IN the season of the elephant-mango, when motorbike riders wear raincoats backwards, I lived in a hotel on an avenue once named Rue Catinat. That is now Tu-Do-Street. The year was 1969.
It was also that season when cricket-hunters come down Cong-Ly with bamboo-poles and glue-pots. And all cricket fighters hope for the rains that come on the summer monsoons. For crickets fight harder then.
I communicated with only three people in that hotel: a black GI living with a Vietnamese girl, who called himself Duke; Pham-Quynn, an eleven-year-old cricket-fancier; and a woman in a white aodai called Giang; for whom Pham served as a procurer. Giang was his mother.
Duke’s girl complained of the prices of American whiskey and cigarettes on the black markets. So I changed his green money into piastres, through an Indian bookseller; changed the piastres into Military Payment Certificates with a Chinese leather-goods merchant; then bought whiskey and cigarettes, as well as soap and comic-books, for Duke at the PX. Where he got green money I didn’t inquire. And how long he’d been awol I didn’t conjecture.
Pham spoke to Duke and myself in GI English; to Duke’s girl in Vietnamese; and used sign-language with his mother.
To eight a.m. motorbike riders down Tu-Do, Pasteur and Cong-Ly, red warning lights meant only to slow down to 40; yellow meant GO! And the green signaled the right of way to all riders to wheel up on the walks. Then an air of mischief, touched by desperation, began dividing Honda from Harley and trishaw from taxi. As if the mischievous headlines were inspiring them to out-gun, out-ride, out-risk and out-dare one another both ways down the Tran Hung-Dao:
REDS DECIMATED
REDS REPULSED
LT. JUMPS ON GRENADE
NVA WALKS INTO TRAP
NVA RALLIES TO CHIEU HOI
HOI CHANH LEADS GIS TO CACHE
PRESIDENT RAPS WHISKEY-DRINKING INTELLECTUALS
SEE ACCEPTANCE BY VANQUISHED VC
The same lieutenant leaped upon the same grenade every morning. Day after day the NVA walked into the same trap. The President rapped the same intellectuals drinking the same whiskey. Reds who weren’t immediately decimated were instantly repulsed. The few who strangely survived rallied to the Open Arms-Chieu Hoi program—“rallying” here meaning that an NVA defector had led Americans to a cache of Russian-made arms, slaughtered eighteen of his former comrades to establish his loyalty to the Saigon Government; and then had jumped on a grenade to save democracy. While vanquished VC wandered aimlessly about looking for somebody to put them to work. Preferably in the Cholon PX.
Yet the mortars still came in and yet bike-riders flung plastiques. Gun-ship and fireship searched the skies and docks; while MP patrols cruised the darkened alleys.
Whenever I saw a motorbike upturned, its wheels spinning slowly and more slowly, above a rider whose face was now part of the pavement, and a policeman looking languidly down at the rider’s splattered head, I realized that traffic accidents were part of the struggle to win the hearts and minds of men.
Giang wasn’t trying to win hearts or minds. It was all she could do to hold onto her own. Though her features were Vietnamese, her expression was French. For her eyes, commonly languid among Vietnamese, were energetic. The openness of her glance, not unusual in women of Paris, was unique on Tu-Do. She was deaf and mute.
Once she was standing in the hotel entrance, toward evening, and made way for me as I entered. She flashed her wide white smile, then folded her hands against her cheek and closed her eyes, feigning sleep. I thought it was a good idea.
Later I had dinner, alone, on the riverboat restaurant Phat Diem. On a river with a view of a shore that looked, in the evening air, like the beginning of a contented country, I decided to invite Giang and Pham to have dinner with me here the following Sunday.
When I asked Pham, he ran, exhilarated, to inform his mother. She came to the door, in her white aodai, and nodded confirmation to me. She seemed pleased.
I told Duke that I had invited Giang and Pham to the Phat Diem.
“Numba Ten,” Duke’s girl put in.
“What’s the matter with her?” I asked Duke.
“She says that, in this country, it’s smart not to get involved.”
“What kind of country does she think she’s in anyhow?” I asked Duke.
When I rapped Giang’s door the following Sunday, Pham opened it—dressed less for an afternoon on a riverboat than for an alley. He was barefoot, uncombed, was holding a peanut butter jar, and had a GI toothbrush hanging around his neck. I’d expected Giang to have him ready and to be ready herself. I didn’t want to be on the Saigon River after dark.
Pham indicated that his mother was home; but she didn’t appear. And instead of getting ready, Pham insisted on showing me the stupid cricket, that he called Skippy, in the peanut butter jar. A few grains of rice and the remains of a spider lay on the jar’s bottom. Feeling both disappointed and annoyed with Giang, I got up to go; but Pham took my hand.
“Tau Chit Choot,” he told me, and led me down to the street: we were going to a cricket fight.
Every trade had its own tune in Saigon, and each tune its own pitch. The fellow wheeling along the curb, rattling a chain as he cycled, was asking for knives to grind or scissors to sharpen. The little man, afoot with a big shears as if preparing to cut his way through the throng, had nougats ready for cutting if only you’d buy. The ten-year-old boy blowing piercingly on a tin whistle was whistling for bike or motorbike tires on which to put patches for whatever you’d pay. The woman getting a chirping cry out of coca-cola tops strung on a wire, was offering to massage me, on the street, for fifty piastres.
