Charmaine Craig - Miss Burma

“So why accept the glass?” Benny hadn’t meant to be cruel, but even as he regretted his tone he snatched the glass from Hatchet and defended himself with a few swift gulps of its contents.

“It seems to make others more comfortable,” Hatchet said, looking rather shocked.

“You’re wrong. It makes people far more uncomfortable when a man isn’t easy in his skin. So you don’t like liquor. So what? Say you don’t drink. That’s a respectable position. For heaven’s sake, don’t take a glass and fondle it and dab its rim around your lips.”

“Okay.”

“I didn’t mean to hurt your feelings,” Benny told him.

“You haven’t hurt them.”

“For God’s sake,” Benny said.

Another bloom of embarrassment rose to Hatchet’s cheeks, and Benny had the sudden, unreasonable instinct to protect the devil — and then, just as swiftly, to punish him for needing protection. What he wanted was to take him by the collar and give him a good shake.

“Why did you name yourself ‘Hatchet’ of all things?” he demanded instead. “Leaves a terrible tingle on the back of a man’s neck.”

“I don’t know. Just came to me.”

“That’s a cop-out if I ever heard one. It must’ve come to you for a reason.”

“Maybe it’s related to a story my father used to tell me.”

“Your father?” Why was Benny astounded by the entirely ordinary revelation that Hatchet was someone’s son?

“I grew up in New England, Boston — that’s—”

“I know where it is.”

“My mother was raised there. But Dad was Southern, the son of a Presbyterian minister from a place called Prattville, Alabama. That probably doesn’t mean anything to you. Back home, the difference between the South and the North — it meant even more when Mother and Dad married in the early twenties. He came to Boston to go to MIT, a university—”

“Of course.”

There he was, Benny, wanting to pummel the fellow again.

“I guess he converted to Mother’s perspectives — Republican, Congregationalist. And she apologized for his old ones. She liked to say his ancestors had been ‘nice to their slaves.’” Hatchet laughed as he said this, with a spite Benny had never seen even in the shadows of his most stifled expressions of interest or pain. “Whenever I used to get dreamy, or sleepy, or talk about some scheme I had when I was a kid, my father would tell me the story of what he did to the Negro working under him when he was a boy. I guess they were ten or eleven, and one day my father was left in charge, and the other boy — a sweeper — fell asleep on a cracker barrel, and my father told the boy to wake up, to get back to work, but the boy kept sleeping. So my father picked up a hatchet and threw it at the cracker barrel, where it stuck, while he shouted, ‘When I say wake up, I mean wake up!’” The American was laughing more fiercely now, laughing with that awful spite in his eyes.

But all at once the laughter stopped, and he said, “Maybe I will have something to drink, if it’s not too much trouble,” and he sank onto the sofa, beside his balled-up overcoat.

When Benny returned with a couple of bottles of beer from one of Lynton’s stashes, Hatchet took his warm bottle by the neck and drank absently. And it was suddenly pleasant, drinking in the shadows with him. They seemed to have found a way to be together.

But when Benny’s bottle was empty, it occurred to him that a man’s personal vulnerability could blind one to his cold cruelties.

“Did Lynton send you?” he said, startling Hatchet out of his daze. Benny hadn’t spoken sharply, yet the accusation in his tone must have been audible.

A sort of sourness pinched at the man’s mouth now, and he put down his own half-drained bottle, as if unable to manage the taste after all.

“I was a little hurt by what you wrote,” he said. “But I guess I deserved some of it.”

Almost sadly, he sifted through the mess of his overcoat and brought out Benny’s volume. “You should have it,” he said, holding it out.

Benny took the thing between his fingers, wanting to protect it from extinguishment. “Has Lynton had the chance to read it?” he said, his heart thumping in his throat.

Hatchet didn’t seem to catch on to the significance of his question. “I imagine so,” he said quietly. “He’s very well-read.”

“You haven’t told me what you think. I have thick skin. Tell me where I’ve erred.”

Hatchet seemed to consider this a moment. “I can’t speak to everything about the past. And I guess I don’t understand the value of all the time you spend on it. But your conjectures about recent events and what’s going on now—”

“Hold on a minute,” Benny interrupted him. “Don’t you see — don’t you see that one of the values of examining the past is that it allows you to escape the tyranny of the present? I mean the tyranny of the self in the present. A self that is terrified of diminishment in the face of the past, in which it played no part.”

The fellow looked at him in pity and confusion. He couldn’t follow where Benny’s thoughts had taken him — beyond history, beyond circumstance, to the realm of the spirit. He couldn’t follow it, and he mistook his confusion for Benny’s.

“I’m sorry for not finding a way to make contact before,” he said. “The pressure has been intense. I mean the pressure not to interact with insurgents or anyone involved in insurrectionary activities.”

“Yet you’ve kept in touch with Lynton.”

Now the man couldn’t hold his gaze.

“Am I correct, Hatchet? Correct in what I describe about America playing a role — if not in overthrowing U Nu and installing Ne Win on the throne, then in keeping Ne Win on that throne. U Nu came too close to bowing to the demands of the ‘ethnics,’ didn’t he? Too close to giving in to federalism. And your government doesn’t want that kind of fragmentation, as you told me. That might open the region to communist influence. Whereas the Union is safe in the dictatorial fist of Ne Win — provided, of course, he maintains his so-called posture of neutrality regarding China. Never mind his Marxist rhetoric, that he’s staffed his ranks with old communist sympathizers, that his party controls everything. And his army’s program to ‘liquidate’ minorities, as you people like to call it — the executions, the way he’s relocating villagers en masse to camps, forcing them to serve in the Burma Army. Am I right that America wants Ne Win to succeed — to kill off the minority problem?. And Lynton — are you behind his ‘surrender’? Have you promised him support as long as he works with Ne Win? Hatchet?”

“Will. Please call me by my name.”

“For God’s sake. Answer me.”

There was a pause, during which Hatchet — Will — seemed to be trying to decide his next course of action. Then he looked at Benny very plainly, and he said, “I have it from a reliable source that Ne Win will be seeking substantial military equipment from the United States any day. I’m not talking about the aid program already in place, what you write about in your diary. I’m talking about substantial amounts of advanced stuff: Trainer, transport, and tactical aircraft — fighter-bombers of the Mach 2 class. Patrol ships, minesweepers, torpedo boats, auxiliaries, amphibious craft. Washington is going to say yes to him because it’ll be seen as an overture. And because, bottom line, yes, our government thinks the ethnics are the problem. As far as Washington is concerned, the United States hasn’t been involved in aiding the opposition since the embarrassment with the Chinese anticommunists.”

For a long moment, Benny was too winded to speak. “What have you been doing here, then,” he finally stammered, “as far as your people are concerned?”