And now he had weapons with which he could protect us all, if he was so inclined. The trouble was, I was pretty sure, from the look of him and all that riot-squad energy shooting from him, that his inclination was to kill anything that moved, including us. Face it, William was nuts and I wasn't feeling so stable myself, which was why I sat back down, very slowly, and huddled with Ahn while William poked and prodded and eventually leaped over us, quite literally overlooking us. He stalked away, his aura blazing so intensely that he looked like a walking forest fire.
I watched until he was a mere flashlight beam in the greenery, then drew a deep breath. I tried to rise, but my knees wouldn't support me for a long time. When I put my hands out to brace myself on a log, they shook so hard it looked as if I were trying to play the bongos. Ahn pulled himself up beside me.
Ahn's aura was shallower than it had been, a washed-out sParrow brown with little veins of red. He looked as tired as I felt. 'What we do now, mamasan?'
'We follow William,' I told him. I didn't want to lose him entirely.
Not only did we need him, he might need us. I didn't really think I'd be able to trail him for too long, but maybe I could until he was in his right mind and the three of us could band together again.
'William beaucoup dinky dao, mamasan.'
'No shit,' I said. But we didn't seem to have a lot of other options.
We lost him in less than an hour. Not that we didn't know where he'd gone. We only had to follow the machete slashes to figure that one out.
But we couldn't keep up. Even with the support of his stick, Ahn fell often. Sometimes I carried him, but at others we both needed both hands to climb or brace ourselves for steep descents down muddy slides. We drank often from the rain pools on the leaves and stuck our tongues out at the rain, but it was a far cry from having a whole cool glass of water from mama's tap at home.
Soon the trail started heading mostly down, and when we finished sliding down muddy, root-riddled banks, the ground below was less overgrown, we stumbled less often, and none too soon we began treading on grass once more. The machete marks dwindled with the vines, and so did our ability to follow William.
Remembering what William had said about the other flatlands, I kept us in the trees. I kept thinking that soon the valley floor would turn into rice paddies.
The rain blew straight at us and I took my poncho from my ditty bag and tried to cover us both with it. I couldn't bear it in the heavy jungle.
It was too hot. Now, however, as a wind and rain break, it was inadequate. Clouds like gray scouring pads blew across the top of the valley, squirting squalls every few minutes. The bomb craters, already full, flooded and ran into one another. I felt dizzy and headachy, as I did when I was catching cold. I wanted my mother again. I wanted her to bring me aspirins and antihistamines and a vaporizer with Vicks and comic books and fresh orange juice. The fact that she hadn't done that since I was about ten made no difference. Sick adults regress too.
'Dear Mom,' I mentally wrote while carrying Ahn down the valley, 'Ahn and I took a walk today-well, mostly I walked. He got tired. William had some business to take care of, and when he returned he wasn't in a very good mood, so Ahn and I decided we'd give him time to cool off. I bet we'll find a rice paddy today. William wants to avoid people, but I think the paddies are a good sign. They're so normal and agricultural, like wheat fields. William doesn't want to visit a Vietnamese village, but then, he's a city boy. I feel that, after all, these people are rice farmers just as the people where we're from are wheat farmers, so what really is the difference? I'm getting Ahn to teach me to say, 'Hot enough for you?' and 'Nice day if it don't rain,' in Vietnamese.'
Thinking about home probably wasn't the best thing in the world, because my mind began drifting. just because I didn't want to be in Nam, I started dreaming, with my eyes wide awake and my feet walking, that I wasn't. I imagined I was walking through the woods by my Aunt Janet's cornfield carrying my cousin Sandy, who was now about seventeen years old, though to my mind she was still as I had last seen her, younger than Ahn. It was like a mirage except that I didn't actually see anything that wasn't there, I just reinterpreted what I was seeing so that it seemed instead to be something I wanted to see. I have no idea how long or how far I walked thinking myself back in good old dull Kansas. It's a wonder I didn't mistake a booby trap for cow fence and kill us both.
Ahn pulled me back to Southeast Asia by suddenly rousing to point out what looked like a brilliant sunset. Indulging him, I stopped so we could admire the reds, oranges, and yellows of the sun, as I thought, reflected in the sky.
