Duncan would quote himself. Unlike the deer, the VC would not be scared away by hearing us. With that to think about and the work of climbing to occupy my energy, I was fresh out of conversation anyway.


Not that William was hurrying-he just sort of oozed up that slope like so much oil compared to me. He did let Ahn down, and the boy made good use of his foot, both hands, and, though I winced for him, his stump, as he climbed. He stopped and rubbed his stump occasionally, but didn't complain, and twice grinned at me as I stood panting for breath, trying to keep up. Nursing involves a lot of walking, stooping, bending, lifting, and running, but it's blessedly short on scrambling up steep muddy hills in dripping, steaming rain. The exertion more than made up for the slight drop of temperature caused by the wind and rain. Whereas in the clearing I'd been cold, within the heavy cover of jungle growth with big leaves overlaying bigger leaves, I felt like a pig at a luau.

Sometime in late afternoon we broke through the thick cover into light rain sprinkling the top of the ridge. Here the trees were tall but the undergrowth was rocky and relatively free of tangly growth. I leaned against a rock and almost slid off it, I was that slippery from my own sweat. William looked like a ghost, wrapped in his own cloud of congealing moisture.


My head roared and my eyes weren't focusing all that well. The rain was warm but it was water, and I raised my head and let it trickle into my mouth. Ahn crawled over to me, dug into his shorts pocket, and offered me a Baggie of salt tablets. William was already on his stomach, lapping from a hollow rock. He gave me a turn, as he might at the drinking fountain in some park, and after a few laps I popped the salt tablets and lapped some more. It helped, but I couldn't knock it back and reach the most parched part of my throat. Still, I knew the systemic effects would save my life anyway.


When my eyes and mind had cleared a little, I looked at Ahn, who was pocketing his tablets again.


"Babysan, where'd you get those?" I asked him.


"I find them, mamasan. Numbah one, huh? I think maybe I sell when I fini hospital."


The Vietnamese version of free enterprise had for once proved useful. I had my own salt tablets, but having two supplies was better than having one. I had no idea what a salt lick looked like and doubted we would just run across one every time we got dehydrated. William had swallowed a couple of tablets too, but he had been in the bush long enough that his body had adapted somewhat. My sweat glands were spouting like Old Faithful and his just seemed to flow gently, like the Danube, adding a polishing gloss to his skin. Of course, he stank like a billy goat, but then, I was building up quite a pungent fragrance myself. The grunts were all warned against using scented American hygienic products like toothpaste and deodorant and after-shave. I wondered if it mattered.

I'd heard that Americans smelled bad to Orientals, that eating red meat gives us a special odor they find objectionable. I wondered if the VC

would kill you quicker for smelling good from toothpaste and after-shave or smelling bad from stinky pits, toe jam, dragon mouth, and crotch rot.


We walked along the ridge and over onto another one, with just a slight dip between hills. Once I stopped and removed the amulet for a moment, to see the country with normal eyes. I thought how much my mother with her love of nature trails and bird-watching would have loved this.

Fields of elephant grass rippling like summer wheat were the only resemblance between this country and Kansas. The country was spined with ridges protecting low-lying areas of grass, paddies, and more jungle. Atop these ridges, spindly trees clawed their way out of rocky ground strewn with explosions of thin green tongues. The hillsides and valleys brimmed with forest green, emerald green, peridot green, bright, light, medium, dark, and drab olive green, lime green, chartreuse, and other shades of green I had no name for. Through the valley to the east of us, a stream glinted between the trees like fragments of Christmas tinsel.


"What you stoppin' for?" William asked.


"I bet you can see all of Vietnam from here," I said.


"I bet all Vietnam can see us too; think 'bout that and move your ass."


He didn't have to tell me twice. I slipped the amulet back over my head and followed. Although the footing was easier, and the wind and rain felt fresh against my face and arms, my feet burned as if I were walking on hot coals and my legs ached to my waist. William dumped Ahn onto the ground and rolled his shoulders back to relieve the tension. Ahn looked at me expectantly, but I shook my head, and without whining, he picked up a long stout stick and used it for a crutch.


The sky darkened from pale silver to the color of a new cast-iron skillet. The raindrops grew larger and the ground boggier. Below the ridgeline, the jungle covered us again. We slid down a slick embankment on our rears and dropped onto a spongy dead tree trunk that supported two more trees sprouting from its corpse. William stepped down from this and scuffed the ground cover up with his feet. Several lizards and spiders scuttled away, including two or three pretty large spiders. I wanted to ask if those were tarantulas but felt stupid for not knowing already, so I tried to look nonchalant as if, oh sure, I knew they could be tarantulas but I wasn't scared of anything like that.


"We better post sentry tonight," William said. "Which watch you want, first or second?"


"I'll take first," I said. "I'm beat but I don't think I'm going to be able to sleep-I hurt too much. What do we do if they do come? Spit at them till they drown?"


"No, but if we see them first, we're warned, we can hide. We don't see them and they see us, nicest thing they could do is slit our throats while we're asleep, but I don't think they'd let us off that easy, specially with you along."


"Thanks, William," I said, shuddering. "Any inclination I had to sleep is definitely gone now."


He nodded as if he thought I really was grateful and curled up between the tree and the lip of the ridge to sleep. Ahn was dead to the world as soon as the spiders were gone. I sat with my back to the cliff, my arms curled around my knees, and watched the auras of my companions dim with sleep, like private sunsets damping to dusky rose and slate blue.


Every once in a while I'd uncurl enough to peek up over the ridge, alert for the teiltale glow of enemy auras. But I didn't think I'd see them in time if they overran us.


I rolled my head and shoulders and rotated my feet, feeling the deep pain in my shoulders and neck, my legs, arms, hips, my feet especially.

I wanted to take off my boots. I knew I should or I'd get jungle rot, but who cared about that kind of thing when you could be shot# worse-at any time? I understood how the grunts came in with some of the complaints they did. I didn't want to take off my boots. I wanted to be able to run if I needed to. I did not want to be captured.


Officers' basic at Fort Sam was pretty much a lark for my class of nurses-they needed us too badly to harass us. Unlike the men, many of us could have quit. Those of us who had contractual obligations could get pregnant and get out if need be. They did not want to bug us too badly. So when they took a group of us into a small classroom and closed the door behind the instructor and a Special Forces-type sergeant, I thought they were just being melodramatic.


"Ladies and gentlemen," the instructor said, "what we are going to tell you here is not to go outside this room. If you repeat it, we will deny it." Oh boy, I thought. "Mission: Impossible." The others showed varying degrees of concern-with most of the women it was polite. The male nurses responded a little differently. I saw jamison, a fellow I'd chatted up at the 0 club, lean forward and look suddenly very intense.

There were several male nurses in our group, but two or three, including jamison, were already veterans before they got their R.N.s.


As soon as they got their diplomas, they were eligible to be redrafted.


jamison told me he'd enjoyed Nam as a corpsman, had felt he'd really done some good on the medcap missions, but wanted the expertise he thought nurses' training would give him. He hadn't been redrafted, but from the expression on his face, I wondered if he wasn't having second thoughts.


The sergeant introduced himself first as a two-tour Vietnam veteran. We didn't really need to be told. And it was looking at his face, with its tired eyes, at his stance that was at the same time very casual and very tense, that made me realize that this part was not just more Army melodramatic bullshit. "Now I'm going to tell you something and I know you're going to think this is a cruel and inhuman thing to say and all that, but I got my reasons. You women, if it ever appears as if you are in a situation where capture appears inevitable, the best thing you can do is to kill yourself. You men, if you are in a situation with one of these women and it looks as if she may be captured, do her a favor and kill her. Because the tortures are atrocious." Then he showed us pictures.


I was a little shaken, but still thought to myself: Oh, what a load

-there they go playing John Wayne again, the old saving the last round for the schoolmarm bit. The horribly hurt people in the pictures were shoved to the back of my mind with icky pictures out of medical books after a while.


At Fitzsimons, I met the nurse who told me her system for handling overseas romance. She had served in Nam during Tet too, which made her crazy enough to like me, I suppose, and try to help me out when the brass and all the other head nurses were so down on me. The day I got orders for Nam, she gave me the big-sister talk about men and we split first one, then two bottles of wine.


