The Refugees(34)
“Name three times I’ve said that.”
“When I left Maine for school.” Claire held up three fingers of her right hand and slowly curled each one into her palm as she counted the times, ending up with a balled fist. “When I majored in women’s studies. When I told you I was going to Vietnam to teach. And those are just the most recent ones to come to mind.”
“But those things are stupid.”
“Oh, God, God, God.” Claire beat her fist on her forehead. “Why do I ever think things will be different with you?”
“For Chrissakes,” Carver muttered. Whispering drew his attention to the door, where a handful of the students had clustered. Claire wiped tears from her eyes. “Look! Now you’ve made me lose face with them.”
“Lose face?” Carver said. “You really do think you’re turning into one of them.”
“Shut up, James.” Michiko pushed by him to offer Claire a tissue. “I think we’ve had just about enough family time together, don’t you?”
While Claire escorted Michiko on a shopping expedition for local textiles, Carver was forced to entertain himself, a problem since there was nothing to recommend Quang Tri to the foreign visitor except its proximity to the old Demilitarized Zone. The city was just a provincial town that had been destroyed in the course of the war and, from all reports, there had not been that much to see before its destruction. Carver passed the time sitting at a bar’s sidewalk patio and watching local boys play soccer on a patch of grass. By the time the monsoon arrived in the afternoon, he had drunk enough 33 Beer to remind himself that nothing had changed since he had drunk it in Thailand over thirty years ago. If you’re going to bomb a country, his roommate in U-Tapao had said, you should at least drink its beer. It was insipid then and it was insipid now. As curtains of rain swept over the road, he ordered a bottle of Hue instead. Watching the water flooding through the gutters, Carver longed for his clapboard cottage on the shore of Basin Cove, autumn waving its metamorphosing wand over the forest’s greenery. That new world of crimson and gold receded even further when the lady who ran the market next to the bar turned up the volume of her radio. Above the relentless hammering of the rain, a woman’s high-pitched voice whined in accompaniment with what sounded like a xylophone, the music pregnant with sorrow, although perhaps it was only Carver who heard a lamentation where there was none.
The demining site was half an hour from their hotel in Quang Tri the next afternoon, far beyond the outskirts of the city. Legaspi had promised to pick them up in a white buffalo, and when Carver had asked him if he really meant a white buffalo, Legaspi had winked and said, “You’ll see.” The white buffalo turned out to be a white Toyota Land Cruiser speckled with measles of rust, its counter reading over 300,000 kilometers.
“Locals call these things white buffalo because they’re as plentiful as white buffalo,” Legaspi said from the driver’s seat. “The foreigners and the NGOs and the UN love the Land Cruiser.”
“Donor money,” Carver said. “All the doughnuts and four-wheel drives you can buy.”
“Pretty much, Mr. Carver.”
Michiko and Claire sat in the backseat, Carver in the front. Lining the road outside Quang Tri were one-and two-story homes of faded wood and corrugated tin, a few freshly painted and plastered mini-mansions towering over their primitive neighbors, all of them long and narrow. Occasionally a cemetery or a temple came into view, encrusted with dragonesque architectural filigree, as well as a couple of churches, their ascetic walls plain and whitewashed.
The flat fields behind the homes were mostly devoid of trees and shade, some of the plots growing rice and the others devoted to crops Carver did not recognize, their color the dull, muted green of an algae bloom, the countryside nowhere near as lush and verdant as the Thai landscape visible from Carver’s cockpit window as his B-52 ascended over the waters of Thale Sap Songkhla, destined for the enemy cities of the north or the Plain of Jars. There was a reason he loved flying. Almost everything looked more beautiful from a distance, the earth becoming ever more perfect as one ascended and came closer to seeing the world from God’s eyes, man’s hovels and palaces disappearing, the peaks and valleys of geography fading to become strokes of a paintbrush on a divine sphere. But seen up close, from this height, the countryside was so poor that the poverty was neither picturesque nor pastoral: tin-roofed shacks with dirt floors, a man pulling up the leg of his shorts to urinate on a wall, laborers wearing slippers as they pushed wheelbarrows full of bricks. When Carver rolled down his window, he discovered that the smell of the countryside was just as unpleasant, the air thick with blasts of soot from passing trucks, the rot of buffalo dung, the fermentation of the local cuisine that he found briny and nauseating. All of the sights, sounds, and smells depressed Carver, along with Claire’s and Michiko’s silent treatment of him, unrelenting since yesterday.
Only Legaspi was attentive, playing Giant Steps on the stereo, undoubtedly informed by Claire of her father’s love for bebop, the way the music flowed directly from his ear canal into his bloodstream. Of all the lands Carver had encountered, he liked France and Japan the most because of the natives’ enthusiastic appreciation of jazz, an admiration they extended to him. He regarded it as fate that he had met Michiko at a jazz bar in Roppongi, she a teenage waitress and he a decade older, on R & R from Okinawa, wowed by the sight of Japanese musicians sporting porkpie hats and soul patches.