Part 22 (1/2)

A drop of sweat trickled into my eye, and I wiped it away. Not even eight-thirty, and the temperature was already into the nineties. I felt a sudden upsurge of emotion and realized how much I missed Kim. Though I had tried to throw my heart in a new direction, though Lucy was an interesting woman and, without doubt, more s.e.xually adventurous than Kim, I was ready for some home cooking, and I asked Kim if she was planning to meet me in Saigon.

”If you still want me to,” she said.

We discussed when she would come, at which hotel she should stay, and spent some time repairing the rift in the relations.h.i.+p. I was so consoled by the familiarity of her voice, so excited by the predictable promise it conveyed, I suggested that we could marry in Saigon, a suggestion she did not reject out of hand, saying we should table the matter until she arrived. I thought we both had concluded that these adventures, these dalliances no longer served a purpose-they had become interruptions in our lives, and it was time we moved on. Yet when I hung up, it was as though I had cut myself off from her. I felt a total lack of connection and regretted having mentioned marriage. I went into the bow and asked Lan if we could head south in the morning. He sat facing the river and its farther sh.o.r.e, his legs dangling over the side of the houseboat, wearing a grease-stained pink T-s.h.i.+rt and shorts; he pushed a shock of gray hair from his eyes and peered up at me like an old turtle, blinking, craning his stiff neck.

”Anytime,” he said. ”Need provisions.”

”Send Deng into town.”

He chuckled, showing his gapped yellow teeth. ”Deng.”

”What's so funny?” I asked.

”Gone. You scare him. He tells me you are a bad man. He says a bad man is unlucky for people around him.”

I thought Deng's leaving probably had more to do with Lucy than with his perception of my character. ”You don't believe that, do you?”

”Maybe,” said Lan.

”Then why haven't you deserted?”

”No reason.” He fixed his eyes on a barge loaded with crates chugging upstream, c.r.a.pping an oil slick and black fumes. ”Need provisions,” he said.

That afternoon, under an overcast sky, we visited a market on the outskirts of the city, a place where the pavement ended and green countryside could be seen off along the main road; the streets widened to form an open area-a square, if you will-of tapioca-colored dirt amid dilapidated buildings, none more than two stories tall. Infirm-looking, vertically compromised stalls of weathered wood were clumped alongside the buildings, pitched at eccentric angles. If you squinted and let your eyes slide out of focus, they resembled old, hobbling, gray-skirted women, some leaning together, who had paused for breath during a const.i.tutional and never stirred again. The majority of the stalls were the offices of fortune-tellers, and this was the reason for our visit: Lucy's favorite fortune-teller could be found there. Why she picked him out of all the fortune-tellers in Phnom Penh, I hadn't a clue. He offered no complicated graphs and charts to demark your fate, as did many. His method was to rub dirt into her palm to make the lines stand out and mutter abstractions about her future until she was satisfied. Perhaps appearance played a part in her choice. Iron-gray hair hair fell in tangles over his chest and shoulders, and tattoos, faded to intricate blue scratchings, wrote an illegible legend on his arms, chest, neck, and forehead. He had a wispy goatee, wore a wraparound that covered his loins, and could usually be found smoking a cigar-sized spliff, which may have accounted for his benign gaze. His colleagues, most neatly dressed in western-style clothing, free of tattoos and spliffs, gave him a wide berth.

While Lucy consulted her wizard and Riel dawdled at a stall that sold cheap jewelry, I walked through thin crowds along one of the market streets leading off the square and, after a bout of token haggling, bought a U.S. army-issue Colt .45 and six clips of ammo from an arms dealer. Though old, the weapon appeared to be in good working order. The dealer encouraged me to test fire it, but I was afraid that I might be reported-I had no conception of the legalities attendant upon buying a gun. I tucked the pistol into my waist, beneath my s.h.i.+rt, and hustled back toward the square. A block along from the arms dealer, I stopped dead in my tracks. Standing in the doorway of a building on the corner was a bearded man dressed identically to me-shorts, sandals, a black T-s.h.i.+rt-and with an identical (as far as I could determine from a distance of forty feet) face and build. I imagined that we wore the identical stunned expression. We locked gazes for a moment, and as I hurried toward him, he ducked into the interior of the building. I raced after him, through the door and into the midst of twenty or thirty people slurping noodles at wooden tables, nearly knocking over a waitress who carried a load of dirty dishes. Her irritation gave way to confusion. She glanced toward the kitchen, then at me, and that told me all I needed to know. I ran through the kitchen and out onto the street behind the restaurant. There was scant pedestrian traffic-some kids kicking around a soccer ball, two women talking, a man looking under the hood of a beat-up yellow Toyota-and no sign of my double. I walked along in the direction of the square, peering into doorways, my excitement draining. What could we have said to each other, anyway? We could have compared notes on Cradleness, on what it meant to be a Cradle, for all the good that would do. Possibly I could have learned something new about the delta, but nothing, I thought, that would have greatly illuminated its central mystery. It had been a strange thing to see myself, yet now, at a remove from the moment, I questioned whether he had actually been my double. A bearded man in shorts and a black T-s.h.i.+rt at a distance of forty feet who had fled when approached by a stranger on the run: I told myself he might have been anyone.

