The Snowfly (11 page)

I was curious about the enemy troops, but I had come with Gillian to fish and I had never been readier. All the gear was stored neatly in a stone hut with a thatched roof beside the river. There was no need for waders or hip boots; the riverbanks had been sculpted and shaped to accommodate dry-fly fishing and we had nets with six-foot-long handles. The drizzle intensfied as we selected and assembled bamboo rods.

“How high are we?” I asked.

“About sixteen hundred meters,” she said. It was easy to see why the hoi polloi used to flee up this way in the warm season down below.

“English rules,” Gillian said, false-casting her rod to limber her arm. “One must present only to a rising fish. Upstream only. Dries, please. A fish in net must be killed.”

“There's no point in killing them.”

“Sorry love, but tonight we will dine on
my
trout from
my
river. Perhaps for the last time,” she added, a bit teary. “Makes me feel crook and quite sad.”

Her casts were more accurate than mine and I saw that she mended automatically and effortlessly to give her fly long drag-free drifts. We were using small orange-and-red attractors, flies she called Hens.

Rarely did ten minutes pass without a fish on, but at least half of them fought their way free by breaking off the tippets on sharp-edged green rocks in the river.

At our latitude, and with so many mountains around us, there was little twilight. The sun set with a sort of no-notice, perfunctory plop. By dark we had ten fish and the surrounding forests were alive with the screams of insects, birds, and monkeys.

Gillian cooked the two largest trout over coals with bacon and fresh lemon slices. We had a chilled Sancerre with the fish and, afterward, a sweet yellow fruit in thick clotted cream and syrup.

We did not talk a lot. Gillian was pensive and sad. It was downright cold after darkness came. The servants (I assumed they were servants) made a fire in a bedroom that looked down on the river. We made love on a mat in front of the fireplace; Gillian was usually in a hurry, but this time she took her time and seemed to make the moment last and, afterward, we fell asleep in each other's arms.

I rolled around restlessly, couldn't sleep, and finally got up. I tried to get Gillian to move into the bed, but she sleepily waved me away and muttered, “Bugger off, Yank.”

I found a light blanket and covered her. I needed to stretch tight muscles and I was curious about the Trout House.

There were several lanterns hissing in the house; outside, the drizzle had melted into a thick night fog that diffused the light and made it shimmer. The house was filled with shadows.

There was a study off the bedroom and a lantern in one corner that cast a golden glow through the room. Two walls of the study had books on shelves made of a fragrant, shiny wood that smelled of incense. The shelves were packed with books and I perused them halfheartedly until I discovered one entire shelf lined with books on angling and trout flies. I couldn't resist.

I began to reach for a book but stopped myself. These were ancient tomes, with faded bindings, some of them in leather. Many had no titles on the spines, and some of the books lay on their backs rather than standing upright. One section of a bookcase was built into cubicles into which the books fit. Custom-made, I decided, with each book measured by the carpenter. I had never seen anything like it and, after getting up my courage and hoping I was not transgressing, I began to pick up the books and look at them. It was hard to believe. The titles were in modern English, Old English (maybe it was Middle English; I had never been able to distinguish the two), French, Latin, Greek, and other languages I couldn't recognize because of the strange and antiquated type fonts.
Reliquiae Antiquiae,
1845.
Livre de Chasse. The Book of St. Albans,
whose faded date read
MCDXCVI,
or 1496. Could it be I was holding a book created only four years after Columbus blundered into the Americas? My heart was pounding. The miracle of old books had always fascinated me, how knowledge could be imparted over centuries. I next picked up
A Booke of Fishing with Hooke and Line.
It was dated 1590 and in fragile condition, and I carefully replaced it after examining the flyleaf. There were also editions of Ovid, Pliny, Socrates, Thoreau, and Shakespeare.

Trouting on the Brule River,
1880.
Driffield Angler,
1890.
The Fly-Fisher's Entomology,
1836. W. J. Turrell,
Ancient Angling Authors,
1910. Hills's
A History of Fly Fishing for Trout,
1920. The books all seemed to be original printings, first editions. I had never seen a collection like this, never imagined such a thing existed. I was fascinated.

