Tatjana Soli - The Lotus Eaters

“I told Darrow we’re going back to Saigon now. He wants for you to fly down to Mekong Delta today.”

“He’s really okay?” Helen hesitated. “About yesterday…” She was mortified by what now seemed like a temper tantrum on her part.

“I check when we’re okay for flying out.” He walked away, brusque, but he didn’t want to be tampered with any longer. Easier to keep a distance. With Darrow, that had been acceptable. She wanted more, wanted too much, pushed him past his limits. What she wanted, finally, more than he was willing to give.

Village

Helen and Linh flew low over the southern Mekong area to An Giang province, controlled by the Hoa Hao sect that opposed the Viet Cong. One of the few safe areas in the country, it was where Darrow had decided to stay and recuperate.

The air boiled hot and opaque, the sky a hard, saline blue. For miles the black mangrove swamp spread like a stagnant ocean, clotted, arthritic. Farther on they passed the swollen tributaries of the Mekong. Papaya, grapefruit, water palm, mangosteen, orange-fruit of every variety grew in abundance, dropping with heavy thuds on the ground to burst in hot flower in the sun. The soil so rich from the emptying of the Mekong that crops grew year-round, and the local food supply remained ample even during war time, allowing villages and hamlets to unspool loosely along the canals and rivers instead of circling tightly in privation behind bamboo hedgerows as in the north.

As they made a first pass over the dirt airstrip, Helen could see Darrow standing by a jeep with two other civilians. He stood straight, slightly too formal in this loose, watery world. A white short-sleeved shirt, his right arm supported by a cotton sling, he looked thinner, his brown hair shorter, eyes invisible behind the glare of his glasses.

She ducked under the wash of the rotors and ran, embracing him so that he winced as she pressed his shoulder. Linh followed, forgotten.

The reality of Darrow’s injury struck her with new force, frightened her all over again. “Are you okay?”

“Except from your manhandling,” He smiled and held her off. “Meet some friends. They’ve offered to put us up while my shoulder heals.”

Both of the men worked for USAID, handling rice production and irrigation in the area. The younger one, Jerry Nichols, had a sunburned face and blond hair so sun-bleached it was almost white, giving him an albino look. He pumped Helen’s hand and smiled, his mouth crowded with large teeth. The other man, Ted Sanders, was portly, with buzz-cut hair, also retired military, polite and formal in front of her.

“How long are you here for?” Helen asked. Darrow’s attitude irritated her, the presumption she had nothing better to do.

“An eternity. Four weeks. But I haven’t had a vacation in five years, so I’m overdue.”

His hesitation went unnoticed except by Linh. Only he would understand how Darrow must have bargained as the plane went down-how many times could one escape unharmed? The fear that the crash had paralyzed him again like in Angkor.

Linh came up, and Darrow moved to embrace him. Seeing the easy friendship between the two men, Helen thought how stupidly she had handled things.

“You took good care of her.”

“But you have got sloppy without me, it seems.” He would have given anything for it to be only him and Darrow in the village, the way it had been in Angkor. A woman changed everything.

“These damned helicopters can’t seem to stay in the air.”

They got into the jeep, Helen sliding across the hot and dusty canvas, stepping over the semiautomatics lying on the floor. Nichols drove them a short way along the washboard dirt road to the hamlet of thatched buildings straddling a wide bend in the Hau River. The jeep stopped in front of a small hut in a shaded grove of coconut palms and mango trees.

“Home, sweet home,” Darrow said.

“Are you sure this shack’s okay?” Ted asked.

“She’s a girl with simple tastes.”

“We don’t all go native like Darrow,” Nichols said. “If you get tired of it, we can offer steaks and hot showers.”

“Go away, guys. If she changes her mind, we’ll show up for dinner.”

The two men ignored Linh; he had hardly gotten out of the jeep with his bag before it raced off, covering him in dust.

The front of the hut was a narrow veranda of dirt floor and thatched overhang supported by thick poles of bamboo. Large clay cisterns filled with rainwater formed the boundary with the outside. The framework was bamboo, walls and ceiling interlaced palm fronds with a layer of rice straw on top that smelled thickly of grass in the heat of the day, reminding Helen of sleeping in a barn loft as a child.

Inside was a single room with a dirt floor, a low wood table used for eating, sitting, and sleeping. Around the sides of the room were additional clay pots filled with rice. In the corner was a stack of woven mats.

A young woman in dark blue pajamas, Ngan, carried in a tray with small ceramic cups of mango juice. An older Vietnamese man entered, and she bowed low. He was the village chief, Ho Tung, an elegant man with flowing silver hair and features softened by time like soapstone. After he welcomed them, he stalled long enough to share a cup of juice before leaving.

“We are very cosmopolitan in An Giang, used to Westerners,” he said. “After all, my granddaughter lives in St. Louis.”

“Really?” Darrow said.

“We have not heard from her in two years, but her last letter said that in St. Louis it snows. That things move very quickly.”

“I’m sure that is true.”

“That is how I’ve learned most excellent English.”

Helen pictured the granddaughter living alone in the great foreign city, working long hours in some invisible job, yet back in her village she was a celebrity. After Ho Tung left, Ngan carried in their bags.

“I’m supposed to take it easy at least a month. Not much use for a one-armed photographer. I’m hoping a couple of weeks will do it. So I thought we’d have a little in-country R &R.” He wished it were that simple. Since the accident, night sweats, insomnia, shaking, everything back with a vengeance. He couldn’t say aloud that he hoped to be saved by her.

“And you just assumed I’d drop everything?”

Darrow picked up her hand and kissed it. He hadn’t counted on her being standoffish, prickly, and he almost wished for the company of his native women, their docile willingness. After saying good-bye to the chief, Helen went back under the shade of the roof, sat down, but it was hardly any cooler than standing in the road.

“How about it, Linh? You could use a rest, too,” Darrow said.

“I need to do some errands,” Linh said.

“Stay and relax. They’ve got a place for you up the road.” He wanted to say, Stay and keep me company.

“I’ll be back at the end of the month.” The smallest intuition that Darrow longed for the days at Angkor also. Instead, he had saddled both of them with this woman. He remembered how Mai used to exasperate him, and yet now he would give almost anything to have that irritation back. Was it like that for Darrow?

“What in the world are you going to find to do around here, in the middle of… nowhere?” Darrow asked.

Linh spoke in Vietnamese to Ngan, and they both laughed.

“What’s funny?” Helen said.

“That we are in the middle of nowhere. Everyone knows this is the center of the universe.”

“Don’t go all Buddha on me,” Darrow said.

During lunch the two men talked about people they knew, upcoming operations that might be interesting to go on, although they agreed it all could change in a month’s time.

“I’ll keep an eye out for things,” Linh said.