Toward the bottom of the second bottle, she started talking about the part of Nam she hadn't told me about: not the beach parties and the inconveniences, but her work. She had been triage nurse at Cu Chi during Tet and was talking about the way the Vietcong overran the place at one point and of some of the awful things that came through her E.R., the mutilations, the deaths. I asked, carefully, because we'd been warned not to mention it outside the room, "Did you get that talk about enemy torture before you went over there?"


She nodded. "Yep. I wish someone had told the civilians the same thing, because they were right on. We had a couple of American nuns come in; the VC had tortured those women till-well, one of them died, and I was praying to God the other one would too."


I thought about that while I huddled under the lip of that ridge. I could still see my friend's face. This wasn't something she had heard.

She had seen it. American women like us. Only they were civilians.

Surely it would be even worse, if there was worse, for military. And then there were all the officers trying to scare us, saying, "They know your names. They know who you are. The VC have you on a hit list." I thought about all the hideous things I had heard first- and secondhand, the Vietnam folk myths and the stories from other nurses, about torture victims, mutilations, Vietnamese and Vietcong women who had been sickeningly abused by either us or them, and I felt my own body, achy and sore because it was soft, easily pierced, of how I screeched if I stubbed my toe. Jesus Christ, what was I doing here?


The bugs were torture enough-my arms were sore from swatting at them, and big lumps itched and burned all over my face and arms and ur?derneath my clothing. Even though I sat on my poncho, I was saturated to the bone with rain and plant sap and mud. How did the grunts take it out here in this shit? No wonder people got vicious-the discomfort alone was enough to drive you nuts.


There had to be better things to think about, but I'd never stood guard duty before. What would Duncan do if he were with me? Probably say that if he had his old .30-06 he would pick off the entire NVA, but since he didn't, he'd probably leave me alone "just for a minute, kitten, while I check something out," and go off with some Vietnamese floozy. Ahn whimpered in his sleep and crunched himself into a tight ball. I wanted to whimper too. I wanted my mother. I could just hear her saying, "Now, Kathleen Marie, it's not that I don't love you, honey, but you got yourself into this. Neither your daddy nor I, nor even the Army, forced you to go over there, so now you're just going to have to handle it the best you can." Thanks a lot, Mom.


She'd also tell me it was no use getting morbid. Good advice, but a little hard to follow. I tried to mentally construct a letter she would be able to relate to.


Dear Mom, A funny thing happened on my way to transfer Ahn to a different hospital. The darn chopper broke down and Ahn and I had to jump into the jungle. Tony, good captain that he was, went down with his ship, but we met this colorful character named William who's on his way back to civilization to get reassigned, since his last post was terminated. Little Ahn has been learning lots of new American expressions from him and woodcraft tricks I'm sure will stand him in good stead if he joins the Vietnamese Boy Scouts later on.


Anyhow, we've been spending the day on this wonderful nature hike. Your African violets would really take to this country.


The place looks like one big greenhouse, crammed with angel wing begonias, spider plants, ferns, mother-in-law's-tongues, all kinds of vines and ivies and flowers, most of which look as if they want to eat you. Seriously, though, it's very beautiful, if in bad need of a good pruning, and you'd enjoy the bird-watching and identifying all the kinds of spiders and lizards. We've heard monkeys too.


Though we haven't seen them, I know that's what they are because they sound just like the sound track of a Tarzan movie. There's supposed to be even bigger wildlife around, but so far none has crossed our path.

Fortunately, it's not too hot because this is the rainy season now. A little wet, but don't worry, I remembered my raincoat! Love to Daddy and all I wouldn't mention the amulet. She might not like me accepting jewelry from strange men, especially patients.


I wondered if the amulet would give me aura-enhanced nightmares. At least the glow from the greenery was fainter at night than during the day, probably because, with the whole sun-chlorophyll reaction, plants put out more energy during the daytime. That was good because all of that unaccustomed visual stimulus had given me a peculiar headache in the middle of my forehead.


Something rustled between the tree trunk and the ridge, where William was lying. At least good fortune had brought him to us, I thought, raising myself to my knees to peer over at him as if he were one of my night-shift patients. Something hard caught me across the throat and slammed my head back against the bank.


William's face loomed above me, his forearm pinning me by the throat to the bank. He wore a strange expression not of hatred or anger so much as concentration. Fortunately, the bank was crumbly and gave under my head, or I think he would have killed me right away. I kicked out and felt my boot scrape Ahn.


"Cut it out," I said, though it didn't sound like that when it came out.

"William, dammit, stop!"


Ahn flew into him, pounding him silently with bony little fists, dragging at his arm. William released me long enough to backhand the boy halfway down the rest of the ridge.


I couldn't wait to get my breath back, but gasped, "William, goddammit, what the fuck's the matter with you?"


He started to grab me again but I blocked him, rather feebly, with my own arms, and looked into his eyes again, trying to find out, before I died, what in the hell was going on. My arms were surrounded by a dingy mauve light that fused with his dull maroon glow and diluted it. He sat back on his haunches abruptly, overbalancing himself so that he tumbled*backward a pace or two. He threw out his hands and grabbed a branch, sat up, shook himself like a wet dog, and blinked.


Ahn scrambled around him up the hill and hid behind me, rubbing his stump tenderly and sniffling. But he hadn't uttered a single cry throughout.


William crawled back up the hill. I scuttled back and nearly knocked Ahn over, but William just said, " 'Bout time you got some sleep, girl.

I'll take watch."


"Oh, no thanks," I said, determined not to sleep a wink around him lest I inadvertently die before I wake.


"What you mean, 'no thanks'?" William asked. "Thass crazy. You gotta sleep." He said the last like a mother cajoling a youngster.


"I'm crazy?" I hissed. "You just tried to kill me."


He looked blank.


"Yeah," Ahn chimed in. "You numbah ten, GI. You get mamasan like this and He parodied choking himself and made a terrible face, then dropped his hands to his sides. "Hey, William, you some kinda VC?"


"Wait a minute, wait a minute. I did what? Is this child jiving me or what?"


"You tried to kill me, William," I said, and relaxed enough to try to figure it out, now that I was pretty sure he was himself again. "Maybe you were having a dream or something about being back at your unit again, do you think?"


"Yeah, yeah, could be. Hey, I'm real sorry-" He extended his fingers to my neck as if to stroke away the bruise I could feel rising. "I didn't mean-shit, I'm real sorry." His voice broke and I realized he was crying. He reached out a rather large paw and grasped Ahn's hand. "Sin loi, babysan."


Ahn gave him a measuring look that was older than he was, and nodded, dismissing the whole thing.


"It's okay, William," I said. "It's over."


But none of us slept, and as soon as it was light enough to move without falling over our own feet or tripping on one of the knots of roots and vines crisscrossing our path, we started walking again.


"Where are we going, William?" I asked.


"Hell if I know. I was just told, when you out in the bush, you keep movin'. So we movin'."


It was good enough for me. Only I wished I was sure we were moving toward a hot meal, a nice bunk, and lots of ugly wire and sandbags between us and other people's bullets.


Ahn clung to my hand all morning, but suddenly he slipped away, looking very excited, and peered intently along the side of the trail. I stopped and he took hold of the tail of my uniform shirt for balance and jabbed at something with his crutch stick. I thought it was a snake, but when Ahn shuddered backward I decided it might be even more dangerous.


"William?" I whispered. He was walking point. We were several yards behind him on the trail, though we were going as fast as we could and he as slow as he could.


"Yeah?"


"I think Ahn found a mine." I snatched Ahn back when he leaned forward to poke again, but he wriggled from my grasp and once more extended his crutch.


William rejoined us and caught the stick in mid-thrust, pulling it out of Ahn's grasp so that he fell back against me.


"You VC, kid? Try to blow us all up?"


"No VC," Ahn said. "Look," and he made eating motions, as if he were scoopin rice out of a bowl into his mouth.


I took about four hasty giant steps backward as William prodded the mound of earth this time. I could vaguely see little round shapes at the top. "What are they?" I whispered as William dug at the mound with a stick and flipped something loose that rolled to his feet. "They look like Sterno cans. Homemade bombs?"


"Don't seem like it, but almost as bad. Beans and muthahfuckers."


"Huh?"


"Beans an' hotdogs. See here? Some dudes, when they out in the field and they got C rats they hate, they just buries 'em. How you get along with lima beans?"


William had the Army equivalent of a church key in his pocket. A few hundred yards farther down the ridge we found a stream, shallowlooking and only about fourteen feet wide. We choked down the cold food straight from the can.


