Finding Moon

west. There were stars overhead, and just in front of them was the white line of beach and above it the black wall of shoreline vegetation.

Osa was huddled near the stern of what Captain Teele called in his odd mixture of English and Dutch his “shure boot.” She was talking to Mr. Lee, who seemed to have perfect sea legs and rarely sat down even when this awkward craft was rolling through the heavy swells out in the blue water. Mr. Suhuannaphum sat beside her- assigned to take the shore boat back to the Glory of the Sea but demoted now to the role of passenger. When they neared shore and moved into the brown water flowing out of the Mekong, they entered Rice’s territory. Rice had taken over the navigation.

“Here on in we need to keep it quiet,” Rice told them. “Normally at night you wouldn’t worry much, because the devils come out after dark and these delta farmers like to stay in their hooches with the doors closed. But now things ain’t normal.”

Things weren’t normal, Rice explained, because the Vietnam navy personnel who took over the U.S. Navy patrol boats and their bases were mostly refugees from the north end of the nation.

“They came down here because they hated the Commies, and because they hate the Commies, Saigon figured it could trust them in patrol boats,” Rice said. “You know, not to take the boats and go over to the other side. Anyhow, the point is these guys are mostly Christians, or maybe a different kind of Buddhist, whose demons stay home at night. So they patrol just they way we trained ’ em to. Sneak along in the dark, listening. Maybe turn off the engine and just float. Hear an infiltrator, turn on the light, and zap ’em. Taking the night away from the Cong, we called it.”

“But now,” Osa said, “it is so dark I don’t know how you can possibly see where you’re going.”

“You don’t exactly see it,” Rice said. “Actually, you sort of feel it. Do you notice how choppy it is under the boat now? Just bump-bump-bump? No more upsy-downsy rolling from the waves coming in. Here that’s being canceled out by the current, the brown water coming out. So when it’s dark, you just keep in the middle of the current best you can.

And if you think you’re lost, you use these night binoculars.”

“But so many different mouths to this river,” Osa said. “I think they called it ‘Nine Dragons.’”

“Two of ’em are silted up and closed. They oughta call it ‘Seven Dragons,’ but with the gooks nine is the lucky number.”

Moon now could see that the trees lining the shore were some sort of palms. Soon their crowns were outlined against the stars, almost overhead. And then they were past the palms. Inland. The air felt different: hotter, heavy with humidity. Moon was sweating. The soft sound of the current now drowned the murmur of the idling engine.

The sky lightened a little with a false dawn. Moon saw that the forest lining the river was no longer palms. And no longer alive. The jungle was leafless, dead. Barren limbs formed a black tracery against the horizon. He pointed that out to Osa.

“Agent Orange,” Osa said. “I think that’s what killed everything.”

“Only We Can Prevent a Forest,” Rice said, spacing the words. “That was the slogan of the C-One-thirty guys who dropped the stuff. They’d zap the jungle so we could see, then we’d come along and zap the Cong.”

The smell of the sea was gone now. Moon’s nostrils picked up the aroma of flowers, of decayed vegetation, of rancid mud, the perfume of sandalwood and smoke. Sweat ran down from his eyebrows into the corners of his eyes.

Rice throttled down the engine. “Better be quiet now,” he said. “This one we’re in they call Cu’a Cung Loi, I think it is. Probably means ninth mouth, or something like that. Anyway, it’s the mouth furthest from Saigon. Full of Vietcong before we got ’em-”

Mr. Suhuannaphum was whispering something.

“Something’s coming,” Osa said in a low, low voice. “Can you hear It?”

Moon heard it. The sound of someone crying. A child’s wail. A tinny rattling. Hushed voices. The creak of wood on wood. The steady thumping of a heavy engine.

Rice cut the motor.

It was off somewhere to their right. Coming toward them but farther out in the channel.

“There,” Osa whispered, pointing.

A dark shape, looming above the water. And then it came out of the shadows into the moon path: a sampan, Moon guessed. It had a high round bow and a roof from which the light reflected. Probably tin, Moon thought. It moved steadily past them, loaded with whispers, with someone sobbing and someone scolding, the sounds of sorrow and despair. And then they could see only its stern, quickly disappearing again into the shadows of the mangrove trees.

“Well,” Rice said, “I wish them luck.” He restarted the motor.

“Refugees from that dreadful war,” Osa said. “Probably no place to go. They must be frightened.”

“Scared to death,” Rice said. “Ghosts are out in the dark at night. They call ’em kwei, the Hungry Ones. They’re the spirits of folks who die without any children to take care of their bones. They get out of the underworld after dark and go around causing bad luck, making people sick.”

“And us,” Osa said. “I think you should also wish us to be lucky.”

“I think we’re already being lucky,” Moon said.

About dawn they saw a flare arc into the sky, across the river and maybe a mile to the east. Two more flares rose and died away, and then there was the sudden sound of a machine gun. Moon reached out his hand, touched Osa’s arm, and she rewarded him with a strained smile. But the gunfire lasted only a few seconds. It aroused frogs and night birds and provoked challenging calls from the same sort of lizards he’d heard on Palawan Island. That, too, quickly died away.

Silence then. Only the purr of the motor, the hiss of the hull sliding through the brown water, the small clatter when Mr. Suhuannaphum shifted his feet. Moon noticed the night was fading fast. He could make out the shape of mangrove trunks, see the pattern of the current on the water surface, discern flotsam moving with the stream. Beside the bank ahead, a man-made shape loomed. It seemed to be a platform raised above the riverbank on stilts with an odd shape built on it.

Rice noticed him staring at it.

“Used to be a house,” Rice said. “The VC used it, and we flushed them out and burned it.”

The sky was reddening now in the east. A rooster crowed somewhere nearby, exuberant. And awoke another rooster. A dog barked. Something bulky was floating past, a hundred yards out in the current. Cloth. A human body too far out in the river to determine gender. And beyond it something else that looked like a floating bundle. Another body? Too far away to be sure. He glanced at Osa. She was looking inland. So was Rice.

“There’s a few rice paddies back there behind the mangroves,” Rice said. “Eight or nine hooches, best I remember. The ARVN boys thought they might be Vietcong, but then they thought everybody might be Vietcong. It’s the way they stayed alive.”

“Do you think the army will still be here?” Osa said. “They must know they’ve lost the war.”

“I don’t know,” Rice said. “They had this Yellow Tiger Battalion stationed here. Part of an airborne regiment. If they were normal ARVN, I think they’d just shoot some civilians and steal their clothes and pretend to be just plain folks. But these Tigers were tough cookies. Had a colonel named Ngo Diem. Supposed to be mean as a snake.” He chuckled. “Even the marines liked ’em, and the marines didn’t like nobody.”

From far across the river came another sound. It sounded to Moon like a truck engine starting.

“We got to stick close to the bank now,” Rice said. “Around that bend behind that bunch of palms there’s an old LST anchored. LST,” he repeated. “Landing Ship Tank. The U.S.S. Pott County. They anchored it out there and used it as a base for our river patrol boats. Then in ‘seventy-three they turned it over to the Vietnam navy.”

He looked at Moon.

“What do you think? Should we check in with the good gooks, tell ’em what we’re doing here?”

“Maybe we should,” Moon said, doubtfully. “We’re in here illegally, of course. But maybe they’d be too busy this morning to think about that. What do you think?”

“I think first we should sort of take a look and see what we can see,” Rice said. “Could be Charley’s taken the place over by now.”

They took the first look from almost a mile away. Mr. Suhuannaphum extracted a set of very large, very heavy