The Snowfly Page 9

  This was not a good sign, I thought. “What?” I asked, spitting foul-­tasting water.

  “You’re in a minefield,” the black soldier said.

  My heart started backfiring. “It’s not marked.”

  “This is fucking I Corps, man. What the fuck good’s a minefield, you put a sign up for, Charlie?” This from the black marine.

  He had a point.

  “How do I get out?”

  “Follow your tracks,” the black soldier said. He looked at his partner and they both smiled and nodded.

  I was in water the color of dry straw. There were no tracks. “That’s a problem,” I said.

  “That would be a rog,” the white guy said.

  “Seriously, is there a trick to getting out?”

  “Jes’ luck,” the black soldier said.

  Great. My options were all bad and my legs were shaking. I couldn’t believe I had been so stupid.

  In a war it doesn’t pay to agonize or delay decisions. I sucked in a deep breath, let it out, and started wading awkwardly through the muck-­bottomed water toward the Marines, who got up and fled, clasping their helmets to their heads.

  There were no explosions except in my chest.

  I caught up with the Marines a hundred yards from the paddy. They were hunkered under a small tree, crowding each other for shade.

  “You guys were joking, right?”

  “We don’t joke about mines,” the black man said. “Who are you, man?”

  “Rhodes, UPI.”

  “A pencil?” he asked.

  I nodded.

  “It’s your job to ask questions, right? They pay you to ask questions, am I right?” He didn’t wait for my response. “You’d better get better at your job, man.”

  I took out a drenched pack of smokes and tossed it on the ground in disgust. The white soldier offered me one of his and lit me up.

  “Where are you guys from?” I asked.

  “Michigan,” the black man said. “Both of us. Different families.”

  I laughed out loud and I told them I was from the same state and we began the game called Small World.

  Over the next two days I got to know the two sergeants. The white one was Grady Service, who had been raised in the Upper Peninsula, his dad a game warden. The black man was Luticious Treebone, a Detroiter with a perpetual and infectious smile. Grady and Tree. They were friendly and wired, their eyes never still, as if they expected to be assaulted at any moment.

  “Why’re you hangin’ around MagNo?” Service asked one afternoon.

  “I want to go out on an op with you guys. I made a formal request through channels, but you know how that goes.”

  They both nodded. “Why you wanna go?” Treebone asked.

  “It’s my job to go and see.”

  “You’ll never get approval,” Service said. “No way, Jose. What we do is in the black.”

  Treebone chimed in. “And black in this context definitely ain’t beautiful.”

  “You want a story?” Service asked.

  Of course I did.

  “This is righteous, okay? Up north on the En-Vee-Lao border there are animals that few people have ever seen and most scientists in the world have never heard of.”

  I probably grinned. “Like some kind of Shangri-la.”

  Service gave me a harsh glance. “No, man. This is for real.” His tone was earnest.

  “You’ve seen this place?”

  “Once,” Service said, staring off into the distance.

  “Where is it?” I asked. “Exactly.”

  I followed them to a bunker with thick walls of iron sheeting and sandbags. Service got a map out of a musty leather case. The area he pointed to was at least one hundred miles north of the Demilitarized Zone, that belt of land that separated the two Vietnams and, contrary to its title, was more militarized than just about any locale in either country.

  “You were all the way up there? On foot?”

  Service smiled and said, “I can neither confirm nor deny.”

  “Doing what?”

  “Peepin’, lookin’ around, shit like that. The details are classified.”

  I couldn’t read him. He could have been yanking my chain. I still had my doubts about the minefield. “How would I get up there?”

  Treebone smiled. “You wouldn’t, man. After the war, maybe. But now, no way.”

  “That’s not much of a story.”

  “Suit yourself,” Service said.

  That night the two men came to my bunker just after dark, their faces streaked with vertical lines of black and green camo paint, their eyes blazing, nerves taut.

  “That place we told you about,” Service said. “It’s real. Tree and I were both there. There’s a lot of stuff on this planet still to be discovered.”

