through these graveyards whistling sixties’ tunes. Dummies who never got the word about the Buddhist recycling program…
In from the sticks and utterly lost in the big city of death.
There were still occasional farms, set among meandering white furrows garnished with green.
“Sweet potatoes,” explained Trin. “The only thing that really grows out here.” He slowed and pointed. Two rusty teardrop-shaped projectiles lay by the side of the road, marked by a stick and strip of white cloth. Old mortar rounds.
They left the meager farms behind and entered rolling dunes patched with scrub, spindly willow trees. The desolation was interrupted only by the remnants of abandoned hamlets, their outlines softened by the shifting sand. And one more military cemetery-out all alone in the dunes.
“We’re almost there. You can smell the sea,” said Trin. And Broker saw it, a band of glittering blue-green between the dunes. The dizzy relief of a breeze swayed the spindly willows.
“Now we walk,” said Trin. They got out and Broker carried two of the beer cases. Trin hauled the other case, the smokes, and the camera. They plodded toward a red flag flying over the willows and came through the trees onto a sand beach. The sea blended placidly into a deceptively calm, baked-enamel blue sky. A buckled cement ramp poked from the sand, all that remained of the old Cua Viet Riverine base. Down the beach Broker saw a tall, new white lighthouse.
Two young men in tan shirts, brown trousers, and bare feet hailed Trin from the beach. He called back. One wore a wide-brimmed brown hat with a visor and had green epaulets on his shoulder and a red armband.
“Militia sergeant,” said Trin. “He’s a good guy.”
Three more young soldiers were in the small head-quarters tucked into the willows. On the way in Broker marked the radio cord draped from a field antennae that leaned, unsteady on its sloppy guide wires. Inside, Trin stacked the beer and handed over the cigarettes amid much deferential gab and more than a few bows.
The radio lead came in through a window and stopped. No radio. A stout, padlocked chest-high wooden bureau took up one whole wall. Maybe the radio was in there, with the guns. The militia had no apparent means of transportation besides their feet. Nobody was armed. Nobody seemed concerned. Maybe they weren’t really soldiers. Maybe they just all bought their clothes at the same place.
The militia insisted they sit down for tea at a rickety table. Ho Chi Minh smiled down on them like a big-eyed alley cat from a calendar tacked to the wall. “The camera,” said Trin. Broker took the camera from its cardboard box and fumbled in the heat. Sweaty fingers dripping on the instructions, he loaded the film.
All smiles, the militia straightened their tunics; one of them combed his hair; the sergeant struck a matinee idol pose. Broker hoped the camera worked.
“They
“Oh yes. AKs and grenades and one RPD machine gun,” Trin assured him.
The camera worked. Broker continued to take pictures as more members of the militia platoon arrived. He handed over the sheets of film as they popped out. The militia boys clustered around, chatting happily as their pictures swam up from the chemistry. “Do they have a radio?” he asked.
“Yes. Locked up, with the guns.”
Broker wondered if the Communist party trusted them with the key. “Do
“No. We have a truck. We’ll send somebody in the truck or the van, at the right time.”
Broker clicked his teeth. They had pimples. They were kids. “What are you telling them?”
“Oh, just talk, about their families.” Seeing Broker’s consternation, Trin reassured him. “Don’t worry. They’ve never been shot at before, so they’ll be very eager. When we tell them that American pirates are stealing antiquities they’ll be tigers.”
“Antiquities?”
“Yes. There has been a big party campaign about foreigners taking our treasures, since eighty-nine.”
Broker wasn’t reassured. He sat in an isolation booth of language, with flies crawling on his fingers. Trin smiled. The militia smiled. Heat-induced paranoia scripted the casual conversation.
When Trin’s socializing was concluded, they left the camera and the last roll of film with the militia and walked back to the van. They backtracked up the sandy road and turned left and drove through the dunes.
“This is a long drive,” said Broker after almost an hour bouncing on a rutted cow path.
“Not far,” Trin minimized. “Five kilometers.”
They turned again and headed back toward the sea. Trin stopped and pulled the emergency brake. “See. Not far.” They left the van at the pylons of an unrepaired bridge and trudged the rest of the way, coming out of the willows onto a beach. Ribbons of breakers eased into a small cove. A decrepit fishing sampan was moored to a rickety dock, rocking gently in the surf. A baleful Chinese eye glared on the bow. A sail was furled to a boom off the mast.
“A sailboat?” Broker groaned.
“It has a motor,” said Trin quickly. Immediately Broker went down to inspect the boat. He climbed over the gunwale and made a face. What looked like the rusty vertebrae of a mechanical dinosaur filled the stern of the boat. An automotive engine, off a Willis Jeep maybe, coupled to some kind of marine transmission with some kind of universal joint. A fifty-five-gallon drum served as the gas tank. He kicked it. Empty. The stirrups next to the motor were absent a battery. The boat was like the militia: unusable. He glanced at Trin dubiously.
“It runs,” said Trin. Then he pointed to a whitewashed building that sat on higher ground among the willows. A different flag tossed from a pole in the sea breeze: red and blue with a yellow star. The first VC flag Broker had seen.
“He can make it run,” said Trin. A scarecrow shadow in sweat-stained gray cotton separated from the shade of the porch. His left pant leg hung empty as he hobbled on a crutch down a lane between rows of vegetables. As they walked up the beach to meet him, Broker shielded the sun with his hand. The old man’s skin was a mahogany shrivel over knotty muscle, his stringy gray hair was tied in a pigtail. His right eye gleamed like a Greek olive in a salad of scar tissue. A black patch covered his left eye.
“That’s Trung Si, my old battalion sergeant major when I was in the Front. Welcome to Jimmy Tuna’s home for down-and-out Viet Cong,” said Trin with a sardonic hung-over grin.
62
Trin introduced Broker to Trung Si, who was under the initial impression that he was Jimmy Tuna, their benefactor. With that cleared up, the weathered cripple hopped off to a well and hauled up a net full of chilled beer bottles. Broker accepted a bottle. San Miguel. “Jimmy liked this beer,” he said, making conversation.
Jimmy was dead.
“Yes,” said Trin.
“Yes,” said Trung Si.
Trin recounted how Jimmy had bought an old truck for the home. The rest of the men had driven it into Hue to have their artificial limbs reset. One man had stayed behind. A double amputee, legs gone above the knees, who remained inside, withdrawn, sitting on a sleeping platform. A set of artificial legs lay discarded on the floor by the bed. The man smiled politely when Trin introduced him and then looked away.
Back out on the porch, Broker said, “We need to get the boat running.”
Trin scratched his head and seemed dazed by the sun. “It’s too hard for the men to manage. They use little round wicker boats to fish.”
“We aren’t after fish.”
“Yeah,” said Trin. He barked to Trung Si, who barked back, and they had a heated discussion that Broker couldn’t understand. In the end, the old man, bitching, and refusing Broker’s offer of help, stalked off one-legged with a tool box, a battery, and a five-gallon tin of gasoline piled in a small wagon that he insisted on pulling all alone. His loud alien profanity carried up from the beach as he thumped down the dock. In a few minutes the engine
