Thai Horse

‘Don’t you get it?’ said Cody. ‘As far as the world is concerned, we’re all dead. In Prophett’s metaphor, we all crossed over the river. We can’t go home because there’s no home to go to. And some of us couldn’t go home if we wanted to. You know about Riker and Gallagher?’

‘I know they were both in big trouble when they disappeared. I assume Prophett can’t go back because he’s a hopeless junkie, you can tell by looking at him. Wonderboy — he’s learned to live with his face. But you, Corkscrew, Potter, Max Early —‘

‘It all started back before Nam. Hell, my dad and the admiral arranged my marriage like a couple of feudal kings arranging a wedding for the good of the realm. It was like living in a strait-jacket, my wife and I were barely civil. The old man was over here. So I volunteered for the Black Ponies.’

‘In the end it all came down on Cody,’ Pai quietly interrupted him. ‘He had volunteered for the Black Ponies so nobody could say he was looking for an easy time of it. The losses were like snakes in his head, I could see it every day.’

‘It wasn’t just me,’ Cody said with a touch of bitterness. ‘It was the mission. It’s always the fucking mission. You set out to do what you have to do regardless of the cost. But then you begin to wonder.

Hell, is the mission right or wrong? You probably don’t understand that, Hatch.’

‘More than you might think,’ Hatcher said.

‘The final irony is I became one of the losses. That morning I had picked up a letter for John Rossiter, my gunner. But I forgot to give it to him. I never carried any ID — shit, I knew if I went down and they knew who I was, who my father was, then school was out. So all I had was that letter and Rossiter burning to a crisp, the whole jungle afire behind me. I saw that chopper coming in and I thought, God, I’m gonna get out of this. Then suddenly it turned around and just — flew away.

‘Then the bullets started hitting around me, the fire was all over — so I threw away my dog tags. Next thing I knew, I had my hands up and they were frisking me and they found that letter and all of a sudden I was Gunner’s Mate John Rossiter.

‘Riker was the first to recognize me. But he kept mum, they all decided to keep mum. But I figured the least I could do was act like the ranking officer.’

‘He tried negotiating with Taisung,’ Namteen said. ‘To get medicine for Wonderboy and morphine for Johnny and keep Max out of the hole so he would not go crazy.’

‘And food, just food,’ Cody said. ‘I became the camp negotiator, the pimp. The fuckee. If Prophett needed heroin, I sold a piece of myself for heroin. If Wonderboy needed medicine, another piece for medicine. Another piece to keep Max out of the hole so he wouldn’t go stark raving mad. I was Taisung’s slave.’

‘The trouble was, I really didn’t have anything to trade for,’ Cody said. ‘And then . .

‘And then?’ Hatcher repeated.

‘And then Pai came to us,’ Cody said.

Unsure whether Cody was alive or dead, Pai had set out to find him. She knew only to go northwest and northwest she went. In Vietnam she was Vietnamese. In Cambodia, she was Cambodian. In Laos, she became Laotian. Wherever the was, she smiled and talked and listened. She worked when she had to for food and then moved on. She waded through the rice paddies, dodged the Khmer Rouge, slept in trees to avoid wild animals, almost died twice with fever.

She kept going, crossed the Annimitique, found the remains of one camp the telltale holes dug in the ground, the remnants of bamboo cell doors — devoured by vines and ground crawlers. The skeletons. She moved on, encouraged and discouraged at the same time.

And then one day she heard the voices — the unmistakable profanity of GIs — and she crept through the jungle grass and saw the camp and that night she crept up to the holes in the ground they called cells and softly caned his name as she crept from one to the other and finally she heard Cody’s unbelieving voice answer, ‘Pai?’ and she lay across the crisscrossed bamboo doors, reached down and felt his hand take hers.

‘Oh, Cody,’ she whispered through her tears, ‘at last I have found you.’

It had taken her six months to get to the Huie-kui.

‘Oh, Cody, at last I have found you,’ Cody repeated her words. ‘God, I can’t tell you how I felt at that moment’

He stopped and swallowed hard and then said, ‘And finally. . . I had something to offer Taisung.’

He whispered as if he feared the words would turn to ashes in his mouth, and they hung in the air along with all their terrible implications.

‘It was my choice,’ Pai said in her soft voice. ‘I wanted most to keep Cody alive, to keep them all alive. No one asked me to do what I did.’

‘And I didn’t stop her,’ said Cody, turning and staring straight at Hatcher, and the expression on his face said all that needed to be said about what living had cost him and the woman he loved.

‘We stayed alive, most of us anyway. Jaimie Solomon was eaten up with cancer. He got back to the States. Joe Binder died in the camp, and Sammy Franklin died of malnutrition before Pai ever found us.’

‘Jaimie Solomon?’ Hatcher said, remembering the note that had been left on the Wall.