The Healer's War (31 page)

The rain blew straight at us and I took my poncho from my ditty bag and tried to cover us both with it. I couldn't bear it in the heavy jungle.

It was too hot. Now, however, as a wind and rain break, it was inadequate. Clouds like gray scouring pads blew across the top of the valley, squirting squalls every few minutes. The bomb craters, already full, flooded and ran into one another. I felt dizzy and headachy, as I did when I was catching cold. I wanted my mother again. I wanted her to bring me aspirins and antihistamines and a vaporizer with Vicks and comic books and fresh orange juice. The fact that she hadn't done that since I was about ten made no difference. Sick adults regress too.

"Dear Mom," I mentally wrote while carrying Ahn down the valley, "Ahn and I took a walk today-well, mostly I walked. He got tired. William had some business to take care of, and when he returned he wasn't in a very good mood, so Ahn and I decided we'd give him time to cool off. I bet we'll find a rice paddy today. William wants to avoid people, but I think the paddies are a good sign. They're so normal and agricultural, like wheat fields. William doesn't want to visit a Vietnamese village, but then, he's a city boy. I feel that, after all, these people are rice farmers just as the people where we're from are wheat farmers, so what really is the difference? I'm getting Ahn to teach me to say, 'Hot enough for you?" and 'Nice day if it don't rain,' in Vietnamese."

Thinking about home probably wasn't the best thing in the world, because my mind began drifting. just because I didn't want to be in Nam, I started dreaming, with my eyes wide awake and my feet walking, that I wasn't. I imagined I was walking through the woods by my Aunt Janet's cornfield carrying my cousin Sandy, who was now about seventeen years old, though to my mind she was still as I had last seen her, younger than Ahn. It was like a mirage except that I didn't actually see anything that wasn't there, I just reinterpreted what I was seeing so that it seemed instead to be something I wanted to see. I have no idea how long or how far I walked thinking myself back in good old dull Kansas. It's a wonder I didn't mistake a booby trap for cow fence and kill us both.

Ahn pulled me back to Southeast Asia by suddenly rousing to point out what looked like a brilliant sunset. Indulging him, I stopped so we could admire the reds, oranges, and yellows of the sun, as I thought, reflected in the sky.

Around the next bend, I felt the heat, smelled the smoke, and watched tongues of fire lick at the sky as the field below us spouted flames.

Acres of plants were already consumed and blackened, and the fire now fed on earth and roots. I wondered what burned so hot and remembered napalm. But why napalm somebody's field?

I hated the feel of it even more than I hated stumbling through jungle, so I started climbing again, up away from the fire. Just before nightfall we found another stream cutting a ridge in half. We bathed again and drank and I gave Ahn two of my Midol for his fever, and allotted us two salt tablets apiece after saving one for my new crop of leeches. I tore the sleeve off my fatigue shirt and bound it around his stump with a piece of his old bandage. The stump didn't look as bad as I feared, but there was a nickel-size sore where the stitches had once been, and it was draining.

We climbed back up and over another ridge before nightfall, and bedded down between two rocks under a very large tree that gave us some protection from the rain. I dreamed my grandpa was pointing at the field and laughing, telling me about strip-and-burn agriculture, but he was saying something about how they did it with crop dusters these days.

When I woke the next morning, I felt the warmth of a small fire, smelled meat cooking, and heard it sizzling. William squatted, Vietnamese style, beside the fire.

"If I be Charlie, lady, you be dead," he said.

"I almost was anyway," I said, prying Ahn loose so I could stretch a little. William's aura still had a faint edge of black and maroon but was mostly blue, a little yellow, clear green. "You remember coming after us with a machete and a .45 by any chance?"

"Me? Nah, I go after VC. Got some too. One got away, the girlsan with the heavy artillery."

"That who you thought we were?" I asked. But he just looked puzzled, and hurt, and his colors started swirling around in a confused sort of way.

"Never mind," I said. "How did you find us?"

"Easy. You not exactly Sheena, Queen of the Jungle, woman. You see any of 'em?"

"Any of who?"

"Our boys. They around. Who you think called in that napalm on the taro field?"

