Chuck Logan - The Price of Blood

He stood up and furtively hacked the air with his hands. “Since the tourists I’m better off. In a good month with tips I can make three million dong. That’s three hundred bucks. Usually it’s more like two hundred. A bicycle cost thirty. Ordinary people make two million dong a year. Two hundred dollars. I lived like that, after I got out of the camp. Bartender. Laborer. Desk clerk. Dammit, Phil. I don’t even own a car. This is my chance.”

“We won’t ditch her for the gold,” Broker said emphatically.

“No. We do it all. We get some. We get her back. Get Cyrus arrested…we can do it. But if we go to the police-” Trin drew his finger across his throat.

Trin stood his ground in the rocking compartment, stubborn and desperate. Broker turned his head and gazed through the heavy screen on the open window into the inky Tonkinese night. He could barely hold the outline of the sadness that gripped him. Couldn’t penetrate it. If he tried to picture her face and what she was going through right now he started to unravel. He ached from helpless anger. If they had gone to the MIA people she would be…

But he had to go with his hunch. Now he was chained to it.

“Okay,” said Broker. Useless to talk. He rolled on his side and faced the compartment wall. Ghoulishly his hand crept to his pocket where the portion of Nina’s ear and the earring made a tiny lump. Coil by sweaty coil the snake wine choked off the lurching light and he fell asleep to the clack of the wheels.

Broker never dreamed. Now, as he woke drenched in a cold sweat, shivering, he amended that truism.

Except in Vietnam.

He had dreamed that he and Nina and Ray Pryce and Jimmy Tuna were crossing a swift river on the back of a giant frog. Except Jimmy had the body of a scorpion. In midstream, Jimmy smiled and stung the frog and they all drowned.

He stared at his hands. His fingers itched and had broken out in a bubble of raspberry blisters. Fungus. Hadn’t troubled him since 1975. Slowly he peeled the dirty bandages from his injured thumb. All but forgotten about it. Amazingly, the swelling had gone down. With a pink tickle, the stitched edges of the wound were healing. He took hydrogen peroxide and a fresh dressing from his bag and repaired the bandage.

He checked his watch. He’d slept almost nine hours. Be daylight soon. They must be getting close to the former DMZ.

The old neighborhood.

He was familiar with the slim waist of Vietnam that pinched between the Laotian mountains and the South China Sea: 60 kilometers across at its narrowest point. The Ben Hai River ran along the 17th Parallel; the old demarcation line that partitioned North and South Vietnam in the 1954 Geneva Accords. The Demilitarized Zone had buffered the river, 5 kilometers to the north and south.

Broker didn’t know Saigon. He knew the province that lay below the DMZ. Quang Tri. Highway 1 linked the two main towns along the coastal plain, Dong Ha and Quang Tri City. West out of Dong Ha, Highway 9 ran the gauntlet of gory Marine firebases: Cam Lo, Camp Carroll, Ca Lu, the Rock Pile, and finally Khe Sanh. Hue City was 60 kilometers south on the highway from Quang Tri City, into the next province, Thua Thien. The large port city of Danang lay another 160 kilometers below Hue.

Quang Tri was poor and mean tough. It had lepers and bubonic plague and the temperature could hit 120 degrees in the summer. The red dirt had soaked up a lot of blood. It had been Vietnam’s main killing ground for ten years. He remembered a paragraph in a guide book: seven thousand people had died digging for scrap metal in Quang Tri after the war ended. Mines. Unexploded ordnance…

And now Broker was back. To dig.

And his backup and main means of support lay sprawled on the opposite bunk with the empty bottle of rice wine between his knees. A book lay open on Trin’s chest, The Sorrow of War , a novel by a disgruntled North Vietnamese veteran, a black-market English translation the Hanoi street kids hawked along with postcards.

He stared out the grated window. Steaming ground fog, hot as a kitchen stove, obscured the land. A sleepy porter trundled by the door pushing a cart. Broker croaked, “Cafe.”

With a tall, almost clean, glass of thick black coffee he whipped his raw throat into shape with nicotine and watched the dawn come.

The land burned through the wet cotton mist. The ten shades of green furnace he remembered. Brilliant and still vaguely hostile, it hurt his eyes after the smoky, overpopulated inferno of Hanoi. He separated the green into shapes and marveled-not the blasted hills and craters of memory. Pine and eucalyptus trees, planted in orderly farm rows, as far as he could see. Rice fields wandering between them hemmed by dikes of rich red earth. Farmers, hoes on their shoulders, trickled into the fields.

A boy wearing a neat white shirt with a red scarf ran from a farmhouse, schoolbooks under his arm, and raced down the dirt path toward the tracks. Excited, he waved at the passing train. Broker almost smiled. So kids still did that someplace in the world.

The conductor leaned in the corridor, looking out a window. Broker fumbled in broken Vietnamese to inquire when they would cross the river that ran through the old DMZ. “Song Ben Hai khong adoi?”

The conductor pointed to his wristwatch and held up his hand, fingers spread, and said, “Five minutes,” in English. He nodded to the south. “Quang Tri,” he admonished solemnly. Broker leaned back and sipped his coffee.

They had planted a million pine trees in the DMZ.

The sun came up and the heat rolled over him like freeway traffic and left his bones as soggy as Cyrus’s squashed cat. It was Quang Tri all right. The train chugged past a huge military cemetery and its long shadow rippled over thousands of square stone markers laid out in neat rows around a cement spire engraved with a red star.

He craned his neck, looking for reference points. He had operated on every foot of this red dirt along the train tracks between Dong Ha and the DMZ. But now, with things growing everywhere and all the new construction-the war wasn’t just over: it was gone.

Except in America…

Broker shook Trin. “I’m lost,” he said. “A sign just said Gio Linh and I can see a road that has to be Highway One. We must be coming up on Dong Ha but I don’t recognize a thing. There’s…houses.” They crossed the Cam Lo River. A ticky-tacky patchwork of roofs and TV antennas everywhere. Places where he’d fought were now Vietnamese subdivisions.

Trin stared uncomprehending, crushed in the snake wine blues. He shrugged and grimaced and reached for a plastic liter of mineral water. He rinsed out his mouth, spit out the window, poured some water on his hands, and washed his face. Then he sat with his head in his hands.

Half an hour later the train stopped at Quang Tri City and they got off. A driver and another van was supposed to meet them. “Expect delays,” said Trin with a weak smile. “He lives a few blocks away, we’ll walk. Now we’ll find out if we’re being followed.”

They strolled through a small lorry park and Broker saw that the boxy, thirties-style, French Renault buses were still in operation, painted bright blue and yellow. They continued on toward a small bustling open market. Several kids on bikes circled them, shouting, “Lien So.”

Trin, hungover, grumbled, “They think you’re a Russian.”

Broker thumped his chest and said, “Co Van Mi,” American adviser. The kids’ hard faces broke into smiles.

“We called Russians ‘Americans without dollars.’ They were no fun,” said Trin. He went on to explain how Quang Tri City had never recovered from 1972. Dong Ha had replaced it as the provincial capital. He stopped and pointed to four bullet-and artillery-ravaged walls. Saved as a memorial. “We call this the Lucky House,” he shrugged. “The only thing left standing.”