In the end we win on an amazing cutback Clive slices into the corner. He misses scratching by a centimeter. “Brave,” I say.
He pats me on the head. “No. Just good.”
“Another?”
“Not tonight, kiddo. I’m knackered. Going home to the missus.”
“Sounds lovely.” He just smiles and shuffles out barefoot into the dark.
It’s midnight, and the place is getting crowded, filling up with overflow from the Apocalypse. Phượng is delivering drinks, so there will be no window time before closing. Ian comes in, takes his usual place at a corner table, and nods at me. I nod back. I know I should get on my bicycle and go home, but the idea is too depressing. I don’t want to be lonely any night, but for some reason — maybe the twisted clarity of too many beers, or Phượng’s situation, or the music, or the rain, or my brother — I especially don’t want to be lonely this night. I wonder where James Taylor was when he wrote that song. Not Saigon, I bet. I bet it was someplace he knew and unquestionably belonged, and that he wasn’t even all that lonely.
Phượng takes Ian his beer, and I watch as he puts his hands around her tiny waist and pulls her close for a quick kiss when no one else is looking. I don’t count. I am a collaborator. And all of a sudden I want what they have, even if I don’t get to know exactly what it is, or even if I’ve been telling myself for years there is no future in it. I suspect it is something along the lines of love.
Phượng leaves for the bar and Ian waves me over to come sit with him. I am caught off guard by how grateful I feel but mostly am relieved to have at least a semilegitimate reason to stay awhile longer. On the way, I pick up a beer for him and a bottle of water for me. I already know I am going to feel like hell in the morning, but I don’t have to hammer in the last nail. Since tomorrow is Saturday, I have only one class — a sweet and ragtag band of earnest college students I will meet at the park in the afternoon — and then the eight-to-midnight shift at the shelter. I’ll survive.
Ian takes note of the water, my unfocused eyes, and says, “How many?”
“How many what?” I know what he’s asking but don’t want to admit to more than I have to right away.
“Sandwiches.”
“I was working on my second.”
“Thought better of that?”
“I did.”
A Tiger sandwich is three beers: one Tiger beer between two other Tiger beers. Two or more sandwiches is tilt. Not pretty. He gives me a thumbs-up. Which is nice. We try to guess the tourists’ nationalities and watch them flirt with the taxi girls. Eventually I go home.
Ian was one of the first people I met here, the night I found the Lotus, the first time I was brave enough to leave the one square block containing the eight-dollar-a-night hotel I stayed in for a few weeks after I landed. The block I had confined myself to, terrified of venturing any farther, of crossing the street. I had been in town only four days, but they had been long ones, spent mostly sleeping, dreaming of mountains and highways and home, fox dens and snow caves, waking to wonder what I had done. My room was enormous and timeworn; painted, with what looked like watercolor, a peeling and mottled blue: walls, floor, ceiling, doors, and window frames. The filmy curtains were also blue, and the holey mosquito net. It was like being underwater, and finally I had to get out, before I couldn’t anymore. In those four days I memorized the entry for “blue” in my dictionary. It said:
of a color intermediate between green and violet, as of the sky or sea on a sunny day: the clear blue sky / blue jeans / deep blue eyes.
(of a person’s skin) having or turning such a color, esp. with cold or breathing difficulties: The boy went blue, and I panicked.
(of a bird or other animal) having blue markings: a blue jay.
(of cats, foxes, or rabbits) having fur of a smoky gray color: the blue fox.
(physics) denoting one of three colors of quark.
It was Ian’s table that first Lotus night, and I watched him win for a long time before I had the nerve to put my name on the board. I was too unsteady to shoot well but made a few decent shots and earned myself a beer and some conversation, in English, which was a lot like being let out on my own recognizance. But after so much time and silence, it was hard to get used to talking again.
He asked what part of Canada I was from. Later I would find out the locals did that to avoid insulting anyone by guessing they were American. At the time, though, I just said no part, but close.
“Yank, then?”
“Yank.” I laughed. I’d never been called one of those before.
“What brings you to our fair city?”
“Curiosity, I guess.”
“You know about the cat, right?”
“What cat?” He waited for me to figure it out, which took me longer than it should have. “Oh, the curious one.”
“Right.”
“I do. We have that cat in America too.”
“Con mèo,” he said. My first Vietnamese lesson. I knew then that I could easily come to love a language in which the word for an animal was the sound it made.
He asked me how long I planned to stay, and I said I didn’t know. My ticket was open-ended and my purpose was clear as mud.
“Good luck with that,” he said, but not in a way that would make me feel ridiculous. More than, in some unnamable way, I already did.
After a few months I constructed something of a purpose: living, getting from place to place, not crashing my bicycle, teaching idioms and street slang, feeding feral orphans. A few months more, and Saigon’s incessant din and treacly grime and sleepless lunacy have taken me over. The city carries me along like a wave. Or an avalanche.
Which leaves little time to think about the reasons I came here: most of all to locate Mick, or his bones; or if not his actual bones, then his spirit, and anything else he could have left behind. Something I can see, or touch, or at least find a place in me that will accept this: MIA, after all these years, means gone, gone, gone, really gone. This will mean bucking up long enough to go to Củ Chi — so close it is practically a suburb — getting down on all fours and crawling into the tunnels where the army mislaid my brother.
1. Hawks
They say our early memories are really memories of what we think we remember — stories we tell ourselves — and as we grow older, we re-remember, and often get it wrong along the way. I’m willing to believe that, but I still trust some of my memories, the most vivid, like this one: there was a newspaper, and a headline, bigger than the everyday ones. It was morning and I was alone at the kitchen table, sleepy, my feet resting on the dog — he was a cow dog, speckled black and white, name of Cash — on the floor underneath. I had a spoon in my hand and was waving it around; drops of milk splashed on the paper.
The headline said, “Johnson Doubles Draft to 35,000.” It was summer and I was nine. I knew who Johnson was. He was the president. He was tall and talked funny, and his nose took up half his face. The reason he got to be president was on account of the last one getting shot in Texas, by Lee Harvey Oswald, who got shot by Jack Ruby, who did not get shot by anyone. JFK was the president when I first started school. John-John and Caroline were his kids and his wife looked like a movie star. When they buried him, she wore a black veil over her face so no one could see if she cried. John-John held her hand.
President Johnson, in the paper, said Vietnam was a different kind of war. I knew I could ask Mick about that: about how many kinds of war there were, or how there could even be different kinds, but he was outside. My parents were out there too — Mom probably in the garden already, digging up potatoes before the sun got so high and hot it would turn them green, and Dad fixing fences or tractoring or scaring up dopey runaway calves. The usual. Our life.