The Deep Green Sea (4 page)

Mr. Thu drove off, and in the shadow of the Metro-pole, Ben looked around and across the side street and he realized where we were. “Noodles,” he said.

“Tea,” I said. “You can go with me and I will make you some very nice tea.”

“And what about your neighbors?”

“That is not a public thing,” I said, and though what I said was true in a way, it was also true that I was finally prepared to accept some censure for this man.

He nodded at this with a soft smile and perhaps he understood, perhaps he had grown very alert about me, as well.

And s
o at last I found myself sitting on a straw mat before a lacquer table in Tien's apartment and she disappeared into her little bathroom. She hadn't made any gesture toward it, but I knew the place where she'd do her prayers. On the opposite wall from where I sat was a little table. It was spread with a white cloth and there were two narrow brass holders with blue irises drooping in them and a plate of fruit, a couple of mangoes, the yellow of them dark-spotted from ripeness, a bunch of the tiny bananas that are so impossibly sweet, also going dark, and in the center of the table was a glass bowl with sand holding a cluster of incense sticks. I'd seen this kind of thing before. In another little room somewhere not much farther down this back alley. With a woman who was as young as me at the time. And, I always thought, just about as scared.

As I waited for Tien to appear again, I tried to see Kim's face in my mind. Her eyes came, large but cut deep in her face like they were done fast. The eyes of these people in the Nam. It was the one thing about them you never quite stopped noticing. The one thing that kept saying they were from some very different place. Not that I minded Kim's eyes. They were beautiful, and though I was scared shitless about half the time in Nam, I was also happy to be away from Wabash, I think, which was my home, a little Illinois steel mill town in the bottomland of the Mississippi River across from St. Louis. I was happy she was different. But all these years later, that was all I could see of her easily, the thing that wasn't like anything else I knew.

I tried briefly to picture Kim in some particular moment, and since I was staring at this prayer table I thought of her at her own place where she took care of a soul. But she was across the room. I was on the bed and she was far away and there was another face instead. A large photo sat in the middle of the table, an old man with a brimless little mandarin hat. Kim's grandfather, I think.

The bathroom door opened and Tien stepped out. She'd gone in wearing that white blouse and long-cut skirt from Saigontourist. Now she was in black silk, a blouse and pants that rippled around her and made me want to touch her already, made me want
to forget the things I knew I had to be with her, like careful and slow. Her hair was down now. It was very long and black like the world beyond the push of my headlights. She said, “Just a little while.”

“Yes,” I said, though I could hardly make a sound.

She moved to the table and knelt there and her bare feet lay beneath her bottom, her toes in a fine little row, and this was going to be tough, I knew. She lifted her face to the table and I realized now that something was missing. There was no photo. I'd learned enough from Kim to know this was odd.

But how little there is from Kim. How little that comes easily. She crouched before her grandfather and she prayed and the smoke rose from her hands and filled the room with the smell of something, maybe jasmine. I can't re-member exactly, but how else would I know this smell? I love the smells of things. The smell of oranges in the San Joaquin Valley. I remember that moment, though it was a time without love, without a woman nearby who would soon come to me and touch me. The smell of the land on the long runs out of St. Louis, the earth turned out there in the dark, ready for seed. Even the smell of the mill. The naphtha and the coke gas. I loved that smell like my father loved it. My own dead. He'd come home from his shift and he'd smell lik
e those mill smells, and also like Lava soap and the
starch of his off-work shirt. If his spirit is caught somewhere without the prayers of his kin, like the Vietnamese believe, it's out there haunting Wabash Steel, out at the blast furnace or maybe the field next to it, where he'd lift me and put me on his shoulders and he'd think for a long time and stay quiet and he'd fill himself with the smell, now and then, his chest lifting and he'd take it all in and I would too. That I remember. He'd take it all in and he'd point to the thin stack rising near the
highway and at its top was a vivid, gelatinous flame thrashing there and he'd say, That's the bleeder valve. Look how beautiful the flame is. And I would look and it was very beautiful.

And I squeeze hard at these things I still have of Kim. Things come and I don't know if they are memories or things I'm dreaming, making up from some deep and persuasive place. Her smell. Her hair smelled of the in­cense. She'd come to me from her dead grandfather and she was naked and her body was slick and hard and she'd lay me on my back and crouch over me and when I was inside her she would lean forward and her hair would fall on my face and I would smell the incense, like I was being taken up in her prayer.

Then her face slid up to mine and she kissed me with loud smacks and she moved on me and she whispered, “You like Kim very many.”

“Much,” I whispered. We'd played this little game be­fore. She'd made the mistake the first night I'd met her at the bar and she'd thought about it when I corrected her and then she let it go, but we played it out to a new con­clusion the first time we made love and every time since. I'd say, “I like Kim very much.”

“Many,” she'd say. “One hundred times.”

