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.We all smile and say ‘yes’ but sometimes it gets very hard.Very hard,” he repeated, gripping the steering wheel.“Trin, Jesus,” Broker ran his hand through his hair, “you have to control yourself.”“I will,” said Trin, determined.“You saved my life that night in Hue.They were going to put me up against a wall.”“The militia? Do any of them speak English?” Broker asked gently.Trin’s eyes flashed.“I’m all right now, Phil.I can do this.I used to do things like this all the time.” He closed his hand around the tiger tooth that hung around his neck and made a fist.As Trin put the van in gear and pulled back onto the road his expression was carved in black teak.The worst possible thing had happened.He had lost face.In front of a foreigner.And, considering what Trin had been through, Broker could have accepted the mood swings in an ordinary man.But he wasn’t willing to grant Trin the luxury of being ordinary.But what if he was?They drove on without speaking.Trin turned left before they came to Tuna’s bridge and drove toward the coast on a gravel road.The cars, trucks, and hordes of motorbikes disappeared and they were in the countryside among more traditional traffic: water buffalo, bicycle, and foot.The land now conformed more to the pictures in Broker’s memory, except for the concrete struts of electric powerlines and telephone lines strung through the rice paddies.And the red flags hanging from the houses.They passed another cemetery with a bleached crop of stone under a red cement star.Broker cranked down the window and turned off the air conditioning.“We won’t have AC where we’re going.I better get used to it.” Trin nodded and opened his window.The air was a swimming pool.The breeze was an itching pepper of red dust.Broker’s determination to wear his sweat like a pro ran out his pores.He reached for an omnipresent liter of bottled water.But Trin’s spirits revived in the rice fields, away from the noisy highway.He worked a jigsaw on the dusty roads, weaving in and out of plodding farmers and school kids on bikes.Twice they stopped.To snack on bananas and then for some iced Huda beer.But really they paused to watch the traffic behind them.Two hours into the fields and farms Trin decided they were not being followed.“Interesting,” said Trin, more centered now.“Cyrus can’t afford to trust even one Vietnamese.”Then he drove to a riverbank and they waited for a small car ferry powered by a sampan with dual out-boards.Slowly they crossed the muddy river.On the other side they waited an hour.When no one else used the ferry they stopped looking over their shoulders and drove straight for the coast.The country began to change: patchy white sand diluted the green palette of tree line and paddy and then the trees thinned out.The green and white gingham landscape became more solitary as the farmhouses and fields bordered in the reddish earth leaked away.They went by another stark grid of rectangular cement coffins guarded by a truncated pillar.“Quang Tri,” said Trin absently.Through a veil of sweat, Broker saw thickets of traditional graves everywhere he looked.Mounded earth.Circular walls.Square walls.Painted, unpainted, weeded, unweeded.Even his unseen destination was a grave, lined with gold bars and Ray Pryce’s bones.He wondered if the heat and the pressure had finally boiled away his rocky North Shore good sense.He was out here all alone in this foreign land with a tormented alcoholic for a guide.Jimmy Tuna’s ghost held him captive and pointed the way.Nina’s life rolled like dice.He had crossed oceans and continents and now he wondered if he had blundered across the Buddhist frontier into a swarming landscape where the dead still cast shadows.Quang Tri.More than bones were buried here.Empires.And Broker, who didn’t dream, except in Vietnam, reminded himself that he didn’t believe in ghosts.Except in Vietnam.Come sundown, he mused, the Quang Tri night must draw a crowd; betel nut-chewing ghosts with big, knobby rice-paddy toes who squatted gook-fashion and haggled in their jabber talk; slim, elegant cosmopolitan city ghosts who conversed in French, or swore like legionnaires, and the Japanese and Mongol would-be conquerors and how many million Chinese grunts from the Middle Kingdom who made a one-way trip down here…And the most recent members of the club, gangs of young rubbernecking American GIs who wandered through these graveyards whistling sixties’ tunes.Dummies who never got the word about the Buddhist recycling program…In from the sticks and utterly lost in the big city of death [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]