Fire Summer. Thuy Da Lam
believed him when he said he was sent from America. He had come via Thailand, crossing at Poipet into Cambodia, driving eastward nonstop for two days. Now, he opened fire at the slightest shadow.
After the commotion, the men ate and drank heartily. A bottle of Jack Daniel’s, packs of unfiltered Camels, and news from the Little Saigon headquarters lifted their spirits in welcoming the Year of the Goat. More than two decades in the jungle had blurred their military ranks, national allegiances, and vital statistics. Except for the bald ailing cook and young boy, the men’s features—like those of Lee Hakaku Boyden’s—were buried under shrouds of dark overgrown hair. Sometime during the Second Indochina War, the loose band of twelve had formed. They drifted back and forth across the border of Vietnam and Cambodia, ghostly vagabonds roaming a wasteland, not sure whether they were dead or alive.
“They sent a girl?” Cook Cu asked, his atrophied legs crossing stiffly on the kouprey hide. Before the rain, he had sprawled out on the mossy jungle floor beneath the burgeoning evergreens where the B-52s had failed to hit. “This is our home now,” he had told Kai, pointing to a spot beneath a creaking pine where they could see the mountain ridge trailing the sky. “When the wind shakes the pine, the roots sway like the rocking of a sampan drifting on the Perfume River of the old imperial city.” The paralyzed cook asked Kai to mark the gravesites beside the tilting pine.
“They’re sending a girl,” Vinnie said.
“Girls are good for some things.”
The men chuckled and sipped their rice whiskey, reveling in the warmth that spread through their bodies. As the night fell, the rain pitter-pattered and the wind gushed through the cracks; they felt their isolation. They thought of their homes and the women from past lives and wondered what had happened.
Even young Kai looked momentarily lost. After a hamlet on the outskirts of the Central Highlands was burned to the ground, Lee had found a scorched child. He dropped the things he carried, tucked the dark waif into his cut-up duffel bag, and walked westward into the jungle of Cambodia. The child was named Kai for the cool peaceful sea that Lee remembered of his own home on a far-off island in the Pacific. More than any other member, Kai belonged to the wilderness, to the perpetual cycle of destruction and renewal, yet at times, his innocent eyes seemed to long for permanence, a place to call home.
“Who’s the girl?”
“A decoy,” Vinnie said.
The jungle moonshine tasted grainy and bittersweet as he recalled how customs agents had interrogated him and stopped his physical entry at Tan Son Nhat International Airport, denying his return to the land of his origin.
The Other Side
THE WOMAN HITCHED the weight of the cripple up on her back. She moved slowly though he was only skin and bones. The straps of the red basket cut into her forearm, and the glass jars and bottles knocked against each other, sloshing water full of debris from the South China Sea.
I should throw them all away, she said to herself. What does it matter now?
His spirit seemed heavier than his ashes, which she had placed in a sealed jar before the failed escape. The nuns at Ox Pagoda had warned against crossing the ocean with human remains, but it was so her husband would have his kid brother with him. The woman continued down the sandy footpath with the spirit of her crippled brother-in-law on her back.
“Put me down,” he wheezed again.
“And leave you in the middle of the road?”
“You could have left me on the back beach with those chess players. They would have given me a drink.”
“Drink-drink-drink,” she scolded him. “Chết là phải!”
“Death is contentment.” His eyes closed halfway, his bony chin rode on her shoulder, and his shaved head bobbed as she plodded on. “I was contentedly dead before you brought me along in your jar.”
“You wanted to see America.”
“When I was alive!”
Her thin back curved under his weight, and his twisted feet dragged on the ground, but she kept treading as if they were still at sea. When the currents had returned her to the back beach of Vung Tau, she found her brother-in-law Hai washed ashore beside her. Without a word, she hoisted him onto her back, looped the handles of the basket of what remained around her arm, and trudged off over the sand where beachgoers lounged, oblivious under the sun.
“Steeped in moonshine, I was,” Hai croaked. “Now an anchovy in brine, a cup of rice wine would be fine, oh fine.”
“Have you seen a shuttle to Saigon?”
“Why don’t you leave me here?” He lifted his head. “Look, over there.”
In the distance, they could see a roadside café—a broken glass case of assorted cigarette cartons, beer cans, and Coca-Cola and Orange Cream bottles. A blue-and-yellow striped umbrella shaded a girl lazing in a hammock and two men sitting on low wooden stools.
The woman stopped to hike Hai up on her back. “Về nhà rồi tính.”
“Home?” He chuckled dryly. “By now our house’s been confiscated. You’d be thrown back in jail. No, no, no. A drink, I need a drink.”
When they neared the café, their nostrils were stung by smoke, gasoline, and gunpowder, and their throats tightened. They realized the two men were teenagers in scorched peasant rags. Hai’s knobby fingers dug into her collarbones. “Don’t stop. Walk faster.”
The woman lowered her head and moved as quickly as she could, the jars and bottles clinking loudly in her basket, water dripping.
“Set him down and rest,” one of the boys called in a northern voice.
The woman glanced up and saw eyes squinting at her from a burned face.
“Nhìn thấy hãi cơ?” the boy asked. His mouth opened wide and eyes squeezed shut as if laughing. “You look creepy, too.”
“Don’t listen,” Hai whispered. “You’re just a little green and bloated.”
She stopped before the two boys. “Does the bus to Saigon pass through here?”
“A jitney comes at nightfall,” the burned face replied. “We’re going to Ho Chi Minh City to catch the train north to be home for Tết.”
“Is it Tết already?”
“Four more days ’til the Year of the Rooster,” his friend said. He was missing a right arm and part of his upper torso.
“It’s February 1981!” Hai croaked, calculating aloud the number of days that they had been at sea. “Twenty in December . . . thirty-one in January . . . Fifty-one. We’ve been gone for almost two months!”
“Let him rest against here,” the boys said.
They lifted Hai off her back and propped him up amid a pile of dried coconut husks. The one with the hole in his chest lit a cigarette and tucked it between Hai’s parched lips. The burned face dug two paper coins from his ragged pants pocket, held them up to his squint, and offered to buy them drinks.
“How far did you get?” the vendor asked. Her thick make-up did not mask her swollen pale skin but made her appear like a character from a cải lương folk opera.
“Bidon Isle,” Hai said, his gnarled fingers clutching a Bia Saigon. “Everyone dove for it. My sister-in-law jumped in. People swam, swam, and swam.” He stopped mid-story. The xe lam arrived at nightfall, jam-packed with riders and tilting to one side from the unbalanced load on its roof. The three-wheeled jitney skidded to a stop, and the driver hobbled from the cab to the rear to shove the passengers further into the overcrowded compartment, forcing the mass of bodies to bulge through the side openings. He nudged the woman onto a stranger’s lap while pulling at her basket, a momentary tug-of-war until she clasped the