After he forgave a ninety-five-dollar debt to get her on board the plane, he treated her like a stranger, which hurt her feelings though she understood its necessity. Darrow turned his back on the safety of the rear position, on Helen, on thoughts of Saigon and possibly America; his whole attention directed toward the depth of the marsh, and the further depth of the jungle, the war, the secrets he still had not found. Not yet understanding what drove him, she already respected it. She felt stupid with fear.
Raising her head, she saw that the trees were eucalyptus, lined like the windbreaks back home between the citrus groves. The familiarity of the trees, malevolent in this setting, doubly disturbed her.
Home. She longed for the clean quiet of her mother’s house, the mildew smell of closed rooms from being so close to the beach. All those surf days of beating sun and rolling water, dried out and happy, licking her child’s lips of salt, of ice cream. The crowded boardwalk along the beach, the pink-burned tourists and the tanned locals, giggling with her friends over the browned, lean torsos of older boys playing basketball, always shirtless, always ignoring them. Walking past the restaurants with their unfurled umbrellas, their white tablecloths, and cheap bottles of wine on the table to entice customers, the waiters leathery and bored.
Her mouth was dry, air scraped the shallows of her lungs, as the reality of where she was took hold. Shivering from the foreign rush of terror, she felt a warm, wet sensation, and burned at the realization that she had peed herself. She pressed her cheek into the dirt, the lip of the helmet-a man’s small but still too big- cutting into her ear. The sharp scent of burned grass combining with gunpowder and the sweetish smell of her own urine shamed her.
Nothing had prepared her for the smallness of the action. The moment-to-moment boredom. Intellectually, yes, there were people on the enemy side trying to kill them, American men might die, but that was all television stuff. Being on the flat land, pricked by the dying grass, the idea that she herself could be the target of a bullet became real. But the whole time she lay there she mostly fretted over the embarrassment of wetting herself, solving the problem by spilling the water from her canteen over part of her pants.
Minutes passed. She heard a cry in front of her. A soldier had been hit in the thigh. Helen crawled up to the group as the medic bandaged him and gave him a quick prick of morphine. Movement was better than paralysis. The boy was lying on his back, wild-eyed and jabbering.
“He’s fine, mostly nerves,” the medic said, shrugging. “First time out.”
The soldier’s lips twisted in sarcasm. “They say that to anyone who isn’t dead.”
“What’s your name?” Helen touched the boy’s hand.
“Curt.”
“Shut up, Curt,” the medic said. “We should call you Yellow.”
The bullets stopped, and half an hour later the patrol was back together, waiting on an opened dirt road for an evacuation helicopter for one wounded. The thick marsh slime dried stiff and dark on their fatigues in the scalding air. Helen’s own darkened pants went unnoticed. Against regulations, soldiers took off their flak jackets, smoked cigarettes, and wrung out socks while they waited.
Helen joined a group sitting under a tree. She took off her helmet. In herpanic and then relief that the encounter was over, she realized she hadn’t shot a single frame, had, in fact, forgotten all about the camera. Years later, her biggest regret was not taking the shot of Darrow in the marsh. It remained the one image etched in her mind, perhaps because she did not have the film to refer back to. Once a picture was taken, the experience was purged of its power to haunt.
Curt was talking and joking too loudly. Lieutenant Colonel Shaffer told him to keep it down. “It’s not a goddamned party that you’re going to the hospital.”
“Oh, yes it is,” Curt mouthed behind his back.
“That was a nothing.” Darrow crouched a few feet from Helen and took her picture. “How’d it go, Prom Queen?”
She wiped her face and made a grimacing smile. “All right.” The way he looked at her, she knew he guessed that she had frozen.
“More excitement than we expected. It’s cleared till it’s not, till it is again. End of lesson today. Take this ride out.”
“No!” If she left now, it would be empty-handed, without a single exposure taken, the risk all for nothing.
“No bodies in the tree line. That means they retreated, probably back to the hamlet, waiting for us. It’s no longer Peace Corps stuff.”
“I can handle it.”
“Enough for today. I’m asking, but Shaffer will order you.”
Helen braced herself as the helicopter pitched, then rose. She crawled, crablike, along the corrugated metal floor over to Curt. Away from the other men, he looked even younger-clear blue eyes slightly dilated from the morphine and a child’s rosy lips.
“Looks like you and me got a ticket out of there,” he shouted in her ear above the roar. “Aren’t we smart?”
“You wouldn’t believe how I worked just to get here.”
“What’s wrong with you?”
She shrugged. “Where’re you from?”
“Philly.”
“I’m from Southern California.”
“Oh man. When I get out of here, I’m going straight to Hermosa Beach and learn to surf.”
“My brother went there all the time.”
“Is it great?”
“Surfing capital.”
She thought of the water off the pier back home, how one day she finally couldn’t bear sitting on the beach with all the girlfriends. She had paddled out on a borrowed board to hoots and howls from Michael and his friends. She had tumbled in the surf, frightened, pounded against the sandy bottom again and again, but she wouldn’t stop trying. The first time she got up on the board and saw the beach ahead of her, she had felt invincible. Everything had happened so fast during the firefight and now her failure was settling in.
“I can’t wait,” Curt said.
“Do you want me to take your picture? I’ll send it to you.”
“Okay.”
She picked up her notebook and as she wrote his dog tag number he grew quiet.
“You promise you’ll send it? Maybe to my parents in case I’m not around.”
“If it’s in this book, you’ll get the photograph.” Helen talked briskly, pretending she had not heard his last words. “They’ll send it to your local paper. You’ll be a hero back home.”
“Fuck the people back home. This wound’ll be patched, and I’ll be back out in the boonies in a few weeks. I promised myself I’d go out and kill me at least one dink before I left here.” He leaned back, and they both remained silent the rest of the way.
When she returned to the hotel that night, she took a long, hot shower. Her first action after returning from the Cholon apartment had been to throw her copy of The Quiet American in the wastebasket, but her room boy, a small, thin-shouldered boy with the long eyelashes of a girl, dug it out of the trash and put it back on the table. Inconceivable to him that a perfectly good book would be thrown out. Now he knocked and gave her a note from Robert that a group of them was having dinner at the hotel dining room and inviting her. She couldn’t face them down to night, especially not after the afternoon’s disaster. She looked at the boy. “I’m done with the book. Would you like it?”
“You sell.” He gestured with his hand, and she was struck by the grace of his movement.
“You sell, keep the money,” she said.
He looked the book over carefully, gave a tender shrug.
“On second thought, leave it here to night. Take it in the morning.” Although she had read it at least a dozen times, she longed to lose herself in it to night, to rest in Fowler’s certainties or Pyle’s innocence. To counterbalance the uncertainties of life with the sureties of a book. She had always been an avid reader, but as an adult her reading habits had changed, and only after she had reread a book many times did she claim to begin to understand it.