  “Why tell me?”

  “I thought you might write about the unexpected costs of war. Here’s a place that may have things that exist nowhere else on earth and we’re bombin’ the shit out of it and the NVA are using it to hide the shit they’re haulin’ down from Hanoi.”

  “Do I quote you?”

  “You do and our young asses will be cooked. Only Tree and me ever been in this place and if you say we told you, they will royally fuck us both over.”

  “Why?”

  “Because of what we were doin’ up there.”

  “Peeping.”

  He shrugged. “It wasn’t a Boy Scout camporee.”

  I thought about what he had to say. “I appreciate this, but it’s still hard to believe. Put yourself in my place.”

  Treebone laughed bitterly. “We’d love to, man! But we gotta split.” Service placed a crinkled snapshot on the cable spool that served as a table. It was some kind of antelope and not anything I recognized.

  “Show that around and if you can find anybody who can ID it, I’ll make sure Tree kisses your civilian ass.”

  The next day the two Marines were gone and word came down that my request to go out with the Lurps had been officially rejected due to the area’s “tactical instablity.”

  I figured the two sergeants had been toying with me, that they’d been bored and I had been the handiest entertainment. A secret place in North Vietnam with undiscovered animals? I doubted it, but I also remembered what Red Ennis had once said about the snowfly, that there was usually some kind of fire where there was smoke. Okay, the photo was more than smoke, but I wasn’t ready to buy the story. This was one bait I wasn’t going to take. While I waited for my chopper, I saw a water buffalo wade into my fishing paddy. I paid no attention until I heard shrill voices and a sharp thump followed by a geyser of pink-and-green water. A mine had exploded, leaving chunks of buffalo floating in the discolored water.

  The Marines had been serious about everything.

  When I got back to my office in Saigon, I sent a letter and the photograph to Lloyd Nash. I told him about the claim but not my sources and asked him to show the photo to some of his colleagues to find out if the animal was known.

  Then I forgot about the episode. I had wasted days with the Marines and all I had to show for the effort was one stupid move on my part, because of some fish of all things. Even if the secret place existed, I decided it was not my job to pursue it.

  For years after, I would wonder if the two Marines got out of the war alive. In my two years immersed in violence I often wondered this about the many people I encountered. I knew that not all of them would get home alive, and that this possibility also applied to me. Not that the odds against a reporter were as high as those against a grunt, but there was always a chance.

  There were many reporters, some of them quite famous, who rarely left the areas where they felt the safest and I couldn’t blame them. Queen Anna and my old man had always warned me to not go up the creek, but they also had instille
d in my sister and me an almost religious fervor for not buckling to fear.

  Queen Anna would say, “Bowie, God gave us imaginations in order to test our courage. Adam and Eve were afraid when they were cast out of Eden because they could imagine all sorts of horrible things. We’re all like that, but you can’t let your fears hold you back from doing what you think you need to do.” I never forgot her words. I felt fear many, many times in Vietnam and usually I could push through the veil of terror. Beating fear became a great part of what my life was all about.

  •••

  Soldiers on a yearlong tour in the combat zone got a two-week R&R break during their year. Two weeks out of thirteen months. I was more fortunate.

  For escapes I went to Bangkok, a city where you could walk faster than you could drive and everything and everyone was for sale. The Thai were devoted to their king and to literacy, but neither devotion seemed to move the country in any discernible direction. Spicy Thai food was created by ingenious sadists for insatiable masochists. Buddhist monks in saffron robes roamed the city begging alms. Prostitutes cost less than a gallon of gas in Detroit. The sprawling city’s ubiquitous canals, called klongs, were clogged with wooden speedboats and fecal matter. I was fascinated and repulsed by all of it.

  The Florida Hotel was ocher colored, seven stories, a U built around a small, long pool an even twenty feet deep. There was a bar in the basement. Reinforced windows in the bar allowed patrons to watch live underwater sex shows. After midnight it was amateur hour. You could sit and watch GIs and pilots on R&R screw fourteen-year-old hookers who took Americanized names like Wendy Sue and Zoe, which means “life.” As in the war itself, there were no rules on its periphery.