'$'Wisht I had my canteen cup and a little c-4," William said. "I could heat this shit."


"What's c-4?" I asked.


"You know, plastic explosive."


We filled the cans with water over and over till our arms ached from dipping and lifting. The morning had been hot and muggy and the water felt wonderful when it splashed me. William waded into the water. "You wanna get wet, lady? Come on ahead, then. We gotta cross this fucker anyway." He waded across without blowing ;mything up.


Ahn looked dubiously at the rushing waters of the stream. I stepped into the bone-chilling water and could see right away that he was going to have a problem. The force of it was enough to knock you off your feet. "Come on, Ahn. Hang on to me." I let Ahn hold on to my shoulder while I dipped down to my knees to get wet and cold all over. The night before, I'd thought I'd never be warm again, but now I couldn't believe how great it felt. Then we sloshed out. William, just a head of us, began ripping off his clothes.


I scarcely had time to wonder what in the hell he was up to when I saw for myself. An inch-long leech was fattening itself on my forearm. I dumped Ahn unceremoniously on the bank and started stripping too. So did he. I started batting at the bloodsuckers, trying to pull them Off.


"Don't do that," William said. "You'll break the head off in there and it make you sick. Break up a salt tablet, put on its back. It'll pull out. Cigarette works better, but mine are long gone."


Ahn, bare as the day he was born, bent over his clothes and pulled a rather soggy pack of Kools out of his pants pocket. He also produced a Zippo, with which he expertly lit the cigarette he gave me. William was already at work on his crop of bloodsuckers with the salt. For his own, Ahn just plucked them out. You aren't supposed to be able to do that, but he did, pinching them up near their heads. It worked, anyway. When we were done, we had a total body count of about forty-eight leeches.


I turned my back on the men while I did a search-and-destroy mission on the leeches in my lingerie. I am really not all that shy, but guys who are not your lovers can be more modest than somebody's grandma, on your behalf as well as theirs. It is often ridiculously difficult to get a male patient to accept a urinal from a female nurse. I waited until I had my fatigue blouse on again to turn back around. Sure enough, William was buttoning up as rapidly as he could. Ahn was sitting in the grass, smoking a Kool with the savoir faire of James Bond.


In a debonair manner, he offered a smoke to me, to William.


"No thanks, kid. I tryin' to quit," William said.


The only thing I hadn't taken off was the amulet, and now it had fallen outside my uniform blouse, flashing back the sun like a mirror. William sat down beside Ahn to pull on his boots. "Uh, Lieutenant?"


"Huh?"


'Bout last night. I still don't recollect much of what happened, but what I reckon's I just sort of went dinky dao from all this duckin' and hidin' shit. You know I don't mean no disrespect to women, and it't got nothin' to do with black or white. I wouldn't want you to am think I-to think-"


I knew what he meant, but then it was so soon after the time when blacks were beaten for using the wrong rest room or riding in the front of the bus, when civil rights workers were being murdered, that it was awfully hard to talk about racial stuff, especially between a man and a woman, especially an enlisted black man and a white woman officer, which is just sort of too parallel to the darky-plantation belle bullshit.

"William, let's not get into that shit, okay?" I said. "I am not nearly as worried about the possibility of having you after my ass as I am about the possibility of getting it shot off. I'm real glad we found each other because I don't know a damn thing about the jungle. But I gotta know: is there some real sure way to snap you out of your sleep, something maybe your mom used to wake you up when you were a little kid?

Because you almost killed both of us last night. I know you didn't mean to, but-"


He shook his head. "I never done nothin' like that in my life before. I never even had no nightmares before I come to this place. Used to sleep like a rock." He handed me the can opener. "Here. Maybe you can jab me with this if I go off again. Only be careful where you stick it, huh?"

As he handed it to me, his aura wavered a little into the brown and his eyes suddenly got wet. "Goddamn, I am just fucking up all over the damn place. First I just roll under the bed and don't warn the men and they all get blown to shit, then I try to kill you-I don't know what the fuck is happening to me."


Ahn tapped him on the arm and offered him a cigarette again.


"Thanks, kid." He lit it this time and took a long drag, then offered it to me.


I don't smoke, but I took a drag too. "Look, man, you don't have the corner on fucking up." The chopper crash flashed across my mind.


I pulled on my trousers and tucked the amulet inside my shirt. William watched me with more relaxed interest now.


"What's that you wearin'? Where's your dog tags?"


"In my pocket. They got to irritating my neck."


"Yeah, well, if I'se you, I'd get shed of that rank sewed onto your collar too. Officers is the first individuals Charlie try to grease."


I cut off the ends of my collar with my bandage scissors. "William, how long do you think those C rat cans had been there? Do you think that unit is still nearby somewhere?"


"Sure. I do. Them and a whole bunch of others. And a whole bunch of VC too. just depend on who we find first. You ain't talkin' to no trusty African guide, bwana. I didn't have much call to learn trackin'


in Cleveland. Damned if I know how old them cans was. You the woman.

You probably know more about canned goods than me."


"Not if I can help it," I said. I've never been the domestic type.


We walked just inside the edge of the jungle, down along the edge of a valley again that day. The valley was full of soft grass and little round fisliponds and the rain blew gently across it, sweeping toward us, carrying a heady, fresh scent that reminded me of spring on Lake of the Ozarks. The jungle smelled more like a cross between the zoo, the alley in back of the A&P the day they tossed out the produce, and the aggressively green, earthy smell of a hothouse. "Can't we walk down there?" I asked William. "It'd be easier walking, especially for Ahn."


"Easier to get blowed away, you mean. See, some of them things hit but they don't explode. Plus the VC likes to set booby traps round that kind of thing. No way, mamasan. This soldier stickin' to high ground."


When he spoke to me, mostly William seemed perfectly okay. He was one of the nicest people who ever tried to strangle me, in fact. But when he was walking point, not looking back, not staying in touch with what was going on with us, his spine would twitch and his head circled and dipped like a snake's, sniffing the wind, looking for signs. We started climbing again, up and up into really thickly interwoven jungle with trees growing out of other trees and vines so thickly twined together that we had to stop and climb over them or separate them to climb through. Ahn and I had a tough time keeping up. The boy's adrenaline was finally wearing off and his little face looked pinched again. He started whining. He wanted to be carried, regressing, the way sick kids do, to an earlier age, where people were supposed to take care of them.


"No can do, babysan. You break my back," I told him.


He screwed up his face as if he was going to cry. "No way. You carry me before."


"Yeah, and I may have to again, but only in an emergency. I'm afraid I'm not strong like your own mama, babysan. No can carry water buffalo on each shoulder and a water jug on my head."


He smiled a little and patted my butt. "No sweat, mamasan. Ahn take care of you."


"Right. We're a great team."


William swung around on us with a look of such truculence that I feared for a moment he'd lost it again. "You people em di," he said, and whirled back around to take a step. Ahn was staring a little ahead of William with his eyes almost as round as mine.


"Dung lai, William," he yelped. "Stop!"


"What the fu-" William began, then abruptly stepped back and knelt down, feeling along a line in front of him.


"What is it?" I asked.


He didn't answer for a moment or two as he traced the thing back into the trees, made some sort of adjustment, and let out a deep sigh.

"Thanks, kid. Mamasan, you better take a look at this."


"William, I wish you wouldn't call me mamasan," I complained as I clawed my way through the leaves and vines that kept smacking me in the face.

"Or Lieutenant for that matter. What's the good of me cutting off my bars if you go announcing it all over the place? My name's Kitty."


"Yes, ma'am, Lieutenant Kitty, ma'am," he said snottily. "Now the private wishes to request, Lieutenant Kitty, ma'am, that you kindly take a look at this here trip wire so's you be able to spot a booby trap next time you be seein' one."


"Don't be a pain in the ass," I grumbled, but I took a look. It was a nasty apparatus-a dead log with a lot of pungi sticks set at angles that would make a porcupine out of anyone who tripped its mechanism. The whittled bamboo sticks with the excrement on the tips were more chillingly malicious than a grenade would have been. I had already seen the infections and damage they could cause-a man could lose his limb or life as surely to this sort of trap as to high explosives or gunfire.


"Right there is how these people be lookin' out for themselves," he told me. There was no anger in his voice. In fact, it was becoming increasingly remote and flat. The old wine color crept back into his aura, along with a grieving umber, and I knew he was seeing himself impaled on that device, feeling that maybe he should have been.


