The Return: A Novel (30 page)

“Oh, maybe because you took her to Mexico City in a chartered plane to buy her lots of fancy stuff and set her up with the most famous telenovela director in the country. Why would you do that unless you were pulling down her new La Perlas?”

“Wait … people in Colonia Feliz are talking about this?”

“Of course. You’re the sun around which their lives revolve. You’re the
patrón.
Your moods are consulted like the weather. When you frown, the clouds darken—”

“Oh, cut it out, Carmel!”

“It’s true. I thought that was the point of you coming down here, to be a big shot in Mom’s hometown.”

“Did you really think that? What possible word or deed of mine in all the time you’ve known me would give you to believe that I was that kind of man?”

“None. But I thought you’d gone crazy, remember?”

“And now?”

“I don’t know. The jury is still out. I mean, one day I’m, like, oh, my dad’s an editor in New York, and the next it’s, oh, my dad’s a feudal lord in Michoacán. It takes some getting used to.”

Another gust of laughter and high spirits from forward.

“And I agree about your boy up there. That’s the other thing I can’t figure out: What’s in it for him? Why is he hanging around and doing all this stuff?”

“Did you ask him?”

“Yeah, I did. He said he just wanted to help out a pal.”

“And…”

“Moving an apartment, lending a car, letting him sleep on your couch, is what you do to help out a pal. Not dropping your whole life and setting up a state-of-the-art security system for him and shooting people. You have no idea the kind of surveillance and commo equipment he bought last night, tens of thousands of dollars’ worth, besides that whole damn private cell-phone system. And I bet you went shopping with him when you took off yesterday morning.”

“He did. I waited in the car.”

“What did he get?”

It passed briefly through Marder’s mind to dissimulate, to get Carmel into the zone of deniability, to protect her from whatever consequences Skelly’s purchases might have, but then he dismissed the idea. Marder had never been the kind of father who treated his adult daughter like a perpetual daddy’s little girl. Sometimes he thought it was a little unnatural, but there it was.

He said, “He bought heavy weapons, military grade. It was part of the deal with the Templos, in exchange for protection.” Marder felt it was fair to leave out the China White, since he didn’t officially know about that yet.

“Do you think that’s wise? These guys seem to do enough damage with American gun-shop stuff and machetes.”

“I don’t know. Skelly’s in charge of security. And I think that in this particular situation, there’s nobody better.”

“What do you mean, situation?”

“A people occupied by an oppressive force, or forces, and wanting to resist. That’s what he trained for; it’s what he knows how to do.”

“Well, I hope it works out better than Vietnam,” she said.

When she said that, something clicked in Marder’s mind, and he understood why Skelly stuck around and why he was expending so much effort to make Colonia Feliz secure from the forces of evil. He’s making up for the failures, for the way his army and his country abandoned the Hmong forty years ago. And for the destruction of Moon River.

It came back to Marder clearly now, like the fight in the bamboo forest, the names and faces still obscured but the visceral memories arriving in waves, like the onset of a drug.

*   *   *

It was a day or so after the firefight. They were back in the village, the wounded had been evacuated, the dead in their dripping poncho liners had been taken away. Hayden and Lascaglia were dead; Pogo too—he’d died in the helicopter, with the medic working against the wound shock and Skelly gripping the man’s shoulder, his mouth an inch from the dying man’s ear, shouting against the chopper’s roar, demanding that he not die, that he stay with the living, stay with me, stay with me …

He’d seen Skelly’s tears clearing bright runnels in his grimy face and had wondered then (and still did) why he himself was tearless at the death of comrades. Maybe what Skelly had said was true, that his body might be here but the essential Marder was not, was a tourist, a visitor. Or perhaps, being diffident by nature, he lacked the basis for the intense comradeship he observed among the SOGs and among the Hmong soldiers. Or perhaps it was simple denial—his mind had closed off the war, shut down all feelings; I am not really here, so I can’t die. But these considerations did not occur to him until much later. At the time he simply experienced a terrible isolating chill and felt badly about himself because of it.