"Is that what it was? I wondered. What's taro?"

"Good food. But ten to one some asshole thought it was weed. Or maybe they just wanna make sure Charlie don't eat no taro. I dunno."

"Wait a minute," I said. "If that was one of our planes that dropped napalm, then there must be some of our guys around-"

"You catch on quick, Sheena. I spotted a patrol of about six dudes just as I got to that taro field, but they was 'way far down the valley, and about the time I started into that field after them the planes come up and it was weenie roast time. I had to didi mau. But that patrol is maybe a day ahead of us."

"Of you, maybe," I said. "I'm surprised you could backtrack far enough to find us. You sure are one tough act to follow."

''Yeah. Well, I think we should find them dudes."

"If they're a day ahead of us, we'll never make it. Ahn's leg is going bad again."

"We all gonna go bad we don't get out of this shit pretty soon. Want some of this primo monkeysan here?"

I nodded and looked back toward Ahn. He was sweating in his sleep. "You could carry Ahn again. That would speed us up."

"It'd slow me down, though," he said thoughtfully. "That patrol's already got a day's lead on us."

We chewed monkey and thought it over. I was tempted. I wished I hadn't brought Ahn out here. And William was undoubtedly right. We'd lose our chance at rescue altogether if we slowed down for Ahn. On the other hand, if he was an American kid, we wouldn't even be discussing it. I decided not to discuss it anyway.

"Well," I said, "maybe it would be better if you left us here and went after them yourself. I don't think Ahn's going to get very far. His stump's infected."

"Lady, you don't seem to understand. We ain't in the world no more.

This be war, baby. I leave you here and when I come back, if you here, you probably be some kind of beaucoup messed-up fucked-over corpse."

"Okay, okay, I know, I know. Stop talking about it, okay? The whole idea makes me nervous. But frankly, buddy, I'm just about as nervous hanging out with you. That's twice you've nearly killed us."

"Will you stop sayin' that? I ain't harmed a fuckin' hair of your head-"

"It wasn't my hair I was worried about," I argued, ever as ready with witty repartee as I was when fighting with my kid brother.

"Nor nothin' else neither. Where you get this shit, girl? You ack like I crazy-truth is, you be the crazy one. What you tryin' to do? Set me up to get lynched for rubbin' up against your lily-white round-eye tail?"

"Watch the names, buster," I told him. "I'll make a deal with you, you don't call me round-eye tail and I don't call you nigger, okay?"

The red and black was growing in his aura again and I realized that I was no longer dealing just with William, my fellow refugee, but with an armed and angry man who currently killed people for a living and was having a lot of trouble telling which people were the ones he was supposed to kill and which ones were on his side.

He half rose, then sat down again, his eyes full of resentment and hostility and something else that fueled both-the grief that cloaked all the other colors in his aura, and the self-reproach that was growing in prominence. The colors were altering so quickly, shifting from one emotion to the other, that I was having trouble naming them, although I knew what they meant.

"What you watchin'?" he asked belligerently. But he stayed seated and his hands were open on his knees. "You look like you about to shit yourself. What's the matter? I look like some nigger mothahfuckin'

street gang rapist to you or what?"

"You got this all wrong, William," I said when I was able to detach myself from watching his aura. It had a hypnotizing effect that was soothing in a purely detached kind of way. But it was alarming how quickly his soft-spoken kindliness ran to anger. I was convinced it was misdirected when pointed at me, but I squirmed anyway. If I was not exactly a bigot, it was probably more from lack of opportunity than from actual ideals. There hadn't been any black kids in my classes until high school, though the neighborhoods near us had been integrating gradually-and with much paranoid grumbling and dire prediction from my relatives. I didn't mind talking to a black person, but the sexual stuff made me uncomfortable, all the more so because I knew that if I were the liberal person I thought I was, it shouldn't. But the real problem I was having was that even though William and I spoke the same language and were from the same country, I knew less about the problems and attitudes of the culture he came from than I did about the Vietnamese. Proximity to the soul brothers back at the enlisted barracks-hard-core groups who looked like the Army equivalent of street gangs and made nasty remarks as I passed-did not lead me to believe that I was going to be liked just because I was in favor of the civil rights marches on TV. But I was damned if I was going to be lost in the jungle with enemies all around and a sick kid and a crazy man and admit to being a bigot on top of it.

