Mukdahan and Savannakhet sat opposite each other. There was only a river and a national border between them. But the feeling of them two little cities was as different as you can get. It was like some lab experiment where you got two bunnies in cages side by side. One bunny gets fresh fruit and vegetables and a little tender loving care. The other bunny has a permanent cigarette strapped to a hole in its neck, and no love.
I ain't saying the folks in Savannakhet smoke a lot. This is like an example. All I'm saying is the folks on the Lao side was different. They seemed, I don't know, sadder maybe. They didn't seem settled somehow. Savannakhet was poorer, even though people could cross back and forth as they liked, and there was a lot of the same stuff in the markets. The Lao just didn't have the money to pay for none of it.
There was a look in the eyes of the Lao like they just wanted to be settled and left to get on with their lives. They'd been at war with the French and with each other for over 200 years. All that war tends to make you a jumpy little bunny.
Waldo was real sensitive to the way people felt. They didn't have to speak his language. They didn't have to say nothing. He knew.
Wilbur invited Waldo for dinner at his place. They'd bumped into each other at the post office the day before. In a town the size of Savannakhet you have to try real hard not to bump into someone you know. It was a neat but naturally dirty place. There wasn't a clear gap between the dusts of the dry season and the muds of the rainy season. Most of the wooden houses wore a red dirt jacket outside. But the insides was spotless and cared for. You could hear the sound of sweeping way across the river.
Wilbur was just getting home from his tennis game when Waldo arrived on the doorstep with a bag of beers. Wilbur liked tennis so it was only natural he'd requisition some runway tar and gravel to build the town's only court.
"Good timing, Waldo. Come on in. How's your pool ball research coming along?" The guy had this weird habit of mentioning pool balls and then winking. It was beyond Waldo, so he didn't question it. You had to be a little crazy if you wanted to work for the CIA.
He walked into a home that was like one of them House and Garden magazine spreads. There was real classy pots, and expensive looking furniture, and at least a zillion dollars' worth of stereo equipment. He remembered his poor crippled record player at home and thought about how happy he'd be to have a quarter of the goodies spread out in front of him. Wilbur saw him drooling.
"You like music, Waldo?"
"Man, I love music."
"Go ahead and choose yourself some then. I've only got modern stuff, but you might find something there you like. Excuse me while I get cleaned up."
If you imagine how skinny one LP is, and you think of a rack eight feet long with three shelves full of albums, you'll know just how much music we're talking about here. Waldo was happy as a smiley T-shirt. He wasn't one of them cuss stubborn old folks that gets stuck in some music time-warp and thinks everything after that is crap. He was a with-it old timer.
He picked out the Chi-Lites' 'I like Your Loving' and put it real slow and easy on the beautiful turntable. It was just that he didn't have a university degree in electrical engineering so he couldn't fathom out how to play the darned thing. There was buttons everywhere. It was like when David took him up to the front of the airplane to meet the pilot.
"Hell, driver. How d'you remember what all them dials is for?" This was even more complicated. So he just pulled over a chair and sat back and looked at it till Wilbur come back.
"How you doing there?"
Wilbur walked out of the shower with a towel wrapped round his skinny waist. He had the type of muscly body Waldo was easing himself into. He come over and pressed a little button and the next thing you know they was surrounded by Chi-Lites. There was speakers all over the house.
"Good choice."
"Oh, brother. This is better than live."
"No, there's nothing better than live, Waldo."
"It seems like spying pays pretty good."
"Tell you the truth, this is just my hardship allowance. The salary goes straight to …my family."
"Hardship like this I can handle." Waldo didn't begrudge him a good salary. It wasn't like he worked in an office. In fact, Wilbur's life was most peculiar. He left home at seven in the morning and got in one of them Air America helicopters and they flew him to the front. And that's the war front I'm talking about, not the sea front.
There'd be bullets flying and mortars exploding and enemy attacking and soldiers dying all around him. And that was Wilbur's place of work. He'd spend the day there checking that his Hmong fighters was stocked up on ammo and spam, listen to complaints about conditions, dodge sniper fire. Then at five, he'd look at his watch, climb back in his helicopter and come on home. He'd play a few sets of tennis, have his dinner, and listen to music till the next day. And I swear I ain't making this up.
"Ain't you afraid they'll kill you, Wilbur?"
"My uncle George choked to death eating a pretzel. I guess that pretzel had his name on it. If it ain't a speeding car it's a rabid dog. Something's got your name on it. You can't be afraid of everything, Waldo, cause you just don't know what it is with your name on. And judging by the shooting practice I've seen, I'm more likely to get hit by one of our guys than one of theirs."
"Excuse me for saying this, Wilbur, but I get a feeling you ain't taking this war serious."
"Waldo, I hate this goddamned war. I don't know what the hell we're doing here. There's people freezing on the streets in New York, and we're spending money here like it's air. You wanna beer?"
