that he sweated each assignment, felt like he was sending off his own children? Unfazed by Linh’s silence, he had changed his mind about him being a criminal. Probably something far worse. The whole damned country was shell- shocked as far as he could tell. At least he had maybe bought himself a few weeks of peace from his prima-donna photog.
By the time the jeep reached Angkor Thom, the sun throbbed like a tight drum in the late afternoon. Villagers were handling a jungle of equipment-cords snaking over the dirt; large sheets of foil scattered along the ground, heating already hot air to scorching; tripods splayed like long-legged birds; film floating in coolers; and in the middle of it all, directing the chaos like a maestro, stood Sam Darrow.
Gary handed Linh a bottle of lukewarm Coca-Cola and promptly forgot him, leaving him standing in a group of Cambodian workers. One man, Samang, grumbled that the sodas had been dumped out of the coolers so that there was more room for the film. His brother, Veasna, tapped him on the calf with the leg of a tripod. “Complainer. But not when there is a tip.”
Linh sat in the shade, apart, and watched as Darrow painstakingly looked through his camera set on a tripod, moved away to make an adjustment, looked through the finder again, and at last pressed the cable release to snap the shutter, taking exposure after exposure of a bas-relief overhung by a cliff of rock that cast shadows on it. The joke among the workers was why so many pictures of a rock that hadn’t moved an inch in thousands of years? Linh calculated it would take more than an hour to go through a roll of film at that rate, the job potentially endless. Darrow made minute changes after each frame with infinite patience. Three men held a long piece of reflector foil, changing the angle an inch at a time.
During a break, the workers collapsed into the shade. Samang gossiped among his coworkers that the Westerners would kill them by working through the heat of the day. Darrow bellowed out a laugh and with his long strides moved to greet the new arrivals. He was even taller and thinner than Linh had remembered, as if his figure had attenuated during the months that had passed. Or had Linh’s misfortune bent him? Made him smaller in the world? He recognized the American’s large bony wrists.
Earlier at the office, Gary had drummed on his desk in joy when Linh said he had worked with Darrow. Everyone in the know avoided working with his star photographer, and Gary had been on the verge of locking up the office to go hump equipment himself when Linh turned up. He would not look this gift horse over too closely. Past assistants quit because Darrow insisted on covering the most dangerous conflicts, carried too much equipment, and worked them endless hours.
“You’re as red as a lobster!” Darrow said.
“The climate’s killing me. Look who I found!” Gary used a flourish of hands as if producing Linh out of smoke, trying to cover the sham. “Nguyen Pran Linh. Am I good or what?”
“Sure.” Darrow smiled and offered Linh a cigarette and a piece of gum. This was a land of nuance, the outright question of where they had met before unspeakably rude. Content to wait, Darrow dipped his bandanna in the cooler water to wipe his face. The afternoon had been long and peaceful, but with the sound of Gary’s jeep he felt a black weight descend on him. He cocked his head, moving slightly side to side, trying to place Linh. “How are you, my old friend?”
“Why don’t you make foil shields for each side instead of lighting only from underneath?” Linh took the cigarette and lit it quickly so the shaking of his fingers would not be noticed.
Darrow let out a big laugh. “My technical expert from Binh Duong. Of course.”
Linh smiled but said nothing.
“You really do know each other?” Gary asked.
“Why would you bring someone who I didn’t know?” Darrow said.
Gary looked back and forth between the two men. “You’re one funny guy. That’s what I love about you. He’s going in with you to the delta and Cu Chi. Lots of good stuff there. Cover stuff, you know? Another Congo. How can one man be so lucky? Chop, chop.”
“Got it.” A mixture of feeling angry and tired, and something else-a strange, gauzy sensation that Darrow recognized as fear. Did Gary sense that he was hiding out? Trying to forget about Henry? That he was waiting for something? A sign that things were safe again? Why didn’t Gary go hump through Cu Chi and risk getting his ass blown off? Instead he pimped another inexperienced local off the street as his assistant. Darrow’s business was faces, but he hadn’t recognized this one-Linh had changed so drastically. The guy had been dipped in hell.
