The Time in Between (3 page)

“Did you talk to him?”

“A little. He said that he had come to this same restaurant thirty years ago as a soldier.” She shrugged. “This is probably true. I was a young girl then. Many Americans have come back and told me the same thing. That is good. I need the business.”

“When was the last time you saw him?” Jon asked.

Maryann said that it was probably at least three weeks ago, maybe more. On a windy day. “Like today,” she said, and she hugged herself and offered a mock shiver.

The young girl brought over a plate of fried fish and raw carrots. She placed it on the table. They ate the fish and watched the rain fall. Ada began to speak and then she stopped, aware that her words would mean nothing at this point, because they were words that had already been said, and so they each drank another beer and rode back on the cyclo they had come out on.

THAT EVENING SHE WALKED ALONE TO THE EMPIRE HOTEL AND drank coffee in the dining room and ordered a strudel and ate it slowly, looking out at the street. When she was finished she stepped outside. Down the road, closer to Bach Dang Street, two women stood side by side. Their faces were powdered white and they waved at passing cyclists and pedestrians. Ada approached them. They were young, maybe twenty, perhaps less. One had a round face with a smile that revealed bad teeth. Her breasts were small and she wore blue stockings. She looked at Ada and said, “Want to fock?”

Ada shook her head.

The girls giggled and the one with bad teeth touched Ada’s arm and ran her hand up and down the silkiness of her skin. “Beautiful,” she said, and then she chirruped, “Twenty dollars. For you.”

Ada turned away and walked back up toward her hotel. The boy Yen appeared and, walking beside her, asked if she truly wanted to buy one of the women back there.

Ada said, “You’re impossible. I don’t want you following me.”

Yen nodded. “I see,” he said. “So, you don’t like me?”

“That’s got nothing to do with it.”

“The girl you were talking to? She has bad teeth. I know a girl who has beautiful teeth. She is lovely to kiss.”

“I don’t want a girl.”

“But, you were talking to one back there. Were you asking her the time?”

Ada shook her head. She stopped walking and faced Yen. “Good-bye,” she said. Yen grinned and said good-bye. Ada crossed over to the harbor side of the street and sat down on a bench and reached into her purse for a cigarette. The air was warm; a few mosquitoes circled her head. She brushed at them and looked out over the water, aware of the smell of diesel fuel and the sound of the waves lapping at the retainer wall.

She heard footsteps and turned. A man stood a fair distance away from her. He bowed slightly and said, “Don’t worry, you are not in danger. I have been watching you and you are safe. Though you are foolish to be sitting out here all alone in the middle of the night. You are a woman and beautiful and you are a foreigner and you probably have lots of money. It is not safe for you to be sitting by yourself near the harbor on a dark night.”

He took a step forward. The dim streetlight revealed his face. He was short and older, probably fifty, though Ada couldn’t be sure. He wore suit pants and a white shirt buttoned all the way up, and glasses that were black-rimmed and thick. He seemed harmless, though it might have been the glasses that projected safety. He spoke English perfectly; the only flaw was in the perfection.

“I’m Canadian,” Ada said.

“Of course you are. This is even better. But still, the average criminal on Bach Dang Street is not going to stop and ask the nationality of his victim. And even if he did I do not think he would be partial to certain groups. Do you?” As he spoke he crept forward. He was now standing in front of her and she saw his clean leather shoes and his hands, which were cupped as if he were about to dip them into water.

Ada stood. She was looking down at the man, who shuffled his feet and stepped backward to give her more space.

“Vo Van Thanh,” he said. “Or just Thanh.”

Ada looked around and was conscious of their isolation.

“Don’t worry,” he said. “I will walk you back to your hotel. Is that okay?”

