Chuck Logan - The Price of Blood

The fixed eyes of the double amputee stared past him, through him, a brown study in dead ends. Broker fell asleep to escape the man’s presence.

Broker woke with a start and didn’t know where he was. He heard the chug of motors and faint voices. Fishing boats. A battered varnish face-the one-legged, one-eyed man loomed over him. “Nuc,” said Trung Si. He made a scrubbing motion to his face with his hand. “Rua.” His crutch banged a bucket of water at the foot of the platform.

Broker nodded, rolled off the plank bed, and squatted to the bucket. He stripped off his T-shirt and dashed water on his face. Something missing. The staring double amputee was gone.

Trung Si jerked energetically into the room with the pogo stick grace of a one-legged stork, both hands free, his crutch wedged in his armpit. He handed Broker a small glass bottle with a glass stopper. Broker opened the bottle and smelled moonshine, home-brewed million-proof rice whiskey. Then the old man pointed at Broker’s trousers and raised his hand to the side of his head and tugged on his ear.

After several demonstrations Broker understood. Trin must have told him. He removed the napkin from his pocket. Trung Si unpacked the shriveling ear part and earring and cleaned off clinging bits of thread and dirt. Then he dropped the grisly memento into the glass jar, which he plugged tight. He set the bottle on a shelf.

Then he brought a charcoal brazier from the kitchen shack and set it on the table on the porch. He put a screen over it and laid out strips of meat.

“Trin?” asked Broker.

“Yes,” said Trung Si, smiling, and going back to his kitchen. He hopped back with a tall glass of steaming black coffee.

“Where’s Trin?” asked Broker, blanking out on even the simplest Vietnamese.

“Yes,” said Trung Si, again smiling politely. He gave Broker the glass and pointed to the porch. Broker went out on the porch and sat down, lit a cigarette, and watched the afternoon shadows lengthen down the beach. A rattle of metal preceded Trin, who came around the corner of the house looking like the Tin Man in The Wizard of Oz , loaded down with a fuel oil lantern, a tin of fuel, two short shovels, a longer-handled shovel, two mattocks, a coil of rope, and two huge banging buckets.

Trung Si muttered something.

Trin held up one of the short snub-nosed shovels. An old surplus North Vietnamese army shovel. It was worn from use and the wooden handle had been shined smooth by sweat and callus. He laughed. “Trung Si says this shovel won the war.”

They sat down to eat, picking strips of meat off the brazier and mixing it with rice and raw vegetables laced with cilantro and chopped chilies and garlic. Flies settled on the table. Trung Si grumbled and shooed them with his chopsticks. The slender sticks flicked; he shot out a hand and plucked a single fly from midair. He flashed a grin at Broker and tossed the crushed insect aside.

The sound startled Broker. At first, lulled by the surf, he thought it was the call of a loon. Then he located the source and saw the double amputee sitting on a dune up the beach, bent over a bamboo flute. His wide face shone in the muzzy light, fiery with music.

Trin smiled. “It is a very old song. For us.”

The notes were a sinuous blend of pastoral and savage and Broker, who came from a place where old didn’t really mean “old,” asked, “How old?”

“Oh, a thousand years. It’s a village song. A young man takes a wife but then he must go to the mountains to fight the invaders.” The cripple’s breath soared through the wooden flute like adrenaline in a fighting man’s blood.

“Do you live here?” Broker asked.

“Sometimes. I have a room in Hue. A bed, a desk, a chair, and some books.” Trin squinted in the failing light. “Don’t worry. I’m good.” He held up his Pepsi can as evidence.

Then it was time to go. Trin handed Broker a bucket packed with a tall Chinese Thermos, two flashlights, six liters of bottled water, and some kind of lunch wrapped in bamboo leaves. Trin picked up a similarly packed bucket. They both grabbed a shovel and a mattock.

“Compass,” said Broker.

“In my pocket.”

Trung Si took the hunting rifle off the peg on the wall and loaded it. Trin said, “We’ll post Trung Si up the trail from the beach. If anybody comes he’ll signal.”

Trung Si shouldered his ancient rifle. The flute marched them through the long shadows as they walked up the sandy track to the van. Without speaking, Trin guided the van through the dunes keeping to a faint trail. He stopped twice to consult the map. The third time he stopped for good by the skeletons of abandoned houses, foundations, and one wall that framed a solitary window. “Trung Si waits here. Now we walk,” he said. “It should be up there, in the willows.”

Silently, Trung Si hobbled over to a block of cement sticking from an old foundation and sat down with his rifle. With their tools and loaded buckets Trin and Broker headed toward the slosh of breakers rolling on the beach. Except for the bang of tin on steel and the rhythm of the sea it was perfectly still.

“Are we walking on bombs?” asked Broker.

“Iron elephants,” grinned Trin. “A whole herd of them sleeping below us.”

Broker stopped and stared. Just ahead. Hundreds of raised rectangular stone markers slept in the wind-rippled dunes. The low walls of the military cemetery were irregular, slurred in the sand. The central monument was shorter, squatter than the others he’d seen. The sand and salt wind had eaten the color from the pitted stone star. It sparkled, a gritty molten ocher, in the rays of the dying sun.

He picked his way carefully through the field of stone and sand, and suddenly he stopped and cocked an ear at the vast silence. It occurred to him. He hadn’t heard a single helicopter since he’d arrived in Vietnam.

They left the boneyard behind and walked up a slight rise, ankle deep in sand. Trin stopped, studied Jimmy Tuna’s map and pointed. “There are your graves.”

Just like Jimmy said. Three old graves. Gray and embroidered with moss and big around as wrestling rings. A masonry screen blocked the entry to each tomb. Inside the walls, a simple circular cairn of rock.

“Jimmy chose well,” said Trin. Below the graves the beach tucked in a gentle sloped ravine for two hundred yards down to the waterline. The sea in front of them was quiet, shielded on either side by natural breakwaters.

You could see how it happened. The encircling arms of the cove would catch the eye from a helicopter, the inviting fold of the ravine, probably with higher walls twenty years ago. Drop the sling into the ravine, set the charges and drop several tons of sand over the load.

Pirate cove.

Broker walked around the screen and entered the center grave. Trin tossed him the compass. Broker shot his azimuth and extended his arm down the beach. “Eighty-two paces,” he said. Trin took the long-handled shovel and Broker called out adjustments as he walked it off.

Trin stopped and thrust the shovel into the sand about fifty yards from the water’s edge. He trudged back up the slope. “Now we wait for dark,” said Trin.

They sat down in the shadow of the tombs and waited. Broker opened the Thermos from his bucket and poured a cup of coffee. Trin opened his Thermos. Broker steered it under his nose. Sniffed it.

“Hot tea,” said Trin.

The desolation was deceptive. The surf breaking on either side of the cove sounded like a Superbowl crowd. He said, “Ray’s down there.”

“His bones are. They should be returned to his family.” Trin rubbed his chin and looked around. “Do you think she’ll talk?”

“She’d die first.”

“Do you love her?”