Gift of the Golden Mountain (79 page)

     "Or that's what he wants us to think, to get himself off the hook. 'It's the drug talking, man. Can't help myself.' Bull. He can help himself, and he's doing it by extortion and blackmail and kidnapping. He should be locked up for all those reasons. Hao and An are my first priorities."

     "Sam is going to destroy himself, Hayes. Faith tried to warn me. She sensed the struggle going on inside of him long ago. That last time we saw Sam, she told me she thought he was losing. She helped him get a start in photography because she felt he was
an artist at heart, and she thought that somehow that art might turn out to be his salvation. In Hawaii, she knew it wasn't going to be enough. I didn't listen to her because I couldn't, not then. I was afraid if I waited any longer, I'd risk losing you. Again, you, me and Sam."

     For a moment she thought Hayes had drifted off to sleep. "Honey?" she asked, quietly.

     "Yes," he answered, so she knew he was thinking. He took his time; the room filled with the sound of the fan as it rasped through the warm air. "So you're saying Sam's whole life has been an act of self-destruction? That the only way he could live with it was to direct his self-hatred somewhere else, and my family was it?"

     "Something like that. Love and hate all mixed up."

     "Maybe. I know people become unhinged over here. It's not hard to see why . . . our motives are so goddamned mixed. Remember Gerard's remark about Vietnamese and Americans bringing out the worst in each other? Sam proves his point. If he weren't so dangerous, I might be able to dismiss him. Gut he knows about Hao now, and things are so goddamned volatile here, I've got to do something about Sam."

     "You don't think he'll just nod off into oblivion?" she whispered.

     "I can't take that chance. And there's Galt, too. Hao and An are too important."

     Her stomach rumbled. She put her hand on it, felt the sticky dampness of her flesh. A faint light filtered into the room from the street, casting shadows on the wall. She thought about the bats in the plain tain trees and shuddered. In Hong Kong, Hayes had talked about her money and the complications it would bring to their lives. She felt a sharp cramp in her stomach. The faint light that filtered in from the street was enough to guide her to the bathroom. She poured herself a spoonful of Pepto Bismol, drank it with a shudder and thought, Hayes was right. First Eli, now Sam. Flesh for money. Her money was the draw. For a moment she
thought she was going to retch. She felt dizzy, her skin was cold and clammy to the touch. She forced herself to drink two more spoonfuls, and drank some of the bottled water.

     When she returned to bed he asked, drowsily, "Okay, babe?"

     "Yes," she whispered, "go back to sleep." She wanted to say how sad it made her, how sorry she was. She lay her head close to his, and listened to his sleep breathing, in rhythm to the turning of the fan. Sleep, when it came to her, was troubled.

     When they woke it was full light, the ceiling fan had ceased to revolve, and the air pressed heavily on them, as if their bodies had to carry the burden of the pressure of this country.

Before sunset that day, Sam Nakamura was on one flight out of Saigon, Galt was on another. The South Vietnamese functionaries who escorted them to the planes made it clear that if either attempted to reenter the country, he would be imprisoned. Sam left with only a navy blue nylon flight bag, in which he carried all of his worldly possessions—two or three changes of underwear, several shirts, a shaving kit, and fifteen rolls of unprocessed, uncaptioned film. His cameras were gone, he could not remember when he sold them, or how much Mud they had bought. Mud. Asian Mud. Opium. He was rolling in it now, he was up to his neck in mud and it soothed and comforted him. Words sang in his head.
I am the kingdom and the glory, come unto me, come into the mud, sink into the mud.
He wondered how it would feel, when finally he slipped under, into the cool, cool dark.

     When the cabin attendant reached for the blue nylon bag to stow it above his seat, he had to stifle the urge to grab it back, to hold tight to it, to feel through the cloth the canisters of film, wherein lay his security, his Mud.

