left the tote behind, unable to bear the weight on her shoulders and neck any longer.
They walked, this time more slowly, so slowly that any of the old people along the streets could have kept up.
Her head throbbed from the rifle butt, and she fingered a crust of dried blood in her hairline. Should she discard the two black cases to keep moving on? But it was as if she were abandoning each person captured on a frame of film. She remembered one shot in particular, a baby that had been trampled by the crowds of refugees on the outskirts of town. The guards had set up barriers right next to the body without touching it. He lay on his side like a small animal curled up in leaves in a forest. Myriad stories like this. This human being already gone, except as a dark spot on a lighter background of negative. If the print were published, the child would achieve some kind of immortality, however flimsy. Each of those kinds of pictures diminished the taker.
Helen hefted the straps higher on each shoulder, skin rubbed raw, and kept walking.
Linh held an arm across his stomach and picked up a walking stick lying in the street.
“Put your hand on my shoulder,” she said.
They walked down the center of main thoroughfares now, incapable of taking the more roundabout route of small streets and alleys. Luckily, hardly a vehicle was on the road anymore. If soldiers or coi bois came upon them now, they would be unable to run away. The traffic thinned even more as they approached the residential section where the American embassy was located. Here the streets appeared deserted, and she felt cheered that the hardest part of the ordeal was nearly over.
Linh collapsed against the trunk of a large tamarind tree. The neighborhood was old here; the branches arched over the streets in an umbrella of shade. Many of the trees on other streets had been chopped down to make room for tanks. A pair of helicopters came in, and Helen saw them clearly now down to the runners, heard the throbbing of one as it hovered over the embassy grounds, waiting for the first to land.
“We’re close now,” she said and squeezed his hand.
He leaned against the tree, holding on to it to stay upright, his face as wet as if he had just doused it with water. The blood spot on his shirt was as large as an outstretched hand. He gave her a stiff nod.
“We can’t stop again,” Helen said. “Next stop is inside.”
This was as bad as her worst patrols, each step an act of will, the urge to lie down overwhelming.
A block away from the embassy, a new noise joined the cacophony of helicopters and distant artillery. A silky, rustling sound, constant yet changing like the rolling of the ocean. Helen and Linh turned the last corner and came to a standstill.
A sea of bodies spread before them, not an inch of ground empty, bodies limited only by the buildings they were crushed against, from the front of embassy gates to the other side of the boulevard. Not a static, passive crowd, but a turbulent ocean of people eddying around motorcycles and islands of stacked suitcases, people surging and dashing themselves up against the solid metal gates of the embassy front like waves crashing against the rocks of a forbidding coast, breaking and falling back onto themselves.
Helen stood, numbed by the sight of Americans locking themselves away, fleeing. She glanced at Linh, who barely registered the turmoil around him. If he lost consciousness, it would be over for both of them.
“Give me the gun,” she said.
Too weak to argue, he handed it off to her. If anyone used it, it would have to be her. Helen took off the safety and placed her index finger on the trigger. In all her years in-country, she had never carried a weapon, had refused to make a decision to defend herself. Yet Linh had just killed to save her.
Shouldering her way into the back of the throng, moving toward the side entrance, her fingers firmly locked around Linh’s wrist, she figured even if they made it inside, the film cases would have to be sacrificed at some point along the way. But not without a fight.
The first people who felt the pressure of her pushing turned with angry glances but shrank away once they saw her.
She looked down to her blood-covered smock, realizing it wasn’t her own blood but the child- faced soldier’s. Her stomach flopped. She wanted to rip the smock off, but there was hardly room to lift her arms. If she released her grip on Linh, he might go down under the feet of the crowd. So she let go her grip on the gun, dropping it into her smock’s pocket, and reached up and pulled the black scarf off her head. She wiped dried blood off her face, wiped the smock, then let go of the scarf and watched it suspended between the bodies of people before it disappeared from sight as if in quicksand.
In the hot wind her hair blew, and the faces around her registered the fact that she was an American, or at the very least a Westerner, and more compelling than resentment was their realization that staying close might be a ticket out. “Make way for the dying American, make room for the dying American.” And so Helen and Linh were surrounded and nudged through the crowd, and after two hours they were pressed into the grillwork of the side gate.
She felt delivered, grateful for the Marines with their crew cuts and black-framed glasses, elated at the sight of their uniforms and reassured by the M16s across their chests that rendered her own attempt at self-protection ridiculous. Almost delirious, head throbbing, legs like paper, she realized that she was still on the wrong side of the gate, the guards so overwhelmed they didn’t see her.
All around her voices were raised to the highest pitch-pleading, Vietnamese words falling on deaf ears, begging in pidgin English for rescue. People bargaining, trying to bribe at this too-late hour with jewelry and gold watches and dirty piastres pushed through the bars of the gate, valuables flung inside in this country where wealth was so scarce.
A man close to Helen held out a baby. “Not me. Take my baby. Save my son.” He would pay one million piastres, two million, and as he met silence on the other side of the gate, he cried and said five million, five million piastres, money that he had either amassed over decades or stolen in minutes. He opened a sack and shoved bundles of the bills through the gate to obligate his son’s protectors, unaware that to these Americans his money was worthless, less than Monopoly money, that these soldiers were scared of this dark-faced mob, unable to grant safety even to one baby, that all they wanted was to protect the people already inside and escape from this sad joke of a war themselves.
Helen’s arm jerked down as Linh collapsed behind her, his legs buckled, and she screamed in Vietnamese, forgetting, languages blurring, then realizing her mistake, screaming in English, “Let us in. I’m American press.”
The Marine’s head turned at the sound of her words. “Jesus, what’s happened to you?”
“Let us in.”
“Open the gate,” he said, motioning to the guards behind him.
As the gate opened, more Marines came to provide backup, aiming automatic rifles into the crowd.
The guard put a hand against Linh’s chest. “He can’t come.”
“He works for the American newswires. He’s got papers.”
“Too late for papers,” he said. “Half the people out here have papers.”
“Damn you,” Helen screamed. “This man was just wounded saving my life.”
“Can’t do it.”
“He’s my husband.”
“I suppose you have a marriage certificate?”
“He stays, I stay. And if I get killed by the NVA, the story of the embassy refusing us will be in every damned paper. Including your name.”
The guard’s face was covered in sweat, already too young and tired and irritable for his years. “Shit, it doesn’t hardly matter anymore. Get in.” He came out a few more steps, grabbed Linh, then Helen, and flung them inside like dolls. The man with the baby tried to grab Helen’s arm, but the Marine punched him back into the net of the crowd. As they passed through the gates, five or six Vietnamese used the chaos to rush in. They scattered into the crowd, invisible like birds in a forest, before the guards could catch them. Guns fired, and Helen hoped they had been fired into the air. No more blood on her hands this day. With a great metallic clang, the gate shut again.