Despite this, Skelly persisted in cultivating him. At the time, Marder imagined that it was because he was the sole surviving airman, the last helpless kitten in the litter, and that the SOGs regretted losing Sweathog and Pinto, but then Marder decided it was more personal than that. Skelly was
interested
in him.

After the firefight, Marder had little to do. The sensor system was complete and apparently operational. Occasionally they could hear and see, far off over the jungle ridges, the flash and rumble of the Arc Light strikes that the vast machinery of Igloo White had vectored in on the sounds of transit on the trail, invisible B-52s dropping hundreds of tons of explosives on truckloads of rice and ammunition. There was no radio traffic for him from Naked Fanny; the air force seemed to have forgotten him, at least temporarily, and he thought that was fine. He had no real desire to go back to Task Force Alpha. He volunteered to monitor the radio nets and made himself useful maintaining various electronic devices. The SOGs were famously unconcerned with military occupation specialties; people did whatever was necessary, and Marder learned how to call in air support from the forward air controllers during operations. The SOGs went out on missions and returned—most of them. New people arrived and were absorbed and were wounded or killed or served out their tours and variously departed, but Marder didn’t really go to the war anymore.

He spent a lot of his time in the village. He talked to the children, enticing them with PX potato chips. That was one nice thing about the SOG: it had its own air force and supply lines, and the Ponies—their private helicopter pilots—would bring in almost anything you wanted from Long Binh or Saigon. All of the SOGs were comfortable dealing with the Hmong—they had been trained to be nice to freedom-fighting natives—but none more so than Skelly. He was forever bending Marder’s ear with descriptions of the beauty of their culture, its integrity, its spirit. He thought it was how human beings were meant to live. Skelly spent whatever free time he had in Moon River, surrendering his turn to fly to Saigon and its delights in order to submerge himself ever deeper in the culture of the Hmong. He very much wanted Marder to be inducted into his tribe and clan, even volunteering to buy the buffalo required for the ceremony.

Marder put him off for a long time and then gave in. He did so because he did not wish to offend Skelly or to be the only American without a bracelet, but in fact he did not take the induction seriously. Unlike Skelly, who was essentially an outcast, Marder had been a member of an intact tribal society for his whole life, having been brought up in a Brooklyn Irish parish under the old ecclesial regime. He thought there was something unpleasantly desperate in the way Skelly had plunged into Hmong culture, and he felt it even more when he discovered that Skelly had taken a Hmong wife, had married with all ceremony a girl name Joong, who could not have been more than seventeen. The other SOGs seemed to accept this Hmongness in Skelly as another of the eccentricities they all exhibited as members of an unconventional army, along with their exotic weapons and uniforms, the quasi-legal supply system, and their relative freedom from the MACV chickenshit that characterized the rest of the war.

What Marder saw, and he thought that perhaps they did not, was that Skelly took it very seriously indeed, that for him the entire war was about the preservation of the Hmong in this village, that this was, in fact, the only honorable facet of the immense waste of life and treasure that was tearing his native land to pieces. Like everyone else who’d been in-country for more than a week and had half a brain, Skelly understood that the Republic of South Vietnam was worthless and unsalvageable. The ARVN was corrupt at every level and completely penetrated by the enemy. MACV was a house of lies, devoid of honor, whose only strategy was throwing hapless draftees out in the bush until they got blasted by the NVA and the remnants of the VC and then sending bombers and artillery to blow holes in the forest in hopes of adding to the (largely fictitious) body counts. Skelly dismissed all that—he knew the NVA, he knew they would never give up, they would sacrifice their entire population before they’d tolerate any foreign soldiers on their soil.

The montagnards were different, though. They were their own nation, and they would fight. They’d been fighting the Vietnamese for centuries—they were like the Indians in America—and with just a little help they could build an independent nation in their mountains that would be proof against any attack and that would inspire the sympathy of the world. The United States would at last be fighting a good fight—even the fucking hippies, even fucking Jane Fonda, would see it was a good fight—and the Americans would support it.

