Stephen Wright - Meditations in Green

A modest crowd had assembled on the ramp to watch them taxi up. The Mohawk rolled to a stop amid a circle of beaming faces. Griffin popped the hatch and was instantly enveloped in a bath of wondrous heat and friendly humidity. Then he saw Weird Wendell below him, aiming that obnoxious lens at his face and he smiled, he smiled and he waved cheerfully, so absorbed in impersonating Charles Lindbergh or Errol Flynn he failed to notice until he began climbing from the plane that the hand with which he had been greeting the happy ground crew still held firmly clenched in its tight fingers a colorful bag of fresh vomit triumphantly displayed as though it were a prize, an award just presented by the president of a grateful nation.

There were journalists in the hotel too, most of them experienced enough to recognize someone like Kraft. They were tolerable company for brief periods despite their sophomoric idea of relaxed conversation.

“Hey, Kraft, how many kills you got by now? Fifteen? Twenty-six? Forty-two?”

“Lost count, I guess.”

“But what’s it like, to kill somebody personally. For the reader back home. Intimate details, please.”

“What’s it like? Well, I guess I’d have to say it’s like taking a shit. You know, some are good and satisfying, some okay, some just plain messy, but one way or another, it’s always nice to get the crap out.”

Then they’d all laugh and pass around the dope.

Kraft, of course, had forgotten nothing—he was well aware of the precise number—but whenever he thought of the dead he always pictured American corpses and heaps of boots at impossible angles still attached to limp doll-like legs, the edges of the Corfam soles worn smooth and round on their journey through the war, tread clogged with dry mud, black leather uppers scratched and creased, boots safe now from future wear, boots ready for the dump. Enemy dead were jagged lines and shaded bars on plastic graphs and colored slides. Yes, that was how it was except for those solitary dark-of-the-moon scenes upstairs in his room when it was conclusively proven that even here in the ersatz luxury of the Hotel Golden Gate, joking with journalists and flicking lizards off the walls, there could still be found telltale traces of messy shit.

Hanging behind the desk in Major Quimby’s Spook House office, next to a mounted letter of congratulations from General Edward Lansdale, was a framed motto: A Guerrilla Swims Among the People As A Fish Swims In Water. From the sayings of Chairman Mao. Beside this was one of those bleached-out watercolors torn from a children’s Bible and depicting a golden haloed blue-eyed Christ knee deep in water, surrounded by an adoring mob of robed believers, the first two fingers of one hand erect, raised in benediction, the other casually yanking in a net of leaping silver fish. His superior’s famous sense of humor. He thought often of that picture now. In from the field, his lone-wolf status temporarily modified, Kraft operated his own net out of this hotel. Vietnamese agents and informers came and went bearing news, sometimes reliable, of arms and rice and communists. Kraft listened and wrote reports, which were added to the eternal round robin of reports that circulated from hand to hand until the outlines of a consensus formed in the murk. A wish became a guess, a guess an estimate, an estimate the reality. Kraft sat in the middle making lists. Names were added to lists, action was initiated, names were deleted from lists. Sometimes a name on his payroll list appeared on one of these other lists and then Kraft himself often participated actively to assure a proper and complete deletion.

His counterpart on this present job was a short skinny Vietnamese with a face as unexpressive and grimly humorous as Buster Keaton’s and a name—Le Thong—more appropriate for a pair of stylish French sandals. Kraft neither liked nor trusted Le Thong and was expecting his ludicrous name to appear momentarily on a list. But at least Le Thong wasn’t a smudge; he was neat, he avoided mess like a cat, and for these characteristics Kraft respected him and occasionally accompanied him on those various outdoor jobs Le Thong enjoyed so much more than sitting in a hot office “waiting for Mister Charlie to knock on door.”

Doan was a cab driver. Hardly a section of the city he did not pass through daily. Friends and acquaintances everywhere. Good man, eyes and ears always open. Unfortunately, too often also his mouth. Le Thong, sitting in back, waited until the cab had come to a stop at an intersection before shooting Doan through the seat. Passersby thought he had passed out from too much dope.