  There was no point in searching for a different kind of establishment. Every hotel and establishment in the city had its own version of the Florida’s erotic entertainment. I sometimes amused myself topside at the pool. Three very drunk F-105 pilots stumbled in one night and began stripping, staring down at unclad women in the pool. I was the veteran in this environment. “First time here, guys?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Stay away from the black-haired one, she has the clap.”

  “Hey, thanks.” They dove in.

  There was a couple at the table beside me.

  “You’re a naughty one, aren’t you, Yank?” said a gent in a double-breasted blue blazer festooned with brilliant gold buttons. He had a wide flat face, blond hair, and a ruddy complexion.

  “You’re not military,” the man continued. “Journo?”

  “It shows?”

  “Have a tonic, mate?”

  I moved to their table. A waiter brought a huge bottle of Foster’s.

  “Name’s Dickie Goodwin,” the man said. “Wife’s Gillian. Tazzies.”

  Which I eventually learned meant Tasmanians.

  Dickie Goodwin was fifty-seven, Gillian thirty-six. His fifth marriage, her second. His vocation he described as “a bitta,” meaning he had a lot of irons in various commercial fires, including a coffee plantation in South Vietnam, near the resort town of Da Lat. Thus far, he explained, his operation was producing without interruption through increased bribes, which he called “grease to the monkeys.”

  “Won’t last,” he added. “Northies are mobbing up all over. First Law of Business, mate: You don’t accumulate inventory if there’s no campaign in the offing.”

  “How do you know?” The brass in Saigon were paranoid about an enemy thrust out of their ubiquitous sanctuaries in Laos and Cambodia. There had been rumors of a major enemy offensive for nearly a year, but there had never been confirmation from intelligence, military or otherwise.

  “Simple, mate. I pay and they say. If they won’t, I don’t. Information is always available at a price, even from Reds. I’d think a journo would know that. Your shout, Yank.”

  It was my turn to buy a round. This led to another and another. The Tazzies were a gregarious pair with an astonishing capacity for alcohol.

  I awoke the next morning with a searing headache and a very naked Gillian Goodwin snoring lightly in my ear. Our clothes were nowhere to be seen. We were on a huge cushion on a wooden-plank verandah over green water. I watched a dark, waterlogged rat paddling frantically below us.

  I nudged Gillian.

  “Again?” she mumbled.

  “Gillian, where’s your husband? We need our clothes.”

  “Dickie’s in his bedroom, I should think,” she said sleepily. She had thick brown hair and high cheekbones. Her smile made long sliver-moon dimples appear. “Not to worry, mate. Dickie’s got a soft pommel. He doesn’t mind sharing a bit.”

  I slid off the cushion and looked around. “Our clothes?”

  “Later, love. Shall we celebrate the glorious sunrise?”

  There were boats passing by. “Where are we?”

  “The Klong House,” she said. “Probably. I don’t really remember. Did we have loads of fun before we got here?”

  She wasn’t the only one with a blank memory.

  She patted a pillow. “Don’t be paranoid, love. It’s the boy’s duty to do what his hostess wants.”

  Eventually we showered and dressed and joined Dickie Goodwin for a late brunch at a glass-topped table in a lush garden on top of the house. Frangipani perfumed the air just enough to overpower the river’s bouquet of garbage, oil, gasoline, and human waste.

  “You two don’t look so crook,” Dickie said. “Have a good go, did you, old girl?”

  “Quite,” Gillian said enthusiastically. “Legendary Yankee stamina.”

  “Good show,” Dickie said, slapping the table mirthfully. “Bit out of practice, Gil?”

  “Fair dinkum,” she said, feigning discomfort. “Feel absolutely deflowered.”

  A servant brought champagne in long-stemmed crystal flutes.

  “What do you write, mate?” Dickie Goodwin asked me.

  “War correspondent.”

