The Refugees(36)
“It’s okay,” Legaspi said. “I’ve heard this before.”
“It’s not okay,” Claire said. “He’s old and angry and bitter and he’s taking it out on everyone he meets.”
“I’m not angry and bitter. What am I angry about? What am I bitter about? That I’m being lectured to by a kid who thinks he’s going to save the world with a tin can robot? That I have a daughter who thinks she’s Vietnamese?”
“I said I have a Vietnamese soul. It’s a figure of speech. It’s an expression. It means I think I’ve found someplace where I can do some good and make up for some of the things you’ve done.”
“I’ve done? What have I done?”
“You bombed this place. Have you ever thought about how many people you killed? The thousands? The tens of thousands?”
“I don’t have to listen to this.”
“It’s not like you’ve ever listened to anyone before.”
“You don’t understand anything. We coddled you so you wouldn’t have to worry about the things we worried about. Isn’t that right?”
Carver turned to Michiko for support, but she was studying the ragged copse of palm trees at the far end of the model minefield. Legaspi had returned to steering Ricky, while Claire had her arms folded across her chest, daring him to walk away, exactly as he dared her when she was six, clamoring for a blond Barbie doll in a toy store. You can sit here and cry your eyes out, young lady. She had promptly sat down in the aisle and howled with all the grief and fury only a child or someone on the brink of death could muster. He walked out of the store then, leaving her there, and he had no choice but to walk away now.
The monsoon struck fifteen minutes later, when Carver was a few hundred meters away from the demining site, the best he could manage on the rutted road and with his bad hip. Outrage and self-pity propelled his every step. He had never explained to Claire the difficulty of precision bombing, aiming from forty thousand feet at targets the size of football fields, like dropping golf balls into a coffee cup from the roof of a house. The tonnage fell far behind his B-52 after its release, and so he had never seen his own payload explode or even drop, although he watched other planes of his squadron scattering their black seed into the wind, leaving him to imagine what he would later see on film, the bombs exploding, footfalls of an invisible giant stomping the earth.
Claire’s mind wasn’t complex enough to grasp the need to strike the enemy from on high in order to save fellow Americans below, much less understand his belief that God was his copilot. She was his complete opposite, joining Amnesty International in high school and marching against Desert Storm at Vassar, as if protesting made any difference at all. If it did, the help it offered was to the enemy. Although she empathized with vast masses of people she had never met, total strangers who regarded her as a stranger and who would kill her without hesitation given the chance, she did not extend any such feeling to him.
The unfairness of this absorbed Carver so much he did not notice the rapid marshaling of storm clouds until the sky grumbled. For a few seconds scattered drops of rain pinged off his forehead. Then came the deluge. Rain glued his clothing to his body, water sluicing down the back of his collar and soaking into his hiking boots. He stopped walking, unsure of whether to keep heading for the blacktop road or turn back to the demining site. The ribbon of earthen road was now the texture of peanut butter, and he sank millimeter by millimeter into its stickiness as the monsoon’s onslaught continued. This was why he hadn’t wanted to visit this country, a land of bad omens and misfortune so severe he wanted nothing more to do with it than fly over it. But Claire had brought him back to this red earth, and he wasn’t about to run to her for help, even if he could. He slogged toward the blacktop, not a human being or an animal in sight, the dull green fields flanking him on either side. It was the middle of the afternoon, but twilight had descended with the storm clouds.
In the distance, behind him, a car honked. He lowered his head and kept walking, the downpour so intense he feared drowning if he looked up to the sky. He heard the car’s old engine as it got closer, choking like a cat coughing up a hairball. With light from the high beams scattered on the raindrops falling before him, he decided that instead of ignoring them, he should raise his head in defiance. He stopped and turned, but somehow he misjudged this simple step, his right foot trapped by mud clutching at his ankle. With the high beams in his eyes, blinding him, he made another misstep, this time with his left foot, the toe coming down straight into the mud, the leg locking at the knee and his body pitching forward into the path of the car. The mud was wet and cold against his belly and face, its odor and taste evoking the soil in the distant yard of his childhood, the one where he had so often lain prone on the earth and played soldier.
It was Legaspi who helped him to his feet and into the idling Land Cruiser, Claire hovering over them with an umbrella. They put him in the backseat, shivering, Michiko using the silk scarf she had bought yesterday to wipe the mud from his eyes and face.
“We all thought you just went to sit in the car, Jimmy,” she said. Legaspi started driving toward the blacktop. “What got into you?”
“I’m sixty-eight, damn it.” Carver sneezed. “I’m old but I’m not dead.”
“You’re sixty-nine.”
He was going to argue as she scrubbed at the mud around his ears, but then he realized Michiko was right. Even his own years were elusive, time ruthlessly thinning out the once-dense herd of his memories. In the rearview mirror, he saw Legaspi looking at him, and when Legaspi spoke, his voice was not unkind.