We climbed for two more days, through knots of gnarled root and twisted undergrowth that surely was usually handled with machetes. We were constantly climbing, tripping, trying to thread our way through it like darning needles through finely meshed silk. I feared I was going to grab hold sometime of a fat snake instead of a fat vine, and the thought of that slowed me down even more as I doublechecked the aura of the growth in front of me to make sure the long things were uniformly plant-green. A little watery daylight filtered through from those towering top trees, splashing onto the broad flat leaves of the trees that grew to about half their height, and down through the undergrowth bristling above our heads, to sluice down the backs of our necks or splat into our faces. By that time the rain was no longer cool and refreshing but warm as sweat. As it evaporated, shivers ran down my spine without relieving the sensation of being slowly steamed.


Ahn started sneezing that afternoon, and his stump seeped pus and trickled smears of blood through the rough bandages I tried to keep over it. I was one big ache. My head throbbed from the constant glow of the jungle and my muscles burned. Every one of them, when asked to lift a body part over another clump of roots cannibalizing another giant log, felt as if heated lead slabs had been specially implanted in it. I had to think about how to position my fingers every time I grabbed another sticky, bug-infested vine, I was that exhausted.


In the dense forest we rarely saw the birds or monkeys. We heard them, like ghosts in old houses scuttling through the upper stories of the jungle, but they were almost always just out of sight, except for the flash of bright feathers or the suggestion of a tail. So much greenery lay above us that I saw animal auras only occasionally, like slightly bigger Christmas lights among the tiny glows of insects and reptiles.

Much of the time all I could see of William was a glimmer of his aura, a flicker of wine or blue bobbing like a will-o'-the-wisp in the sea of green surrounding us. Except for the help of the amulet, there were several times when we might have become separated because Ahn and I slowed more as the day wore on.


Toward evening the watery green light diffused even more, until you got the feeling of being deep under the sea, surrounded by seaweed, a feeling enhanced by being continually soaked and with the smell of wet greenery always in our nostrils.


Ground fog swirled up from the forest floor, and soon all I could see of Ahn was a grimy teal pool of light. William doubled back for us, his legs lost in the fog. He'd put on his fatigue shirt, but now and then he shook his shoulders like a dog having a bad dream and the goose bumps rose on my own arms. Ahn had a sneezing fit that wouldn't stop, and William glared at us and disappeared into the jungle again.


We couldn't even hear each other well because the sound of the rain blotted out everything but the shrillest cries from the creatures in the treetops. The beat of the rain thudded and splatted but was never regular, so that you couldn't get used to it or discount it. I was glad for it in some ways. It kept me from being hypnotized by the monotony of struggling through the shrubbery. Since I couldn't be sure I was following exactly in William's footsteps, I was constantly scanning the growth at shin level, looking for more booby traps. Once I nearly ran into trouble looking too low. I started to pass a tree vine, and a spadeshaped face surrounded by a tomato-red glow met me almost nose to nose. I fell backward so quickly I knocked Ahn into a fan-shaped fern.

The snake slithered away until the last flick of red was obscured by the jungle's green glow. Mom always claimed snakes were more afraid of people than vice versa, and I was glad she was right.


After the snake, I slowed down even more, which was a good thing. We were barely moving when, a short distance ahead, a claycolored triangular glow popped up from the ground and into the milky, roiling fog. It wavered for a moment and bent toward the ground, then with a scrabbling noise that sounded no louder than a mouse might make gradually elongated into an oval the size of a small person.


Ahn had to sneeze just then, and since he couldn't see what I saw, he made no effort to muffle the noise. The brown oval bobbed back and forth, searching for us, a metallic gray tingeing its edges, but the forest redirected sound. Although Ahn was standing right beside me, his sneeze could have come from anywhere. I bent low, clapping my hand over Ahn's mouth. He grew very still and we hunkered in silence, waiting.


The brownish aura floated a few paces away from us, and I heard bare feet on damp ground.


Then abruptly it doubled over and began coughing. I focused on the figure within the light and saw a small woman. She was pale, her skin wrinkled like a prune's, her hair caked with dirt, her pajamas black.

She wore bandoliers draped across her chest and a rifle slung over one shoulder. Her left arm was raised, the wrist daintily covering her mouth, a foot-long dagger held negligently in that hand. She coughed, and melted silently into the green at the side of the trail. Moments later, where she had been, William's wine-colored aura bobbed slowly in on the fog, looming over a far vaster patch than hers had. It stopped a short distance away on the other side of where she had been, and as it hovered there, it gradually changed, the wine separating into rays of red and black, spurting from him like blood from an arterial wound.


Suddenly a second glow rose up from the ground between us, within it a man not so well equipped as the woman. I froze with my hand over Ahn's mouth. I had no idea how much I was able to see because of the aura, how visible I was to them, how much of them William could see. But a third, fourth, fifth, and sixth person issued from the hole without seeming to see us, their auras blending with the mist. As a seventh rose up to follow them and carefully turned to plug the hole behind him, William struck, and the small figure crumpled over the hole. Silently William stripped the body. Relieving the dead Vietcong of a long knife, he slit the throat with the efficiency of the neighborhood meatcutter.

He took two more steps before he saw us.


The mist boiled up around him, curling in and out of a black and red radiance pumping from him. His face was hard and his eyes cold and resentful, but he raised one arm and motioned us forward. I hoisted Ahn onto my hip and stepped over the corpse. When we came even with William, he pointed into the mist beyond him, where he had already squashed some of the undergrowth.


I started, expecting that he was going to follow and keep the VC off our tail in case they were inclined to be there, but when I glanced back, the red and black stripes were overlaid with green as he cut into the forest in the direction the other Vietcong had taken.


Ahn clung tightly, silently, but I was making an incredible amount of noise trying to carry him and follow William's course through the foliage. I hoped if the VC heard us, they'd mistake my noise for their own. Or for William's, if they discovered him. God, I hoped they wouldn't. What if they caught him? I prayed to God that wouldn't happen. I wouldn't know what to do. I didn't have a weapon. I couldn't save him. How could I live with myself if I just let him get caught, tortured maybe? Maybe I wouldn't have to worry about it. If they caught him, they'd probably get us too.


If we got away this time, maybe we could try to find a village someplace, somewhere where it looked as if there was enough food. Maybe I could pay them to take Ahn in at least until I could find help. If he'd had two legs, he probably would have left me by then, I thought. A lot of Vietnamese kids adopted Americans, but when it looked as if the bases were going to get hit, the kids suddenly became history, along with a lot of other friendlies.


We stopped dead in front of a huge snarl of roots, impassable as the Great Wall of China. Unable to go forward, I sat on the ground and waited. Ahn continued to cling to me, and I thought he might be crying.

The wind shivered the grasses and smaller leafy plants, and the fern fronds swayed and danced, the bare trunks creaked, the leaves rattled like Halloween skeletons, while the rain beat its erratic patter and splash all around us, and on top of us. It had the advantage of keeping my own trembling limbs from shaking the shrubbery like a pair of Mexican maracas.


do we huddled there getting stiffer and stiffer, and I tried to distract myself by remembering what it was like to be dry. We were still erilously close to the VC tunnel entrance, which was what that hole had to be. I wondered if a second group would file out of the hole. Maybe I should have moved the dead VC. His body still emitted a faint mustard-colored glow, growing gradually darker, drifting on the wind, separating itself. The version of the Twenty-third Psalm that went

"Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I shall fear no evil, for I am the evilest son of a bitch in the whole damn valley," went through my head and I felt a rather savage rush of pride in William; then, watching the VC's feeble aura fade like an ember, I felt ashamed and said a generic, universalist prayer, including in the scope of my entreaties the elderly gent with the flowing beard and kindly eyes and the cosmic forces of the universe and my own idea of Buddha, of whom I could conjure up only the image of a statue.


We had had to kill the guy-I felt I'd killed him as much as William. Or would have, if I'd had a means. Anyway, his death no doubt saved my ass, let's put it that way. But it had been nothing personal, and I wasn't especially glad he was dead.


As I watched, the dead terrorist's aura grew clearer, ruddier, within the milkiness of the mist, like fire deep in an opal. The discoloration from hatred, grief, and fear was dissipating with death . . . sort of like in the werewolf movies where the ravening wolf, after being shot by the hero's silver bullet, slowly turns back into the innocent human being infected with lycanthropy.


