The Lotus Eaters: A Novel (53 page)

"Whiskey time," Matt said, and burrowed in the bags again.

Tanner put the car in drive. "Forward?"

Helen took a long drink, wiped her mouth, then took another. The scale of this depravity like something out of World War II. She shook her head. This was clearly beyond them. "We'll never make it to Phnom Penh. And if we do, what then? They'll confiscate the film." Helen studied the map. "Let's go back a few miles and take this secondary road. It's probably a cow trail, but it'll hook up with Route 6. Route 6 goes to Thailand."

Tanner let out a yell and banged his hand on the dashboard. "Do you two have any arguments to sharing the Pulitzer three ways?" He laughed. "We have it. How lucky can you get?"

Helen tried to hold the whiskey bottle, but her hand couldn't grip, the shaking was so bad. She stuck it between her knees so the two men wouldn't notice. The irony was that she could have no better company for this trip; they were insulated from the horror by their own ambitions. She didn't have the strength at that moment to question her own motivations. Why, indeed, was she there? She could only pray their ignorance would carry the three of them to the border.

"They thought they would get away with it. Pol Pot denying the whole thing. No pictures, no proof. Won't make us too popular around here, huh?" Helen said.

"Smoked if they catch us," Tanner agreed. "Hand over that bottle and let's celebrate."

"They have to catch us first, Helen baby," Matt said.

After spending the night out, and another day of bruising roads, they reached the Mekong River. Tanner argued with and then bribed the ferryman to carry them across. The man, named Chan, had small, pig eyes, and one cheek puffed up nearly double from an infected tooth. He kept stirring at a pot of something green over a burner, spooning a paste into a dirty poultice he held against his ear. His left hand was missing three fingers, severed below the knuckle. After Matt asked to look at his cheek, he turned away quickly. "Abscessed."

Finally, Chan agreed to take them across for an exorbitant amount, ten times the usual, and insisted the station wagon be camouflaged under palm fronds. While Tanner and Matt covered the car, Helen walked down to the water to wet her handkerchief. A pink, checkered shirt floated in the water, and as she got closer she saw it covered a swollen torso, the fabric pulled tight, splitting the seams. Another body in black swayed at the bank, face-down, long hair twisting in the reeds.

During the crossing, the
water lay still like liquid metal, the ferry suspended on its surface, unmoving. Helen stared down in the water, her image as sharp as in a mirror.

The ferryman sat at the very-most edge of the boat, poultice pressed tight against his face, and glared at them. Matt and Tanner smoked a joint. "To protect our cover." Helen slipped the Buddha on her tongue, growing used to the iron taste till the bitterness comforted her.

"I don't trust him," Helen said.

Matt shrugged and stared at Chan, his dour, squatting image reflected in the blue sunglasses. "What'd you want to do? Kill him?"

"He's going to report us," she said.

"Too bad. We'll be across the border in a day. But I'll kill him if you want."

She felt light-headed, as if there were too little oxygen in the air.

Once they got off the ferry, Tanner paid Chan again as much for a tip if he would forget their meeting. The ferryman eagerly accepted and smiled for the first time, breathing in their faces, his breath like sulfur, but his eyes remained hateful. He delayed pulling the rope gate away for the car to pass. His pidgin English suddenly improved. "Khmers bad. Americans rich, the goodest."

"So how do we get to the Thai border? With no running into Khmer? We take--" Matt pulled out a Baggie of marijuana to show him. "No
problemo
?"

Chan talked and gestured as Matt wrote down his directions. Tanner again pulled out a thick stack of money and peeled off more bills for him. Chan pointed to the car and Helen, and then motioned taking a picture.

Matt nodded sagely and motioned to Helen. "Girlfriend. Wants to take pictures of Phnom Penh and Angkor Wat." Matt grimaced and took him aside. "How far to Angkor? Otherwise no--" He made an obscene poking gesture with his hands, and the ferryman laughed. He gave another set of equally convoluted directions, taking Matt's pen and drawing part of a picture on the paper. Tanner peeled off more bills and handed them to him.

"You go Phnom Penh. Much goodest."

"No dangerous?" Tanner said.

"Much goodest." The man insisted. He slapped Tanner's stomach. "Womans."

At last he moved to take down the rope barrier, and the three men pulled over the ramp to drive the station wagon off. "You go Phnom Penh?" he insisted like a worried mother hen.