     Hayes was shaving when the first call came through. "Get your body back here on the double, boy-o," Davis in the deputy director's office shouted over the bad connection. "You are being summoned to the Presence. Your star is definitely in the ascendency. The word is, big things are in store, buddy."

     "What does it mean?" May wanted to know.

     Hayes grinned. "Hard to say. I hope it means my radical background is going to be less of a stumbling block. Since Congress has overridden Nixon's veto of the law limiting the president's right to wage war, the writing is pretty much on the wall—for him, and for Vietnam."

     "All the more reason to get Hao out," she said.

     "All the more reason," he repeated, grim.

     The second call was from Karin, in Honolulu. "Israel is gone," she said, her voice hollow with grief.

     May felt the tears slide down her face, the salt taste of them in the damp heat. A blotch fell onto her silk slip, leaving a wet mark. Hayes sat next to her on the bed, touched the wet place with his fingertip as if he could absorb some of her grief. "It is all so hard" she cried, and he had no answer except to hold her and rock her in his arms.

They left without seeing An or Hao. None of their calls were answered, and when they stopped by the house on Nguyen Dinh Chieu Street on their way to the airport, the servant said no one was there, that everyone had gone, that they should leave and not come back. They stood in the dusty street, under the plantain trees, and May thought about the bats and felt the futility of it. "How do we make them understand?" she said, knowing he had no answer.

That same day Hayes returned to Washington for his command appearance, while May returned to Hawaii for yet another funeral.

     On the long flight over the Pacific she thought about Israel, and about Andy and Dan and Vietnam, and about Eli and Sam, and lost battles. Her stomach felt tight from sleeplessness and grief and the strange, unsettling spell cast over her by Vietnam. She drifted into a troubled sleep, filled with the choking smell of burning trees from which bats escaped, and a child's scream for help. Struggling out of the dream, she wakened to the bright glare of a moonset. She opened her eyes to the white-silver light, to the full moon shining over the empty sea, and she blinked and saw it, as clear as day: The rabbit in the moon.

May wants me to stay on but I cannot. Now that Israel is gone . . . buried in Punchbowl, not far from Daniel Ward . . . it is time for me to go home.

     "Why?" Annie and Karin ask me, why when you love it so here where the weather is warm and the sky is forever blue and your bones don't ache all the time?

     "Because," I tell them stubbornly, "I have to go home." How can I explain the hold that old cottage has on me? It is silly, of course, to be so attached to a collection of old boards, many of which have had to be replaced in the sixty years I have lived there. How to tell them what comfort there is in knowing every inch of a place, of being able to run one's fingertips over a soft redwood window ledge which bears the imprint of Emilie's baby teeth?

     Emilie. I want to be closer to my daughter. And my granddaughter needs to return to the mainland and get on with her life.

     I need to finish my work on the archive, to get it ready to pass along to the next caretaker. Kit writes from the Malibu that she will have time, now, to go over the work I have done and decide, with my help, who is to succeed me. She hopes I am in no great hurry.

     I am in no great hurry, but I am eighty-one. My candle burns
low, at times the light is not bright. I must use a magnifying glass to read. Old age is such a bloody nuisance! Annie threatens to become my eyes and my ears, and I must be diligent not to let her become indispensable. She is such a big, robust, generous girl, but she blows with the wind. She has talent and energy to spare, but little ambition, I think. "Big girl, big heart," Abigail said of her, approvingly, but then she had added, "She better watch out, that one, before she gives it all away."

     I didn't need to ask Abigail what she meant by "it." There are always boys who hang around, hankering after Annie. Sometimes, late at night, I can hear them laughing and singing out by the beach. Her voice is a firm, steady contralto, Annie's candle is strong and bright and burns at both ends, and she flings herself into the storm, lighting the way for everyone. That is what distresses Emilie, of course. That her girl cannot take what she calls "any of the ordinary precautions." Even when she knows that Annie is neither ordinary nor cautious, and can never be.

     So it is settled; we are going home, and I am going to concentrate on the "May Papers," as I call them.