I was glad William had been so thorough, because if he had left the VC

alive, I knew I'd feel honor-bound to try to patch the poor SOB up. As it was, I just wondered about the wisdom of leaving him draped across the tunnel entrance. Wouldn't that announce our presence? But if they didn't know how many of us there were, maybe that would make them abandon the tunnel.


Which shows you what an incurable optimist I am.


Ahn's face was next to my ear. "Mamasan, we didi now, huh?


"No can do," I mumbled back. "We wait for William."


"William dinky dao, mamasan, we didi."


Well, that was one vote in. Ahn, who had taken to William at first, was scared of him. And though I hated to admit it, I was, too. What kind of a nut would go unarmed after seven-well, six-VC?


That was movie stuff, not what your practical, I-want-to-go-home-alive grunt would customarily do. The only reason I could imagine him doing such a damn-fool thing was to get supplies and weapons. Personally, when it came to getting supplies that way, my overwhelming hunger became a niggling little sense of peckishness, but nothing I couldn't handle till I found a particularly tasty-looking rat.


And William's behavior had been so erratic-the coolness that I at first admired I now saw as what was referred to in psych training as a bland affect, which meant simply that his face was usually expressionIcss and he didn't show much feeling. Of course, that figured, considering the trauma of watching his friends killed and being left to make it by himself in the jungle. But the blandness alternated with swings into irritation and I didn't know enough to be able to tell which was more dangerous: the agitation or the numbness.


The mist blew clear across the trail. I scooted back into the deeper shade of the root canopy, dragging Ahn with me. Normally I would have thought of snakes, but I really didn't care at that point, because I was convinced I was not going to live much longer anyway. It was just a question of when and how-a bite from one of those little bamboo vipers called two-step snakes because their venom could kill you before you'd taken two steps might be the easy way out under these circumstances.


A curse blew toward us on the breeze. The voice was so muffled the curse could even have been a Vietnamese one, though I didn't think so.

What did it mean? Had they caught William and strangled off his last defiant words? I wished I could see what was happening-not as me, of course, but maybe as a bypassing lizard.


Ahn's small body shook silently and I thought how different he was from what he had been in the hospital, when he bawled so much the other patients were 'ready to throttle him. Maybe he'd been saving it up for then, when he thought it was safe, because now he knew without anyone telling him that weeping aloud could be fatal. I considered crying myself, but I was already losing too much water sweating.


The rain intensified, rattling the leaves, misting through the screen-of interlocking growth, driving through the occasional opening where collective drops plopped like fat slugs from overburdened meaty green leaves. The jungle floor, steaming with recondensing moisture, reminded me of a cannibal's boiling kettle, with us in the stew.


An overhanging branch dropped one slow drop at a time on the crown of my head, reminding me of a story I'd read about the Chinese water torture, a procedure that involved letting water drip one drop at a time on the same spot on a victim's skull until it eroded skin, bone, and sanity. I decided not to think about that. The ground fog once more formed an opaque veil obscuring the faint path between us and the body. I could still see the outlines of the plants and the body, because of the auras.

The fog hid Ahn and me from anyone else, however.


Ahn shivered again and emitted a small whimper. When I looked down, his eyes were closed. He'd fallen asleep. His skin felt hot against mine.

His rag of a bandage had come off completely and the wound was draining again. Damn. There was nothing I could do about that now.


The glow of the jungle shuddered and wilted to a shade ever so slightly brown moments before blood-red and pitch-black light strobed through like the lights on a police car, silently broadcasting death, hatred, fury, malice, and murder.


One of the VC, I thought. They'd caught William, he'd told them about us, and now they were circling back to get us. Before the malignant aura broke onto the trail, I pushed and prodded Ahn up over the root tangle and scrambled over after him. He whimpered once more, but as soon as I reached to cover his mouth he shut up, flipped over the top of the tangled root and decayed log, and cowered on the other side. I landed heavily beside him and lifted my face just far enough to reach a hole in the woven roots.


Like fire and char the aura burned in the clearing, then headed straight for where we had been. In the center of it, his face impassive except for eyes watchful as a jaguar's, and as impersonal, William stalked toward us, a machete in one hand, a .45 automatic in the other.


I was relieved to see him alive, but on the other hand he looked as if he was searching for us where he knew we ought to be, but did not look as if he was going to be happy to see us. He stepped across the corpse and began stalking up the trail, slashing at impediments. If we had been hiding in the jungle beside the trail we would have been spaghetti before we could say hello. I suppressed an urge to stand up and ask him what the hell he thought he was doing; didn't he know he could hurt somebody that way? I didn't because obviously he knew that very well.

And it looked as though he no longer cared.


This was a bit of a dilemma. William was a swell guy when he was in his right mind. Even though he could get killed as easily as Ahn and me, he was a man, larger than me and with all that reassuring extra upper-body strength. I felt protected by him. He had training and know -how and had already showed me a couple of things that might help keep me alive.

And now he had weapons with which he could protect us all, if he was so inclined. The trouble was, I was pretty sure, from the look of him and all that riot-squad energy shooting from him, that his inclination was to kill anything that moved, including us. Face it, William was nuts and I wasn't feeling so stable myself, which was why I sat back down, very slowly, and huddled with Ahn while William poked and prodded and eventually leaped over us, quite literally overlooking us. He stalked away, his aura blazing so intensely that he looked like a walking forest fire.


I watched until he was a mere flashlight beam in the greenery, then drew a deep breath. I tried to rise, but my knees wouldn't support me for a long time. When I put my hands out to brace myself on a log, they shook so hard it looked as if I were trying to play the bongos. Ahn pulled himself up beside me.


Ahn's aura was shallower than it had been, a washed-out sParrow brown with little veins of red. He looked as tired as I felt. "What we do now, mamasan?"


"We follow William," I told him. I didn't want to lose him entirely.

Not only did we need him, he might need us. I didn't really think I'd be able to trail him for too long, but maybe I could until he was in his right mind and the three of us could band together again.


"William beaucoup dinky dao, mamasan."


"No shit," I said. But we didn't seem to have a lot of other options.


We lost him in less than an hour. Not that we didn't know where he'd gone. We only had to follow the machete slashes to figure that one out.


But we couldn't keep up. Even with the support of his stick, Ahn fell often. Sometimes I carried him, but at others we both needed both hands to climb or brace ourselves for steep descents down muddy slides. We drank often from the rain pools on the leaves and stuck our tongues out at the rain, but it was a far cry from having a whole cool glass of water from mama's tap at home.


Soon the trail started heading mostly down, and when we finished sliding down muddy, root-riddled banks, the ground below was less overgrown, we stumbled less often, and none too soon we began treading on grass once more. The machete marks dwindled with the vines, and so did our ability to follow William.


Remembering what William had said about the other flatlands, I kept us in the trees. I kept thinking that soon the valley floor would turn into rice paddies.


The rain blew straight at us and I took my poncho from my ditty bag and tried to cover us both with it. I couldn't bear it in the heavy jungle.

It was too hot. Now, however, as a wind and rain break, it was inadequate. Clouds like gray scouring pads blew across the top of the valley, squirting squalls every few minutes. The bomb craters, already full, flooded and ran into one another. I felt dizzy and headachy, as I did when I was catching cold. I wanted my mother again. I wanted her to bring me aspirins and antihistamines and a vaporizer with Vicks and comic books and fresh orange juice. The fact that she hadn't done that since I was about ten made no difference. Sick adults regress too.


"Dear Mom," I mentally wrote while carrying Ahn down the valley, "Ahn and I took a walk today-well, mostly I walked. He got tired. William had some business to take care of, and when he returned he wasn't in a very good mood, so Ahn and I decided we'd give him time to cool off. I bet we'll find a rice paddy today. William wants to avoid people, but I think the paddies are a good sign. They're so normal and agricultural, like wheat fields. William doesn't want to visit a Vietnamese village, but then, he's a city boy. I feel that, after all, these people are rice farmers just as the people where we're from are wheat farmers, so what really is the difference? I'm getting Ahn to teach me to say, 'Hot enough for you?" and 'Nice day if it don't rain,' in Vietnamese."


