Can Tho
Paul is sloping down the road from his mother’s house. The road is straight and leads away from Athens or Barstow or Paris, Texas, where concrete mixes up with the dirt of the land, and men and women tend gas stations happy in their isolation. It was not what they had expected but after everything else they had taken it. It was so easy to settle under the weight of their bent backs, so why hadn’t they sooner? Maggie and Ray stand on the road like statues in the sun with Maggie a little behind, watching the ground in front of her feet. Maggie is fifteen. She curls the corners of her mouth up and rubs the nape of her neck. She nods to no one and shows pretty teeth. Her shoulders are bare. The alate blades are finely wrought; the belly belongs to a girl; the legs to a tall girl; the shoulders to a young woman. Paul kicks up dirt and their eyes never catch, never meet. The three of them stand together in a pocket of silence and look at the sun that breaks through laces of fog at intervals and after a while Ray says, There’s a creek a mile in from the road. Ray speaks in imperatives. The way he bends his body towards Maggie as he raises his left hand to claw her to him is an entreaty to allegiance against Paul.
After a thoughtful moment Maggie says, Do you want to go, Paul? without really looking up from the ground in front of her. Her skin is patterned with sweat.
My mom says if I miss one more day of school, I’ll end up like my dad.
Paul already knows what Ray will say; can hear the music drifting towards him, the challenge of it.
You always let your mom decide what you do? You’re a coward. Are you a coward?
The creek is just a mile in from the road. Paul spits and watches the spit heat on the hard dirt of the ground and tugs a little at the frayed cuffs of his jean jacket and walks in the direction Ray was pointing towards.
Who takes care of your mom, Paul? Maggie says.
The trees around them are thicker and the air is dense with moisture. It’s hot.
She takes care of herself.
You walk around like you’re carrying a load on your shoulders, but you’re not that old.
Even if it is 1982 in a clearing of forest in America, in the mainland or closer to the coasts where littoral winds carry primal salts from other shores, the trailer that Paul Maggie and Ray find could be from anywhere. Its windows are shut and covered. An empty coffee can rolls on the ground. The sound and smell of unseen dogs, their shadows passing aberrations. Cut lumber swollen with the night’s moisture leans on tarps and boxes at grotesque, improvised, neglected angles. Paul is not thinking about 1982 or 1972 or 1892 because the truth is he wants to find the creek and show Ray and Maggie he is not a coward and make it back to school like his mother said. He likes the way Maggie walks next to him, the cunning in her steps, the kindness in the way she clears a path for him. She moves to examine the lumber and the back of her elbow brushes up against Paul’s shoulder. Paul is not used to the sensation that comes from her casual touch, the wellspring of affection it opens in him. He stands dazed, favoring his shoulder, while Maggie and Ray pick things up and toss them down.
From the outside, where Paul and Ray and Maggie are, it looks like no one is living in the trailer. But there is a man. There is also the scent of urine and stale beer. Dust. It is heavy with the detritus of life. Posters and ads hang all over the walls. Some of them look very old. Some of them don’t. There are pictures of helmeted marching men. One shows a shouting man pointing a gun at another man who kneels in front of him. His hands are tied and he’s partly blindfolded. In another, a plane drops fire onto lush jungle, thickset trees. They are organized in no particular pattern. They say things like: Fly to Vietnam, SEE Japan; For a Dime You Can Have Joy; It’s Time To Set The Record Straight; See Where the Wildness Takes You; Depression Hurts; Act Like a Woman, Look Like a Woman; Works to Correct Serotonin Imbalance; Challenge Yourself to Results; Don’t Sell Out Buy Out; Winchester: It’s True; Your Life is Waiting; Buy a Bucket of Chicken and Have a Barrel of Fun; Divided We Won’t Conquer; It’s No Time to Quit; It’s No Time for Politics; The Better Side of Wireless; Now Lasts 5 Times Longer; Prozac Can Help; Army Strong; This is The Age of Knowing How to Get Things Done; Getting the Most Out of Life is Army Strong; I’ll Meet You in The Yellow Taxi Dear; Who Says Men Peak at 18; Personal Care Since 1933; Ballard’s Snow Liniment Cures All Pain; Take the Blue Pill and I’ll Show You How Far the Rabbit Hole Goes; Never Settle for Less Than the King; Take the Fun With You Wherever You Go; The Smartest Dollar You’ve Ever Spent; 100 Experts Agree; Forge Your Own Path; Forever Faithful; The Right Fit for the New You; The Slick Way to Keep Your Motor Running; Human Capital; Simplicity at Its Finest; The Pursuit of Pleasure; Above All Else; What a Difference a Night Makes; Just the Essential; Hate is Love; The New Way to Mobile; Love is Color; Love is True; Absolutely the Best; Happiness Has a New Look; If There Were Three Reasons To Stay Tonight Which Ones Would She Choose; there are others not worth mentioning, bent and faded and crammed with their messages and pathways of desire.