"Private Johnson to you," William Johnson snapped.

"You got this all wrong, Private Johnson," I began again. "You don't remind me of anything like a street gang."

"Nah?" he asked, sounding maybe a little disappointed.

"Nah," I said. "What you remind me of is this nice little old lady I took care of during my psych affiliation in training. She was just as pleasant and sweet as anything except that every once in a while she attacked clergymen and tried to castrate them. The rest of the time you couldn't meet a nicer person."

He didn't seem inclined to dignify my remarks with a response, so I speared a piece of monkey and turned around to give some to Ahn. He wasn't there.

"Babysan?"

"Ixave him alone, will you, he's probably gone to take a piss in the brush over there," William said in the tone of an irritable father criticizing how I raised the kid.

"What if he runs into a booby trap or a snake or-"

"What would you do about it if he did? Scream?"

It was my turn to ignore him. I scanned the brush and the surrounding hills and valleys. No Ahn. But on the other side of our ridge was a valley with rice paddies. Across the valley was another ridge, and about a quarter of the way up this a few houses. No people that I could see, but curls of smoke rose from a couple of places in the village.

"Hey, look, civilization!" I said.

He didn't even look up from swabbing out his canteen cup with a wet leaf.

"Did you hear me?" I asked, forgetting to keep my dukes up. "There's a village over there. People."

"Yeah, but what kind of people do they be is the question."

"It's a village," I said.

He nodded. "Yeah, but it ain't San Francisco."

"But it's worth checking out. They might have some food we could buy, or medical supplies, or a radio-"

"Or VC. You act like it some kinda shopping mall. Well, it ain't, no more than I'm a platoon, even with you and babysan. You don't just go waltzing into those villages alone. Ho Chi Minh could be the mayor for all you know."

"Yeah, sure, but it could also be where those guys who burned the field are heading, couldn't it?"

"Unh huh, and it could be they're just going to call in an air strike and waste the place too, just like they did that field. I wouldn't say that was a real healthy place to be, especially not for just you and me."

"Yes, but with Ahn along-I mean, he's a Vietnamese."

"If he's not from that village or don't have relatives there, that ain't gonna cut no ice with them. Lotsa strays runnin' around the countryside. People look after they own folks. Can't take care of every draggly-ass kid who wanders in."

"Maybe not but-" In the trees below I saw movement, and Ahn broke into the clearing by the paddies. "Jesus, there he is. He must have spotted the village and gotten the same idea I did." I started off after him, but William was on his feet and pulling me back before I had time to take so much as a step.

"You can't go down there. They puts mines and booby traps all along the paddies. Babysan probably gonna get the rest of his ass blown off. No need to make it two of you."

"I won't abandon him," I said. "And I'm sorry, but you are crazy and you do scare me." He curled his lips and wouldn't look at me, intent on polishing the weapon he had captured. "William, I know when you're going to flip out if I'm awake, but when I'm asleep I can't-"

"That's bullshit," he said in a low voice with so much force behind it I felt as if he'd slapped me. "You don't know no such thing."

"I do. Look." I pulled out the amulet and showed him. "This lets me see a light around a person that shows me what they're feeling-I can sort of read them. An old wise mana magician, kind of-who was one of my Vietnamese patients gave it to me."

He smacked at it. "What you tryin' to tell me, girl? That I should leave you go wanderin' off by yourself through the jungle 'cause you got some gook equivalent of a mood ring? You think I'm dinky dao!"

"Look if you don't believe me!" I took it off over my head and handed it to him. "Put it on. Go ahead. And tell me what you see. Go on. I dare you. I double-dare you." Jesus, I was regressing to thirdgrade fights with my brother again. But he slid the amulet over his rifle barrel and very gingerly slipped it over his head.

"Now look at me!" I said. "What do you see?"

see one crazy white chick thinks she's Sheena, fucking Queen of the jungle," he said, but his voice was a little more.reasonable as he stared.at me. He passed his hand over his face once in a weary gesture.