The Vietnam Reader (76 page)

Lights of all colors, vaguely darkened and skewed in the thick glass doors, zipped up and down the sides of buildings. She glanced all around and back to the clock again. Minutes passed. Slow fright took her as she sat in the chair; she would have to go out soon. How many hours did she have left? The clock said eight. She sat stiffly, counting the moments, waiting for something to tell her what to do.

Now that she was in the city, all the daydreams she’d had were useless. She had not foreseen the blind crowd or the fierce activity of the lights outside the station. And then it seemed to her that she had been sitting in the chair too long. Panic tightened her throat. Without considering, in an almost desperate shuffle, she took her bundle and entered the ladies’ room.

Fearing thieves, she took the bundle into the stall and held it awkwardly on her lap. Afterward, she washed her face, combed and redid the tin barrette that held her long hair off her forehead, then sat in the lobby. She let her eyes close. Behind her eyelids dim shapes billowed outward. Her body seemed to shrink and contract as in childish fever dreams when she lost all sense of the actual proportion of things and knew herself as bitterly small. She had come here for some reason, but couldn’t remember what that was.

As it happened, then, because she didn’t have anything particular in mind, the man seemed just what she needed when he appeared.

He needed her worse, but she didn’t know that. He stood for an instant against the doors, long enough for Albertine to notice that his cropped hair was black, his skin was pale brown, thick and rough. He wore a dull green army jacket. She caught a good look at his profile, the blunt chin, big nose, harsh brow.

He was handsome, good-looking at least, and could have been an Indian. He even could have been a Chippewa. He walked out into the street.

She started after him. Partly because she didn’t know what she was looking for, partly because he was a soldier like her father, and partly because he could have been an Indian, she followed. It seemed to her that he had cleared a path of safety through the door into the street. But when she stepped outside he had disappeared. She faltered, then told herself to keep walking toward the boldest lights.

Northern Pacific Avenue was the central thoroughfare of the dingy feel-good roll of Indian bars, western-wear stores, pawn shops, and Christian Revival Missions that Fargo was trying to eradicate. The strip had diminished under the town’s urban-renewal project: asphalt plains and swooping concrete interchanges shouldered the remaining bars into an intricate huddle, lit for action at this hour. The giant cartoon outline of a cat, eyes fringed in pink neon, winked and switched its glittering tail. Farther down the street a cowgirl tall as a building tossed her lariat in slow heart-shaped loops. Beneath her glowing heels men slouched, passing bags crimped back for bottlenecks.

The night was cold. Albertine stepped into the recessed door stoop of a small shop. Its window displayed secondhand toasters. The other side of the street was livelier. She saw two Indian men, hair falling in cowlicks over their faces, dragging a limp, dazed woman between them. An alley swallowed them. Another woman in a tiger-skin skirt and long boots posed briefly in a doorway. A short round oriental man sprang out of nowhere, gesturing emphatically to someone who wasn’t there. He went up the stairs of a doorway labeled
ROOMS
. That was the doorway Albertine decided she would try for a place to sleep, when things quieted down. For now she was content to watch, shifting from foot to foot, arms crossed over her bundle.

Then she saw the soldier again.

He was walking quickly, duffel hoisted up his shoulder, along the opposite side of the street. Again she followed. Stepping from her doorway she walked parallel with him, bundle slung from her hand
and bouncing off her legs. He must have been a little over six feet. She was tall herself and always conscious of the height of men. She stopped when he paused before a windowful of pearl-button shirts, buff Stetsons, and thick-nosed pawned pistols. He stayed there a long time, moving from one display to the next. He was never still. He smoked quickly, jittering, dragging hard and snapping the cigarette against his middle finger. He turned back and forth, constantly aware of who was passing or what was making what noise where.

He knew the girl had been following and watching.