In my absence, the center of the square had been taken over by an elephant. It was kneeling, a heap of fresh dung close by its hindquarters, and Riel stood at its side, like a princess beside a weathered castle wall, talking to a boy in shorts, twelve or thirteen, mounted behind the animal's neck. A farmer's son, I thought, who had ridden the family tractor into town to show it off. I found a stall adjacent to Lucy's wizard that sold coffee sweetened with condensed milk and sat on a rickety folding chair and watched Riel trying to entice the boy into giving her a ride (he kept wagging his finger no, and scowling), while the elephant flexed its trunk and blinked away flies, presenting an image of stuporous discontent.

The crowds were thinner in the square than they had been on the side streets, so Riel was the object of much attention, especially from the male stallkeepers. I sipped my coffee and thought about the gun pus.h.i.+ng against my pelvic bone, imagining it had been s.n.a.t.c.hed from the hand of a dead officer during the Vietnam conflict and wondering how many lives it had snuffed out. It had been an impulse buy, although the impulse was informed by a lifelong fear of and fascination with guns and was given a quasi-rational basis by the idea that I might need it once we reached the delta. It was a steel phallus, a social ill, all those things that left-wing politics said it was; yet its cold touch warmed me and added weight to my purpose, enabling the fantasy that my mission there was important.

Lucy finished her consultation and joined me for coffee. ”It's going to rain,” she said.

The clouds had gone from a nickel color to dark gray brushed with charcoal; the muggy heat and the smell of the elephant's dung had thickened. I laid an envelope on the table by Lucy's hand.

”What's this?” she asked, fingering it.

”Severance pay,” I said.

She met my eyes steadily, and I thought she would object or demand an explanation; but she only looked away, her face neutral.

”So what did he tell you, your guy? What's in your stars?” I asked, breaking a silence.

”Obviously not a trip south,” she said. ”Oh, well. Like they say, all good things . . .”

”I hope it's been good.”

She appeared to rebound. ”It's been an adventure . . . and good.” She grinned. ”No complaints on this end.”

”It's about time you went home and kick-started that career, don't you think?”

”Advice? And from someone who should know better?” she said merrily. ”I shall have to reevaluate my impression of you.”

”Just a thought.”

The stallkeeper switched on a radio and tuned into a station playing reggae-Peter Tosh and elephants, the essence of globalization. Lucy inspected the contents of the envelope. ”This is a lot of money,” she said. ”It's too much, really.”

”I was hoping you'd see to Riel.”

She nudged the envelope over to my side of the table. ”I don't want to be responsible.”

”I thought you fancied her.”

”The lesbian thing . . . it's my exhibitionist side coming out. It works for me when the right guy is around. Otherwise . . .” She wrinkled her nose.

”Look, I'm not expecting you to spend much time on this. Give it a week or so, and try to pa.s.s her off to someone decent. That shouldn't be much of a problem. Maybe you can trick her onto a plane back to Winnipeg. If she stays here, she's bound to run into someone who'll f.u.c.k her up worse than she already is.”

”All right. I'll do my best for her, but . . . I'll do my best.”

I took her hand, letting my fingers mix with hers. ”I'm going to be in London next spring. I'll give you a call, see how you're doing.”

”I'm likely to be busy,” she said after a pause. ”But, yes. Do call, please.”

We held hands for ten or fifteen seconds, reestablis.h.i.+ng the limits of our limited affection, and then Lucy said, ”Oh, my gosh. Look what she's doing now.”

Riel had stepped around to the front of the elephant, facing it, and was dancing, a slow, eloquent, seductive temple-girl dance, arms raised above her head, hips swaying, as if trying to charm the beast. The elephant appeared unaffected, but everyone in the square had stopped what they were doing to watch. A livid stroke of lightning fractured the eastern sky, its witchy shape holding against the sullen moil of clouds, and was followed by a peal of thunder that rolled across green fields into the city. As it pa.s.sed, the sky flickered, the clouds s.h.i.+fted in their conformation; but such phenomena had grown so commonplace, I would not have noticed except that it added a mysterious accent to the scene.

”Do you think she's in any danger?” Lucy asked.

”From the elephant? Probably not,” I said. ”The boy seems calm.”

”We should fetch her, anyway. It's time we went back.” She tucked the envelope into her bag, yet made no move to stand. ”Whatever comes, I think we've helped her.”

”We provided a place where she didn't have to worry about survival. But I don't think we can claim to have helped.”

”What should we have done? Put her in a clinic? She wouldn't last a day. We're not her parents . . . and it's not as if she cares a fig about us. She'd be off in a flash if something better happened along.”

”Maybe something better will come along. That's why I gave you the money.”

Lucy acknowledged this gloomily.

”She may care about us more than you think,” I said. ”Her attachment to the world is flimsy, but we became her world for a few weeks. Flimsy or not, she formed an attachment.”

”Isolate one moment, if you can, when she demonstrated genuine affection.”