Robert Butler - A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain - Stories

You can see how this might be a great help to a seemingly wimpy man with a beautiful wife. When my people brought me information about my wife and another man, or I used the evidence of my own eyes, I would send a warning to the man. The fire would come from heaven, I told him in a note delivered by one of my agents. I told him that my wife carries this ancient curse with her. The curse of the little man. I would sometimes go into historical detail. Napoleon Bonaparte, for instance, was very small and conquered 720,000 square miles of Europe. Attila, King of the Huns and ruler of an empire of 1,450,000 square miles, was still smaller, thought even to be a dwarf. History teaches, by the way, that not only is the curse I bring upon the would-be lovers ancient, but the problem of the husband is ancient, too. Napoleon had great troubles with his butterfly of a wife and Attila died in the middle of making love, no doubt due to his being foolish enough to have many wives. But, of course, these are observations that I left out of my warning messages, which were clear and forceful. And if they were not heeded, I would find the coordinates of the place where the man cut wood every morning or where he went to eat his lunch or to fish or some other place where the United States Air Force could find him. We are all creatures of habit.

And how did my wife react when she found some man who was pursuing her suddenly disappear? Perhaps the first time or two she felt that it was something she herself had said or done, or perhaps she thought they did not find her attractive anymore. (This makes me a little sad, to think I made my wife doubt herself. But surely she has always known how beautiful she is and nothing could truly shake that.) Later on she must have known that I was responsible in some dramatic way. But however it was that she felt, I can never say for sure. She would always maintain a face and attitude that revealed nothing. I would speak to her, as I often did, of history or politics or matters of daily life, and she would listen, her face bowed over her sewing, until it was time for us to sleep. Only once did she let on that she knew what had happened to her latest suitor. I believe that this man — a woodcutter with a shack by a stream — never understood what I could do. He was a big man, an arrogant man. One evening soon after this particular reported rocket attack was prevented by the United States Air Force, my wife looked up from her sewing. I had just paused for a few moments in speaking to her due to an itchiness in my throat, so at first I thought she wished me to quickly continue the observations that I had been making on the futility of using our Regional Forces irregulars to guard local government buildings. But instead, she said, “It’s sad, the mistakes made in a war.”

I knew at once what she was talking about. She had made a terrible mistake in letting this man get too close to her.

“Very sad,” I said.

“Do you think someone is actually in control of all these things that happen?” she asked.

“I am sure of it,” I said, and a clearer reminder than that was unnecessary. My wife is beautiful, but she is also subtle.

So finally history caught up with my country. I could see it coming for a long time. I stopped enough rockets from hitting the air base at Biên Hòa that in repayment my wife and I, along with our two children, flew from there a week before the place was overrun by the communists. I was not so very sorry to go, for I was coming to a country full of men that my wife would not look at twice. And it’s true that in America, things have been much calmer, though this Gretna, Louisiana, is an area with many Vietnamese. But it seems as if somehow the men of Vietnam have lost their nerve in America, even with a beautiful Vietnamese woman. I sometimes receive a respectful compliment about my wife, but these men are beaten down; they are taller than me and even younger than me but wimpier by far.

We live near the Mississippi River and just over the bridge is New Orleans. My wife has seemed happy simply to live in an apartment where she can sit in the living room whenever she wishes and she and her women friends can go out together and shop and get their hair fixed. I work for the telephone company and we have a television set which makes me more interesting to my wife because she does not have to listen in the evenings to the thoughts I have on polities and history and such. I understand her limitations, and a wise man does not try to change the things that can’t be changed. It’s just that I’d begun to hope that things had changed on their own. For a long time she seemed utterly uninterested in allowing me to be tormented in the ways I was in Vietnam. There was no town street to walk down with the eyes of everyone on the open throat of her blouse or the movement of her hips. The hairdos she liked here seemed intended to impress the other women rather than any man. Things have been very good, very calm. That is, until two months ago.

It was, of course, a Vietnamese. He is a former airborne ranger, a tall man, nearly as tall as an American. And he owns a restaurant in a shopping plaza. The restaurant is called Bún Bò Xào, a name obviously chosen to attract the American diners out for some exotic treat that they can’t even distinguish from Chinese. I know this because Bún Bò Xào means Sauteed Beef with Noodles. What if an American restaurant was named Grilled Hamburger with French Fries or Baked Chicken and Mashed Potatoes? Do you see the point? To call a restaurant a name that a whole people will understand as Sauteed Beef with Noodles is an insult to that people. And the bún bò they make there is second-rate anyway, and the nu’ó’c m m, the fish sauce, is even worse. This sauce is very special to the tongue of the Vietnamese. I do not expect to taste true Vietnamese nu’ó’c m m in America. The nu’ó’c m m from Phú Qu c Island was the best of all, clear and with an astonishingly subtle taste for a substance that a fish will give up only after a prolonged process lasting several days. But the sauce in this restaurant is from the Philippines, very bad, not from Thailand, which at least is a pale second-best.

I do not criticize this man’s taste and sincerity idly. These were my first clues. My wife and this man forgot that I am a spy. They may have known that I can no longer command the United States Air Force, but they forgot that I know how to read clues. You see, in spite of the bad bún bò and the worse nu’ó’c m m, this suddenly became my wife’s favorite restaurant. We did not know where to go one Friday night, which is the night we usually go to a restaurant, and she said, oh so lightly, so offhandedly, that she’d heard that this Vietnamese place was quite good. She quoted one of her hairdo companions, a woman who would be plucking chickens and getting high on betel nuts in some Saigon alley if we had won the war. I have tried to avoid Vietnamese restaurants in the United States, but Bu’ó’m seemed so set on this, yet in such a casual way, that I indulged her. She is, after all, still a very beautiful woman.

We pulled into the little shopping center and found the place just a few doors down from Ngon Qúa Po-Boys and the Good Luck Bowling Alley. I noticed how my wife’s hand casually slipped off my arm as we stepped into the Bún Bò Xào Restaurant and I only had time to make a quick note of the Chinatown lanterns on the ceiling and the lacquer paintings on the wall, mass-produced in Hong Kong, when this tall Vietnamese man in a tuxedo was suddenly bowing before us and shooting little knowing glances at my wife. The owner. Tr n V n Ha. He was so glad to see us and I felt a chill going up and down me from my scalp to my toes.