She allowed this, and as they walked Thanh kept a good space between the two of them and he spoke to her about the places they passed: the photo shop that sold yeast imported from Thailand; the pool hall that fronted for cockfights and boxing matches—he said that his son, who was an excellent lightweight, fought there sometimes, and as he said this he raised his own fists and feinted left and right and his leather shoes flashed; and the library in which there were numerous appalling novels about the glory of the Vietnamese state. As they approached the Binh Duong Hotel, he said that the owner of the hotel, Mr. Duong, had married a woman who was too beautiful for him. She had a fondness for men from other countries, typically workers from Czechoslovakia and Russia. “Miss Binh likes Germans as well and the occasional American. Perhaps you should warn your brother.”

Ada wondered how Thanh knew about Jon. She said, “My brother would not be interested.”

Thanh did not respond, though he did cup his hands once again and clear his throat. At the entrance to the hotel they paused and Ada turned to thank Thanh.

He said, “I knew your father, Charles Boatman.”

Ada lifted a hand as if to fend off a bright light and she asked, “Oh? How?”

“I was his guide. His translator. For the month that he was here. And then he was gone and you arrived and now we are standing in front of the same hotel where he stayed. What do you call this? Symmetry? Serendipity?” He said that there had been a sadness that emanated from Charles Boatman, and no amount of talk or food or even the love of a woman could remove that sadness. “He disappeared one day. I came to pick him up and he was gone. Miss Binh did not see him. The bellhop did not see him. No one saw him. That was a month ago.”

“What do you mean, love?” Ada asked.

“Oh.” Thanh took off his glasses and cleaned them on his shirttail. He put them back on and said, “There was someone.” His hands moved about as if he were willing them to pluck the words from the air.

“Who was the woman?”

“It is not for me to say. I observed. He did not tell me.”

Ada wondered what was true and what was not in this man’s story.

He said, “I will come back. Tomorrow. Please, do not worry. I do not want to be a bearer of unhappiness. I am simply a translator. Do you understand?”

His hair was dark and combed to the side, and Ada realized that he was a careful man, both in his dress and in his speech. She said good-bye, and when she reached her fifth-floor room she was breathless and she stood for a moment in the darkness. She knew that Jon was not there but still she said his name, softly. She said it again, and when she received no answer she went over to the window. There was a lightning storm far out at sea. The flashes were dim and brief except once when the lightning went on for several seconds and lit up both the sky and the water. Ada saw what she imagined was a large ship but might also have been a gargantuan raft or a house floating out to sea.

She thought about time, about the future and the past. She thought about the mountain back in British Columbia where she had been raised, and how one year around Christmas her father had shot a deer that wandered onto their yard. Del, her younger sister, had wept and beat at her father with her small fists. Ada had been most amazed at the flatness of her father’s face as he held his younger daughter until she was done flailing.

And now her father was gone, and Del was living with a sculptor, an older man who had captured her and pinned her, just as Del claimed would not happen, like a butterfly to a corkboard. And she, Ada, who for so long had floated about, brushing up against people with whom she had little connection, had left her small apartment in Vancouver and was standing in a hotel room looking out at a perplexing and alien place where the language she heard was more beautiful because she did not understand it.

2

CHARLES BOATMAN GREW UP IN MONROE, WASHINGTON, AND IN 1968 at the age of eighteen he was drafted into the U.S. Army. He was not pleased to be drafted. He had seen the
Time
magazine photograph where a Marine pilot was killed in a CH-34 and the crew-man was crying in the background. The photograph of the dead soldier frightened him and the Marine’s tears surprised him. He was also about to get married to Sara Fonce, his pregnant girl-friend. They had talked about running up to Canada but she said she would wait for him. And so, after his training and during his thirty-day home leave, Charles and Sara married and moved into his parents’ basement and then, with the same resignation that would carry him through his next thirty years, Charles left for Vietnam. He was situated in Danang and was in the country when Lieutenant Calley and his battalion shot dead five hundred villagers in My Lai. He learned of it only months later, when he was back in the United States.

