Tommy Vang was looking down, thinking.
“I’ve been wondering if you might have come here to warn me. Just to keep me from eating it?”
“Not the cake,” Tommy said. “The cake wouldn’t have hurt Mr. Bork. The cake I make is good.”
“Then is it the cherry? Is that it?”
“The cherry might be spoiled. Out in the heat. Fruits get rotted, not preserved properly,” Vang said, his voice so choked that Leaphorn could barely understand him.
“Maybe that was what got the people sick.” The people, Leaphorn thought. Other people? Tommy’s command of the nuances of English was somewhat shaky, but he seemed to have more people than just Mel Bork in mind. Leaphorn considered that, decided to let it wait and come back to that question later.
“Well, let’s not worry about that then,” Leaphorn said.
“I’m curious about how you got acquainted with Mr. Delos.
I guess he worked for our government in Southeast Asia during the Vietnam War. Is that where you met him?”
“In Laos,” Tommy said, staring at the windshield. “In our mountains. A long, long time ago.” Laos? Leaphorn considered that, wishing he had a better recollection of Asian geography and the pattern of that war. If his memory was right, Laos would be on the border of about everything. It would fit Delos’s presumed role as a CIA operative. The CIA was working on all the edges there.
“Is that where you started working for Mr. Delos?”
“My father did,” Tommy said. “And my uncles, and—” he exhaled, shook his head, broke off his study of the wind-172
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shield to look at Leaphorn “—and about everybody in our village. All the Vangs, and Thaos, and the Chues anyway. All the families except the Cheng men. They had mostly joined the Vietcong. And the Pham. I don’t know about them, but I think they were maybe working with the Pathet Lao.”
“You’re not Vietnamese, then?”
“We were Hmong,” Tommy said. “Our people were running out of China. Getting away from the wars that always went. Coming down into the Laos mountains, I think maybe same time Europeans were migrating into America. My older kinfolks still used Chinese words. But the CIA didn’t mind. They recruited the men in our village. We were already having to fight both the Vietnamese and the Pathet Lao. Trying to protect our villages. And then the Americans came in and wanted us to help them fight their war. That how I got acquainted with the colonel. He wasn’t Mr. Delos then. He was Colonel Perkins. He was recruiting my family members.”
“What did this colonel want you to do for him?” Tommy produced a wry-sounding laugh. “I guess you would say he was a collector of information. He would come into our house, and my father and uncles, and the men from the Thao and Chue families would come in and talk. And Mr. Delos would tell each one of them where he wanted them to go, and what he wanted them to watch for. Mostly he would be sending them back into Vietnam to watch the trails the Congs were using. When they got back, Mr. Delos would come again, and they would tell him what they had seen.”
“Did he have you doing anything for him?” Tommy shifted in his seat, wiped his hand across his eyes. “I was too young to be useful at first, and my mother THE SHAPE SHIFTER
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wouldn’t let me go anyway. Then one night my uncle came back, and he said some North Vietnam soldiers had seen them and they had killed my father and my youngest uncle. Or maybe just took them captive. He wasn’t sure, and I never did find out. But after that, the Vietcong came to our village, and my mother and sister and I, we had to hide out in the mountains.”
With that Tommy resumed his study of the windshield, lost in his memories.
Leaphorn waited, as unwilling to interrupt such thoughts as he was to break into a conversation, and just studied Tommy Vang. Very slender, Leaphorn noted.
Very neat. Trimmed. Buttoned. Clean shaven. Shirt cuffs correct. Trousers somehow still properly creased. Vang raised a hand, and wiped the back of it across his cheek.
Wiping away a tear, perhaps. The wind rattled dust against the truck door. Two women hurried past, one carrying a blanket. Tommy sighed, shifted in his seat.
“We were living in a sort of a cave shelter up there in the high ridges after that. The American planes, they came over, very loud, very low, and they bombed our village with napalm. I guess they’d got the word that the Cong had moved in.” He laughed. “I always wondered if Mr. Delos told them. Anyway, we went back down later to pick up what was left.”
With that Tommy lapsed into silence, looking straight ahead.
Overcome with memories, Leaphorn guessed.
“Not much left,” Tommy Vang said. “Even the pigs.
The napalm fire had flooded right over all their pens so they couldn’t get away.” He sighed. “All burned up. I still remember. It smelled like a huge roast feast like we’d 174
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have for a wedding banquet. That is sort of special with the Hmong elders.” He glanced at Leaphorn, looking doubtful. “I think the way we are supposed to be taught God gave us multiple souls, or maybe I should say duplicate souls, and the duplicate souls live on in our animals.”
“I read about that when I studied anthropology. In an article about Hmong funeral rituals.”
“I don’t know enough about it,” Vang said. “I was too young. The elders were busy with fighting the Vietcong and the others. And hiding. Too busy to teach the children. You understand?”
