The Brittle Limit, a Novel (18 page)

Severine gave Samnang one last hug and walked
to the door, stopping briefly to peer out the single window. It was
small but it would do. She looked back to see the little girl, who
waved a small hand.

As Severine walked down the steep steps and
through the house, her mind raced. Heang waited outside, his face a
sneer.

“You got to see the little girl. Now go.”

Severine picked the money up from the puddle
- Heang had kicked it in - and shook it.

“Thank you for letting me see her.” She bowed
with palms together to Heang and turned away.

“Kiem, I’m ready to go home now.”

Lighting a cigarette, Heang watched as the
tuk-tuk drove away. He liked to toy with his prey. He called out to
the guards. He had a job for them.

Chapter 22

The old man walked to a wall of stone that
rose up before them in the jungle. He flicked on a red flashlight.
Andrew watched in the bare light as the man pressed the stone wall
and the rock moved. A sliver of light and then a gap appeared, just
wide enough to slip through sideways. He gestured at Andrew to
follow. The door closed behind them.

They were inside a small stone chamber. A
stairway at the chamber’s far side led down. The man walked to this
and began to descend the steps. Andrew followed.

At the bottom of the stairwell was a large
metal door. The man inserted a key and the door swung open. Another
staircase stretched down and down, as far as Andrew could see.
Andrew hesitated.

The man led the way. Again, Andrew
followed.

“I’m Stuart,” the man said over his
shoulder.

“Andrew.”

“You don’t like this so much?”

Andrew shook his head. “Not so much.”

“Better than getting skewered out there.”

Andrew nodded. “True.”

Andrew’s ears popped slightly on the descent.
At the bottom, another door and another key revealed a long
hallway.

“Come on.” Stu had started the walk down the
hallway and glanced back at Andrew, who hurried to catch up.

At the end, they’d reached another stone
wall. Stu pushed through a swinging door and under a low
archway.

Andrew followed and looked around. He was
stunned by what lay in front of him. It was a vast open well-lit
space, a huge cavern underground. Andrew’s estimate was that the
space was about a football field long and wide.

But it wasn’t the open space that shocked
him.

It was the people.

There were men, several of them. Andrew
counted nine that he could see. Ten including Stuart. From what
Andrew could tell, they were all Westerners, engaged in various
activities.

A few struggled with a large unwieldy green
tent, next to a row of already constructed tents. Next to the tents
was a basketball court, where two guys were playing hoops, albeit
slowly. A couple men sat by a tent playing checkers. Two more were
tending a garden beyond the tents, but close to the river.

The men waved at Stu, who waved back.

Accustomed to the unexpected and not one to
be taken aback, Andrew tried to think this through. Andrew
estimated that these men were all in their seventies, maybe a
couple in their eighties.

He turned to look around and inhaled at the
sight to his left. “There’s a river.” At the far western edge of
the space, a river flowed through the cavern.

One of the men tending the garden, a burly
guy who looked like he might have been a defensive lineman a long
time ago, had looked up and dusted the dirt off his hands. He
dropped his trowel in the dirt and headed up the hill toward Andrew
and Stuart, taking his time.

Andrew turned to Stuart. “Who are all these
guys?” Before Stu could answer, the gardener had reached them.

“Who’ve you brought us this time, Stu?”

“This is Andrew. He’s a friend. He needed
some help out there.”

The burly man stuck out his hand to Andrew,
who took it, staring with interest at the man’s wrinkles. The man’s
eyes sparkled; he was delighting in the surprise on Andrew’s
face.

“Welcome to our little slice of heaven. I'm
Frank Hopper.”

Frank spoke with a slight southern twang. His
handshake was strong and warm.

Stu turned to Frank, “I’ve not explained our
set-up. Andrew had caught the attention of the neighbors, so I
thought it best just to hurry along.”

Frank nodded. “Got it. OK.” He turned to
Andrew, put a thick arm around his shoulder. “Well, son, how about
I show you around? Sound alright?”

Andrew followed Frank down the hill to the
basic camp, Frank walking with care along the rocky terrain. Andrew
stepped in his footsteps.

