T. Parker - Little Saigon

Bennett drank again and considered the picture. “He fooled us all, right up to the end.”

Another shot of the plantation, this one apparently taken by Houng Lam. Bennett and Crawley hugged Li, while a grinning Tony edged into the far side of the frame. The next picture was of Bennett and Li, crammed into a booth in a bar. Crawley sat beside her and three other soldiers were pressing into the shot, all drunken smiles. Frye noted a familiar face, far right.

“The Pink Night Club at the Catinat, Chuck. Helluva place. Li got a few gigs there. I got her an apartment on Tu Do Street in Saigon just a few weeks before I got blown up. Look at this one! That’s Li and Elvis Phuong. Great singer, that fuckin’ Elvis. He sings at the Wind sometimes. Li did a set with him and the band and Elvis backed her up. I thought she’d come unglued she was so nervous. Everybody loved her. She had that something about her. Now check this! There she is on stage.”

Li stood, mike in hand. Frye could see the muscles in her neck straining beneath the pure white skin. She had on a black miniskirt and a pair of matching boots.

“Nice, Benny. Burke Parsons, on the right?”

Bennett nodded and drank again, shaking his head. “Burke was CIA, so our paths crossed and we hung out some. He came and went. That was the spooks.”

The next picture sent a chill of sadness through him. Bennett was leading Li to a dance floor, her hand in his, her face beaming up at him, his trousers pressed tight around his good strong legs.

Bennett stared at the picture a moment. “They still itch and ache sometimes,” he said. “And my fucking knee gets sore. Remember the knee?”

“Football.”

“Back then, I thought torn ligaments were a bummer” — more gin — ”But I never complained, Chuck. And I’m not gonna start now.”

“Maybe it would do some good.”

“Fuck complaints, little brother. Fuck you and fuck me. Now here, this is the kitchen of our place on Tu Do.”

Frye’s heart sank as he looked at the screen. Li was sitting at a table with a cup of something raised to her lips, caught unaware, a look of surprise on her face. The apartment looked small and almost empty, washed in a rounded, yellow, distinctly eastern light. There was a vase with no flowers in it on the table in front of her. Frye felt an overwhelming sense of solitude in the shot — the solitude of a girl without her family, of a soldier far away from his, of a small room in a big city soon to fall. Two solitudes, really, vast and hemispheric as two halves of the earth, coming together for reasons more desperate than either of them could have known.

“Nice apartment,” said Bennett. Frye watched him wipe his eyes with a fist. “Really nice little place to be. Cost me a fortune, but Pop sent money by the pound. You should have seen her, Chuck. Sitting on the bench at the plantation with a fucking guitar. She was just a girl. It was her innocence, how simply she accepted things. Innocence isn’t right — more like faith. Yeah, faith, that was what she had.”

Bennett drew carefully on the bottle. His eyes never left the screen. When he started talking again, it was to the picture. “Yeah, you should have seen her. She was everything I thought we were fighting for. She was young and beautiful as a girl could be. She’d sing all the fuckin’ time and that voice was like heroin inside my veins. It made me feel warm and good inside. She had one of those faces that seem to have a light on behind it. Even when there wasn’t any sun and it rained a week straight, she had a glow. It was unreal, but the things I felt coming alive in me when I talked to her, they were brand-new. It was like she was a perfect animal. A perfect human female animal, right there in front of me. Everything I thought that animal should be. We connected. She picked up English fast.”

Bennett dropped the carousel controller and hooked his thumbs together, flapping his hands like wings. “She’d do like that when she saw me. Frye always came out ‘Flye,’ like a bird. I told her we could fly away from that war together someday. We did. We tried to.”

“I see what you loved in her, Benny.”

“No,” Bennett said quietly. “You don’t. She was Vietnam. Her parents came south in ‘fifty-four because they were strong Catholics. Mom died of fever; they killed her father because he wouldn’t shelter the Cong. You know what she wanted? She wanted to study music.” Bennett examined his gin, tilted back the bottle and drank. “So there she was, like the rest of the goddamned country, trying to be left alone while the Viet Cong terrified them at night and we ran the place during the day. She’s why I’m here, I thought. These are the people we came here for. We’re here to give them half a chance at running their own lives someday.

Frye watched his brother lean back and stare for a long while at the ceiling.

“You tried.”

Bennett reached clumsily under the couch cushion and brought out a .45. He almost tipped over, then righted himself and studied the barrel of the gun. “See this? I’m not afraid of this.”

“Put it down. You’re drunk.”

Bennett clicked off the safety and looked down the barrel again.

“I got soaked in Agent Orange, Chuck, and I don’t have cancer. I saw worse shit than you can dream up and I’ve never had a flashback I couldn’t handle. I had enough pain for a whole city, but I don’t shoot, pop, or snort. I drink because I always drank. I don’t even collect the disability I got coming. You know why? Because I’m one tough stand-up motherfucker, and they can keep their dollars and send ’em to someone who needs it.”

“Come on, Benny. Put it down.”

Bennett gazed through Frye. “I got my legs blown off, that’s all. But Chuck, I gotta tell you right now, if they kill her, I’m gonna blow my brains out too. That’s no complaint, that’s just what is. Without her, I’m a bunch of pieces left all over the globe. With her, I can still see why it happened and why it was worth it.”

Bennett clicked back the hammer, hooked his thumb against the trigger and rested the gun in his lap, barrel pointing at his chin. “What more can I do, Chuck? What more? I keep looking, and she doesn’t come home.”

Frye reached out his hand. “Come on, brother,” he said softly. “We’re gonna get her. She’s okay. It’s going to come out all right, Benny. I promise. Then it’ll be just like old times. We’ll eat on the island on Thursdays and argue with Pop, and Mom’ll be happy and Li can write some more songs on the Martin. Maybe you can meet this new girl — Cristobel — she’s really good, Benny. The four of us could do something. Maybe we could get the family like it was in the old days. We’ll be tight again. Come on, Benny. Debbie’s gone. Don’t you go too. That wouldn’t be fair.”

Frye reached out and touched his brother’s hand. Slowly, he eased Bennett’s thumb from the trigger guard, then brought the gun away. Bennett tipped over, burped, tried to sit back up and tipped over again. “What am I supposed to do?”

Frye and Donnell worked his clothes off and got him to the shower. Bennett slumped in the corner and stared out, a defeated soldier, while the warm water ran down him.

Back home, Frye got into a pair of Mega-Trunks and waxed his board. He made the ten-minute walk to Rockpile while the first light of morning coalesced in the east.

The hurricane surf had hit. He stood on the sand and watched the horizon, the plate-glass water, the gray waves marching in, precise as infantry. Each crashing mountain sent a tremor up his ankles and into his legs. Eight feet at least, he thought, and all muscle. Hard, vascular tubes, well shaped. The air filled with spray, and the sand vibrated. Frye watched two surfers carefully picking their waves. One took off and got launched from the lip — nothing but the long fall down for this man — his orange board trailing after him like a flame. The other thought better and backed off. More like ten feet, Frye saw now, and getting bigger. The beach trembled. The wide white noose of a riptide wavered out when the set ended.