When he returned, Charles told people that he had killed only one man during his tour in Vietnam and that the man was an enemy soldier. His battalion was usually holed up in the hills that ringed the harbor of Danang. However, one day, near the end of his tour, Charles was walking point on a sortie near Marble Mountain when he came face-to-face with a North Vietnamese soldier and he fired into the soldier’s chest. This was the story he told.

Back at home he dreamed about severed limbs and fire and the intestines of Jody Booth, a friend who had died beside him in a field outside Danang. He dreamed about pigs being strung from a rope and gutted alive and he dreamed about a young boy who looked up at him as if to ask, “Why?” He woke from these dreams and sat in his room, smoking and staring into the darkness. Sometimes Sara held him and cradled his head and said, “Charlie, what are we gonna do?” but mostly he wanted to be left alone.

Their baby, Ada, was two years old when Sara became pregnant again. Sara worked as a bartender in the evenings and he worked days as a logger, though being in the trees made him panicky, and more than once a co-worker found him huddled and shaking under a jack pine. They were still living in his parents’ basement and Sara said she was tired of the family shit, of not having money, of Charles not getting serious about work and obsessing about the war. “Let it go, Charlie,” she said more than once. “There’s a whole bunch of mouths to feed here.” She was a small woman whom, when he returned from Vietnam, he did not at first recognize. She was holding a baby in one arm, and though she smelled the same when he pushed his nose against her neck, she seemed harder to approach, as if she were afraid of him. For a while after his return she tried to get him to talk, but either he was unwilling or he waved his hand and said, “I don’t know where to begin.”

He loved her being pregnant. He had missed her fullness with the first baby, so now he was always touching her, holding his ear against her belly and then sliding down so that she could clamp his head between her thighs while he whispered secrets to the twins.

While Charles was overseas, Sara had taken on a lover, a bank manager who adored her but who had no interest in ruining his own marriage. The affair continued when Charles returned, and though Sara felt the occasional shiver of guilt, she rationalized that the pleasure of seeing a man who wore a suit and bought her things and told her what beautiful legs and breasts she had made it all right.

Charles knew nothing, until the day the twins turned five and Ada, who was eight, asked him if Robert was coming to the party. That night Sara came home late and found Charles sitting at the kitchen table, surrounded by dirty plates and balloons and streamers. He was drinking rye straight out of a bottle and his voice shook when he said her name. She knew that he knew. She said, “Go ahead, hit me.”

“I’m not going to hit you. You know I can’t do that.”

Charles lifted his head and looked at his wife. Her hair was dirty; one side fell over a breast and covered half her face. He stood and went into the bedroom and shut the door. The children, who slept in the same room with them, were laid out like little packages. Charles slid the children up beside each other and lay down on the outside of the bed. He heard Sara in the kitchen, running the water, then she was in the bathroom, taking a bath. He fell asleep and woke briefly as Sara crept into the room for clean underwear and jeans and a shirt. He opened his eyes. She was naked, standing by the dresser. He saw the backs of her arms, and her ass, the full hard shape of her, and the outline between her legs as she bent toward the drawer. She put on panties and turned and slid into her jeans. Top on, no bra. She looked back at the bed, and in the half-light Charles closed his eyes. She called his name quietly, then she said, “Charlie, I’m sorry.” She waited, but he didn’t answer. He opened his eyes again only after she had left and closed the door. He heard her go, the click of the lock, her footsteps, the revving of the car engine, and then the crunch of the gravel as she backed out onto the street.

CHARLES LEFT SARA AND THE CHILDREN AND MONROE AND THE United States. He moved across the border close to Abbotsford, British Columbia. Rented two acres on Sumas Mountain and bought an old caboose that he towed up the winding road. He renovated the caboose and insulated it. Installed a woodstove and built a stack-log shed for his machine shop and raised goats and chickens and milked one cow. In the evenings, he spread his correspondence books over the kitchen table and studied for his accounting exam. He planned to make himself into something other than a man who lived on a mountain and operated a drill press and made machine parts for people much wealthier than he was.