“So how much longer, you think?” Gary asked as they walked back toward the jeep.
“Till I get the picture.” He played Gary, pulled his chain, unfairly resenting the push. After all, it wasn’t his fault-this crisis of nerve. Henry broke the illusion that they were charmed because they carried cameras instead of guns. It would pass. Darrow had been through it before. Just a matter of waiting it out. The accumulation of deaths and horrors and jitters that got him. The curse of curses was that he was good at war, loved the demands of the job. What was frightening was he had developed an appetite for it. Like a starving man staring at a table of food, refusing to eat on moral grounds; appetite would win, and his shrewd boss counted on that.
Gary stopped in front of the jeep, and in a gesture of bravado slammed his hand down on the trunk. He barely kept himself from wincing and crying out in pain. “It’s going down now, man, and you should be the one getting it. This old pile of rocks will still be here when the war’s over.”
Darrow wagged his head. “Did you know that the French who discovered Angkor asked the peasants who was responsible for creating it? They answered, ‘It just grew here.’ ” More and more it seemed to him a possibility just to sit out the war where he was.
Gary wiped his face and shook his head. “That’s truly crazy.”
“You never know.”
“How’s that? Who cares about this tourist crap? Just hurry back home, okay?” Gary tapped the driver on the shoulder to start the motor. “And take it easy on this new guy. My hunch is that he bullshitted me to get the work. Let’s put it this way-there’s no waiting line for the job.”
“Sure you don’t want to spend the night? Hang out a couple of days?” The truth was he liked Gary ’s callousness, his will to do anything to get the picture, because that was the way Darrow used to be. And he didn’t want to be alone another night, and didn’t have much faith in Linh as a drinking buddy.
“Yeah, that’s right. That’s what I want to do, hang in this godforsaken place- Angkor What?”
“The gods will strike you for that.”
“Add it to the list, baby. I don’t care how good the stuff is you’re smoking. Get me back to Saigon with air-conditioning and ice cubes. Headquarters is busting me about hiring women, you think you have problems?”
“I’m hurt. Thought you’d want to watch a genius in action.” Darrow slapped his palm against the jeep hood.
“Don’t take a week? Right?”
“Hurry, Gary. Get out of here before the sun goes down and the monsters come out.”
After the jeep had left, the silence settled back down on the place like dust, but the black weight that was the suck and pull of the war had arrived, and it pressed down on Darrow’s shoulders. He should tie himself down to one of the big stones to keep himself there, to avoid Gary ’s siren call. He smiled into the shade where Linh was standing. Too bright; he couldn’t make out Linh’s expression. The day he met him had indeed been dipped in hell, Darrow assigned to cover the joint operations as American advisers walked the SVA through a basic search mission. When they were fired on, the advisers called down airpower, but it dropped short, falling on them and civilians. A free-for-all clusterfuck. The SVA panicked and started firing on their own people, on civilians instead of the enemy, who had probably long retreated. The next day as they reassembled, the man assigned as his assistant was AWOL, nowhere to be found. He had seemed an unenthusiastic soldier. Perhaps he had used the chaos as an excuse to slip away. Perfect, Darrow laughed out loud, finally the type of assistant he deserved.
For the next week, Linh lived in the jungle side by side with Darrow. They rose at dawn, ate a simple breakfast of rice, fish, vegetables, and the dark Arabic coffee Darrow had become addicted to in the Middle East, insisting on brewing it himself. They worked all through the day with a crew of a dozen men, including the two brothers who were his favorites, taking hundreds of exposures, spending hours to light a subject, sometimes to the point of sending Veasna shimmying up a tree to strip foliage that was blocking the sun. One day, Veasna spent five hours picking half a tree away, leaf by leaf. He came down dehydrated, and Linh fed him glass after glass of water while Darrow hurried to get the right late afternoon light.
