Absolution, p.17
Absolution, page 17
Dom shifted gears and slowed as the road quickly grew muddy. I realized I was losing all sense of the time of day. Was this darkness merely the lowering clouds, or had we left later than I realized? There was the dawning fear—senseless, but reflexive somehow—that the rising volume of the rain elicited (surely this crescendo would build to something destructive, overpowering), as well as the fear that we would return to Saigon much too late, that Peter would go looking for me, call at Charlene’s, talk to Kent.
Dom downshifted again, seemed to struggle with the wheel, and then the truck came to a gliding halt. The sound of the rain was at its apex. I couldn’t hear the engine as Dom attempted to start it again. Couldn’t hear whatever words he and Wally were exchanging up front. The doctor pursed his plump lips. Charlene leaned toward Wally. Lily glanced at me. I could see my own worry on her plain face.
The rain let up, almost imperceptibly, and Dominic and Wally pushed opened their doors. They pulled up the hood. Reluctantly, our good doctor joined them, touching my thigh as he climbed out, crouching.
There ensued all the things that men do with stalled cars. No different than if we had been pulled to the side of the thruway. They looked and conferred and Dom climbed into the driver’s seat again to try the ignition. Nothing. Not even a hopeless mechanical cough, an exhausted attempt to turn over. Just the click of the key in the ignition and silence. The engine might have disappeared altogether. Eventually, they closed the hood.
We three women sat still in the way women did in such cases—at least back then. Trusting and clueless. The world of auto maintenance a world of men alone.
Through the wet windshield, I could see the three consulting in the rain. Then Dom appeared at the back. “Sorry, ladies,” he said. The water was dripping from the peak of his cap, staining his shirtfront. “Damn thing has just died on us. We’re about ten miles from the airport. Lieutenant Welty’s gonna ride. He’s a long-distance biker. News to me. A man of many talents.” He laughed. “He’ll get us another vehicle. Shouldn’t be too long.” He climbed in. His clothes were wet as he brushed past us. He wrestled a bit with the black bicycle that had been wedged behind the two seats, then, lifting it above our knees, he maneuvered it out again, saying, “Sorry,” “Careful there,” “Excuse me.”
As soon as he was outside, Charlene, moving quickly, followed. The rain had let up again. Outside, the two doctors were consulting over the bike, the captain no doubt sharing with Wally his familiarity with the flimsy piece of machinery, Wally nodding, moving the wheels back and forth a bit, as if he had already taken ownership, knew what he needed to know. Charlene stood watching them both with her hands on her hips. The two men shook hands. Dom gave a salute. Dr. Jones-Smith-Bones and Dom walked around the truck and stood outside the driver’s-side door, talking. The doctor leaned, tall, over Dom. Dom nodded but only looked around.
When I glanced out the back again, I saw Charlene and Dr. Wally in conversation. Wally had one hand on the bike, resting it against his thigh, like some teenager on my street in Yonkers. He was bending toward her. They seemed to be speaking casually, no urgency, nothing to reflect our situation. He was even smiling. And then I saw her reach up to touch his cheek. He raised his free hand to touch hers. She lifted her face to him, and they kissed for what seemed a long while.
She stepped away; he shook the bike a bit, mounted, and took off. When I turned toward the front to watch him struggling down the muddy road, I met Lily’s eyes. She smiled. She had seen what I’d seen.
Charlene climbed back into the truck and slid onto the bench beside me. Once again, we were hip to hip. She patted my thigh, and then, to my surprise, she put her arm around me. Motherly. “Not to worry,” she said, as if she and Lily had agreed to reassure me. “He’ll be fine.” And then she added, “I just hope he doesn’t get busted for bringing us along.”
* * *
DOM AND THE DOCTOR HAD COME to some kind of agreement, it seemed, because somehow they now each had a rifle tucked under an arm. I saw Dom perch himself on the front of the truck. The doctor was on the back bumper, leaning just inside the canvas doorway, one leg raised to the truck bed, one touching the ground. He held the butt of the rifle against his thigh. His body was turned toward Charlene, but he was facing the road behind us, the darkening trees on one side and a wide rice field on the other. I could hear the rain on the canvas, starting up again, although I couldn’t see it in the encroaching dusk.