Thinking about home probably wasn't the best thing in the world, because my mind began drifting. just because I didn't want to be in Nam, I started dreaming, with my eyes wide awake and my feet walking, that I wasn't. I imagined I was walking through the woods by my Aunt Janet's cornfield carrying my cousin Sandy, who was now about seventeen years old, though to my mind she was still as I had last seen her, younger than Ahn. It was like a mirage except that I didn't actually see anything that wasn't there, I just reinterpreted what I was seeing so that it seemed instead to be something I wanted to see. I have no idea how long or how far I walked thinking myself back in good old dull Kansas. It's a wonder I didn't mistake a booby trap for cow fence and kill us both.


Ahn pulled me back to Southeast Asia by suddenly rousing to point out what looked like a brilliant sunset. Indulging him, I stopped so we could admire the reds, oranges, and yellows of the sun, as I thought, reflected in the sky.


Around the next bend, I felt the heat, smelled the smoke, and watched tongues of fire lick at the sky as the field below us spouted flames.

Acres of plants were already consumed and blackened, and the fire now fed on earth and roots. I wondered what burned so hot and remembered napalm. But why napalm somebody's field?


I hated the feel of it even more than I hated stumbling through jungle, so I started climbing again, up away from the fire. Just before nightfall we found another stream cutting a ridge in half. We bathed again and drank and I gave Ahn two of my Midol for his fever, and allotted us two salt tablets apiece after saving one for my new crop of leeches. I tore the sleeve off my fatigue shirt and bound it around his stump with a piece of his old bandage. The stump didn't look as bad as I feared, but there was a nickel-size sore where the stitches had once been, and it was draining.


We climbed back up and over another ridge before nightfall, and bedded down between two rocks under a very large tree that gave us some protection from the rain. I dreamed my grandpa was pointing at the field and laughing, telling me about strip-and-burn agriculture, but he was saying something about how they did it with crop dusters these days.


When I woke the next morning, I felt the warmth of a small fire, smelled meat cooking, and heard it sizzling. William squatted, Vietnamese style, beside the fire.


"If I be Charlie, lady, you be dead," he said.


"I almost was anyway," I said, prying Ahn loose so I could stretch a little. William's aura still had a faint edge of black and maroon but was mostly blue, a little yellow, clear green. "You remember coming after us with a machete and a .45 by any chance?"


"Me? Nah, I go after VC. Got some too. One got away, the girlsan with the heavy artillery."


"That who you thought we were?" I asked. But he just looked puzzled, and hurt, and his colors started swirling around in a confused sort of way.


"Never mind," I said. "How did you find us?"


"Easy. You not exactly Sheena, Queen of the Jungle, woman. You see any of 'em?"


"Any of who?"


"Our boys. They around. Who you think called in that napalm on the taro field?"


"Is that what it was? I wondered. What's taro?"


"Good food. But ten to one some asshole thought it was weed. Or maybe they just wanna make sure Charlie don't eat no taro. I dunno."


"Wait a minute," I said. "If that was one of our planes that dropped napalm, then there must be some of our guys around-"


"You catch on quick, Sheena. I spotted a patrol of about six dudes just as I got to that taro field, but they was 'way far down the valley, and about the time I started into that field after them the planes come up and it was weenie roast time. I had to didi mau. But that patrol is maybe a day ahead of us."


"Of you, maybe," I said. "I'm surprised you could backtrack far enough to find us. You sure are one tough act to follow."


''Yeah. Well, I think we should find them dudes."


"If they're a day ahead of us, we'll never make it. Ahn's leg is going bad again."


"We all gonna go bad we don't get out of this shit pretty soon. Want some of this primo monkeysan here?"


I nodded and looked back toward Ahn. He was sweating in his sleep. "You could carry Ahn again. That would speed us up."


"It'd slow me down, though," he said thoughtfully. "That patrol's already got a day's lead on us."


We chewed monkey and thought it over. I was tempted. I wished I hadn't brought Ahn out here. And William was undoubtedly right. We'd lose our chance at rescue altogether if we slowed down for Ahn. On the other hand, if he was an American kid, we wouldn't even be discussing it. I decided not to discuss it anyway.


"Well," I said, "maybe it would be better if you left us here and went after them yourself. I don't think Ahn's going to get very far. His stump's infected."


"Lady, you don't seem to understand. We ain't in the world no more.

This be war, baby. I leave you here and when I come back, if you here, you probably be some kind of beaucoup messed-up fucked-over corpse."


"Okay, okay, I know, I know. Stop talking about it, okay? The whole idea makes me nervous. But frankly, buddy, I'm just about as nervous hanging out with you. That's twice you've nearly killed us."


"Will you stop sayin' that? I ain't harmed a fuckin' hair of your head-"


"It wasn't my hair I was worried about," I argued, ever as ready with witty repartee as I was when fighting with my kid brother.


"Nor nothin' else neither. Where you get this shit, girl? You ack like I crazy-truth is, you be the crazy one. What you tryin' to do? Set me up to get lynched for rubbin' up against your lily-white round-eye tail?"


"Watch the names, buster," I told him. "I'll make a deal with you, you don't call me round-eye tail and I don't call you nigger, okay?"


The red and black was growing in his aura again and I realized that I was no longer dealing just with William, my fellow refugee, but with an armed and angry man who currently killed people for a living and was having a lot of trouble telling which people were the ones he was supposed to kill and which ones were on his side.


He half rose, then sat down again, his eyes full of resentment and hostility and something else that fueled both-the grief that cloaked all the other colors in his aura, and the self-reproach that was growing in prominence. The colors were altering so quickly, shifting from one emotion to the other, that I was having trouble naming them, although I knew what they meant.


"What you watchin'?" he asked belligerently. But he stayed seated and his hands were open on his knees. "You look like you about to shit yourself. What's the matter? I look like some nigger mothahfuckin'

street gang rapist to you or what?"


"You got this all wrong, William," I said when I was able to detach myself from watching his aura. It had a hypnotizing effect that was soothing in a purely detached kind of way. But it was alarming how quickly his soft-spoken kindliness ran to anger. I was convinced it was misdirected when pointed at me, but I squirmed anyway. If I was not exactly a bigot, it was probably more from lack of opportunity than from actual ideals. There hadn't been any black kids in my classes until high school, though the neighborhoods near us had been integrating gradually-and with much paranoid grumbling and dire prediction from my relatives. I didn't mind talking to a black person, but the sexual stuff made me uncomfortable, all the more so because I knew that if I were the liberal person I thought I was, it shouldn't. But the real problem I was having was that even though William and I spoke the same language and were from the same country, I knew less about the problems and attitudes of the culture he came from than I did about the Vietnamese. Proximity to the soul brothers back at the enlisted barracks-hard-core groups who looked like the Army equivalent of street gangs and made nasty remarks as I passed-did not lead me to believe that I was going to be liked just because I was in favor of the civil rights marches on TV. But I was damned if I was going to be lost in the jungle with enemies all around and a sick kid and a crazy man and admit to being a bigot on top of it.


"Private Johnson to you," William Johnson snapped.


"You got this all wrong, Private Johnson," I began again. "You don't remind me of anything like a street gang."


"Nah?" he asked, sounding maybe a little disappointed.


"Nah," I said. "What you remind me of is this nice little old lady I took care of during my psych affiliation in training. She was just as pleasant and sweet as anything except that every once in a while she attacked clergymen and tried to castrate them. The rest of the time you couldn't meet a nicer person."


He didn't seem inclined to dignify my remarks with a response, so I speared a piece of monkey and turned around to give some to Ahn. He wasn't there.


"Babysan?"


"Ixave him alone, will you, he's probably gone to take a piss in the brush over there," William said in the tone of an irritable father criticizing how I raised the kid.


"What if he runs into a booby trap or a snake or-"


"What would you do about it if he did? Scream?"


It was my turn to ignore him. I scanned the brush and the surrounding hills and valleys. No Ahn. But on the other side of our ridge was a valley with rice paddies. Across the valley was another ridge, and about a quarter of the way up this a few houses. No people that I could see, but curls of smoke rose from a couple of places in the village.


"Hey, look, civilization!" I said.


He didn't even look up from swabbing out his canteen cup with a wet leaf.


"Did you hear me?" I asked, forgetting to keep my dukes up. "There's a village over there. People."


"Yeah, but what kind of people do they be is the question."


"It's a village," I said.


He nodded. "Yeah, but it ain't San Francisco."