Dong was a merchant. A prosperous businessman dealing in consumer items from toothpaste to Scotch and shelter halves, goods stolen from rich American PXs and provided to him at special rates. He was a good mingler, flypaper for buzzes of useful gossip. At night, though, after locking the steel bars across his store front, he’d hop on a Honda for a ride into the country and meetings in the moonlit bush with gun-toting men in black pajamas. Le Thong placed a bomb in his gas tank. One bystander killed, six severely injured. VC, whispered the street, VC everywhere.

Thich was an assistant to the mayor. Friend and confidant of American officials, military and civilian. Le Thong slit his throat. Five days later, bloated belly up, Thich joined the morning sampans moving downriver to the open sea.

Pham worked for AID, Kim was a bar girl, Nguyen a province chief…

Of the making of lists there was no end.

At night Kraft returned to his room in the Hotel Golden Gate, a concrete-and-tile cubicle designed for easy maintenance and quick cleaning. Dirt, urine, vomit, blood, unwanted guests could all be hosed down and flushed out the circular metallic drain embedded in the center of the floor. Kraft would lie on his bed, an inadequately disguised military hospital model, studying for significance the wonderful patterns assumed by the lizards on the institutional green walls of this enlarged shower stall of a room. Sometimes a clear shape or letter would almost form but the moment he looked away the positions would shift, a cruel poltergeist would alter the ornament. On the ceiling light and shadow, reflections from the street, slid back and forth, one over the other like blobs of oil and water attempting desperately to mix until the curfew when the game became more subtle, the movement measured, then finally the inevitable but agonizing triumph of white over black and Kraft would assume he was rested, that sometime during the night he had slept, and he would get up, brush his teeth with bottled water and go down the creaking elevator to breakfast.

The hotel dining room was long and wide with pillars and arches opening into a stone courtyard complete with fountain and fish pond and then beyond what had been in the building’s French epoch an immense, carefully tended garden of tropical color. The owner at the time, an amateur botanist, had taken full advantage of the fertile climate to create a natural beauty that back home in Normandy would have been possible only beneath glass insulation. The Vietnamese owners of the American epoch had no interest in horticulture and today the garden was overgrown, the pond a refuge of poisonous snakes, and the fountain, still visible from tables set with linen and silver, a trickle of brown fluid sliding down the stained beak and algae-furred breast of a stone bird into a bowl of stagnant scum. And of all the places in all of Vietnam that he had ever been this dining room was Kraft’s favorite. Except for the quiet, excellently trained staff there were no stray Vietnamese permitted in the restaurant. Pushers and cab drivers were kept strictly to the street. Women were allowed to sit in the lobby but not to enter the dining room unaccompanied, a vestige of colonial decorum the management attempted to preserve. His table, the same one reserved for him each day by the windows, was a good spot for drifting. Such quiet, such simple peace. Sometimes the cultured voice of a waiter inquiring politely if the gentleman might not be more comfortable upstairs in his room told him he had dozed off again. Or sometimes, nursing a cup of green tea and staring out the open windows, he’d try to rearrange that meaningless jumble of trees and weeds and stones into the garden that once had been and his nose would be teased by the tickle of a scent, a plume of perfume briefly fanning the air, and, glancing about, he’d find the room empty. Perhaps it was an aroma insufficiently appreciated back in the days when the tables were moved aside for dances and all-night parties. Paper lanterns among the orchids, champagne in the fountain. The old botanist had a daughter who required diversion. The hotel then, La Fleur des Champs, was the gathering place for the local European society; military officers, administration officials, missionaries, jewel exporters, rubber plantation managers, the whole white-suit crowd Kraft had forever missed. A waiter approached with a silver tray bearing a modest white card, on it the emblem of the snake-haired woman. Kraft finished his tea—adieu, mademoiselle, save me a dance—and strolled out to the lobby where Le Thong waited. Another crisis, another deletion.