He thanked his hosts for the meal and went outside to bring in his sleeping bag from the jeep. Despite the fading light, he saw that all the tires on his jeep had been slashed.
“Vandals!” the old man pronounced. “Hooligans — from Dalat, no doubt.”
No matter who it was, Baker told them, it meant he would have to go back to Dalat by bus in the morning. “What time does it leave?”
“Seven.”
From habit, Baker unzipped his sleeping bag to make sure that no bugs or snakes had set up shop, then laid it down on the palm-matted floor, sat down and, by candlelight, wrote down a summary of all he’d heard that night. He folded it when he was finished, took his boots off, and stuffed it down his right sock until he could feel the square of paper under the arch of his foot. Then he quietly begged pardon and asked the young man who had said “Saigon” instead of “Ho Chi Minh City” whether it was possible for him to get a weapon — a pistol, anything.
The young man said this was possible; caches of arms had been buried by many villagers during ‘Nam, but Bac Baker must understand that this would cost money, not for himself, but for those who sold such things illegally. Two hundred American dollars.
“Traveler’s checks?”
“Sure, American Express or Visa, okay, fine.”
The young man soon returned and handed Baker a .45 service revolver and two full clips. Sure, Baker admitted to himself, he was feeling a little paranoid about it all, but it was just in case the tire slashers weren’t simply vandals after all.
There was a scream — the old lady who had come to clean up the kitchen. Someone had placed the chopsticks Baker had used upright in his rice bowl — since time immemorial a Buddhist sign of the dead.
Moving quickly, Baker removed his raincoat, flashlight, and what few other belongings he had in the jeep, and bunched them in his sleeping bag to resemble a body. He turned out his lamp, then sat in a corner of the room where he had a clear view of the open doorway, his ears straining for the least sound, the gun in his right hand resting on the left for instant use. All he had to do was stay awake till morning.
He tried to remember what they had told him on the firing range back in Washington, but all that seemed, and was, a world away. He thought about the chopstick sign. The message didn’t worry him so much as who’d done it. He’d heard nothing. Could someone have come up to the high house without making a sound? If not, it must have been someone in the family. Was the young man’s use of “Saigon” instead of “Ho Chi Minh” merely a ploy to build confidence in him? Was the young man an agent provocateur?
In any case, Baker hoped he wouldn’t have to use the gun— merely having it in Vietnam was highly illegal — and hoped the tire slashing and the sign of the dead were merely two unrelated incidents. Perhaps the chopsticks being put in the bowl like that — sticking up like incense tapers — was a nasty bit of teasing by someone else in the village. All right, Baker told himself, so it was a cruel prank by some spiteful neighbor and had nothing to do with him. The problem was still the stealth it took for someone to come up to the house, creep up the ladder steps, do it, and leave without being noticed by either him or his hosts. Which brought him back to the family again.
He heard a soft thud, like a rubber ball thrown in through the doorway. A grenade? He switched on his flashlight, ready to kick it out the door, and instead saw nothing but a slash of brilliant green slithering toward him. He fired with one hand holding the flashlight, the other pulling the trigger, until he’d emptied the .45, his hands shaking uncontrollably from his phobia of snakes, the snake having disappeared under the mattress. By now of course it was as if the house had been bombed, everyone running and talking excitedly, lanterns coming on and swinging through the hamlet.
Baker tried to talk but couldn’t. Instead he pointed the handgun at the mattress. Finally he could manage a few words.
Sure, everybody understood. Who didn’t understand? Pythons, said one of the contemptuous teenagers, are known for their great flying ability! “Must have been a bat!” another said.
The young man, his host’s oldest son, who called Ho Chi Minh Saigon, carefully lifted up the riddled sleeping bag and straw mattress with a stick in one hand and a long knife in the other. There was no snake there, only a wild pattern of holes that the bullets had made after passing through the sleeping bag, mattress, and thatched floor.
Soon the rest of the villagers went home. They needed sleep for their work in the fields more than they needed stories of flying pythons from a mentally ill American. And in his city-bred panic, the American had totally lost face.
Yet the next morning, when a policeman arrived wanting to know who had been firing a gun last night, none of the villagers could answer him. They were all asleep, they told him. No one wanted trouble for the hamlet. Oh yes, they said, they’d heard shots coming from the direction of Lang Bian’s peaks, but Vietnamese had lived with the sound of firing for a thousand years. A poacher, perhaps. Everyone knew that since the Vietnam War deer, wild pig, and even tigers had begun to repopulate the area. “Saigon,” as Baker had begun calling his host’s oldest son, was apparently the only one who believed Baker that a snake, despite the height of the house’s stilts, had been in his room.
“What color was it?” he asked Baker.
“Green.”
“Then it wasn’t a python.”
“No — No, but I couldn’t think of your name for snake.”
Saigon asked, “What kind of green?”
“Very bright.”
“A bamboo viper,” Saigon said.
Baker didn’t want to ask the next question, but his need to recover face at least for himself after his outburst of panic forced him to. He asked Saigon if a bamboo viper was your ordinary elephant grass, nonpoisonous creepy crawly or what?
“Had it bitten you, you would have been dead within the hour. You had better keep the gun.”
In one sense, it was the last thing Baker wanted to hear, yet it reassured him to know that someone at least believed his version of what had happened. “Someone is after you,” Saigon said. “You’ve come too close, I think, to Salt and Pepper. I don’t think they are directly involved — otherwise you’d be dead. They are probably off west somewhere in Cambodia or Laos, but I think the slashed tires, the rice bowl and the chopsticks, this is all — how do you Americans say it? — ’low-tech.’ The word has been put out, but now with the Americans helping us in the north, no one wants to do it overtly—” He paused. “—to kill you in the open. They wish it to seem like an accident.”
“Slashed tires are hardly
“True. But that might have nothing to do with it. Teenage bad types.”
And why, wondered Baker, are you telling me all this? Is it you? Are you after me? Are you just telling me all this so as not to make me suspicious?
It was as if Saigon could divine what Baker was thinking. “I’m helping you,” Saigon said, “because you are here helping us. I wasn’t born until after the war. For me it is history. I do not dislike Americans.”
“Thanks,” Baker said. “I feel awkward with the gun. What if the Dalat police stop me? They’ll stop you because you’re breathing.”
It was the first time since last night’s meal that Saigon had laughed. “It is true. They would stop their grandmothers. Give it to me. You will be safe on the bus going back to Dalat. I’ll send someone to your hotel with it. I think you should have it.”
“You think I should pursue this matter of Salt and Pepper?”
Saigon shrugged. “This is up to you, but till you’re back safely in Saigon, I think you should keep the gun, I will keep the sleeping bag. If the police saw that, they would be suspicious.”
“Yes.” Baker walked a few paces, then stopped. It was six-fifty, and the first bus out would be in ten minutes. He took out a note he’d written about the existence of Salt and Pepper and of the possibility of a Khmer Rouge flank attack against Vietnam. He gave the note to Saigon, telling him that if anything should happen to him, Saigon should give the note to a senior cadre in Dalat to be passed on to USVUN HQ.
As the crowded bus began its bumpy journey back to Dalat, Baker felt the loneliest he had in years. In going
