slamming of ground. No one spoke inside the bunker, vulnerable flesh wombed in earth. In the dark, Helen pressed herself on her cot, longing for the relative luxury of her hotel room in Saigon, of having a good meal and an iced drink. Creature comforts taking an importance all out of proportion to what they offered. Again, she made herself small bargains--buying a silk scarf she'd had her eye on--if she made it out.

At four thirty in the morning, she dozed off and was awake again at five. Mortally weary. She rose, stiff, and washed her face with a napkin and water from the canteen. The sergeant handed her a cup of tepid coffee. The thought of food nauseating, but she traded out rations for fruit cocktail, ate two cans, then drank the juice.

At dawn a third convoy was ordered to get ready to collect the bodies of the first two failed missions. Linh sat at a small fire with the Vietnamese soldiers, boiling tea and rice for breakfast. She hesitated, not sure about approaching him. But when he caught sight of her, he rose at once. He walked her over to a low wall of sandbags and indicated she should sit.

"I want to apologize--" she began.

"I got a message through the radio--Darrow's helicopter was shot down in the Ca Mau area. Darrow is fine."

She felt the ground swaying underneath her at the possibility of something happening to him. "He's okay?"

Linh turned away, the expression on her face too painful. He had seen that expression in Mai's face and taken it for granted. "He said only scratches."

When the trucks began to load, he stood, hefted the pack of equipment onto his back, and walked over to her. They boarded without another word to each other. Now she couldn't remember why she had placed such importance on the mission; she resented the time it would take to complete. If only they would call it off, she could take the next flight out. She had badly lost face with Linh and didn't know how to make it up.

The trucks grinded through their gears as they climbed into the mountains along muddy, hairpin-turn roads. The wall of trees and plants on each side provided a thick screen that could have shielded any number of snipers. Sometimes a hole in the foliage allowed a sight line twenty or thirty feet into the jungle, sunlight filtering through the dense overhead canopy, turning individual shafts of light the color of honey.

Linh reached out to touch small white flowers clinging to the trunks of trees as they passed. The trucks climbed sullenly up the red dirt road, engines drowning out every sound, the only movement the bouncing, swaying bodies of the soldiers. Some of them turned outward and squinted into the jungle, fingering the clips of their machine guns, the rings of their hand grenades. Others simply stared at the floor of the truck bed or closed their eyes or prayed, resigned and unconcerned, weapons splayed under their feet. Plenty of time for fear when the trucks stopped. But Helen was hardly aware of her surroundings, barely noticed the jungle or the soldiers, wondering if it was true that Darrow was unhurt. What if she got hurt now, before she saw him?

They reached a straight part of the road that leveled out, a slight depression muddied with the remaining trickle of a steam struggling across it. The abandoned trucks, noses buried in jungle, impeded their way.

Engines were cut and clips slammed home; the new silence rang in Helen's ears. She ducked at the shriek of a bird, and the soldiers in the truck snickered. Odds were good that the enemy had long since departed, but still they moved forward with slow, deliberate steps.

The first thing was the vinegary sweet meatlike stench. An elemental imprint on the brain one recognized without knowing why. The instinct was to run, but instead the soldiers crawled forward, and Helen reluctantly followed. Clouds of birds and insects flew up as they neared. The ground littered with the detritus of battle--ammunition casings, a destroyed radio, hastily moved sandbags, bloodied bandages; weapons stolen.

A swarm of translucent orange-winged insects rose up, a kind of locust, and underneath Helen saw a flash of strawberry blond that she at first mistook for a clump of flowers. Two thick, loglike shapes covered with leaves, and going closer, she saw they were the bloated legs of a body. And then a few feet farther the lucky bush hat. Two soldiers rolled the remains into a rubber poncho, but the body did not move away in one piece. She turned away and vomited.

"That's what you get, bringing women out here."

She rinsed her mouth with water from her canteen and let the tears dry on her face as she pulled the lens cap off the camera. Most of the scenes too horrific to be used, but she took the pictures anyway because she had to keep her hands and her mind occupied. The promises of leaving replayed themselves in her mind. In this place filled with death, it was impossible to believe that Darrow remained unhurt. She wanted to go to Linh and be reassured all over again, but she couldn't get him away from the other soldiers.

So she turned to
the work. During their days wandering Saigon, Helen hadn't known more than loading the camera and shooting, centering the images so they could be cropped, but Linh taught her how to extract the meaning out of a shot. It seemed impossible to concentrate on light, shutter speed, and aperture in the middle of combat or even in its aftermath, but those were the peculiar requirements of the job. Now the distance of technique saved her.

He had told her to picture the image being formed; the idea of light going through the lens, striking the translucent emulsion, staining it dark. The more light, the longer the length of time, the darker the stain. Those areas most saturated by light--by intensity and duration--called latent images. No turning back, only advancing frame by frame by frame. All the grays had to be sorted out, lights and darks contrasted, even if it meant making them up. She saw that even pictures that purported the truth involved a great deal of discretion and taste and choice, that subject matter and angle and intent were as involved in image-making as they were in the military briefings.