The road to the creek is beyond Paul’s sense of direction. He is anxious to leave. If there were only moments he might lose himself, and forget the obligation that dogs him. To Maggie, for love. To Ray, for weakness. And each for the other. The creek would then not matter, nor the overriding desire to leave the clearing and find it. But it’s drilled in him. It’s his budding nature that he’s beginning to grasp. Maggie plays with the dogs. She’s pretty, and unafraid. Ray turns firewood over, smelling rusted cans for gasoline. There is fire he must perpetually light, burning the path to discovery.
The door of the trailer opens and a man says, Would you all like some beer? Now that you’re here and all. Running around and doing God knows what. He laughs. A charmer. There’s an open cooler at his feet. He lifts the lid using the big toe of a sandaled foot.
Ray doesn’t hesitate. He is already sitting at the edge of a damp fire pit, motioning to grab a can. The man tosses one to him and turns to Paul. Paul catches the beer but does not open it and eyes the tattoo on the man’s bicep. A rose and a sword. Asian lettering. The man does not give Maggie her turn. He pretends not to notice her, but while she is perhaps uncertain in the half-pose of her arms, pulled between the charm of the danger in front of her and her better instincts, animated by some promise of pain she has not yet felt in her life, confused at the new power it has over her, he tosses her a can too.
It’s alright. Alright. Just a beer, he says.
Then the man sits at the fire pit and talks with them and introduces his dogs, which reappear from outside the clearing. One is named Ho Chi Minh. The other is called Tango. They growl a little and sniff at ankles and knees. The man grabs the scruff of Tango’s neck until he yelps. You like it, he says. Then he pets his snout and nose and laughs, his knees spasm up to his chin. Paul understands that the man knows about children and how one might talk to them. He knows they will react to the inflection of authority in his voice. He will mask it with humility or pass it off as kindness, as one passes off violence as a lesser evil, a necessity.
The boys and the girl sit around him.
Are you related? says the man.
No, Maggie says.
Paul and Ray look up from their beer cans.
Are you from town?
Yeah, we’re from town, says Ray.
Folks from town sometimes come while I’m away.
Where do you go? says Maggie.
Into the woods with my dogs. You two take care of Maggie?
She’s good at that, says Paul.
There’s a creek a mile west from the road, the man says.
That’s where we’re headed, says Ray.
Good for swimming, says the man.
It dawns on Paul now that they will never reach the creek. Whatever impulse has led them to this nearly abandoned trailer and drunken hulk of a man has the touch of finality, some working design. From where the knowledge comes is hard to say. It’s in the darkness of the windows of the trailer, and the man’s deep-set, placid eyes. They shine the color of cut gemstones, sea-agate.
Maggie can stay, you’ll only be gone an hour, the man says.
Maggie talks to Tango, You’re a fine fellow, and handsome.
We’ll stay, Paul says.
The man looks disappointed.
Tell me your names, he says. Then, for half an hour they talk, about swimming, the town, oral sex, football, trailers, what they like to do on their days off school. You play hooky? the man asks Ray, who bridles the turns of conversation with the authority of a car thief, the charisma of the newly depraved. I know you do, he says with a dumb smile. But not Paul, not Maggie. Which one of you has done it? Done it? He passes Maggie more beer and presses close to her under cover of conversation. Once, she returns his glances with a caress, a touch of her fingertips across his eyelashes and damp forehead. He’s got someone now, perhaps, a fresh young one, with the gall to touch his eyes. He puts his hand on her back. The skin covering her spine tightens and the pupils in her eyes dilate. She straightens her body and reddens, digging her right hand, the one mostly hidden from him by her body, into the ground beneath her. There is a spot of sweat on her upper lip, and while she moves to wipe it away he grips her arm, tightening his hand a little.
What does your tattoo mean? she says.
It means I was in Vietnam, and they gave me a tattoo there.
What does it say?
It says that you can’t run away from what you are.
