Denis Johnson - Fiskadoro

“I’m British! I’m American!” Marie said, waving her British passport with the American visa.

These documents were more persuasive to him than money. “Police blocking barricade on a highway now,” he said, but he drove along Tu Do, steering around humps of debris — belongings grown too heavy for the people walking into or out of the city, three or four of whom now stepped aboard the taxi’s rear bumper and rode on the back. Marie ignored them, but her mother turned around and tried banishing them with an irritated gesture. “Excuse me! Lice of rodents,” she said in Chinese.

Marie, as they got closer to the airport, felt powerful enough to pass through any kind of trial if she and Hua-ling would ultimately be lifted out of the war. Her mother, too, had drawn some energy from the prospect of getting away, but the air seemed to go out of her as the cab shook her back and forth, until her head was rolling from side to side and thumping against the window whenever they had to swerve. She looked dead, but she was still half-conscious, suddenly rousing herself to demand a light for her cigaret.

The young men in charge of the advance barricade — two ARVN and two policemen — were willing to let whoever manned the later obstacles take care of the actual work. They turned back every second vehicle automatically and let all the others through. Marie waved her papers, but the guard wasn’t even looking as they passed. He was already busy turning back the car behind them. Hua-ling said, “Thank you, thank you, thank you,” to him, intoning the Chinese words expressionlessly, and belched up a stench of brandy. “Do you have a match,” she said to him long after he’d disappeared from her window, “do you have a match, do you have a match?” Her head drooped. “Gimme a light,” she said in English.

As they approached the last highway barricade, not quite a mile from Tonsonhut Airport, the men riding on the trunk jumped off and left the road. The bulk of the traffic moved against their progress slowly like volcanic rubble, while a swifter current of pedestrians ridden by huge bundles overflowed the roadside ditches. Twenty meters out in front of the makeshift thatched kiosk and oil-drum and sawhorse roadblock, a policeman stood waving one hand with a shooing motion and resting the other on the rifle slung across his chest. All passenger vehicles were being turned back automatically.

Now the taxi driver behaved like someone trapped under water. Over Marie’s threats and despite her offers of money, he started yanking at the wheel and raising up halfway in his seat to look behind them and begin a U-turn, broadcasting relief with his body heat.

“I just want a cigaret. You’re denying me this small thing,” Hua-ling said.

“Don’t turn around!” Marie told the driver. “I’m trying to get us out of this,” she said to her mother. The driver was successfully herding his cab into the flow of cars going back into Saigon.

In English her mother said, “A facking cigaret. Give — me — a facking— light.” Her eyes were curtained with hatred.

Marie and the driver couldn’t heed her. The driver ignored Marie as well, until she slapped the back of his head finally, weeping. Now that he found himself able to inch along in the crosscurrent, he wouldn’t give up his tiny momentum to let them out. “You greasy bastard — stupid, stupid, monkey!” she screamed, wrenching open her door and stepping out dizzily from the moving cab. Within a few feet the taxi was jammed up in the stalled warfare of cars and small trucks. Marie reached in through the open door and tried to assist her mother in getting out, but Hua-ling pulled her hand away. “Where are you taking me!” Her face was slack, her vision unfocused, but she had a firmness to her voice born of angry fear. “Don’t pull me,” she said.

“We have to get on the plane now.” Marie put her knees on the seat and tried to haul her mother out by gripping her under the arms; but her mother was limp. “It’s time!” Marie cried out.

“Stop pulling,” her mother said. “Fack you,” she said in English. “I’m not go nowhere until I have a rest , and smoke a cigaret .”

The cab was in motion again in a lane of vehicles that had somehow found space to move. Marie backed herself out of the cab and nearly fell in the road beside it, exhausted of pleas and strength, holding her papers and their only suitcase. The suitcase eluded her grip and spilled open on the road, and she knelt to stuff the contents back into it, but then understood that there was nothing in it valuable enough to stop for. She stood surrounded by machines that honked, gunned, roared, screeched their brakes, and she watched an airplane take to the air over Tonsonhut Airport, realizing, as she yearned after it to the point she believed her vital organs would tear themselves free, that in order to save her life she had to do what she’d actually been in the process of doing for some time. She had to abandon everything and escape. She had to let go of the suitcase. She had to leave her mother behind.

The forward patrolman ignored her as she passed him hugging the edge of the roadside ditch, at one point stepping onto the bumper of a car and clambering across its hood to bridge the mess of vehicles. But at the barricade proper, the guards stopped her cold, not at all impressed by her papers. “Gimp me your ticket!” the man insisted. “Show me!”

“It’s — my ticket is waiting for me,” she said.

“Show me one ticket!” the guard said.

Marie moved her mouth, about to tell another lie, but instead said, “I have money. I have money, no ticket.”

The guard laughed and turned from her. He was brown and Polynesian-looking. She wanted to throw herself at him, and she saw herself crushing his Adam’s apple. The other guard was pounding bitterly with the butt of his rifle on the hood of the only vehicle to have floundered all the way to this last barricade, a black Mercedes that had evidently been mistaken for some kind of official transport, but which now turned out to be filled with a Saigon businessman, his wife and children, and several white-uniformed servants. As he pounded, the rifle discharged with a single loud crack by no means overwhelming in this cauldron of noise, and the guard, who couldn’t have appeared more startled if he’d shot himself, gingerly changed the weapon from hand to hand, and wiggled the safety. The Mercedes leapt into reverse, banging into the edge of the kiosk, and then instantly forward again, the driver making haste, after this gesture on the guard’s part, to turn around and leave. Everyone in the dust-streaked automobile was crying except for the owner, who sat in the front and managed to look only mildly set back by the sundering of his household and the destruction of his way of life. Between the businessman and a white-garbed maidservant, Marie saw her father’s ghost.

He looked at his daughter in some confusion, and then took off his glasses and wiped his eyes with his hand, for he too was crying.

She turned away from him. “I will fuck you,” Marie said to the guard. “My mother is dead,” she added. The guard looked at her in genuine amusement and also seemed a little shocked. “I can get a ticket,” she said. “Just tell me — what do you want?”

“Go!” the guard said, waving her on. “Go airport! You’ll die tonight.” He pointed to the area of the airport beyond them, the sunburned fields and the control tower diminished by open space. His expression showed real concern about the whole situation and possibly for Marie herself. “Nobody—” He just stopped there, weary of seeking foreign words for unprecedented things, and dropped his hand and turned away. Behind them, people were abandoning their cars and taking to the fields, avoiding the barricades entirely.