Frank glanced back and said, “I’m sure you’re
wondering, what the hell. So, it's like this. We came over here
when we were young men to fight for our country. Things didn’t work
the way we’d expected and they definitely didn’t work out for a lot
of our brothers over here - we lost a lot of good men. But we all
kept fighting, right up to the end.”

“In the 70’s.” Andrew, born in 1971, did the
math.

“That’s right. Some years back now. Well,
when we got the word it was time to come home, we thought hard
about it. All of us here had done multiple tours and we’d got used
to living in the jungle, with the bugs, the heat, hell even the
food. And we heard things were pretty bad for GIs back home, people
spitting on our boys, calling ‘em nasty names. After what we went
through over here, we didn’t think that sounded too good. So we
figured we’d stay put, lay low, wait it out ‘til things got better.
We’d got to know the jungle pretty good, so had found this here
place to hole up.”

“You’re across the border? You’re in
Cambodia,” Andrew said.

Frank sighed. “The borders weren’t quite what
they are today, son. Shifting sands.”

Frank pulled out a pipe and tapped it out,
refilled it and lit it, all in one fluid motion. “Where was I?” He
looked to the ceiling for a moment, thinking, annoyed at his
fair-weather memory. “Got it, that’s right.”

“Then the Khmer Rouge came along and
everything went to hell. We sort of got stuck in the middle then,
as it were. So we hunkered down. By the time that madness ended,
we’d built ourselves a nice little community here and made a few
discoveries along the way. Figured we might as well stay put, see
how things went. And we liked the privacy; no one ever came out
this way.” He puffed on his pipe.

Andrew looked around him, shook his head, and
said, “Let me make sure I’m understanding. You’re telling me that
you are all Veterans of the Vietnam War?”

“That’s right. To the man. Quite a cast of
characters we are.” He winked at Andrew.

“And you’ve not been home since…?”

“To the United States? 1968 for me.” Frank
glanced around. Several of the men had left their tasks to gather
round Frank and Andrew, curious about the unannounced visitor.
“Different for everyone. But an easy forty years.”

“But, but…It’s better there now. So much
better.” Andrew had been Navy, like his father before him.

A hunched old guy playing checkers yelled
out, “You sure ‘bout that, son?”

Andrew nodded, emphatic. “Yeah. Absolutely.
People celebrate Veterans. They welcome them. It’s not like it was.
Not at all.”

Frank leaned back on his heels, crossed his
arms and looked at Andrew over his thick black-rim grasses. A large
gold ring flashed on his right hand.

“Son, we get out and about. We stay up on our
current events, don’t we boys?”

The men murmured agreement.

“And we hear our guys are dying on the VA's
watch. And young fellas killing themselves after years of
deployment. That doesn't sound like a heroes’ welcome.”

“Sounds more like a fuck you to me!” The old
checker player cackled, waving his cane.

Frank said, “Please excuse Ed, he was Special
Forces. No manners.”

“Kick your ass though!” Ed yelled back,
louder than necessary. His fellow checker player shook his head in
disapproval.

Andrew felt dazed. He looked at Frank. “But
what about family?”

Frank shrugged. “We were a rowdy young bunch
when we joined up. Buncha misfits. None of us had much family to
speak of. We were all pretty much running away from something or
toward something better. So it made sense to stay. We had nothing
to go home to.” Frank coughed.

“And not a married guy in the lot, save
Jackson over there. But he was a special case.” Frank gestured to
one of the guys washing clothes in the river, who heard his name
and waved.

As he watched the waving man, Andrew heard a
female voice ring across the cavern: “Alright fellas, supper's
on.”

Frank’s eyebrows went up and he smiled at the
voice. “That's Jackson's wife. We voted and agreed he could invite
her on over. We all knew she was a hell of a cook.”

Behind him, the old checker player cackled
again and double-jumped his opponent’s red pieces.

“And once things settled down a bit, we'd
sneak out to the coast now and again, pretend we were some crazy
lost vets, couldn’t find their way home. Which, I guess, we are!”
He guffawed, along with the rest of the men, then his face
darkened, his expression somber. The men fell quiet.