Marder allowed himself to agree with this vision, but he had a lot less faith in the wisdom of America than Skelly did. Although he was a product of an intensely patriotic working-class community and had no connection with the college-kid antiwar movement, Marder had been raised by a couple of Catholic lefties, that rare breed. His father knew what a rich man’s war and a poor man’s fight was, and his mother, whose weekly letters kept him apprised of what was going on back in the world, was a Catholic Worker, who’d known and loved Dorothy Day for decades. Marder thought Skelly was a little nuts, but he was also eighteen and not entirely a cynic, and he was willing to dip a toe into Skelly’s deep reservoir of faith.

And he liked seeing Skelly with the Hmong, with Joong and her siblings and cousins; he liked the sweetness of their natures, how gentle they were with their kids, how gentle horrible old Sergeant Skelly was with the wandlike creature he loved. Marder liked how they honored their old people and how those old people tried to keep intact the rituals, the spiritual tendons, so badly frayed now, that kept the Hmong from a dissolution worse than death.

So Marder relented, said he would buy the buffalo and be inducted, and one morning he squatted in the public room of the
root,
or longhouse, of Baap Can, the headman of the village, and listened uncomprehendingly to Skelly bargain (if that was the word) about the buffalo necessary to the ceremony. It seemed that much had to be done to prepare the spirits for the event. Baap Can had apparently grown ever more conservative with respect to ritual, since it was obvious that the failure of the people to observe every detail of ritual was what had brought about their present calamities. In the past, Marder learned, a single act of violence would have paralyzed the village with cleansing ceremonies for weeks, but now they lived in the midst of continuous violence and the spirits were silent.

It went on for hours, giving Marder plenty of time to think about religion in all its varieties. Did Skelly really believe all this? That the universe was packed with malignant spirits that had to be propitiated with animal sacrifices? That all illness and catastrophe was the action of some sorcery or the caprice of ghosts? Perhaps he didn’t believe it, perhaps it was part of his training, to immerse himself in the culture of the people he sought as allies, not to give offense. Later on, but not then, Marder would come to understand that what Skelly believed in was Training.

The Catcher in the Rye had wandered into the army, and the army had offered him the salvation of eternal boyhood through suffering. If he would torment his body, if he would ascend step by step through the sweaty heirarchy of boot camp, advanced infantry school, airborne, Special Forces, then he would become part of a boys’ gang that couldn’t be beat, that aspired to purity amid the chickenshit of this miserable fraudulent war, that supplied all the brotherhood that a man could handle, that wasn’t phony. Marder had watched them at their play—the roughhousing, the practical jokes, the arrant, gleeful violation of military regulations. He recalled behaving just that way as a kid. And so, when Marder came to think about it, it must’ve been no trouble at all for Skelly to slide into simple paganism—all of them were halfway there already, all more or less worshippers of the Lord of the Flies.

And maybe the girl was part of it. Maybe Joong had converted him—it had happened before. He knew his own father had little or no personal religion, but he went regularly to Mass out of love for his wife, and never a remark about the well-known deficiencies of the one, holy, and apostolic Church. He thought about the girl, Joong. She seemed a blankness to Marder, a sweet, lovely, singing creature who was kind to animals and children. He recalled a conversation he’d had with her once. She was playing with a white cat. Marder had arranged a sentence in his head and tried it. “Do you like cats, Joong? My mother likes cats.”

She looked at him with a puzzled smile and asked whether in America cats were sacrificed as they were among real people. Marder said they were not. She shrugged—it was known that Americans were infected with spirits. This cat would be sacrificed soon to heal her aunt Jieng-Tang. It would take a cock and a cat and perhaps a dog. The cats and the cock would have their throats cut, but, of course, the dog would be burned alive.

The negotiations ended and then they brought out jars of
rhööm,
sour rice beer, and drank a lot of it through straws. When they came out into the gathering dusk, Skelly said, “You’re all set. They have to do a lot of stuff first, cut some big bombax posts and put bamboo finials on them, all carved up in a special way, and there’s a whole ceremony. I’ll explain it later. It’ll probably go down tomorrow evening or the one after.” He slapped Marder on the back, grinning. “We’ll be tribal brothers. How about that shit?”