Around the next bend, I felt the heat, smelled the smoke, and watched tongues of fire lick at the sky as the field below us spouted flames.
Acres of plants were already consumed and blackened, and the fire now fed on earth and roots. I wondered what burned so hot and remembered napalm. But why napalm somebody's field?
I hated the feel of it even more than I hated stumbling through jungle, so I started climbing again, up away from the fire. Just before nightfall we found another stream cutting a ridge in half. We bathed again and drank and I gave Ahn two of my Midol for his fever, and allotted us two salt tablets apiece after saving one for my new crop of leeches. I tore the sleeve off my fatigue shirt and bound it around his stump with a piece of his old bandage. The stump didn't look as bad as I feared, but there was a nickel-size sore where the stitches had once been, and it was draining.
We climbed back up and over another ridge before nightfall, and bedded down between two rocks under a very large tree that gave us some protection from the rain. I dreamed my grandpa was pointing at the field and laughing, telling me about strip-and-burn agriculture, but he was saying something about how they did it with crop dusters these days.
When I woke the next morning, I felt the warmth of a small fire, smelled meat cooking, and heard it sizzling. William squatted, Vietnamese style, beside the fire.
'If I be Charlie, lady, you be dead,' he said.
'I almost was anyway,' I said, prying Ahn loose so I could stretch a little. William's aura still had a faint edge of black and maroon but was mostly blue, a little yellow, clear green. 'You remember coming after us with a machete and a .45 by any chance?'
'Me? Nah, I go after VC. Got some too. One got away, the girlsan with the heavy artillery.'
'That who you thought we were?' I asked. But he just looked puzzled, and hurt, and his colors started swirling around in a confused sort of way.
'Never mind,' I said. 'How did you find us?'
'Easy. You not exactly Sheena, Queen of the Jungle, woman. You see any of 'em?'
'Any of who?'
'Our boys. They around. Who you think called in that napalm on the taro field?'
'Is that what it was? I wondered. What's taro?'
'Good food. But ten to one some asshole thought it was weed. Or maybe they just wanna make sure Charlie don't eat no taro. I dunno.'
'Wait a minute,' I said. 'If that was one of our planes that dropped napalm, then there must be some of our guys around-'
'You catch on quick, Sheena. I spotted a patrol of about six dudes just as I got to that taro field, but they was 'way far down the valley, and about the time I started into that field after them the planes come up and it was weenie roast time. I had to didi mau. But that patrol is maybe a day ahead of us.'
'Of you, maybe,' I said. 'I'm surprised you could backtrack far enough to find us. You sure are one tough act to follow.'
''Yeah. Well, I think we should find them dudes.'
'If they're a day ahead of us, we'll never make it. Ahn's leg is going bad again.'
'We all gonna go bad we don't get out of this shit pretty soon. Want some of this primo monkeysan here?'
I nodded and looked back toward Ahn. He was sweating in his sleep. 'You could carry Ahn again. That would speed us up.'
'It'd slow me down, though,' he said thoughtfully. 'That patrol's already got a day's lead on us.'
We chewed monkey and thought it over. I was tempted. I wished I hadn't brought Ahn out here. And William was undoubtedly right. We'd lose our chance at rescue altogether if we slowed down for Ahn. On the other hand, if he was an American kid, we wouldn't even be discussing it. I decided not to discuss it anyway.
'Well,' I said, 'maybe it would be better if you left us here and went after them yourself. I don't think Ahn's going to get very far. His stump's infected.'
'Lady, you don't seem to understand. We ain't in the world no more.
This be war, baby. I leave you here and when I come back, if you here, you probably be some kind of beaucoup messed-up fucked-over corpse.'
'Okay, okay, I know, I know. Stop talking about it, okay? The whole idea makes me nervous. But frankly, buddy, I'm just about as nervous hanging out with you. That's twice you've nearly killed us.'
'Will you stop sayin' that? I ain't harmed a fuckin' hair of your head-'
'It wasn't my hair I was worried about,' I argued, ever as ready with witty repartee as I was when fighting with my kid brother.
'Nor nothin' else neither. Where you get this shit, girl? You ack like I crazy-truth is, you be the crazy one. What you tryin' to do? Set me up to get
