When Laura was very young there had been Nha Trang, a long empty beach and a rip that might have killed her. She had walked from the sand into water tropical-warm as blood, two steps into a froth scrabbling first around her ankles and then at her knees, and fell into a trough. Strong as muscle, water grabbed and tumbled her around and around. It hauled her away from the air. She swallowed briny gulps, saw scraps of fluffy sky and foam, bubbles, green streamers of seaweed in arabesques. Moments of palms blowing at crazy angles. She’d grabbed at sand, made long clawed channels that instantly filled with water. Wave after wave, heaving and hauling; her mouth opened and flooded with water and hair.
She hit her elbow and then her shin on rock.
Then it was up, up – a sudden dry, hot breeze – and she was gripped across the chest somehow: big, firm hands, fingers digging into her armpits hard against her ribs. A wave spat into her face. Clouds and sun swung. An arm scooped up her legs. Cradled high, she was cold, wet slipperiness against sun-warm skin. Something was said while she struggled, spluttered, retched, panicked, remembered and panicked again. She heard at last, words muffled through water still in her ears, and opened her eyes. The shore was jolting towards her, beach empty but for two towels far apart, a shirt, sunglasses, two pairs of sandals and the palms still heaving in the high breeze.
Lowered to her feet, she stood, shaky, head down and hands spread for balance. Someone spoke again. Nasal, American. A crack in it like her brother’s. Was she alright? She nodded and threw up. Clenched twice, blurted seawater and bits of lunch onto the sand. Stood bent over, shivering and whimpering while the boy-man ran for his shirt and the towels and the sandals, coarse sand spraying.
‘You better let me take you home, kid.’ She found this interesting, how he swallowed ‘home’, and she squinted up through sore eyes and dribbling hair at his blunt nose and blue eyes, wide and young, a reddish crewcut. He flipped his sunglasses open and put them on.
He said, ‘Where’re your folks?’ so she struggled an arm from the towel and pointed. The road behind the line of palms, then the row of French-built villas with peeling pastels, sleepy blinds half drawn for siesta. He took her hand and they walked.
He said, ‘I’m Chuck,’ and she giggled. The towel was over one shoulder, wrapped around her body and gripped from inside, though the scrape on this hand stung. He told her he was nineteen.
It was a short walk, through patchy sun and shade, the line of palms at the edge of the road. A pause for the whirring cyclo to pass, the driver’s legs mahogany-brown, muscles bunched hard as he pushed against the pedals. An old woman squatted in the shade by the road, collapsed face like an old sock puppet, gums dark red with betelnut and head wrapped in white-and-red checked cloth. She had horny old feet, cracked and dusty, and she chatted with a younger woman, her daughter maybe. Two woven baskets of limes slumped against the mossy garden wall behind them.
‘Allo, ‘allo. The women used high voices for her, pitched for the very young. They waved their hands and laughed when she called back, ‘Bonjour!’ Chuck pulled her forward and she looked up at his profile, blank behind dark lenses.
There was middle-of-siesta confusion at the house when they arrived – a long pause inside the front door while Chi Bai clacked on her wooden sandals into the shadows, followed by distant knocking and murmuring, and then the click and clunk of doors upstairs, a voice or two, and footsteps. Nobody had expected to be awake for at least another half-hour; faces were still unfocussed while Laura, shrill, pulled on Chuck’s arm and told the story.
‘Sir,’ Chuck said, and shook hands with her father, Robert. ‘Ma’am,’ he said to Ailsa, her mother, and ‘Hi’ to Philip. Laura was ordered off to the shower, Chi Bai’s hand resting on her shoulder; Laura talking, talking, high-pitched with relief, all the way up the stairs and Chi Bai murmuring in reply.
The hot water battered and she was suddenly very tired, sat in the cubicle with her eyes closed in the warm amniotic rush, until Chi Bai came back to her. Chi Bai crooned and patted with the towel, dabbed at cuts with cotton soaked in antiseptic, applied bandaids, pulled a cotton frock over her head, brushed her hair. The child put her arms around the woman and her face into Chi Bai’s breathing softness, a slight sharp smell of sweat.
Hair drying into white wisps, Laura squeezed onto the couch between her mother and her brother. The cane furniture creaked. Ailsa’s neck was elegant and her dark hair smoothed into a French roll, as always in those days, and she wore a simple print and a single row of pearls. Her manner was slow with poise; this is how she dealt with the unforeseen, in the manner of a diplomat’s wife. Laura looked at her mother as she would a portrait. Ailsa was telling Chuck about their arrangements for schooling, about Philip’s fine Australian school where he slept in dormitories behind ivied walls and played cricket with a white-clad team on broad green fields: ‘He comes here to us for his long holidays.’ She spoke very well, inclined her head with a listening smile.
‘Gee, Phil. Must make for a long time between vacations.’
There was a pause like the intake of breath, and Philip, ears red, stopped staring out of the window and looked at his mother.
Chuck said, ‘Is there no American school here?’ He held a beer, without yet drinking very much of it, and his own ears were peeling at their topmost edge.
‘Laura goes to the French school in Saigon.’
The overhead fan ticked. Robert’s chair creaked. He uncrossed long legs.
‘Did you say you come from California, Chuck?’ Robert reached to empty the beer bottle into Chuck’s glass, put the bottle onto its coaster and shook a little silver bell.
‘Yes, Sir. Outside of Oakland, Sir,’ while Chi Bai clack-clacked on her sandals into the room to pick up the bottle.