"Yes, Phnom Penh."

Matt wagged his head lazily and waved as they drove off. He lifted both hands off the wheel and again made the poking gesture so Chan laughed.

"Definitely avoid Phompers," Matt said.

"So we go up and over the long way?" Tanner asked.

"Chan expects us to do that."

"No, Chan expects us to double-cross him. Take the shorter route under."

"So we triple-cross him and do what we said."

They set off in
high spirits, convinced they had thoroughly confused the ferryman, but the trip became a horrendous series of wrong turns and dead ends. "The little bastard lied to us," Tanner said, pounding on the steering wheel.

"I should have offed him," Matt said. At dusk they stopped because of the danger of being spotted by their headlights. Not wanting to be taken by surprise, they hid the car in the trees and slept in a ditch.

Helen settled down into a pile of leaves. "Listen," she whispered.

"What?" Matt asked.

"No sound. Nothing. No birds even, or insects."

"You're the lady in love with silence."

No one spoke for a few moments.

"Bizarre," Tanner said. "Tomorrow at lunch we'll be in the best hotel in Bangkok, popping a bottle of champagne."

Helen stared up at the sky, but even in the pitch black of the country, not a single star appeared. A blanket of lead; even the heavens had been extinguished. "I'm ready to go home," she said.

"What took you so long?" Matt asked.

She shrugged to the darkness. "I got lost."

Helen closed her eyes. She thought of the rolls of film in the car, the images cradled in emulsion, areas of darkness and light like the beginnings of the universe. She herself full of latent images taken over the years, and yet what she had seen would stay inside her, hidden. Linh had covered her eyes during the mission out of Dak To, because he understood that for them the eye was the most important thing. We close our eyes to spare ourselves or those we love. To see demanded responsibility. To gain power over their enemies, armies blindfolded prisoners. In the fields, the Khmer Rouge had the people turn away so that the executioners would not see themselves in their victims' eyes.

Tanner was probably right--the pictures were good and were taken at great risk, they had a shot at some of the prizes--and so she was catching up to Darrow. It was like chasing the tail of a comet. She had done her final job for the war and was proud of that. But even as she got closer, she understood his contempt had not been feigned, that by the time one earned such accolades, one had paid many times over what they were worth. And yet she was still there.

As she fell asleep, she wondered again where Linh was--still on a carrier or already on his way to California? She saw herself back in the embassy compound, smoke and burning paper swirling in the air. Then she was on the roof, tucking Linh into the cocoon of the helicopter, but this time she stayed on, felt the familiar weightlessness as they flew over the dark city and then over the darker water. She held Linh's hand, free for the first time in so many years, maybe for the first time ever. Somewhere out in that darkness the future was rushing toward them. Had she tricked her fate?

She thought of her brother, not the imagined, damaged Michael of the war, but as he had been before, laughing and dancing around her. His hands up in a mock-boxing stance, his hair slicked back, white teeth shining. She had forgotten that he had a life before the war. In guilt and rivalry, she had given away the chance to have her own. But then Michael tossed his head like a horse throwing off the bit, refusing her memory of him.

Helen saw the young Cambodian girl she photographed in the mass grave earlier. Imagined tearing at the gossamer fabric of her shirt, brushing the long strands of hair like threads of silk, like the tendrils of morning glories in the spring, plunging into the hollow cave of ribs and the small dried grottoes of eyes. The dead entered the living, burrowed through the skin, floated through the blood, to come at last to rest in the heart. Stirring through the bits and pieces of the mystery of the young girl, Helen imbibed her, would leave trans-muted, brave and full of courage, knowing her fear and determined enough to ignore it, courageous enough at last to return home. Time to give up the war.

At dawn, Helen woke
before the men did and felt as rested as if she'd had eight hours in her own bed. She snuck over to the car and pulled out a clean shirt from Matt's bag. An unlikely baby-blue with a peace symbol emblazoned on it. As she tugged her old one off, she brushed the scar on her belly. Linh had traced his fingers over it, the glossy raised skin as pale and iridescent as fish scale.

"No more bikinis for me."

"This makes me love you more," he had said.

"Why?"

"It proves that you will be brave in the future."