  “Slog around in the bush with the lads, do you?”

  “Of course he does, Dickie. I can tell a bush slogger.”

  I nodded.

  “Been in the shit, have you?”

  “Some.”

  “Good-on-you, mate. Our own journos scribble from Bangkok. They are not a credit to their bloody race, I should think.”

  I had never thought of journalists as a race, but I had to concede he might be on to something. An increasing number of people certainly thought of us as a lower order, the so-called fourth estate.

  War, like politics, makes strange bedfellows. Literally and figuratively. Having superficially gotten past the discomfort of the peculiar arrangement with the Goodwins, I found Dickie and Gillian to be interesting and charming companions.

  A week after I left Bangkok Gillian unexpectedly showed up at my place in Saigon, on pho x con nhen cay go—the “Street of Spider Trees.” To find the gate into my garden, you had to negotiate a long, narrow, unlit alley. The seven-foot-high stone walls were topped with jagged shards of broken bottles and tight-packed coils of gleaming razor wire; the inner wall was bolstered by a double layer of sandbags. The garden itself was hard-packed sand. Somehow Gillian had found the place, which was not easy, even when you knew the way. She was sitting at the garden table under a single naked lightbulb when I dragged in around midnight. She wore a short skirt and had her legs crossed. She was restlessly jiggling a leg as clouds of insects fluttered around the lightbulb and crickets chirped incessantly.

  “Bloody crickets,” she said by way of a greeting. “Worse than our cockatoos.”

  “Gillian?” I was shocked to see her.

  “I’m dreadfully parched,” she said. “Had a thought you might be on the roger tonight with some libidinous doughnut dolly.”

  “Just working,” I said.

  “All work and no play,” she countered, teasingly.

 
“Pays my bar bill,” I said.

  She smiled approvingly and patted my behind. “I adore common sense. One tends to admire most what one doesn’t possess, d’ya think?”

  “It’s as workable a theory as any. What’re you doing here?”

  She beamed her infectious and mischievious smile. “Dickie said, ‘Old girl, you ought to pop over to the Trout, harvest what you can, and kiss the old spread good-bye.’ Dickie says the Red invasion’s imminent, Bowie.”

  The Trout? I wasn’t sure what she was talking about. It was often like this with her. “And he sent you?”

  “Dickie’s not the adventurous sort nowadays but I do so adore the Trout. Some boys have no sense of romance. To Dickie, the place is purely a bloody asset.”

  “The Trout?” She had said this twice.

  “Yes, dear. The coffee plantation is called the Trout House on the River of Trout, which the Vietnamese call song ca qua. Their word for ‘trout’ is the same as their word for ‘eggplant’ or some such thing,” she said with a deep laugh. “Such an imprecise language. It’s no wonder they’ve been fighting for centuries,” she added. “The Trout’s up in the central highlands, darling. It once belonged to Sir Thomas Oxley, an Englishman raised on the Test. And elsewhere, I should think. Rich bastard. Planted trout, he did. Absolutely pots about them. Must’ve cost him a bloody fortune, I should think, but fair dinkum, he pulled it off. The spread’s not quite a rajah’s jewel, but it’s splendid and the best trout fishing between here and India. Naturally, I adore it,” she said dramatically.

  “Are you telling me there are trout in Vietnam?”

  “Ah!” she said gleefully. “Only a devout Brother of the Angle would sound so incredulous. Of course there are trout and we can thank Sir Thomas for that! It’s quite amazing. Pine trees, cool nights, cold water, four seasons, perfect acidity, and such. The eggs came from stock in Uganda, can you bloody believe it? The Ugandan eggs were from brood stock originally from England but packed into South Africa by Sir John Parker and the Drakensbergers in 1890. From South Africa up to Uganda, and Oxley sent Ugandan ova to Vietnam in the nineteen-twenties. His stubborn English mind was set on propagating trout. Bloody miracle, indeed, but you know the Poms. Right or wrong, when they decide something will be, then it shall come to pass.”