“We lost a lot of our brothers over them
hills. So far away from home.”

He paused for a long minute and the cavern
was silent, the only sound the river flowing.

“A lot of brothers,” he repeated, looking at
Andrew. “Sometimes, when the loss is too much, a man's heart
breaks, clear in two, and one part just sorta falls away into the
hole where broken things go. And then he's left with a heart that
can't never mend. And he goes about his business, making the best
of things, with what he got left. That's what we done here.”

Ed, listening to this, paused from the game
of checkers and shook his head, murmuring, “A man’s got
limits.”

Frank continued. “And if you believe in all
that Pchum Ben stuff - you can’t live in this country without
picking up the customs - we wanted our boys to have a place here, a
home, in case their spirits went looking for family, or something
close to it. We think this here is a special place and we hope they
do too.”

Andrew looked around. At the rough camp, the
flowing river, the blazing fire, smoke wafting up high into the
stony reaches of the cavernous ceiling.

“I bet they do.” He thought about what he
knew about Pchum Ben. “You'd need a lot of coconut rice balls to
keep 'em happy.”

Frank burst into a grin. “Haw! Damn straight
we would, you hear that Ed? This fella said we'd need a lot of
coconut rice balls, haw haw!”

Ed cackled, grabbing his crotch. “I'll show
him my coconut balls!!”

Frank chuckled, his eyes twinkling.

Andrew looked around, at the tents, standard
Army issue circa 1970. He had so many questions. Frank and Stuart
exchanged a glance.

Frank put his arm around Andrew and said,
“Let me show you the rest of the place.”

They walked down to the river bank and then
along a path by the water, small pebbles crunching under their
feet.

“It’s a lot to take in, I know. So I’ll tell
you another story, maybe it’ll help. I had a buddy, who had a son
before I flew out to Viet Nam. Named me that boy’s godfather, he
did. That was a proud day for me, holding that little boy in my
arms. Anyway, I heard that young boy growed up good and right. Went
to fight in Iraq, spent four years in the fight. Came back home
when that was over, but just wasn't the same. Trouble, you know.
Couldn’t get help, no one would listen. Man up, they’d say. So that
young boy tried to kill himself. He figured better to be dead than
to have those demons in his head.”

Frank wiped his eyes, and sniffed. “Damn
allergies.” He continued. “Well, I got wind of that, we all did
here. We decided it was time to enter the fight again.”

He looked out across the cavern, at the
ragtag band of men, then back at Andrew. “A nation that don’t know
how to save its sons and daughters within its own borders, well,
that’s a nation at a breaking point. So we decided to do our
part.”

They had reached the end of the cavern. A
high wall rose up in front of them. Frank gestured to Andrew to
lean into a small opening at the base of the rock.

“Take a gander in there, son.”

Andrew sat down against the stone and leaned
in. He had to stick his whole head and part of his right shoulder
under the small opening. It was pitch black. Frank handed him a
huge black flashlight. “This might help.”

Andrew turned on the flashlight and shone it
up and around.

In the light, he saw a deep corridor that
stretched as far as the light would reach. What gleamed back at him
was gold. He stared in awe.

Andrew ducked his head out of the hole and
said, “It’s gold.”

Frank gestured around him. “Sure enough is.
Solid gold. When we found this little vein, we decided it was
providence. See here. This mine has funded many a Veteran in need
back home. None of those fancy-pants ‘We are warriors’ foundations
tugging at your heartstrings while the CEO laughs all the way to
the bank in his Mercedes. No sir. Just straight up cash in the
pocket of someone who served his country.”

Andrew stared at this ragged old man who
could have passed for a homeless guy on a street corner in DC.

“You're ‘Epitome’.”

“Damn straight we are.” Frank’s chest puffed
with pride.

Andrew had read about the anonymous donor
that went only by the name ‘Epitome’, that had made countless
individual donations to veterans across the States. No fancy
parties. No rubbing shoulders with movie stars. Just straight up
helping the guys who had given up some of their freedom. And the
families who had given all.

Frank continued. “Anyway. It’s good you’re
here. We thought we'd better go legit before all those mining
companies get out here.”