Robert Butler - The Deep Green Sea

I went back to my hotel just off what used to be Tu Do Street and I stood at the window for a little while. I would not pluck her from the flow of traffic but I watched the little stretch of Tu Do between the buildings below, and the motorbikes coursed there without cease, like blood, and I raised my eyes to where the river was, visible that afternoon but invisible now in the dark. There was only a great red neon heineken on what I knew to be the far bank.

And I thought, What kind of man am I? I had traveled a long way and I was tired, but I had not touched a woman for nearly two years and the woman out there was beautiful and though I would have to pay her, that’s how it had begun with Kim. Not that I was looking for love that way again. It was about being a man, and I have lived most of my life among men, at the mill, in the Army, out over the road with the big rigs, and no man I ever knew would understand that I couldn’t be with that woman who was out there in the dark, ready to come in to me. That I couldn’t pay her what she wanted and bring her into this room and lie with her nakedness and her softness and her wetness and find that very good. I didn’t fully understand it myself.

I turned from the window and the room was dim but I did not want light. I lay down on the bed and the paddle fan moved above me. I was on top of the covers, clothed, as if I wanted to think, as if I wanted to lie there and not have anything in my head at all. I didn’t. And then Mattie lay down next to me.

I closed my eyes and the fan clucked softly overhead and it was quite a few years before Mattie and me could figure out this wasn’t the way life was supposed to be. In the dark, though, on my first night back in Saigon, she just lay beside me and it was her from sometime out in the dim middle of our marriage, sometime after there was no more South Vietnam, sometime when everyone who never went there was trying to pretend none of that ever happened, sometime out there when, for me, the things you’d expect to be the toughest had actually finally stopped being a very big deal — the dead men and the wild thrash of fear when there were a lot of bad sounds going on around you and you could look out of all the windows of your truck and you could see just these rice paddies and jagged trees and a road disappearing in smoke and there was no place to run and the thrashing inside you would begin so hard you’d think you’d never be able to draw another breath and that was how you’d die, without a mark on your body, just slumped over dead from the fear, and it tasted like there was blood in your mouth but there was no blood, not yet. But that hard stuff was pretty much gone by the middle of my marriage to Mattie. It was like getting over the death of your father and then getting over the death of your mother. You think it’ll never end but then one day you realize that it has pretty much ended. The hard stuff was gone, and the marriage was, too. The passion of my fear was gone. And whatever it was that passed for passion between her and me was gone, too.

I opened my eyes and Mattie had vanished and the fan blades sliced above my body, softly, softly, over and over, and I wanted to think that sex had nothing to do with what had brought me to this bed in this country where I once had desperately counted the days till I could leave and never look back. But there was a fullness in me, something unreleased, and I recognized it as the readiness for sex and it felt connected to something important, and I knew the way it was supposed to be: you go inside a woman and you release the stuff of you that suddenly feels so important and she releases something in herself to you, and from all that, a new thing is supposed to come about, a single thing between the two of you, your two selves, a thing that is whole. That was the alternative to the truck-stop view of sex. And it was something I wanted, something I sensed when I found my mother touching my father’s back in the kitchen.

But on that first night of this return to Vietnam I lay on the bed and I knew it had never been that way for me, not with Kim, not with Mattie, not with a few others, and it could never be that way with the woman out there on the back of the motorbike. But I also knew I was in Vietnam because of a desire just like that one you can have about sex, the desire for things to be whole. And I know now how that desire got stuck over here, how it failed to make it onto the plane back home in 1967.

It was out somewhere along Vietnam’s Highway One. I came to the war and I was driving trucks and that was going to be okay, I was driving in the Saigon area, from Newport, the place where the supplies came in by ship, to the dispersion points around the area and it was going to be okay for me, and I thought the biggest danger I faced was running over somebody in the goddamn streets of Saigon, where there was just chaos, it seemed to me, where everybody just swarmed and there was only that. But in 1966 there was a big rush of stuff into the country and lots of new units and I found myself driving a deuce-and-a-half in a convoy up Highway One in the direction of Phan Thiet. It was hot and the cab of the truck was full of the smell of diesel because I was just a couple of vehicles back of our lead ACAVs, the armored cavalry assault vehicles, which had the dirtiest damn engines in the world, waving thick tails of smoke. I couldn’t see what was on the sides really, a rubber plantation for a ways, I remember, the thin trunks cut and bleeding latex, and then rice paddies and a distant tree line, and then red earth, brick kilns along the way.

Highway One was a long road and I wanted to take it in and maybe parts of me did, but I mostly had to keep my eyes on the truck in front of me and the trail of smoke, and there was always the smell of diesel, a smell it would take me years to finally connect to other things, to the smell of oranges and nights on the California coast when nothing was going to come out of the trees to try to kill me. And somewhere along the way the day ripped open with a sound like the air was made of tin and was shearing and then clanging and we stopped dead and there was a roar of tiny sounds all cluttering together and then a hard ping off my hood and I was sitting transfixed and then the truck in front of me scooted sideways and there was a flare at the front of it and I saw an ACAV hustle itself to the right, into the scrub off the side of the road. Now I knew to go down under the steering wheel and I pressed at my shoulders to turn me and a little puff of white skittered across my hood and I was pushing hard at my own body focusing somewhere up around my shoulders trying to go down, go down to a place where I could not see the glass around me which held a bright flash of the sun which was somewhere out there watching all this and the glass also held a dim image of my face, I could see my own eyes looking at me going down toward the seat, falling but not very fast at all and this puzzled me why I was suddenly so slow. And there was another ping and splash of sound, glass, and I was down on the seat and I thought I was there of my own free will, not hit, and my body was cold but there was no pain anywhere and there wouldn’t be, I was okay, and then the ACAVs began their mad minute — the vast sky-wide cry of cannon and machine gun — and I knew that the tree line, where the others were, would shred and dissolve now and my head pounded with the sound.

And I saw only one dead body.

No. Not dead. It’s odd I should remember him as dead, though he probably died later. But he was alive when I saw him, alive and standing just off the road next to his truck. The fight was over. Suddenly I could hear the shallow little pulse of my own breath, fast now, so fast I was going dark behind my eyes. I dragged myself up and I was sitting and I gripped my steering wheel and tried to slow down inside. A sunburst of cracks was before me in the window and my breath slowed and settled, and then there began a slow beat, like great wings, flapping in my chest, and outside, cut by the cracks, was a deuce-and-a-half angled off the road and the cab was twisted and smoldering and the flapping in me felt like it would lift me up now and I had to deal with this breathing thing one more time and I wanted to open the door and maybe get out but I didn’t have the strength right then and so I put my face into the open door window and he was out in the scrub by the road, just a few yards away from his truck. There was no horror to this for me. Not like you’d expect. When I’ve dreamed of him, the few times I have since 1966, it’s been with a sadness that had nothing to do with his body, or even to do with him at all. He was a young guy, my age at the moment I was looking at him, twenty or so, a blondish guy I never saw before, though I think he’d been driving that deuce-and-a-half ahead of me. He was standing upright there in the scrub dressed in fatigue pants and a green tee-shirt and his right arm was gone. Just ripped away somehow and he was looking down at the place where it had been a few moments ago and he had this knot in his brow. He wasn’t making a sound and he was standing there by the road as if everything was okay but he just suddenly realized, with a kind of serious puzzlement, that he wasn’t all there. That’s what the dream has been, the few times I’ve dreamed of him. He’s looking at himself with that quizzical expression and I look down at my own body and I find one arm and then the other and I have both my legs and though I think I can be sure that I have every part of my body, I know I’m not complete.