She asked him, “Should we be worried?”
He took a very long time to answer and when he did, he didn’t turn his head. “What’s the point?” he asked.
His voice was different now, less collegial, courteous. An edge of facetiousness, or, I don’t know, contempt. Maybe with Wally gone—his only peer—he felt free to show his disdain for us women. I admit I’d seen other professional men, in more pleasant social settings, adopt the same tone when they found themselves alone among women, merely women.
I think we were silent for a while—perhaps sensing his distaste—until he, still scanning the landscape behind us, slowly began to describe a skirmish that had occurred some weeks ago. He named the place, a village somewhere to our west. He’d only come upon the aftermath, he said, days behind whatever had occurred. He shook his head and laughed as if to himself.
“You’d have thought someone had tossed a case of dynamite into a butcher shop,” he said. In fact, he’d believed at first, in the falling darkness, that he had stumbled on a kind of jungle slaughterhouse, neatly staged in a narrow clearing. The stench of rotting meat, the tangle of bone and flesh, brown blood caked like mud, blood indistinguishable from mud. Some herd of small-to-midsized animals, he’d thought, sloppily dispatched, dispatched in some kind of frenzy. It was the tatter of clothing that gave it away, he said. Even before the clarifying sight of crushed skulls and swollen faces. Human, after all.
“You ladies will appreciate it,” he said, still looking out. “It was the clothes that made them men.” He paused, as if to admire the wordplay. “And women. And children.”
I felt Charlene beside me, breathing deeply, absorbing the insult, if that’s what it was. A belittlement, a reminder of how trivial we were. How silly our efforts. Her thumb and ring finger were doing their nervous circling above the khaki green of her thigh, but she had not bent her head, pretending to submit. She was staring at him, at his profile, though he still hadn’t turned to face us. His eyes were on the bit of road we could see through the slit in the canvas. Had she been holding a cigarette, I’m pretty sure she’d have screwed it into his face.
“How very awful,” I said. I felt someone should say something. And saw Charlene turn to me, surprised, I think. Perhaps because I sounded so politely curious. Like a McLean matron soothing tensions at her dinner party. I said, “Who were they?”
The rain was growing heavier again. He shrugged. “Innocents,” he said.
We looked away from him, all three of us.
The rain began to stream down the sides of our canvas covering, pooling on the floor. This was the first time since our arrival that I actually felt a chill in the air. After all those months of relentless heat, it should have been a relief. But it wasn’t.
“Poor Wally,” I whispered to Charlene. “Out in this.” But Charlene had her eyes on her hands. We were silent a good while.
Finally, she said to the doctor, “You should pull yourself inside,” brisk and authoritative, her matron-in-charge tone. Whatever he’d been trying to do, whatever rise he’d hoped to get out of her with his insult, his disparagement, had not, her stern-mother tone told him, met its mark.
The driver’s door was suddenly pulled opened—Lily and I both jumped—and Dom slid in, drenched. He rested the rifle across the passenger seat. Shook out his baseball cap. He smiled at us. “Things usually get worse before they get better,” he said. And then leaned to roll down the passenger window, to see out as best he could.
The doctor was fully inside now, too, on the narrow bench, although he still used the rifle to hold back the canvas, still looked out. His odor of sweat, of doused fire, the wet leather of his boots. He seemed to take up so much space. We three squeezed ourselves together. The wind had picked up, and the rain was slanting this way and that, as if to try every entrance. For a few minutes it blew in the back and soaked my fatigues, Charlene’s, too. I saw it gleaming on the dark shaft of the rifle. I briefly entertained the notion that the truck could be washed away. More worse.
We sat for a long time in silence, listening to the storm. At first I assured myself that whatever danger we were in was surely mitigated by the weather. Even Viet Cong guerrillas wouldn’t chance being struck by lightning just to examine a stranded vehicle. A Red Cross vehicle at that. People out to do good.
