I read this now while I’m hidden in the storage shack, invisible, soaked with sweat like it’s that time in Saigon between the dry season and the rainy season, and I know my father will be here soon. The lawn mower is over there in the corner and this morning he got up and said that it was going to be hot today, that there were no clouds in the sky and he was going to have to mow the lawn. When he opens the door, I will let him see me here, and I will ask him to talk to me like in these letters, like when he was so angry with some stranger that he knew what to say.
LOVE
I was once able to bring fire from heaven. My wife knew that and her would-be lovers soon learned that, though sometimes the lesson was a hard one for them. But that was in Vietnam, and when the need arose once more, here in America, I had to find a new way. You see, it has never been easy for a man like me. I know I appear to be what they call here a “wimp.” I am not a handsome man, and I am small even for a Vietnamese. I assume the manners of a wimp, too, and I am conscious of doing that. I have done it all my life. I cross my legs at the knee and I step too lightly and I talk too much on subjects that others find boring. But there are two things about me that are exceptional. First, I was for many years a spy. You think that all spies look like the men in the movies. But real spies have a cover identity, even if that cover was in place many years before they began their secret life. The second thing about me is that I have a very beautiful wife. I married her when she was fifteen and I was twenty-five. Her parents were friends of my parents and they liked me very much and they gave me this great blessing and this great curse.
Her name is Bu’ó’m, which means in English “butterfly.” She is certainly that. She would fly here and there, landing on this flower or that, never moving in a straight line. And how do you summon a butterfly? Only show it a pretty thing. It is not her fault, really. It is her nature. But it is a terrible thing to be married to a beautiful woman. We lived in the town of Biên Hòa, very near an air base and two big American camps, Long Binh and one they called Plantation, and when my wife walked down the street of Biên Hòa, she was dressed in black pantaloons and a white blouse like all the other women but it was so clear how different she was. Her sleeves were rolled far up and her top two buttons were undone for the heat and her hair was combed out long and sleek, and the GI jeeps would slam on their brakes and honk and the Vietnamese men would straighten up slowly and flare their nostrils and the Vietnamese boys on their motorbikes would crane their necks going by, even though more than once I saw them run into some automobile or fruit cart or a pile of garbage and fly through the air for trying to look twice at my wife.
Of all these men and boys it was the Vietnamese I worried about. No American ever tried seriously to go out with my wife. They had their Vietnamese whores at the camps, and it should be said for my wife that she never much liked the looks of the Americans anyway. This is true even today, after we have lived in Gretna, Louisiana, for more than a dozen years. It was the Vietnamese who I feared. They loved my wife, all these men, and it was only to be expected that some of them would try to have her. They would believe that she could be had. Why else, they reasoned, would she be so beautiful and swing her hips in that way and unbutton those two extra buttons on her blouse? How much cooler did she really think that would make her?
But these men were warned. And some of them never showed up again after they ignored the warnings. I could bring the fire from heaven to keep them away from my wife. I was a spy, after all. I worked with many Americans at Plantation. They came and they went each year and I would always bring them what they needed. They called me an agent handler, because I had two dozen people working for me. My eyes and ears. The schoolgirls and the woodcutters and the old women and the Regional Forces soldiers and boys from the neighborhoods on their bikes and others like these — they brought me information and I took the information to the Americans, signing onto the post as a day laborer. Most of what I brought them was tactical intelligence. A VC squad with a political cadre coming down from Lái Khê and working the widows’ settlement near Biên Hòa. A rocket attack planned on the air base at dawn from a certain place in the woods. Things like that. And when I gave them this information, I was right often enough that the Americans didn’t really question me after a while, especially about rocket attacks. If I said there were going to be rockets at dawn from such and such coordinates, then first thing the next morning the United States Air Force would come in and blow those coordinates away.
You can see how this might be a great help to a seemingly wimpy man with a beautiful wife. When my people brought me information about my wife and another man, or I used the evidence of my own eyes, I would send a warning to the man. The fire would come from heaven, I told him in a note delivered by one of my agents. I told him that my wife carries this ancient curse with her. The curse of the little man. I would sometimes go into historical detail. Napoleon Bonaparte, for instance, was very small and conquered 720,000 square miles of Europe. Attila, King of the Huns and ruler of an empire of 1,450,000 square miles, was still smaller, thought even to be a dwarf. History teaches, by the way, that not only is the curse I bring upon the would-be lovers ancient, but the problem of the husband is ancient, too. Napoleon had great troubles with his butterfly of a wife and Attila died in the middle of making love, no doubt due to his being foolish enough to have many wives. But, of course, these are observations that I left out of my warning messages, which were clear and forceful. And if they were not heeded, I would find the coordinates of the place where the man cut wood every morning or where he went to eat his lunch or to fish or some other place where the United States Air Force could find him. We are all creatures of habit.
And how did my wife react when she found some man who was pursuing her suddenly disappear? Perhaps the first time or two she felt that it was something she herself had said or done, or perhaps she thought they did not find her attractive anymore. (This makes me a little sad, to think I made my wife doubt herself. But surely she has always known how beautiful she is and nothing could truly shake that.) Later on she must have known that I was responsible in some dramatic way. But however it was that she felt, I can never say for sure. She would always maintain a face and attitude that revealed nothing. I would speak to her, as I often did, of history or politics or matters of daily life, and she would listen, her face bowed over her sewing, until it was time for us to sleep. Only once did she let on that she knew what had happened to her latest suitor. I believe that this man — a woodcutter with a shack by a stream — never understood what I could do. He was a big man, an arrogant man. One evening soon after this particular reported rocket attack was prevented by the United States Air Force, my wife looked up from her sewing. I had just paused for a few moments in speaking to her due to an itchiness in my throat, so at first I thought she wished me to quickly continue the observations that I had been making on the futility of using our Regional Forces irregulars to guard local government buildings. But instead, she said, “It’s sad, the mistakes made in a war.”
I knew at once what she was talking about. She had made a terrible mistake in letting this man get too close to her.
“Very sad,” I said.
“Do you think someone is actually in control of all these things that happen?” she asked.