But she no longer felt brave. Since she had first arrived in Vietnam, she had been obsessed with courage. Such an ancient quality in modern life, called for only in extreme circumstances. She had admired it in others, in Linh and Darrow, but found it only sporadically within herself. A combat journalist's life mea sured in dog years. She felt old compared to these young savages like Matt. She was softening, but she pushed that thought away, too. As she turned, pulling the T-shirt over her head, she saw Matt watching her.

"That was beautiful," he said.

She picked up his bag and threw it at him. "Pervert."

Trading cigarettes for directions to isolated villagers working the fields, using their smattering of Cambodian and French, they reached Route 6 by midmorning. They let out whoops of joy. "Bangkok here we come," Tanner yelled. "I'm getting me the prettiest hooker I can afford." Helen thought of the images rocking in their cradles of film, gestating in emulsion. She would insist on doing her own darkroom work. The road ahead was empty, leaf strewn, unused. Depending on driving conditions, Tanner figured they were a day's drive from Thailand.

When Helen couldn't put off emptying her bladder another minute, they stopped in the middle of the road. She made the men turn away and peed behind the car, too dangerous to go in the bushes because of mines. As she squatted, she saw a few feet away a pair of black-rimmed eyeglasses like the old Cambodian man's, crushed.

They were half an
hour away from Angkor when a loud explosion created a small hurricane as the back windows were blown out by automatic rifle fire. Splinters of glass flew through the car like steel filings, most absorbed by the equipment, enough reaching them to nick arms and faces.

The back window blocked, Helen couldn't see behind, and she peered through the side-view mirror, but the car was bouncing too hard; she caught only a glimpse of a boy, then sky, the boy, earth. Tanner floored the accelerator; the station wagon lurched forward as another round of bullets swept through the car doors. The tires blew, and the car skidded into the ditch.

"Shit, shit, shit," Matt moaned. One blue lens of his sunglasses was shattered, and he pulled off the glasses, revealing a gash around his eye.

"Shut up. Don't look worried," Tanner said. "Are you fucking kidding?" Matt said.

The car was surrounded by two dozen boy soldiers. Circling the car, they pounded on it with small, violent fists. They wore tattered uniforms with red-checked
kramas
, scarves, wrapped around their heads or necks to signify the Khmer Rouge. AK-47s hung off their small shoulders. The leader was barefoot but wore a bowler hat and orange-tinted aviator sunglasses that matched the fiery sky, a getup so strange it made him seem less dangerous. He banged the butt of his rifle on the hood of the car, leaving long, elliptical dents, while two other soldiers flung the driver's-side door open, motioning with their hands for the three to get out.

First Tanner, then Matt, and then Helen wiggled awkwardly out with their hands folded up behind their heads. Using rifles, the soldiers pointed up the road. Helen hoped that they would simply take the car and let them go, all she could think of was the lost pictures, but when the three had walked about twenty yards, she could hear a barking of orders, and one of the soldiers ran up behind them and used his rifle like a baseball bat to hit Matt in the back of the knees.

The soldier, no older than ten or eleven, had a narrow face and large, crowded teeth, and when he yelled, his voice was high and girlishly shrill. He motioned for the other two to kneel in the middle of the road. When they did, he smiled broadly, pleased, and patted Matt on the back.

"You're welcome, filthy little fuck," Matt said.

Helen closed her eyes. The whole thing unreal, make-believe. She wanted to stand up and tear the gun away from the boy and slap him. So unlikely, it felt like at any minute someone should laugh and admit it was all a game.

At the sound of a groan from Matt, she opened her eyes to see the soldier miming for them to bring their hands down and take off their shoes. The boy soldiers were so inexperienced they had not even known to frisk them for weapons, but the gun Matt carried was safely back in the car. Not that they'd have a chance of shooting their way out. All three sat in the road and worked with numbed fingers at shoelaces, exchanging looks. Helen dipped her fingers in her pocket and slipped the small Buddha into her mouth, unseen. The saving bitterness of iron. Then, barefoot, they were ordered to kneel again and put their arms behind them, elbow to elbow. Other soldiers ran over and bound their arms with a crude rope made of twisted vines. Helen cursed herself for not bandaging her chest down as two of the boy soldiers stood in front of her, giggling and pointing. The smaller boy, with a spiky shock of hair, looked furtively back to the leader preoccupied with the car, then bent down and quickly tugged at her breast.