But then I remembered that American GI killed in Saigon just before we arrived, killed by a grenade tossed into his cyclo. I began to imagine a grenade flying into the back of the truck or rolling under the carriage. The red cross on the canvas was, after all, meaningless in this falling darkness. And how would the Viet Cong here know that the Viet Cong back at the leprosarium were benefiting from the American medical supplies Wally was always sure to leave behind with the good Sisters who took no sides?
I thought of Peter, revisited another version of my father’s mournful trip to Idlewild to collect what was left of me. Thought of you, Rainey, and your two brothers, left motherless. And then of Lily’s cousin, waiting for her to return. I thought of all the patients, the poor lepers, waiting for us to return with their beautiful clothes, their little bit of anticipated joy. I wondered how long they would look for us.
I thought of Dominic’s wife at home with his new baby. How long until they stopped looking for him?
I shut my eyes and bowed my head, trying to pray—how else do you prepare for what you can’t control? Lily reached out and took my hand, as she had taken her cousin’s this afternoon— it seemed ages ago.
It was not yet fully dark, but even with my eyes closed I was aware of the way the light was disappearing, gone from amber to brown to an enfolding gray. Behind my lids, I saw the faces I had seen today. Saw the swollen lesions, the distortions, the noseless cavity above the laughing mouth.
The revulsion I had kept in check all day, tucked under my ribs, stifled, ignored, smothered with a rigorous effort at compassion, at goonish, grinning sympathy, broke apart. I felt it flooding my chest, rising into my throat. I had risked my life, my happy future, for these gross and hopeless creatures.
I saw again Lily’s cousin’s awful face. Recalled the two of them—sweet Lily and that monster—side by side on the neatly made-up cot. Somebody’s deathbed. A terrible death, reached only after the worst kind of pain. The gobbling whirlwind. The body in chaos.
I shook off Lily’s hand. Wrapped myself in my own arms. I felt Charlene lean forward beside me, her elbows on her knees, our thighs touching, and, honestly, my skin crawled under my ridiculous outfit. A wave of nausea, revulsion. Contagion, I was thinking. Infection. I was thinking, awful.
I saw the slaughtered figures in the clearing. The clothes that made them men, he’d said. Pretty clever. The thought, my amusement and admiration, calmed me somehow. The clothes that made them women, made them children. Made of small animals, their flesh and blood and bone, something human.
What had we been doing all day but measuring those poor fools for their shrouds? Fools ourselves, risking our lives to dress the dead and the dying.
I thought of the pages in my little notebook, with my phonetic misspellings of each leper’s name, my own cruel nicknames, followed by Lily’s careful measurements: neck, arm, waist, inseam. No two of them the same. Should something terrible happen— a grenade rolled under the engine—those scribbled pages, that record in my own hand of our intention to do good, would end up blown across these wide, wet fields, meaningless to whoever might find them, notebook pages soaked in mud and rain and blood, my careful Catholic schoolgirl script—as indicative of who I was as my whorled fingerprints—bloated and indecipherable. In pieces.
I felt weighted, saturated, you might say. With what? “Revulsion” now seems too weak a word, but it was not as dramatic as despair. Not as vivid as hate. Or as self-conscious as disdain. A kind of resignation, a giving-in, nearly amused, to the paltriness of it, the human body, the monstrousness of flesh and bone. That seahorse-shaped collection of cells that had burned so easily.
I opened my eyes and saw with some weird detachment my hands folded in my lap, although by then I was certainly not praying. I studied the toes of my gross combat boots, the black sheen, even in the gloom, of the mud and the rain-slicked floor.
We were all very still. It was quiet, although I can’t say for sure that the rain had stopped.
And then I looked up again. He was watching me. He was as he had been: across from us, his legs splayed, the butt of the rifle high up against his thick thigh, close to his groin, the barrel holding back a small slit in the dark canvas.
