‘In the end it all came down on Cody,’ Pai quietly interrupted him. ‘He had volunteered for the Black Ponies so nobody could say he was looking for an easy time of it. The losses were like snakes in his head, I could see it every day.’
‘It wasn’t just me,’ Cody said with a touch of bitterness. ‘It was the mission. It’s always the fucking mission. You set out to do what you have to do regardless of the cost. But then you begin to wonder.
Hell, is the mission right or wrong? You probably don’t understand that, Hatch.’
‘More than you might think,’ Hatcher said.
‘The final irony is I became one of the losses. That morning I had picked up a letter for John Rossiter, my gunner. But I forgot to give it to him. I never carried any ID — shit, I knew if I went down and they knew who I was, who my father was, then school was out. So all I had was that letter and Rossiter burning to a crisp, the whole jungle afire behind me. I saw that chopper coming in and I thought, God, I’m gonna get out of this. Then suddenly it turned around and just — flew away.
‘Then the bullets started hitting around me, the fire was all over — so I threw away my dog tags. Next thing I knew, I had my hands up and they were frisking me and they found that letter and all of a sudden I was Gunner’s Mate John Rossiter.
‘Riker was the first to recognize me. But he kept mum, they all decided to keep mum. But I figured the least I could do was act like the ranking officer.’
‘He tried negotiating with Taisung,’ Namteen said. ‘To get medicine for Wonderboy and morphine for Johnny and keep Max out of the hole so he would not go crazy.’
‘And food, just food,’ Cody said. ‘I became the camp negotiator, the pimp. The fuckee. If Prophett needed heroin, I sold a piece of myself for heroin. If Wonderboy needed medicine, another piece for medicine. Another piece to keep Max out of the hole so he wouldn’t go stark raving mad. I was Taisung’s slave.’
‘The trouble was, I really didn’t have anything to trade for,’ Cody said. ‘And then . .
‘And then?’ Hatcher repeated.
‘And then Pai came to us,’ Cody said.
Unsure whether Cody was alive or dead, Pai had set out to find him. She knew only to go northwest and northwest she went. In Vietnam she was Vietnamese. In Cambodia, she was Cambodian. In Laos, she became Laotian. Wherever the was, she smiled and talked and listened. She worked when she had to for food and then moved on. She waded through the rice paddies, dodged the Khmer Rouge, slept in trees to avoid wild animals, almost died twice with fever.
She kept going, crossed the Annimitique, found the remains of one camp the telltale holes dug in the ground, the remnants of bamboo cell doors — devoured by vines and ground crawlers. The skeletons. She moved on, encouraged and discouraged at the same time.
And then one day she heard the voices — the unmistakable profanity of GIs — and she crept through the jungle grass and saw the camp and that night she crept up to the holes in the ground they called cells and softly caned his name as she crept from one to the other and finally she heard Cody’s unbelieving voice answer, ‘Pai?’ and she lay across the crisscrossed bamboo doors, reached down and felt his hand take hers.
‘Oh, Cody,’ she whispered through her tears, ‘at last I have found you.’
It had taken her six months to get to the Huie-kui.
‘Oh, Cody, at last I have found you,’ Cody repeated her words. ‘God, I can’t tell you how I felt at that moment’
He stopped and swallowed hard and then said, ‘And finally. . . I had something to offer Taisung.’
He whispered as if he feared the words would turn to ashes in his mouth, and they hung in the air along with all their terrible implications.
‘It was my choice,’ Pai said in her soft voice. ‘I wanted most to keep Cody alive, to keep them all alive. No one asked me to do what I did.’
‘And I didn’t stop her,’ said Cody, turning and staring straight at Hatcher, and the expression on his face said all that needed to be said about what living had cost him and the woman he loved.
‘We stayed alive, most of us anyway. Jaimie Solomon was eaten up with cancer. He got back to the States. Joe Binder died in the camp, and Sammy Franklin died of malnutrition before Pai ever found us.’
‘Jaimie Solomon?’ Hatcher said, remembering the note that had been left on the Wall.
‘The main thing is, Pai kept us there,’ said Cody. ‘Taisung didn’t send us to Hanoi. We honestly believed that if we went to Hanoi it was all over.’
‘I seduced Taisung,’ Pai said, staring at Hatcher’s feet. ‘I went downriver and brought him liquor, cigarettes, everything he needed to make life easy for him. Then I brought him China White.’
‘That was my idea,’ said Cody. ‘Hook the son of a bitch. Once he was hooked he’d do anything to get a fix. Johnny Prophett had the connection and Pai was free to move around.’
‘First, a little for the nose,’ said Pai. ‘Then the needle.’
‘Then we had the son of a bitch,’ said Cody.
Earp appeared in the doorway drinking a beer.
‘Everything okay?’ he said.
‘Come on in,’ Cody answered. Earp entered the small room and leaned against the wall.
‘Jaimie left you a note,’ said Hatcher.
‘A note? Where?’
‘At the Wall in Washington, the Vietnam memorial. He thanked you for Thai Horse. Now I know what he meant. He was talking about the Thai Horse that led the fallen warriors to heaven.’
‘That’s right. It was Pai who led us out of that hellhole into Bangkok,’ Cody said. ‘That’s why Johnny called her Thai Horse.’
‘The war had been over almost a year, and Taisung was still holding them,’ Earp said. ‘That’s where I came into it. Hanoi was on to Taisung. He was going to run for it and leave us there with a handful of guards. They probably would have killed us. But Pai offered a trade-out. She’d set up an escape and he could come out with the boys. I was living in Bangkok and helped set up the escape route and the boats.’
‘We should have killed Taisung ‘when we had the chance,’ said Cody, ‘but he was too quick for us. He stole one of the boats and made a break.’
‘And you just stayed here in Bangkok?’ Hatcher said to Cody.
‘That’s right,’ Cody said. ‘During the years I was a prisoner, things happened things that could never be explained properly.’ Cody stopped ‘with a sigh, then went on, ‘When we finally escaped into Thailand in late ‘76, I found out I was officially dead. The insurance was paid, my wife had remarried. My kids had a new father. Me? I had Pai and a chance to start over. What was there to go back to, Hatch? I decided to stay dead. When we first got out I used to fantasize about sneaking back just to get a look at the kids. They were one and two when I left, still one and two in my head — they’re in high school now. Well, so much for fantasy. Hell, I don’t even have a passport.’
‘And the others?’ Hatcher asked.
‘Well, we had Gallagher, who was looking at five to ten years for grand theft, and Riker, who was facing a court-martial for striking an officer. ‘You know Johnny Prophett’s problem. He and Melinda stayed here because dope is inexpensive and accessible. That’s when Sweets and Wyatt started the Longhorn. Tombstone just kind of grew out of it.’
‘How about the rest of them? Corkscrew, Potter, Max Early?’
Earp said, ‘When we got out, Early called home to Utah. The phone was disconnected, the house was sold, his wife and two kids were long gone. What the hell did he have to go home to? Corkscrew? And ex-Detroit pimp. Bangkok was heaven compared to that. Besides, the only family he had was his brother and he was killed on that ridge. And Potter? What was his option — a scratch farm in Arkansas and a wife who serviced everybody in the state while he was gone? The irony is that we were all bonded by those years of imprisonment. Corkscrew and Early couldn’t reveal what had happened to them without jeopardizing Cody, Riker and Gallagher, so they all stayed dead.’