Then I saw M. J. Key's books and I felt a strange light settle around me like a caul. M. J. Key: From Lloyd Nash's study in East Lansing to a coffee plantation in Vietnam. It was unreal. I pulled the two volumes out of their places and set them on a table. The room had a stone floor with thick reed mats and a huge divan made of rattan and covered with thick cushions. I wished for an electric light but knew there was no hope for this. I went back to the shelves.

Several minutes later my hand settled on a manuscript that had been inserted between two hard leather slabs. It had once been bound by string, but that had broken.

I lifted the leather cover and read the title. It was typewritten.
The Legend of the Snowfly.
The author was M. J. Key. There was no date. I felt a catch in my throat. Key? Something by Key never published? About the snowfly. My hand trembled and my heart raced as I stared at the title. I lay the book gently on the table and started to carefully lift the title page, but it was brittle and I did not want to damage it. Not now, not at the moment when a dream was within reach. How could I do this safely?

Before I could decide, an explosion shattered the windows in the study and rocked the foundations of the house; I stumbled into the other room to find a dusty, angry, and disoriented Gillian on the floor, tangled in the blanket I had put over her.

“Bloody fucking savages,” Gillian cursed, hacking and coughing to clear her lungs as she clawed frantically at the blanket.

I freed her, hoisted her to her feet, and tried to brush her off. “Are you hurt?”

She shook her head. “I'm not ready to go,” she said. “It's my night. Ours. Bloody bastards can't just walk in and take over.”

Another explosion rattled the walls. Bits of stone zinged around like angry wasps. More explosives popped outside and I heard several incoming artillery rounds strike close. “There's no choice,” I said. “We have to get out now!” The distinct sharp crackling of AK-47s peeled in the distance.

“There's always a choice, darling,” Gillian said calmly.

She was wrong. “Not this time.”

Another round hit near us, knocking a wall down and filling the room with a nearly impenetrable cloud of gray plaster dust and flames.

Gillian looked at me with tears in her eyes. “Well, we did try to do it right, didn't we?”

I slid my arm around her waist and moved her along. “Yes, we did.”

We hurriedly stuffed our feet into our boots and fled the burning house carrying our clothes. As we passed the study, I stopped. The room was an inferno and in it I saw faces of fear and laughter, faces I thought were mocking me. The Key manuscript and all those wonderful books would soon be ashes and lost forever. Gillian jerked me by the arm and we made our way out of the burning house to the chopper, whose rotor was screaming.

We clambered aboard and Gillian shouted, “Eddie, give us a spin over the old place!” The helicopter leapt off the ground. The pilot bent the Huey in a tight, ascending turn to the north, then veered back south.

Both door gunners shot white flares into the darkness. I watched them ignite and sputter as they floated earthward under tiny parachutes.

I saw a dozen tanks fording the river adjacent to the Trout House. Hundreds of infantrymen were wading resolutely across shallow riffles in the wakes of the tanks. There were sparkling star-shaped muzzle flashes from the river and the area around the house. I wondered about the servants, Montagnards, and other people I had seen loading vehicles when we arrived. I could only conclude that what I was seeing was the start of a major military operation, perhaps even the major uprising feared so long in Saigon and Washington, D.C.

“Throw them some candy?” one of the door gunners shouted.

Gillian answered angrily, “Bloody fucking right! Give it to the bastards!”

Ejected brass cartridges rattled around the belly as the gunners strafed troops caught in the shallow river. The cool night air raced through the open bay and I smelled gunpowder and aviation fuel and my own sweat.

I begged a drop-off at an artillery camp about twelve miles south of the Trout House. My gut told me that the enemy action was huge and I wanted desperately to file a story and beat the competition. The Huey bumped the ground hard. Gillian kissed me quickly and pushed me away.

“Bloody fools, you men,” she shouted before the helicopter smothered her voice and climbed away.

The firebase was built on a treeless ridge and surrounded by wire, fire pits, and bunkers that stretched along the spine as far as I could see.

