Denis Johnson - Fiskadoro

Marie moved past the guard and made for the tower in the distance. She picked up her pace, losing one of her high-heeled shoes and kicking the other from her foot. When she stepped on a sharp rock she knew about the pain but did not actually feel it. In the same way she knew that she was looking around inside the moment when her father had thrown it all away — Marie his daughter, her mother his wife, and the war in Vietnam — the instant in time when escape rises, rippling translucently, out of a stifling landscape. Already the noise behind her was drowned in itself. What she could hear was the wind through the chest-high blades of coarse grass, and faintly a jet engine, like chalk across slate. A plane that seemed unconnected with this sound lifted into the film of heat. Ahead of her, people who’d made their way through the field’s sharp teeth were coming out of them and taking to the road.

It was clear from the scene at the end of the paved service street that nobody was getting into the terminal today. At the entrance, under a modern awning whose aluminum gave a sting to the echoes of terrified and angry voices, the plate-glass windows and electric-eye doors were shattered and covered with boards. Dozens of purple-bereted Vietnamese Special Forces soldiers and Saigon Police guards held back a mass of city people at bayonet-point. Marie took in a picture of men who’d forgotten their purpose here and wanted only to be heard for once, their faces the color of bruises, the veins in their necks like ropes, and the black shocks of hair leaping from their heads as they let themselves be pushed from behind, oblivious of the bayonets, their eyes fixed on the faces of the guards. When a small man vaulted between two riflemen and tried to clamber through a space in the boards across a window, one of the guards turned and smashed the butt of his rifle into the man’s kidneys. He doubled up and fell to the pavement and crawled backward, driven before a bayonet, until he was consumed and trampled by the others.

Marie orbited the crowd’s periphery as if caged, checking through a route that touched panic, dull hope, and nauseated surrender. Lingering on the airport’s centerpiece — a broad disk of lawn, now trampled bare, and a flagpole still exposing the colors of South Vietnam to the wind — she found she’d drifted among the ranks of those who’d given up. Enclosed with their flag in a circle bounded by the asphalt drive, old men and women squatted on their heels, making pillows of their arms across their knees, and slept. Women sat on wide bundles of their belongings tied up in sheets, with children on their laps and other children standing around them, and here and there a husband waited with his arms wrapped around himself and his head bowed, exhausted and pensive, trying to find a way. Not even the children moved here.

The only thing to catch her eye was a figure in light khaki, and she followed his progress along the rear of the crowd. He moved deliberately but not slowly, looking at everybody and acknowledging no one. As he neared, peering right through her, she recognized his outfit as distinctly military. On the flap of his blouse pocket he wore an insignia of wings — Air Force flight personnel. His eyes scintillated as if he were drugged or dreaming. He was just a skinny boy who looked no older than Marie.

Marie was instantly sure he’d stolen this uniform. She grabbed him by the back of his shirt as he passed, and he turned around, smiling and dazed. “Where can I get?” She jerked the cloth of his blouse. “Where? I want a uniform. Uniform!” she repeated in anger, seeing he made nothing of the word.

As if they’d been together all day, he took hold of her wrist and pulled her along toward the rearward fringes of the mob before the terminal’s entrance.

“Merican money,” he said.

“Yes!” Marie said. “I have! I have it!”

With blows of his fists, like a figure come alive off one of Saigon’s theater posters for karate and t’ai-chi fantasies, he advanced them through the crowd and lunged at the first guard he reached, brandishing identification. The guard stepped back, and the boy dragged Marie between barricades. The guard shouted at the boy now, the two spoke heatedly in Vietnamese, the guard pausing to threaten the forward ranks of the crowd with his bayonet. “Vietnam money,” the boy said to Marie.

“Yes!” Marie said. “I have! Have Biet-nam mohnee,” she said.

There was no way through the boarded-up doorway. The guard led them behind the line of soldiers and police for some fifty meters to the terminal building’s east corner, where the windows ceased and only cinder block presented itself, past more sawhorse barricades, and then through a metal door. When they were inside with a few soldiers and two desks — where an odor of boiled coffee overwhelmed her and gave a fearsome homey ordinariness to things — all the men raised their voices. Talking fast and with great confidence, keeping her upper arm in his grip, the boy shook her at the soldiers as if she were compelling evidence, complete proof, that nothing was what they thought it was. Marie nodded emphatically, reaching for the money in her blouse and saying, “Yes, yes, yes,” to the Special Forces officer, a lieutenant she guessed, who was soon doing all the talking. What she might be bartering for was unimportant. The language of Saigon transactions was being spoken, the push and pull, the forefinger repeatedly jabbing the open palm. This man had something which he believed she could be made to want. She wanted it.

The sound of propeller engines was loud through the rear door of the office. There were bursts of small-weapons fire of a type familiar to Marie, the submachine guns of the Saigon police. At this time the Special Forces Lieutenant drew his sidearm and put the barrel of it in the socket of her left eye, against the fluttering eyelid.

This was nothing to her. It was no more alarming than the over-familiar grip of the strange boy’s hand on her biceps. She kept her other eye wide open and watched the cylinder turn as the Lieutenant drew back the hammer with his thumb. A peace and clarity seized the room. She thought she might fall asleep. “I wanna have all your local money,” the man said. “Captain Minh is gonna take your dollars. Care to make some trouble about it?”

“Thank you, sir,” she said. Her life was all around her. She could not, in any sense that mattered, be killed.

The man had an excellent American-style accent. “Cap’n Minh-baby,” he said.

The boy in the Air Force uniform let go her arm and removed the bundle from her blouse, reaching with surgical detachment between her breasts. When he took her packet of seven one-hundred-dollar bills for himself, she gathered that this was Captain Minh, his middle name become his last, as often happened these days. Captain Minh gave Marie’s packet of Vietnamese money, tens of thousands of piasters, to the Lieutenant, who put it inside his purple beret and replaced the beret on his head. The three other soldiers in the office looked on without any interest.

Real light broke into the room as the boy Captain pushed through the back door. He invited her with a toss of his head to follow him onto the asphalt of runways.

The sun was low — the afternoon was half gone. Heat came up miserably from the black tarmac and blew into their faces off the whirling blades of a helicopter skimming the grass between runways a couple of hundred meters west. Backed by the sun, the helicopter looked flat as a shadow in the air, converged on by the tiny figures of desperate people turned bright green by the glare in her eyes. A 707 taxiing out made sound waves and heat waves that blended into a single force she had to turn away from.

The Special Forces Lieutenant was with them. He drew ahead and led them to a hangar in which a U.S. helicopter the size of a house sat on the flatbed of a six-wheeled transport vehicle that must have been some kind of truck, she imagined, but looked more closely related to a golf cart. The Lieutenant jumped into the truck’s seat — there was only room for one, just a seat, a dashboard, and steering wheel — and began trying to get it started, pushing a button so that the engine yowled and died. For ten seconds he waited with a face of stone, then tormented it again, getting nowhere.