And I should remember that first time, because Kim was the first woman I ever made love to. There was a girl in a trailer park in Wabash, out past the blast furnace, and
she had buck teeth and a squint and a wonderful body and we touched one night in the dark and the smell of the mill was very strong. She said she was a good girl, not to forget that, and I said I wouldn't, though I avoided her af­ter that night. I was never inside her, though she touched me with her hand and she asked me to touch her and I said, “No, I'm sorry.” I'd heard about a woman's smell from the other guys and I was afraid of it
and I couldn't look at her after that night. Her name is gone now, but it might have been Jasmine. That might be where the smell of the incense is really from in this thing that comes to me like a memory. And I can't think of the first time with Kim, exactly. The night was very dark. There was no in­cense. There's nothing of that night. Just later, when there was the smoke in her hair and the prayers for the dead.

And even then, what was the big feeling I was sup­posed to have? What was this thing that people say makes you so close, you and a woman? I kept looking for some­thing important from all that and it stumped me. Though I never fit in with the others who lived over the road. I'd hit the truck stops and I'd park my rig off a ways from the others and I'd find a place in the restaurant alone, the last table on the way to the shower stalls or the pinball ma­chines, and I'd stay there out of the traffic. But sometimes when they'd talk about all this and it was just fuck this one and fuck that one and go to this truck stop in Indiana and they sit buck naked on your table and ain't that the life, I'd wonder if maybe they were basically right. If that's all it
came down to.

I try not to think like all those guys I spent too many years with in the mills or on the roads. No, I don't mean all the guys. Just the noisy ones. There were others like me, I think. I try not to let myself sound like the noisy ones. There's enough of my mama in me to give me an-other way of looking at things. She's another one of my dead. Her spirit's probably in the Wabash Public Library with the copper bust of Andrew Carnegie inside the front door and the floors wide and scuffed and the fans going in the corners and the smell of old books. She'd bring me there and she'd get her books and she'd read at night when my dad was working a late shift and she'd weep sometimes and she'd laugh sometimes and I've done some reading but not near as much as she'd wanted for me. I still like the smell of a book, though. I'll find a few old books in some thrift store in some little town somewhere in this last couple of years since I've been off the road and just moving around, and I'll pick one up and put my face in the pages and smell it.

I wonder sometimes if my mom and dad had a big feeling when they touched. There was a lot of pain with all that, I think. They lost a little girl quite a few years before I was born and it was hard on them, I'm pretty sure. Then they had me late. But I'd also find them touching each other. I have one moment in my head from a night when I woke up from something and it was when my dad was working nights and I got out of bed and the house was quiet but the lights were still on. I expected to find my mama reading. She wasn't in our little front room and I went on to the kitchen and I stood quiet in the door and my dad was sitting on a kitchen chair with his shirt off. He was just home and he was sitting with his forearms over his thighs and slumped a little bit forward and my mama was standing behind him and touching his back. Not a back rub. Much lighter. Just slowly sweeping his back with her fingertips and his head was bowed and once, when her hand went up to his shoulder, his own hand rose suddenly and their fingertips met.

Like that, maybe. It's supposed to happen like that. But I can't remember a touch like that with Kim. There was some cute talk. There was her hair falling on me. There was the thing that happened for me when I was inside her, a thing that the guys in the stops have some words for. But I can't quite hear it in those ways. I mean that moment when I run inside her, when I run like it feels when I'm on a good rig and I'm coming out of the hills after a slow climb and I crest and suddenly I think I'm falling. But that's not really a good moment I'm talking about. Most of the
time you feel like you and the truck are pretty much together. But in that sudden run, you feel like you've broken away from this thing you're riding. You have nothing to do with it and sometimes that scares you a little and sometimes it just makes you feel like you've flown off to someplace else and you're not sure where that is.

The place wasn't with Kim, though. I went home from the war in February of 1967, and for a few months before that, I didn't even see her. I went home and that meant Wabash and I went back to my room in the little brick house on Hagemeyer Avenue where I still had baseball cards and my steel-toed shoes and some shirts in a closet that were the color of the deuce-and-a-halfs I'd just driven for a year and were still smelling like the mill. I went there and I slept till noon every day for three months and I went out until I found Mattie from Wabash High who I always liked to look at and she remembered me and she was a waitress at the Woolworth's and she didn't ask me any questions at that time and we got married and I lay in another room on the same street, with her, and she was tall, and though she was lanky, there seemed to be so much of her when she was naked, and she seemed soft to the touch, and she had heavy eyebrows and hair she kept rolled tight in a lace net when she was working but she let it down for me long and straight. That should have been what I needed. That should have been what I'd been wait­ing for all along and I should have gotten back on at the mill like my dad wanted me to do now that I was home from a war, but it never quite turned out that way.

There was nothing even like the moment when Tien rose from her prayers when she brought me to her room and was not ready for us to touch. There would be no touching and I knew it and still there'd never been a mo­ment for me like when I sat on her straw mat and she turned to me and I was having trouble taking a breath with her hair down for me this first time like it was. I sat on the straw mat and she turned to me and behind her the smoke rose from the incense she'd lit, dark, without a flame, and her hair was coming down a little bit over one shoulder and she smiled at me and I said, “Why is there no picture?”