“Who the fuck're
you?
” a sergeant asked. His M-16 was pointed at my head.

“Rhodes, UPI. Get on your radio. NVA tanks are crossing the River of Trout.”

“The River
what?
”

“Get me a map.”

He looked at me with bulging eyes. “Man, you might want to holster your Johnson.”

Only then did I realize I had on my boots and nothing else. In other circumstances, it might have been funny.

 

•••

 

It was several hours after I was dropped at Camp Gates before there was an attack, but once it began, it was brutal and the camp took a terrible pounding. I had no way to call in a story, and it didn't take long for me to forget about journalism and concentrate on staying alive.

A Russian tank fired at the camp and the camp fired back. A light colonel shouted frantically into a PRC radio, “Get that tank, get that tank!” It became his mantra.

I couldn't separate the tank's gun from other incoming rounds, but I sensed waves of violence. First came heavy incoming, followed by a pause, then even heavier outgoing. I had no doubt that the North Vietnamese had us zeroed in, and I suspected our outgoing fire was mostly guesswork and helter-skelter in its effect. The ground around me shook like a continuous earthquake, raising a huge cloud of dust in the bunker where I took cover. Outside it was like a fireworks display on an unlimited budget. A lethal show.

Shrapnel sometimes whizzed by the opening to the bunker and smacked dully into things outside.

The dust inside was so thick that I soaked a kerchief and held it over my nose and mouth to keep from choking. I crawled cautiously outside during one of the brief lulls between artillery exchanges and made my way over to a pair of troopers in a slit trench firing an M-60 at the treeless rim of a clearing slightly downhill of us. I watched spouts of dirt erupt under the machine gun's steady pounding. The ammo feeder's face was red with dust and sweat and he had loud hiccups that sounded like mortar rounds going out.

I never saw anybody get hit, but I saw the results. A soldier farther down in the slit trench was holding his left arm in his right hand. The left arm was no longer attached and he looked puzzled more than hurt. I had seen enough wounded during the war to recognize shock.

Journalists pride themselves stupidly on their professional neutrality. We're supposed to be dispassionate observers and seekers of facts that lead to the truth, not participants. I heard my voice yelling, “Medic! Get me a fucking medic!”

“There ain't none,” somebody shouted to me.

I did not think. I acted. I took the soldier's severed wet arm and set it aside. He objected, “That's mine, man!” Blood spurted from his armpit and pink bubbled from his mouth. I had no idea what to do to stanch the blood and all I could think of was finding somebody who could help. I picked up the soldier in a fireman's carry, bent under his weight, then picked up his severed arm and started through the camp with the man on my back. “Medic? Medic?”

Soldiers pointed and yelled, “That way, man. Keep going! Move, move, move!”

There were explosions all around me, but I couldn't stop. Red dust hung in the air and things whooshed through it. Fumes of cordite hung heavy. My ears rang. I felt like I was going to choke and sneeze all at once. And die. My eyes burned and tears ran freely.

All-out combat is pure chaos; when you are in the middle of it there is no strategic point, only the immediacy of where you are and what you are trying to do. Motion and time slow down. I passed the helipad I had arrived at that morning. Three Hueys were broken skeletons, black against hot tongues of orange flames, ammo from their guns popping.

All along my route troops kept pointing the way to an aid station, which was downhill. Behind me, the explosions continued. Ahead, beside a bunker, I saw a woman smoking a cigarette. Her surgical scrubs were purple, red blood mixed with blue-green cloth and dust, blood in her hair, on her forehead.

“Hospital?” I said.

“There,” she said, pointing to a bunker entrance. “Put him down.” I held out the severed arm, which she ignored as she knelt and felt the wounded man's neck.

“Ernie!” she shouted into the bunker opening. A cigarette stuck to her bottom lip.

A squinting soldier came cautiously out of the bunker. “Take the arm,” the woman said.

“Okay, doc.”

“You're a doctor?”

She looked up at me with glazed eyes. “No shit,” she said, flipping the cigarette away. “Help me get him inside. Buddy of yours?”