The man laughs at his own voice, as if to ease a tension within him, to erase the weight of what he has just said.
He pulls back. Pats her on the knee. She bends her body away.
I’ve had too much to drink, she says.
You are children, with thoughts and desires of your own.
You look like a dead dog, cloven at the skull.
The fourth beer is the loveliest, Maggie. The liver is a strong and vital organ.
Do you know how old I am?
Paul has been sent into the trailer for more beer. They’ve each had four or five, and Paul wobbles up the plank steps, fumbles for the doorknob. Inside, the smell stuns him. Nothing has ever been cleaned. The posters are stuck to every surface. The walls, the ceiling, the bed, a teakettle, shelves, mugs, a small desk, the windows. There’s one on a lampshade. Everything’s eroded and crumbling. Each poster has a message, a code he cannot grasp. He has found the center of something, and can’t stop thinking about a crater. He and Ray and Maggie are stuck in the middle of one, trying to crawl out of it, holding each other’s hands, tumbling down its sides. Before seeing the inside of the trailer, he had thought that the man was a drunk who might stay in the clearing through the end of winter and move on when the weather would permit it. But now, looking at the images, which seem to warp and spiral above him, and cast a possessed glow through the six beer bottles he has in his hands, he feels in his bones that the man will never leave. He has been there since the morning and since ten or twenty years ago, reliving an ancient wound, prodding it, trying to make sense of it. Slamming the screen door, balancing the bottles in his arms, Paul is happy to leave the trailer behind him.
When they’ve settled down again, sitting around the embers of a smoky fire, the man tells them about the delta near Can Tho. It was raining. His patrol was tired from a day’s march and they had left him standing there, his poncho the only color under the vast gray sky in Vietnam. While the village seemed to melt away the jungle closed itself off, performed libations and suffered in private. I knew two brothers and their sister there, he says. They played war games using sticks as guns. The seriousness of their battle, the correct use of firing angles and high ground made him stop to watch. Such limbs, what sideways grace. Later, between marches and firefights he spent idle days watching the waters. He drank cans upon cans of beer and tried to swim in the rain. Blacking out felt good. It meant he didn’t have to remember or think things through. Do you know where Can Tho is, he says. No, none of them know where it is. Well, it’s a hell of a lot far away, he says. How about that, a hell of a lot far away. You can see bits of it in the trailer, did you look Paul. I bet you looked. I would.
Paul had looked. Buzzed on the fifth can of beer he had seen photos of jungles choked with smoke. In newspaper photographs, wounded children stood in burning courtyards. The skin peeled off of their backs.
Is that where the pictures are from?
Some of them, yeah.
There’s an aura to the man. It comes alive when he’s talking and animated. When he gets closer to Maggie it lifts him upward and his eyes go dull. Paul senses that he is the only one to spot it. Ray and Maggie still take him for a novelty, a crazy man of the neighborhood. By every measure they aren’t in a neighborhood. The fire dies for a second, spent by a gust of wind. They stare at it. It reignites.
Were they your friends? Maggie says.
Who? says the man.
The brother and their sisters.
I shot the damn brother. I shot him.
Why?
Friendly fire. Do you know, I’m still there, at the delta, rotting on the bank.
You’re with me, Maggie says.
The will and the sinew are strong, he says.
He presses close to Maggie again and reaches where her legs fork, smelling her neck behind the ear, teething her nape, reaching through her shorts. She doesn’t move. She looks skyward, as if giving in to a minor annoyance. Then she takes his hands in hers, shoving him away a little, and stands over him.
Be nice to me, Maggie.
I won’t.
Ray gets up too.
Alright. I’m not feeling well, says the man. It’s the dampness.
What are the posters in your trailer?
You liked them, yeah?
What are they?
They’re poems. Tell you what to be.
Where did you get them?
O all over.
There’s a hole he’s dug somewhere. He tells them it’s beneath a tree marked with a carved X. Deep as hell. Can you find it? Which one of you finds it? Townspeople come to search for the hole, or rather, what he’s buried in it. When he’s there he observes them from the trailer. The dogs sometimes scare them away. Why, this morning when I saw you three the first thought I had was that the boy I killed had come back to haunt me, he says. How about that? He rambles about the possibility of ghosts, South Asian death threats, a finely crafted blade. When he’s bored he peaks a shotgun through the front door and one shot will do it. They scatter like birds and never come back. There’s nothing better than a treasure hunt for keeping people occupied, he says. Ray searches the clearing, hacks at vines with a piece of plywood, uproots bushes. Close, closer, cold as a river, the man says. Maggie is petting the dogs again, taking their paws into her hand. Where do you think it is, Maggie? You’ll wear it. My god you’ll wear it.