He knew she was watching now. He had noticed her first in the bus station. Her straight brown hair and Indian eyes drew him, even though she was too young. She was tall, strong, twice the size of most Vietnamese. It had been a long time since he’d seen any Indian women, even a breed. He had been a soldier, was now a veteran, had seen nine months of combat in the Annamese Cordillera before the NVA captured him somewhere near Pleiku. They kept him half a year. He was released after an honorable peace was not achieved, after the evacuation. Returning home he had been fouled up in red tape, routinely questioned by a military psychiatrist, dismissed. It had been three weeks, only that, since the big C-141 and Gia Lam airfield.

He examined the pawnshop window again.

Enough of this, he thought. He turned to face her.

Her legs were long, slightly bowed. Jeans lapped her toed-in boots. She’d be good with a horse. One hand was tensed in the pocket of a cheap black nylon parka. Passing headlights periodically lit her face—wide with strong, jutting bones. Not pretty yet, a kid trying to look old. Jailbait. She stared back at him through traffic. She was carrying a knotted bundle.

He had seen so many with their children, possessions, animals tied in cloths across their backs, under their breasts, bundles dragged in frail carts. He had seen them bolting under fire, arms wrapped around small packages. Some of the packages, loosely held the way hers was, exploded. Henry Lamartine Junior carried enough shrapnel deep inside of him, still working its way out, to set off the metal detector in the airport. He had been physically searched there in a small curtained booth. When he told the guard what the problem was, the man
just looked at him and said nothing, dumb as stone. Henry had wanted to crush that stupid face the way you crumple a ball of wax paper.

The girl did not look stupid. She only looked young. She turned away. He thought that she might walk off carrying that bundle. She could go anywhere. Possibility of danger. Contents of bundle that could rip through flesh and strike bone. It was as much the sense of danger, the almost sweet familiarity he had with risk by now, as it was the attraction for her that made him put his hands out, stopping traffic, and cross to where she stood.

He turned out to be from a family she knew. A crazy Lamartine boy. Henry.

“I know your brother Lyman,” she said. “I heard about you. How’d you get loose?”

“I’m like my brother Gerry. No jail built that can hold me either.”

He grinned when she told him her name.

“Old Man Kashpaw know you’re hanging out on NP Avenue?”

Albertine took his arm. “I’m thirsty,” she said.

They walked beneath the cowgirl’s lariat and found a table in the Round-Up Bar. After two drinks there they moved down the street, and kept moving on. Somewhere later that night, in the whiskey, her hand brushed his. He would not let go.

“You know any bar tricks?” she asked. “Show me one.”

He dropped her hand and she made it into a fist and shoved it in her pocket. She still clutched her bundle tight between her feet, under the table. He got three steak knives and two water glasses from the bartender and brought them back to the table. He set the glasses down half a foot apart. Then he interlapped the knives so they made a bridge between the glass lips, a bridge of knives suspended in air.

Albertine looked at the precarious, linked edges.

She was nervous, but she didn’t recognize this feeling, because it was part of a whirl in her stomach that was like excitement.

When Henry and Albertine left the bar it was very late, past last call, past closing. The streets were quiet. He put his arm around her and she stumbled once beneath its weight.

A small black-and-white television flickered on a high shelf behind the hotel desk. President Nixon’s face drooped across the screen. The night clerk took Henry’s ten-dollar bill, and threw it into the cash drawer and sleepily shoved a pen and lined slip across the counter toward him. The clerk was a mound of flesh tapering into a small thick skull. Waiting for the soldier to sign, he yawned so hugely that tears sprang from his eyes. It did not interest him that the man and girl, both Indian or Mexicans, whatever, signed in as Mr. and Mrs. Howdy Doody and were shacking up for the night. Whatever. He yawned again.

Motherfucker, Henry thought, lazy motherfucker, aren’t you? Drunk, he had taken a violent dislike to the man. I could off this fat shit, he told himself. But Albertine was there. “Advise restraint,” he said out loud. She didn’t seem to hear. The place was well off the avenue, and the short upstairs hall was quiet. Henry steered her easily before him, touching her shoulder blades through the bunched padding in the nylon jacket. He shook the thought of the fat clerk away, far as possible.

“Angel, where’s your wings,” he whispered into her hair. “They should be here.” He pressed the ends of his fingers hard against her jutting bones.