Waldo didn't normally drink beer, but Biere Laos was kind of addictive. It weren't exactly slimming food, but for every pint he drank, he'd sweat ten. He wasn't built like a house no more. He was a cabin, heading for a hut.
"Sure."
They sat on the veranda overlooking the jasmine bushes. The maid had just watered 'em and it smelt like an aftershave factory out there.
"Stinks don't it."
"My wife would of been real happy here. She loved flowers."
"You know, out there where I go every day, there isn't so much as a leaf."
"You don't say."
"And you know why that is?"
"No."
"It's because we, that is, our government, dropped 200,000 gallons of herbicide along the Ho Chi Min trail so the Viet Cong wouldn't have nowhere to hide. I don't know if it'll ever grow back.
"200,000 gallons, Waldo. It stripped the leaves off the trees, the vegetation off the ground, and the skin off anyone foolish enough to be standing underneath those trees. And what are they guilty of? What was their crime? Being born, Waldo. They're guilty of being born where they were."
Waldo could see the guy was starting to get depressed. Beer and wars could do that to you. He went inside and changed the music to something happy. Ten minutes later they was out there doing a Supremes routine, singing into their bottles.
The maid and her boy come into the yard to watch the two crazy dancing guys, one burnt sienna, one mocha cream. If you gotta be bombed, be bombed by guys with rhythm.
-o-
Waldo got back to the guest house some time after midnight and something approaching drunk. He hadn't gotten in that state since Aretha passed away. He'd been afraid of getting to be a depressed drunk.
He'd refused a ride from his drunk friend and walked through the streets of Savannakhet singing out loud. He said 'sabaidee' (his Lao was almost as good as his Spanish) to anyone he met foolish enough to be walking through unlit streets that time in the morning. There was any number of reasons why he could of gotten himself killed just for being an American, but like he said to Wilbur;
"You never know what's got your name on it, so you can't be afraid of everything."
Wilbur agreed that those must of been the words of a very wise man, and he let him go. He didn't rightly know what 'sabaidee' meant, but Wilbur told him it was useful to know, and it did seem to get him home in one piece.
The light was on in Saifon's room and there was voices coming out. He knocked softly so as not to wake up the whole house.
"Who is it?"
"Diana Ross."
There was more whispers from inside before she unlocked the door and let him in.
"What time …Wilbur, you been drinking."
"I know." He was surprised to see the little girl laid out on Saifon's bed, but not nearly as surprised as the girl was to see him. She pulled the sheet over her head. She hadn't seen nothing like him in her life, less you count buffalo. Saifon went over and talked to the shape under the sheet and she poked her eyes out from under it. Waldo give her one of his biggest smiles and waved.
"Sabaidee."
She went back under.
"I guess she ain't ready for you yet."
She scooted Waldo out of the room, followed him into the hall, and locked the door. His room was opposite, unlocked as always. They went in. He giggled when he saw he still had his shoes on.
"Naughty me."
"Waldo, this is serious. I need you to stop being drunk for a while."
"OK." He dropped back onto the bed but it found the will power not to collapse under him. She sat at his feet and helped untie his laces.
"Waldo, I found my aunt."
"Hey that's great."
"She was dead."
"OK. Then that ain't so great."
"She'd been dead a week, and …it weren't natural."
"Someone killed her?"
"That little girl you just met, her name's Nit. She clubbed the old lady to death with a hunk of wood."
"No." He tried to sit up. He failed.
"And you know why? Because she'd gotten sold, just like me. The old woman told her a week ago that someone'd be coming for her in the morning. She told her to wash her hair and put on a clean skirt. Nit remembered the same thing happening to her older sister. The woman took in the two of them. Their family got blown up. I guess Nit was too young to sell straight off so she stayed with my aunt for two more years."
Waldo managed to get his legs on the floor and sit up. He was sobering up real fast.
"Man, fifteen years on and she's still pulling the same shit. That's incredible."
"Her sister was gone God knows where, and here she was about to follow her. She didn't want no part of it. She was scared, man. And she hated the old witch every bit as much as I did. But I don't know what it took to whack her to death. I couldn't of. She waited till the woman was out back taking a crap and she did it. She dragged her into the trees and waited.
When the truck come to get her the next day she hid in the rice and waited till it was gone."
"You think she'd recognize that truck again if she saw it?"
"I hope so. If she don't, that's the end of the trail. But she's pretty messed up right now. I gotta spend more time with her."
"You gonna tell the PL?"
"Not till I'm sure they ain't involved. I didn't say nothing to the driver."
"So, what do we do now?"
"Tomorrow we start our truck hunt."
"Right on."
-o-
Back in Saifon's room, Nit had climbed off the bed and was curled up asleep on the hard floor. But that was good. She'd been awake for a week.