What’s buried in the hole? Paul says.
Stones, says Maggie.
Maggie, you’re right! There’s a basket full of jade.
That’s what people in town say, Maggie says.
Jade’s not worth much, Paul says.
Pretty though, Maggie says.
Not worth much, I’ll show you, says the man.
It’s just behind the trailer.
A cloud parts, and sunlight shines on Maggie. Dampness falls from trees and a few white blossoms that hang from them like broken water pitchers. Paul watches her. Wind pulls at her hair, bending it sideways. But he has been burned by these tricks of light before. She follows Tango to a clearing, swiping at a clump of grass three feet tall. Ray and the man are looking for a shovel. They’re taking their time, retelling stories of conquest, maybe, old friends by now, spitting the whiskey they share between squeals of amusement. When Paul reaches her, he brushes his hand against hers, and then pulls it away. She takes it, and pulls him down, and they lie in the little clearing. A crescent moon has risen just below the sun. The man’s no good, she says. Paul turns over and puts his hand on her belly. She stares but doesn’t move, doesn’t reciprocate. What do you think he’s got buried around here, Paul says. They’re stones just like he said. Paul feels blood stir in his groin. It won’t be like other days when he holds it in. You’re sweet, she says. A scalding feeling concentrates below his stomach, then there’s a flash of weakness, dying to say something, anything. He gags. Maybe she notices, but she doesn’t let on. He hasn’t the will to continue. Tango, she says, where are you Tango?
Half an hour later it begins to rain. The man has taken the stones from the ground. He wasn’t satisfied with digging up the hole. Afterwards he took a dull axe to the tree, and Ray helped him cut it down. It’s just a matter of three flat, circular stones with holes in the middle. They are the color of green milk. I took these from the damn boy’s pocket, he says. He gives one to each of them. Maggie is pleased. Ray throws his into the forest, watching its arc in the overcast sky before it disappears in the thickness of trees. Paul likes the way the smooth stone feels, and rubs it in his hands. There isn’t much for them to do. The dogs seem restless, whimpering, baying. In the soft rain the trailer glows a little, its metal exterior shining and sleek. The world slows down. Ray is searching for gasoline again. If he hadn’t told us where they were, he whispers, we could have stolen them. Knocked him out with a shovel and stolen them. The man and Maggie are behind the trailer. There’s the sound of stiff moaning coming from the back of it. What do you think they’re gonna do, Ray asks. The man’s hands are thick with dirt. The dirt makes spirals on her neck, her collarbone, the shirt that runs down the curve of her back. He’s got one finger running up it and another flicking the tab on the can of beer. Then, Maggie says, No. I won’t do it.
With a flicker in his blue eye Ray says, He’s lucky the lines never caught fire. Have you ever seen these burn? He’s looking over the branches of a tree. They’re sagging over the roof of the trailer, caught up in some power lines. There’s a gas tank, a generator. It’s an elm tree, like the one in Paul’s backyard. What is the logical conclusion of his observation? Paul might swipe at the gasoline in Ray’s hands, the plastic red container falling to the ground, spilling a little over their shoes. What has the man done to deserve another day alive, after all, or an intact trailer, pre-fire? The ads and fields going up in smoke. But it doesn’t happen. Paul turns up the ashes in the fire pit, smelling them on his hands, rubbing them below his eyes. The man is elsewhere, ducking under bushes, playing war games. After a while, a little shining cloud floats above the trailer. Is it a portal? Ray says. Maggie steps near it. It sucks at her a bit, Paul thinks, though not enough to lift her off the ground.
Later, Ray and Maggie are fooling around. They’re having fun; ashes cover parts of her body. There are sly glances, new flowerings of touch Paul doesn’t know. There is such small glory in unrequited love, and freedom in six cans of beer. The creek is west of the road, but just a minute from the clearing the man is on his back on the ground. He’s passed out, dreaming of somewhere far away. Paul crouches over him, breathing onto his face. He covers his dull eyes with his hand, and they don’t blink. Then he searches for the jade in his pocket and places it on the man’s forehead. He might sleep a little better this way, or wake up closer to home. Paul thinks so while he’s walking away, not home, and not back to the trailer.