"But it's worth checking out. They might have some food we could buy, or medical supplies, or a radio-"


"Or VC. You act like it some kinda shopping mall. Well, it ain't, no more than I'm a platoon, even with you and babysan. You don't just go waltzing into those villages alone. Ho Chi Minh could be the mayor for all you know."


"Yeah, sure, but it could also be where those guys who burned the field are heading, couldn't it?"


"Unh huh, and it could be they're just going to call in an air strike and waste the place too, just like they did that field. I wouldn't say that was a real healthy place to be, especially not for just you and me."


"Yes, but with Ahn along-I mean, he's a Vietnamese."


"If he's not from that village or don't have relatives there, that ain't gonna cut no ice with them. Lotsa strays runnin' around the countryside. People look after they own folks. Can't take care of every draggly-ass kid who wanders in."


"Maybe not but-" In the trees below I saw movement, and Ahn broke into the clearing by the paddies. "Jesus, there he is. He must have spotted the village and gotten the same idea I did." I started off after him, but William was on his feet and pulling me back before I had time to take so much as a step.


"You can't go down there. They puts mines and booby traps all along the paddies. Babysan probably gonna get the rest of his ass blown off. No need to make it two of you."


"I won't abandon him," I said. "And I'm sorry, but you are crazy and you do scare me." He curled his lips and wouldn't look at me, intent on polishing the weapon he had captured. "William, I know when you're going to flip out if I'm awake, but when I'm asleep I can't-"


"That's bullshit," he said in a low voice with so much force behind it I felt as if he'd slapped me. "You don't know no such thing."


"I do. Look." I pulled out the amulet and showed him. "This lets me see a light around a person that shows me what they're feeling-I can sort of read them. An old wise mana magician, kind of-who was one of my Vietnamese patients gave it to me."


He smacked at it. "What you tryin' to tell me, girl? That I should leave you go wanderin' off by yourself through the jungle 'cause you got some gook equivalent of a mood ring? You think I'm dinky dao!"


"Look if you don't believe me!" I took it off over my head and handed it to him. "Put it on. Go ahead. And tell me what you see. Go on. I dare you. I double-dare you." Jesus, I was regressing to thirdgrade fights with my brother again. But he slid the amulet over his rifle barrel and very gingerly slipped it over his head.


"Now look at me!" I said. "What do you see?"


see one crazy white chick thinks she's Sheena, fucking Queen of the jungle," he said, but his voice was a little more.reasonable as he stared.at me. He passed his hand over his face once in a weary gesture.

"Look, sister, you better cool down now. You so mad you glowin' a little red around the edges."


"Aha!" I said. "See what I told you! See what I told you. Here, gimme it back." I felt blinded without it, like one of the mythological Graeae deprived of her eye. He handed it back, shaking his head, and when I put it on I saw that his aura was back to being predominantly blue and yellow again. He was beginning to understand, in spite of himself.


"William, I have to go now. I have to go get Ahn. I'll be able to tell if those people will hurt me and I'll be careful. But even if you weren't-pardon me-crazy sometimes, I'd be no safer with you than I am alone. Nobody's safe in this shit. You know it better than I do, for Chrissakes. But I can't let a handicapped kid go running around in the jungle by himself, and the longer I sit here beefing with you, the harder it will be for me to find him before he reaches the village."


"I could hit you over the head and carry you or drag you," he threatened.


"That wouldn't make for very speedy progress, would it?" I said.


"Sheeit," he said. "You go on, then, dammit. But don't go cussin'

William Johnson when the VC are cutting' your womb open while you still alive. You think I crazy and you scared. Let me tell you somethin', lady. I have been real scared travelin' with you and that gook kid. My ass ain't been worth nothin' since I took up with you. Get the hell out of here if you so het up to do it. I'm gonna contact that squad I saw.

If I can get 'em to swing back by the village and there's enough left of you to put in a body bag, I'll see to it your mama gets it to bury." He turned around.


"William?"


"Unh huh."


"Did you maybe capture a smaller gun I could have just in case it does look like I'm going to be captured?"


He snorted and handed me the machete without a word and marched off. I looked after him for just a moment, feeling irrationally abandoned, but then I looked away and saw Ahn at the edge of the rice paddy, and a flurry of people in pajamas and conical hats running into the paddies toward him. I plunged down the hill and into the trees, expecting to feel the trip wire of a booby trap against my shin, or my foot step first into nothingness, then to be pierced by pungi sticks as I fell into a tiger pit. It must have been wishful thinking. I got to the paddy in one piece, in time to see that it was not Ahn who was causing the commotion among the villagers. -"IPen I first saw the snake I thought, What's that fireman's ose doing here? I thought it might be something the villagers used for irrigation. Ahn sat at the edge of the paddy, very still, and I wondered if he was having second thoughts about being with his people again. I thought he was scared of something that insubstantial. Then I saw the fire hose more clearly, noticed that it had a distinct aura pulsing from it, the dark red of old blood, anger, malice, and hunger brewed together.


The villagers swarmed across the paddy and then stood watching uncertainly. The snake reared up like a self-motivated Indian rope trick to about two and a half yards above the ground. That made it taller than any of them.


They were very small people, short and lean from hard work and hunger and intestinal parasites, and there wasn't an able-bodied man among them. Ancient men, ancient women, pregnant girls who looked too young to have periods, and tiny children stood with their hoes and knives and watched the snake. It watched them too, swaying, and I thought its aura flickered with satisfaction as it eyed an infant on its sister's hip.

The snake thought it was one badass motherfucker, and it swaggered toward the people as if they were so many mice.


For their part, they prudently backed up, considering, but looked at it mainly as if it was a curiosity. They chatted at one another, as if expecting one of their number to come up with an answer. The snake lay back as if it was about to strike, and the slimmest of the pregnant girls leaped out well beyond striking range and taunted it, flapping her arms and trying to draw attention away from the others. Meanwhile, a few of the others circled back toward the snake's tail.


The snake was a no-nonsense-type creature. It decided that if the damn-fool girl wanted to get eaten so badly, it would accommodate her.

It didn't so much strike as fling itself upon her. The others hacked at it as it flew past them, but it grabbed her in its coils and she cried out as it squeezed. Its jaws snapped onto her thigh and she abruptly stopped thrashing with her machete and collapsed within the coils. The other villagers tried to pull the coils loose, but the snake just squeezed more tightly. One of the babies, sensing the panic of its elders, bawled.


Ahn grabbed his stick and hobbled forward. I hadn't said any thing as I came up behind him, and he still didn't know I was there.


He grabbed the nearest old lady and held on with one hand and felt around the snake with the other until he found the tail, took it in his mouth, and bit. The snake stopped biting and the coils relaxed so that snake, girl, and Ahn all tumbled to the ground in a heap..


I couldn't just squat in the bushes and watch. There was already one corpse lying in the grass, near where the snake had risen. An old woman or an old man, I couldn't tell-just a mass of mottled skin and a Thank of long gray hair in the midst of a bundle of rags. The snake was trying to free its head to reach Ahn. The others were pulling on various parts of the snake while an old man and a girl of about eight tried to whack at the reptile's head without whacking the victim or Ahn in the process. Ahn continued to chow down on the snake's tail.


I knew that however frail these folks looked, they were quite strong from years of work that would have killed me. I knew that they were much quicker than I was, and that I would likely get myself snake-bit or hacked if I tried to help. I also knew that I weighed almost double what any one of them did, and that maybe dragging with all my weight behind it might help. And I had a hell of a big machete. I also didn't think I would be able to live with myself, for however long I was going to be able to live anyhow, if I just sat there and watched that goddamn snake kill people who had survived bombs and bullets for so many years.


I waded into the paddy, my boots shedding pounds of accumu lated mud into the watery muck beneath the rice shoots.


Ahn sneezed, releasing his hold on the tail, and it whipped away from the girl, sending Ahn flying. The snake's head reared up about six inches from the girl's body to watch the kid and lunge for the nearest spectator. It had to uncoil a length of itself from the girl to make the lunge, and when it did, I hit it with my machete, not even sure I was using the right end.


The snake's body was bigger around than my neck, bigger around than my thighs even, so at first I wasn't sure I had done any good. But the blade had bitten deeply into the body just behind the snake's head and the snake hissed, shaking a head the shape and size of a spade, blood spattering into its eyes, and over me and several surrounding feet. I straddled it and bent over double so I could bear down on the blade, which was hard to do. The snake's writhing knocked first one of my boots and then the other sliding in the mud of the paddy, but I held on.

