Robert Butler - The Deep Green Sea

Still, I don’t turn us back to Saigon. I don’t want to give up the wheel. Out here on Highway One, I’ll go to sleep and wake up tomorrow morning with more miles to drive. Back in Saigon, it’s just the paddle fan or that room of Tien’s, which she thinks was part of my little scare, and maybe it was. Wherever it came from and however nasty it was, that panic was actually worth it, it seems to me now, to get Tien and me on the road together. Driving has been the way out for me for so long that being able to bring Tien into it was a necessary thing for the two of us to go on from here.

I’m glad my mama made me read all those books. I think I picked a few things up, hearing all those voices. But they didn’t do me jack shit when it came to the minute-to-minute drag of that life back there. I told Tien the truck driving didn’t solve anything either, and it didn’t, in the long run. That’s true. That’s why her sitting here next to me now as we go up Highway One is so important. But there was a place I’d get to inside me, sometimes, driving the highways, when the silence would feel comfortable, when being alone was a natural thing, and it was usually at night and I’d be watching the lane break in my headlights and it turned into a kind of white-line mantra and there’d just be this soft ticking in my head, with those white lines going by, and things would be okay. And then I’d hit a truck stop and I’d go in and some old woman would be dozing behind the register and maybe one or two other guys were hunched over some coffee and I’d rent a shower stall and go on back along some white-lit hallway and unlock a door and hang the key on the hook and I’d strip down and run the water and the grit of the road would roll off me and the water would feel almost as sweet and good as a shower in Vietnam, where you thought something as simple as that, a goddamn shower, could never ever feel as good again in your life. But once in a while it almost did, out on the highway.

And the sun is getting low and there’s just salt flats and shrimp ponds going by on the east side of the road. The South China Sea hasn’t reappeared. I turn to Tien. Though I’ve been conscious of her there, and happy for that, I haven’t looked directly at her for a long while. She has her hands tented in front of her, palms together, her chin resting on the tips of her middle fingers. Her eyes are closed. There’s a faint smile on her face. She could be sleeping or praying or playing beautiful music in her head, something very private. I look back to the road and keep my mouth shut.

But somehow she knows. She says, “Do you wish to stop?”

I look to her again. Her hands have settled in her lap. Her faint smile has turned to me. I say, “Nha Trang isn’t far, is it?”

“Less than an hour. Do you want to stay in the city?”

“Isn’t there a more private place, by the sea?”

“We can go east up ahead. There’s a narrow road to the shore.”

“What’s there?”

“A villa once owned by. . I was going to say a member of the puppet government of the south. I have caught myself. Am I not a changed woman?”

“Yes. And I’m a changed man.” I lay my hand, palm up, on the seat between us and her palm settles on mine and her fingers close softly and it feels like sex, for the first time in days our bodies are really touching and it runs through me fast and I punch the accelerator.

Up the highway, she motions and we turn off, and the narrow road is made of packed dirt and it’s rutted and it’s slow going, and then, at last, I can smell the salt water, and we go over a little rise and the South China Sea is before me, darkening now at the end of the day.

“Over there,” she says, and off to the right is a large, rambling house facing the sea, and I turn into a shell drive rimmed with palms and I slide up to the front walk and stop. Tien says to wait and she gets out of the car and I turn off the engine. There’s still the crawl of the road in my head and the vibration of the engine in my arms but there’s a letting go, too. My shoulders sag and the car ticks and I can hear the sea on the other side of the villa. I lay my forearm on the steering wheel and my forehead against my arm and I wait, feeling the cloak of the road on me, wanting to take that off. I’m ready to be naked with her again.

Then she’s at my window, leaning near. “Leave the car here,” she says. “We have a room.”

I should rent two rooms for us, for the appearance of it, but I tell the woman who runs the guesthouse we are married, we are Mr. and Mrs. Benjamin Cole, and I believe it is true, in a way. I am not sure if the woman believes me, but I do not care. I so much want Ben to sleep in my arms tonight.

Ben and I walk around the house and beneath a gallery and suddenly the sea stretches wide before us. To the north, the beach curves toward Nha Trang, which is invisible beyond the big shoulders of some hills at a distant turning. No one is on the shore. Out in the sea is a little string of four fishing boats, heading back to Nha Trang. Their engines beat faintly over the rushing sound of the waves. I have just begun to listen to this sound, which is a familiar thing, when Ben says, “It’s like the motorcycles in Saigon.”

I look at him. He is reading my mind now, not even my mind, he reads my ears. “They’ll be gone soon,” I say.

He looks to the south and I do too. Perhaps half a kilometer or more away, there is some figure on the beach, but that is not clear. Otherwise there is no one. The land along the sea flattens out and stretches far away. Ben takes in a slow breath of this sweet air. Now I try to name his thought.

I say, “We are alone on this sea.”

“Yes,” he says. “It feels that way.”

I was right about what was in him. I smile. “There is no one staying at this place tonight but us. The tourists who come along here go on to Nha Trang, I think.”

He turns to me abruptly. “Come on then. There’s still some light.”

He drops his bag on the ground and holds out his hand. I lift my own hand and I move it toward his and even before we touch, it feels as if I have a shadow body inside this one that he can see, and my hand nears his and the body inside, which normally fits snug inside me, has loosened for him and then the tips of our fingers touch and I begin to quake inside my skin. His hand grasps mine firmly and we are moving across a grassy plot and onto the beach, the sand gray and packed hard, and he lets go of my hand and he pulls off his shoes and drops them. I pull off my shoes too, knowing I will destroy my stockings, thinking to ask him to go back to the villa and into our room beneath the gallery facing the sea, for only a brief time, so I can change from these tour guide clothes. But he is groping for my hand again with an eagerness that makes me feel like we are two children and I am angry with myself, thinking of my stockings.

He moves quickly now, almost running, and I run with him and all I am thinking is my stockings should go to hell, my life has changed, and now all that I regret about my clothes is that I have not stripped them from me.

We are at the waterline, the waves bubbling and swiping at us, and we turn to the north, where there is not even a hint of a distant figure, and we move together by the South China Sea and the water splashes up our ankles and I say, “Wait.”

We stop, and again I look ahead, and behind, and even the speck that might have been a person to the south is gone, and to the west there are only dunes and rocks and the creep of the mountains toward the sea. We are alone. So I lift my skirt, and I find the rim of my panty hose with my thumbs, and I grasp only the hose and not my panties underneath, and I strip them down and roll them soggy and ragged off one foot and then the other and my thighs and my legs and my ankles and my feet are naked, and I throw the panty hose into the sea — let some crab inhabit them — and I let my skirt back down to where it was. I look and Ben has squared around to watch this. He lifts his eyes to mine and he smiles and then I gasp as he falls forward and he is on his knees before me and he lifts my skirt again and he bends and I feel his lips on one knee and then on the other and I lift my face to the hunch of the distant mountains and my skirt climbs and he kisses one thigh and then the other. My hands fall to the top of his head, but lightly, so as not to discourage him. I wish now I had stripped off the panties as well. I do feel a pressure there, on that most tender of spots on my body, his mouth is there, but I do not feel the flesh of his lips on me. I lift my hands from his head, ready to take this barrier from between us, but he rises and his arms are around me and I am in his arms and his mouth is on my mouth, briefly, and then he has turned again, taken my hand again, and a great surge of the sea bumps us, rises quick up my leg, floats my hem, jealous, I think, of Ben’s kiss, wishing to kiss me there, too, and we try to stay on our feet, from the nudging of the sea, and Ben laughs and lets go of my hand and moves on ahead.