Now Chuck was smiling and talking about aunts, uncles, Mom and Pop, all in Oakland, dipping his head at Laura because he had a little sister too, ‘bout her age. Robert sat back, crossed his legs and supposed Chuck’s family missed him. Chuck sipped and said he guessed they did, licked froth from his upper lip.
‘Can’t be as much as I miss them, though.’
There was a sudden creak from his own chair and that young crack in his voice, something earnest that sat him forward, anxious to tell: ‘You know, I guess that’s why I’m so happy I met you folks’.
Robert and Ailsa inclined their heads and smiled.
Ailsa crossed one hand over the other in her lap. ‘I suppose you miss family life when you’re surrounded by the army all the time.’
The door to the kitchen swung open and Chi Bai was back with a tray to lay out beer, already opened; a Coke and two glasses with ice for Laura and Philip; to pour the Coke and put the bottle on the table. Laura whispered ‘merci,’ and so did Philip. Chi Bai smiled and left. The door swung open and closed. Laura leaned back so she could see past Ailsa’s back to the window: frangipani, pungent, white and sweet, then the edge of the heavy iron gate and the sometimes movement of someone padding past or a cart slow in the still, damp heat of the afternoon.
Chuck said, ‘Well, sure. But there’s more…’ He thought, and drained his glass. ‘I been thinking, and I think I know what’s missing.’ Very blue eyes, complex and simple as marbles in the light; a patch of fragile pink on his nose, unhealed sunburn. His diction blurred, mouth working in search of the word. ‘It’s…’ There was a moment, then the white-toothed smile of revelation. ‘Decency. Sir, Ma’am, it’s decency.’
Philip jabbed Laura with his elbow and mouthed move over. The sudden silence made them both look up, though none of the adults was aware of them. Robert shifted in his chair. He said, ‘Decency?’ and though Robert’s eyebrows were raised, or because they were, Chuck wanted to explain.
‘Sir, of course. At home, we’re so open and… uh… frank. Folks’re decent, y’know?’ He reached, but his glass was empty. Robert was slow to fill it, though eventually he did.
‘Thankyou sir.’ He drank with his head right back and the Adam’s apple bobbing; part of an urgency to impart what he knew. To express; to define. Everyone waited. He had his beer in one hand while the other tensed in the air, searching for the thought. ‘Over here, you know, Sir, Ma’am – you know this yourselves – these guys are sneaky, everywhere you go people are asking for money, money… It’s not like we’re cheap. I don’t barter with them. I give ‘em a good price for stuff.’ He looked up, eyes empty and light, bright, and Robert raised loose hands, dropped them, said, ‘Old chap’.
Outside in the garden Chi Bai was bending over in leaf-thick shadow under the spreading fig. She held up a doll and pulled a leaf from its hair, tangled like a naughty child’s, and looked up at Laura through the window. Laura made a face; Chi Bai shook her head and waggled a finger, and carried the doll out of sight.
‘They don’t tell you what they think, Sir. And the kids,’ he drank. ‘The kids are covered in lice.’
The fan tick-ticked and outside a pony dragged a cart with its little hooves tip-tap-tip-tapping. The tiny noises played against each other until the tap of hooves faded to nothing, leaving the lonely tick of the fan. The children looked at the silent adults.
Ailsa said, ‘All children get lice.’ She reached for her tea and put it to her lips though the cup was empty. It rattled when she put it back down.
‘Not American children – least, I’ve never seen American kids with lice.’
There was silence again, like a blank sheet. Breathing and the sweeping fan whispered together; condensation trickled the length of the bottle on the table. Ice cracked in Laura’s glass. The boy Chuck opened his mouth as if he were going to speak, but didn’t.
‘Old chap…’ Robert stopped. ‘Old chap, we can’t all be American.’
Chuck was nodding, nodding. ‘Actually, Sir, funny you should say that.’
‘Is it?’
‘Yes, Sir. You reminded me of something I saw just a week or two ago.’
His elbows were on his knees and he was leaning forward. ‘I was walking with some of the guys in Saigon, and there was this work team. Bunch of Viets doing something – unloading a truck, I guess, it doesn’t matter. With an American overseer. Sergeant.’ His hands sketched it. ‘They were working kinda slow…’ he laughed. ‘Like you know, they always do. The sergeant looked pretty pissed – beg your pardon, Ma’am – and you couldn’t blame him. So, you know what he said?’
Chuck slapped the arm of his chair.
‘You know what he said? He said – “Get your back into it! Pretend you’re American!”’ His face was pink, bloating with the heat and the alcohol. He giggled. ‘Said what we all been thinking. Just like that.’
The fan swept and ticked.
Later, Ailsa asked would he return for dinner and Robert said that was the least they could do; they both stood up unsmiling while Chuck said no, no, no thankyou, some of the guys were expecting him. So they walked him to the door and shook his hand, thanked him again, wished him well. Laura went with him to the gate; he stepped carefully, eyes squeezed against the need to focus in the sun. He put his sunglasses on, looked down at her from behind the lenses. He had his towel in one hand and with the other rubbed the springing lawn of his hair.
‘So long Kid, and watch where you swim, OK?’
‘Okay. Bye Chuck.’ He walked past the two women with their baskets; their heads turned to follow him. He walked into the vast black shadow of an ancient tree stretched out from its garden, and vanished.
Laura, small in a hot, sunny patch stirring at the dirt with the tip of her sandal, looked up for Chi Bai coming from the house with a basket.
‘Tu viens?’ Chi Bai reached to Laura and they swung hands into the afternoon. ©