“To where?” Broussard said. No one had told them their mission, nor who was their CO. The men had been muttering about it the last two days, in between talking shit and reminiscing about home, but all anyone—to a man—was told was to wait for their ride, and get on when it arrived. Broussard had assumed it would a truck, ferrying them to some shit job in the rear created to keep the castoffs occupied until the war was over. Why else was he let out of his cell back in Quang Tri?
“Does it really matter?” Darby said, fully dressed and geared up. How did he do that so fast? He clapped Broussard on the shoulder and peeled back a diseased grin of graying teeth crowded between tight lips. “You got somewhere else to be?”
Darby and Broussard jogged out of their tent, lugging their packs and rifles. Render, McNulty, and Jorge Medrano, proud son of the San Joaquin Valley, were waiting by the edge of the LZ, enveloped in purple smoke gouting from a signal grenade, whipped crazily by the gusts. They all held down their helmets and looked up, as three helicopters dropped from the sky at twice normal speed. A pair of Hueys flanked a CH-47 Chinook like sparrows fussing after a gliding hawk. All of them were painted black, and had no markings or numbers on the outer hulls.
The Chinook and one of the Hueys leveled off twenty feet above the ground. The remaining Huey dipped to the LZ, blades still spinning, landing skids barely touching the ground. The side door opened, and Render led the four others to the empty fuselage. Broussard couldn’t take his eyes off the Chinook waiting above them, its heavy bulk motionless and imposing. It was an impressive machine, long and rounded, like a killer whale on land, insides hollowed out to fill with every sort of promise of death. Its doors remained closed, windows blacked out. Broussard wondered what lay sleeping inside its stomach.
Broussard climbed in after Medrano, and before he could find a seat and strap in, the chopper was gaining altitude. He fastened his safety belt and looked down at the fire base below him. A dozen GIs moved like lazy beetles over the top of the raw hilltop sticking out from the surrounding jungle like a Franciscan skull, denuded of bamboo by machete and Ka-Bar. Broad backs filled sandbags, dug 40x40 foxholes that would someday probably save their lives, burned trash in fifty-five-gallon fuel barrels cut in half, smoked cigarettes and adjusted the M110 eight-inch howitzers choppered in months ago to provide fire support for terrified grunts humping through the jungles below in a ten-mile radius. None of them looked up to watch this strange array of unmarked helicopters and their confused passengers leave them behind, almost as if they were never there. Ghosts passing through.
But the group of South Vietnamese ARVN troops who were hunkered down by the perimeter, squatting in their own holes and listening to a transistor radio, all looked up as the helicopters rose into the sky. Before the side door slid shut again, each one of them raised their left hand and made a gesture with their fingers. Broussard couldn’t make out what it was at first, thinking it was a middle finger picked up through contact with the Americans. As the door sealed shut, Broussard realized they were crossing their fingers, which meant something far different in the land of the Blue Dragon.
5. Night Man
The outside knocks at the door. The door is thin, but holds, at least for now. The knocks have saved my life. The door only saves my dignity.
I can breathe again. My lungs unfold and my arms and my legs come back to me while my brain waits and my heart remembers its rhythm. And still the knocks come at the door. Steady, not any harder or softer. Now that my life is saved, now that Black Shuck has been chased off by an intrusion from the outside world over which it has no domain, my fear shifts to those knocks. It could be anyone, but worse yet, it could be someone who can drag me from my cave and throw me into a hole, without my medicine, with only violence and sleep as my eternal sentence. Violence and sleep. The violence of sleep until the day I stand on the brink of the abyss and am carried away into the forever dark with it dragging me there by my ankles.
A hand knocks again. A small hand, by the force of it. I would leave these knocks alone, but I know they won’t go away, and the racket will draw attention from those other kinds of eyes that are more than willing to snatch me up and put me in a cage. I’ll be goddamned if I ever let that happen.
I let my feet find the floor, knowing that it’s probably still covered in water of an endless depth that will swallow me like it tried to swallow my bed, weighed down by the hound. I step anyway, because I have to get off this raft, and toes come into contact with the dust and the damp. I stand, the wounds on my chest felt but invisible to daylight eyes. Mosquitoes circle silently in the air, just like in the jungle. They’re not as big here, and they refuse to bite me, holding back their malaria and meningitis. Maybe it’s the medicine in my brain, or the dreams in my head. Either way, they leave me alone, waiting for me to invite somebody else into the room so they can have their way.
The knuckles continue to rap at my door. This isn’t going away. None of it, not even the mosquitoes.
I walk jungle-quiet to the door and listen. No voices, just the knocks. I peel back the locks, turn the handle and open the door. A withered old woman stands just outside, her granddaughter next to her, holding her hand and holding her up, as the old woman is near collapse from age or grief or some combination of both that keeps old people going long after they should.
The granddaughter looks vaguely Caucasian, hazel eyes imploring me to let them in and give them peace. Another abandoned legacy from the war, this girl, left like a valley crater or rusting M48 tank. The girl and her grandmother are Vietnamese, cut deep by war—refugees just like me.
“Night Man, hep us, okay?”
She speaks pidgin English that an outsider would think was probably gifted to her by her G.I. father. But I know that wasn’t the case. She never met her daddy. Never knew his name or his face. He left or died before she was born, early in the back-story days of the war. Probably a contractor or CIA trainer, leaving behind one more colonial flag buried in the clay. Her English comes from pirate American radio and British Invasion records.
I look down at the girl, barely in her teens. She’s skinny but certainly thicker than any other girl in her family or on her block, with what was probably Scandinavian stock that filled out her hips and lightened her hair to a shiny bronze instead of a silken black. She’s an outcast just as much as I am, which makes her suited to life down in the Floating City. No child, your daddy never saw you born, never held you up like the gift you are.
“You hep us, okay? We pay.”
She holds up a covered bamboo basket. They never bring any cash. They bring trade. Food, family heirlooms, a chicken raised in their kitchen. The purest Triad heroin in the world, that would go for a cool grand in New Orleans or Harlem, but is cheaper than cooking oil in this neighborhood. Even with my employee discount, I can always use a little more junk, one half of an equation that has kept me on the edge of the abyss for going on four years. But she brought a basket, probably filled with something rolled and baked and totally worthless to me. I need cash, and I need sweet and sour white powders, and I need answers, and none of these things are standing in my doorway today.
The girl points to her grandmother. “See her dreams, Night Man. You tell.”
Người đêm, they used to call me, before. When I first stumbled down the street below and climbed up into my cave. Người đêm. I could barely get my tongue around it, even in my head. The older Thai, and the Vietnamese who never went back home even after all of us left, would mutter more quietly in French, putting a name to the man who had lost his. “Homme de nuit.”