The boy beating a pair of strung balls with a pair of drumsticks, in a three-step beat, was an advance-man, announcing the coming of steamed rice; in a Chinese soup-wagon hauled by his mother. If the beat was slower it wasn’t steamed rice. It was the woman who’d dye your trousers while you waited.
While whistles kept shrilling, sirens kept warning, horns kept squawking, ducks kept quacking, and toy-tanks kept zapping chopchop eaters at their chopstick bowls, a girl with a basket on her head came crying, among charcoal fires and children squatting to pee, “Ay vit lon! Ay vit lon!” like a querulous bird.
Down an areaway so narrow only one could pass, we came into a shadowed and gutted shack where a couple dozen men and boys, safe from the National Police, were crowding around a battered and rusted washtub.
The washtub was the ring. A stout Vietnamese was the matchmaker. He held all bets and took a percentage off the winner. He was the Maurice Stans of the cricket-fighting world.
How long ago Charcoal Crickets and Fire Crickets plunged Southeast Asia into a holy cicada, or war of mutual cricket-extermination—literally biting off one another’s antennae to spite their stupid faces, is lost in the mists of cricket-history.
All we know for certain is that the Charcoal bug, being black, cannot bear the presence of the Fire Cricket; who is just as much of a bug because he can’t endure the sight of the darker insect.
Since neither one has eyes, how does either distinguish between friend and foe? We are trapped here in an ecological mystery to which no satisfactory solution has been offered either by science or Wm. F. Buckley, Jr. (whose own blind charges have afforded so much diversion to TV viewers).
Certain arthropodists contend that colors have odors: that the smell of black infuriates the Fire Cricket while the Charcoal Cricket sees red when he smells yellow. But this is mere circumvention. For, if so, wouldn’t the Charcoal Cricket keep beating out his brains against chartreuse houses? And what would keep Fire Crickets from attacking Cadillacs? The fact is that both species are noseless as well as eyeless. Back to the old drawingboard, Professor.
Because it’s territorial instinct—let me make this perfectly clear—which arouses both species to fight to the death at the touch of antennae. This touch being provided—I’m sure you’ve already guessed—by a human being whose territorial instinct is aroused by the hand of another human on his wallet.
But if the stupid bugs didn’t go about dressed in contrasting trunks, like opponents on the Friday Night Fights, there wouldn’t be any fights-to-the-death. For the simple reason that nobody would be able to tell whose boy won and whose lost.
Pham brushed the antennae of his fighter carefully, with his GI tooth-brush, until it stood up on its hind legs, tense for battle. When his anten-nae touched that of the Fire Cricket opposing him, the battle was joined.
Skippy looked pretty good in there at first. He got a strong hold of the Fire Cricket and spun him onto his back with all six firelegs kicking helplessly. Pham cheered. But instead of finishing his opponent off, Skippy just stood waving at the crowd. That bug purely loved applause.
The Fire Cricket’s owner called time out. He tied a thread to the yellow cricket’s leg and spun the bug around his head. Whether this was to restore the insect’s sense or drive him even crazier I still have no idea.
Yet it worked. As soon as the yellow cricket was back on his legs, he jumped across the ring, the thread still dangling, and bit off Skippy’s head. Skippy stood one moment, still acknowledging applause. Then his body followed his severed head. The Fire Cricket was lifted up, the black thread still dangling, put back in the winner’s jar and fed a fresh spider.
Pham had put a lot of work into feeding and brushing and training that stupid bug, and he looked solemn as we passed among copper-gong beaters, shaven-head bonzes bearing umbrellas; and old women whose mouths were bloody with betel, spitting as they came.
Children came hauling between donkey-cart shafts; children being many and donkeys few.
Then a chopper, flying much too low, beat down all sound and rumor of sound: for a moment after it passed silence held all the choking air.
Then the cry “Ay vit lon!” broke through again and all the market’s voices hurried back as if invited by that cry. What was that girl selling?
Half a dozen of Giang’s deaf-mute colleagues were waiting for her in front of the hotel.
One, who looked no older than fifteen, handed Pham a folded note and nodded toward me. Pham handed it to me and I put it in my pocket; still folded.
Duke was waiting for me at my door, which surprised me. He didn’t speak until I’d offered him a drink.
“Did you hear the blast?” he asked me at last.
“Which one?”
“On the river. They blew up the Phat Diem.”
I reached for the note as if feeling, suddenly, that whatever it was, I needed it. It was written with painstaking effort:
I sorry. I afraid go by Phat Diem
Be not mad please.
Giang
I handed it to Duke, who grinned when he read it; inspected the blank side then handed it back. Yet he said nothing.
“Some coincident,” was all I could think to say.
“What coincident?” Duke wanted to know. “The woman was trying to tell you something but you were too dumb to get it, that’s all. What did you want her to do? Hand you a plan of the operation? Put you on her grapevine?”
“She’s not politically involved,” I protested.
“For God’s sake,” Duke became impatient, “she’s Vietnamese, isn’t she? How can she not be involved?” Then added after a minute, “It was just lucky for you she didn’t have something against you, that was all.”
“What if she had?”
“Why, she would have kept the date, then ducked with the boy, that’s all. What country do you think you’re in, buddy?”