Through that opening—and I admit that this is perhaps the distortion of memory or the remnant of a dream—a kind of dull light came, like a muted phosphorous. Just enough of it to touch his neck and his bared chest, the sculpted limestone skin, wet now and still streaked with mud, or blood. He was slowly chewing something—gum or tobacco, a regurgitated bit of the nun’s rice, I don’t know—his jaw moving with some slow, savoring motion in that weird white light.
I felt, madness to remember it, a kind of fury. As if he, not Charlene, had led me here.
But I also felt, more powerfully, the tremendous attraction I’d been trying all afternoon to suppress. It was overwhelming now. A wholly physical thing, a longing.
I wanted to be rid of him, sure, but more than that I wanted to press myself into his flesh, to pass through that wry mouth of his. To be consumed. A morsel.
His jaw was moving. He was studying my face across the weirdly lit gloom, his eyes touched with delight.
I scrambled to stand, to move toward him, felt my feet go out from under me on the slick floor.
Three things happened at once: Dom shouted, “Outside,” the doctor slipped from the truck, and Charlene whispered, “Tricia,” her lips to my ear. She had, somehow, wrapped me in her arms. I saw that Lily, too, had caught me by the waist. Together, we three eased back onto the jeep’s bench.
A vehicle was approaching from behind us, its headlights moved across our legs. I believe we all thought we were about to face the brief and violent end of our lives. Only a moment’s blind despair, then resignation, even indifference.
Dom, too, had left the truck. He was just outside the passenger door, his rifle raised. We heard American voices. The doctor’s voice, greeting them, calmly, “Gentlemen.”
Through the bit of opened canvas, I saw Dom lower the gun and for the first time that evening I remembered that he was supposed to be a CO. When he put his smiling face into the truck again, backlit now by the headlights of our rescuers, he said, “The cavalry is here, ladies.” And then, to Charlene alone, “We’ll be okay.”
She laughed, our arms about one another still. “For now,” she said.
“For now’s good by me,” Dom said, and grinned his all-American boy grin. He made the sign of the cross over his green fatigues and put out his hand to help us from the truck. “Dominus vobiscum,” he said.
MY MOTHER was an information operator at what we still referred to in those days as the telephone exchange, on Fiftieth Street in Manhattan. She worked the night shift, leaving the house every afternoon as soon as my father and I were home from school—our dinner already made, waiting to be reheated—and returning in the early hours of the next day.
(Does it surprise you to know she rode the subway and a bus at that hour without fear—knew, in fact, each bus driver by name? An antique past, for certain. Something out of a fairy tale, indeed.)
She was always there at breakfast with our lunches packed, the house clean, a funny story to tell about the night before: the crazy phone numbers people sought, the drunken confessions, even the “dirty talk” that she always met with an indignant “You are no gentleman, sir.” There were recurring characters in her tales: a crooning hobo; a hapless, out-of-town businessman; a weary streetwalker; a lonely cop; even a guy at Riker’s Island who always wanted the number for the mayor’s bedroom at Gracie Mansion.
And on full-moon nights, she told us, Satan himself often called, from a pay phone on some cold, blue-shaded street deep in the stony caverns of Manhattan. My mother said she knew it was the Devil by the sugary, sibilant way he always began, “I once had this number by heart, but it’s somehow slipped away…” And by the chill in her spine after she’d given him the number he sought—always with one or two digits transposed.
SO: A COUPLE MORE THINGS, weird things, to tell you about that night. Take them as you will. Just keep in mind all the superstitions, the apparitions, I believed in. In those days.
Our rescuers opened the hood and did the whole men-looking-at-an-engine thing again, this time with flashlights. Dom hopped into the driver’s seat, turned the key, and the truck started up immediately, hummed as smoothly as the thing ever hummed. There was some good-natured kidding. One of the GIs used the term “submarine races.” The other said it was a lot of effort just to get alone with some chicks.
And then Dom convinced them to take us chicks to Saigon in their jeep while he and the doctor returned to the base. The three of us squeezed into the back seat and rode a good part of the way with Dom and the doctor in the truck just behind us. We held hands, the three of us, like truant schoolgirls about to face the consequences.
I wonder now, in this long look back, what those two men found to say to each other as they drove.