Her laugh was high and soft. He fumbled for the key. He was not used to having keys again and always forgot where he put them. Groping, patting, he fished the room key from his jacket and put it into the lock. She was poised, half turned from what she might see when the door opened. He waved her in. Once she entered and stood in the hard overhead light, he saw that she was bone tired, sagging from the broad sawhorse shoulders down, her hair wrenched in a clump by the barrette. He was drunker than she was. She had stopped after a few and let him go on drinking, talking, until he spilled too many and knew it was time to taper off.

There was no table lamp. He turned off the overhead light and left on the one over the bathroom mirror.

“Wanna use the head?”

At first she shook her head dumbly, no, and looked at the floor.

But then I can close the door and he’ll be out there,
she thought.

She walked past him. He heard water rush into the sink. The other sounds she tried to hide made him smile. Women are so fucking cute sometimes it hurts. It really hurts.

Don’t ever want to come out of here.
She leaned her forehead on cool tile.

“When angel showers,” he was singing to her closed door, “come your way. They bring the flowers that bloom in May.”

He steadied himself on the iron bed rails, tried to pull his boots off, went to his knees.

“Keep looking for a bluebird and listen.… I know by God you were pissing in there. I heard you. It sounded like rain on a tin roof.”

Then he was beating his chest lightly, like in the cold mission church he had served in when he was eight.

“Mea culpa, mea culpa, I am not worthy that you should come under my roof.”

He tried to stand.

Hearing the sounds of a toothbrush he swayed backward, laughing. It sounded ridiculous. Sitting on the floor, stiff legged, he took off his boots and socks, then stood up warily to ease off his pants, unbutton his shirt. He set the bottle of Four Roses on a chair where he could reach it and turned down the covers on the bed. Then he crawled in and watched the crack of light around all four sides of the bathroom door.

“It was rehung a size too small,” he said in a loud critical voice. “Or else it shrunk in the frame.” He laughed again.

He is out of his mind.

She came through the door, put some clothes down neatly folded, and disappeared again. “If I close my eyes and imagine very hard what you’re doing …” He addressed the bottle, then unscrewed the top. With his eyes shut he drank the rough whiskey. It left a sweet burn going down, and when he looked again his vision had narrowed.

He said those men took trophies. Skin pressed in the pages of a book.

There was often a stage in his drunkenness where his eyesight tunneled, like looking through the wrong end of binoculars. He had to be very careful now to remember where he was. He did not dare take his
eyes from the shrinking door. “Please …,” he urged the dark room, “don’t …,” fearing something might break the concentration. But he kept tight control. Advise restraint. Advise restraint, his brain tapped. He began connecting each loud invisible rustle with a very specific movement that the woman must make as she undressed. From top to bottom. He undressed her mentally with slow deliberation and no desire. Then suddenly, naked. She had even rolled her socks and stuck them in her boots.

She should have come out then, but she didn’t. His heart pumped.

Concentration began to slacken. The image of her fled. He rolled from the bed and started to the door, feeling his way along the edge of the mattress until he lost it and had to cross long steps of endless space, where he thought water lapped his ankles. The rustling stopped. Silence warns. He was going to kick and jump aside like in the village back there, but from somewhere he gained a measure of control. He gripped the handle. The door swung in. The light seemed to move around her in sheets, and the tunnel widened.

On the tiny square of floor, still dressed, the bundle she had carried opened and spread all around her, she crouched low.

And he saw her as the woman back there.

How the hell could you figure them?

She looked at him. They had used a bayonet. She was out of her mind. You, me, same. Same. She pointed to her eyes and his eyes. The Asian, folded eyes of some Chippewas. She was hemorrhaging.

Question her.

Sir, she is dying, sir.

“And anyway, what could I have asked? Huh? What the hell?”

Albertine was looking at him, staring at him. He realized he had spoken out loud.

The brown hair swung over her face as she bent, smoothing a red handkerchief into a small square. She was wrapping things back into her bundle. He tucked a gray towel around his waist and lowered himself onto the edge of the stool. Her clothing was spread between them. He bent over and picked up a thin long-waisted pair of cotton underpants, doubled them, put them back.