I had to. The machete jerked in my hands, but I held it clenched in both fists. I heard a crack and knew one or more of the girl's bones were being crushed. She couldn't even scream with her breath cut off like that. The other villagers tried frantically to pull the coils from her. I leaned more heavily into my machete. There wasn't enough room between me and the girl for me to get good leverage on the snake's head.

Any moment now it would crush her to death and round on me.


"Push her away from me. Ahn, tell them push her away."


Ahn started yammering in Vietnamese and the other people began rolling the girl's shoulders and legs away from my back as if they unrolled people from snakes all the time. I dropped to my knees and used them like a vise against the snake, and it bucked like a rodeo brong beneath me. But from this vantage point I could put most of my weight onto the machete. If I let go and the snake's head snapped free, the war would be over for me.


I cringed inwardly every time the snake undulated, afraid the girl was being pulverized. I didn't dare look back to see, and that almost got me killed.


Ahn's tail biting, though I didn't know it at the time, had caused the snake to loosen its grip somewhat, and the people were able to roll the girl out of its grip. But as soon as she was free of the tail, the tail was also free of her, and the tip whipped up and around my shoulders, jerking me, machete, snake head, and all, backward.


As the coils started constricting around me, my grip on my machete started to loosen. I felt the people mass behind me, grabbing armfuls of slippery snake.


Then Ahn's head was beside mine, and his mouth grabbed an end section of tail and lightly chomped. The coils loosened and the villagers redoubled their efforts at straightening out the snake. That allowed me to keep hanging on to the machete and with it to bear the great head back to the ground.


"Got him," I gasped, and wanted to laugh in spite of everything, because anybody looking on would have seen that I was a little confused about who had whom. William was right. I did think I was Sheena, Queen of the Jungle, serpent slayer extraordinaire. But the truth was, I didn't exactly see a lot of other options. I was a big, strapping girl then and accustomed to wrestling three-hundred-pound ladies in body casts onto bedpans, having knockdown drag-outs with grown men with the DTs, and subduing hysterical three-year-olds while giving them injections.

The snake was bigger and more dangerous and more powerful than any of the situations I was used to, but not by all that much.


"Somebody chop off his fuckin' head, for Christsake!" I rasped. It was in English, no one should have been able to understand me, and Ahn's mouth was full of snake, but the old grandfather with the hoe hit the creature a blow on the noggin and the coils fell from me like a feather boa. I fell back against a pile of villagers and lay panting for a moment. The old man kept hacking, his aura as blood-red as the snake's had been, his face a calm, almost kindly mask.


I crawled over to the girl who had been bitten. Her aura was very dim, gray and muddy except for the part around where her leg had been bitten.


That was deep black and spreading.


The bite was larger than any snakebite I had ever seen-the snake's mouth was bigger than mine, and almost bigger than my entire head. The standard treatment for rattlesnake bites was going to be useless, I knew it, but nevertheless I grabbed a knife out of the nearest hand and sliced at the wounds. The girl took her breath in sharply and her hand shot toward me, a knife in her fist. I dropped my knife and caught her hand, barely keeping her from stabbing both me and herself. She was looking at me with what I would normally have interpreted as hatred, aura and all, but considering what she'd been through, I just figured she was a little unhinged, probably confusing me with her former assailant.


"Come on, you guys, hang on to her or I'm not going to be able to help her," I said, and shoved her wrist into the bony hands of the nearest grandmother. I must have made my point clear enough, because three children and another pregnant woman rushed to help restrain her hands.

Her eyes rolled in terror as she looked down at me and she moaned and squirmed under the blade. "Sssh, sssh, sssh," I told her, as I'd heard Vietnamese women shush their babies. I sat on her leg to keep it from wiggling, so I could do just a little incision instead of "I know this hurts, but I major surgery. have to try to get the poison out."


All around me the women were shushing her, hissing louder than the late snake. Hoping I didn't have any new cavities or canker sores I'd forgotten about, I bent over her leg and made like a vampire, sucking up mouthfuls of venom and blood and spitting it out again-sort of a reverse artificial respiration. It was a huge snake and there was a lot of venom. Even as I sucked I could see the blackness spreading through her pelvis, up her torso, toward her heart, down her knee.


I knew I was getting nowhere, and now the adrenaline was wearing off and I was feeling the effects of exhaustion, starvation, and exertion all at once. Helplessly I spread my hands along the perimeters of the spreading blackness of the venom, mumbling senselessly at it to stop, dammit. I was tired, muddy, and frustrated and about to lose this brave if somewhat screwy young girl in spite of everything. The venom on my tongue made it tingle, and I was starting to turn from her and try to wash my mouth out when I noticed that where the bright mauve of my aura touched the blackness, it gathered before my hands as if I were herding it. I stared at it stupidly, then ran my hands down her trunk, up her leg, and across her pelvis, as if I were sweeping the venom out of her system. Where I touched the black, it retreated before my palms, until it gathered at the wound and bubbled up out of it, like an artesian spring. When it was gone I kept staring at where it had been for a moment, then ran my hand across my tongue. A sheen of black appeared on my palm, and I wiped it off against the rice.


The girl lay still, panting, her eyes wide and her face still terrified.


"Ahn, tell her I think it's going to be all right," I said, my tongue so thick I had to repeat it. "Tell her I think the poison is gone."


I hoped I wasn't raising false hopes. I hoped I wasn't hallucinating.

My head seemed too heavy to lift as I looked up at the faces around me: the girl herself, as pretty as Xinhdy had been, except for a gold tooth in the front of her mouth; the old man who had hacked the snake, most of his teeth gone; the children, wide-eyed and looking halfscared, half-excited. Finally the old man picked up the snake's head and the children followed, trying to lift portions of the body. When I got to my feet, the man shifted his grip farther back and tried to hand me the head. I declined, and emptied my breakfast of stewed monkey into the rice paddy. I hate snakes. I can't stand to look at them, much less touch them.


One of the girls helped the injured woman to her feet, while Ahn leaned on his stick and supervised. I felt the wounded girl flinch as I put my arm around her waist to support her on her injured side, but ainong us we got her back to the village. No mines, no booby traps. Just mud and rice and a concertina-wire barrier.


Later, four of the girls took a mat back out to the field and dragged home the snake's first victim. I watched mutely as they laid the body out. She was not as old as I thought, just very gray. Her face was purpled from suffocation and her body had been crushed, her features so ugly with her death that I had to look away. The injured girl cried out and argued at length with one of the women who was attending the body, but was finally persuaded to lie back. Her aura radiated grieving, a gray as cold and empty as a midwinter sky.


As they cleaned the body and arranged the features back to a semblance of normalcy before laying a banyan leaf across the face, it seemed to me that the dead woman looked nearly like the live one. No wonder the girl had been so ready to kill the snake.


Ahn wasn't allowed in while they dressed the corpse, and the injured woman looked at me, still angrily, as if I were committing a terrible breach of manners, but the truth was I didn't have the strength to drag myself out of there. I fell asleep while they were finishing the preparation of the corpse.


I awoke some time later to the groans of the girl beside me. She was on the mat and I lay beside her on the dirt floor. I was so stiff I could scarcely move, and it flashed across my mind that perhaps the snake had done me more damage than I realized.


But the girl's groan gave way to a sudden, panicky scream. I sat up and automatically reached for her pulse and stared at my watch, counting.

Her stomach was rolling beneath the light cotton of her pajama top, and she clutched it with both hands.


This time she looked at me entreatinGIy, "Dau quadi," she breathed. "Dau quadi."


She was aborting, of course. It was actually inevitable. Even if the venom had never crossed the placental membrane, being squeezed in the coils of a giant snake was bound to be damaging to any growing fetus. I stretched out to the door of the hut and yelled, to whom it might concern, "La dai, la dai," and hoped the urgency in my voice would make up for the lack of explanation.


It was almost over before anyone else could reach her. Blood and water gushed from between her thighs, soaking her pajamas and the mat before I could turn away from the door again. As the first village woman ducked into the house, the fetus, a very small fetus, delivered. It was not well developed. It could almost have been any sort of a baby creature, poor pathetic little thing. It hadn't had a chance. The women brought cloths and we wiped her clean and I wrapped the fetus in one.


She grabbed my wrist. She wanted to see it. I shook my head at first and she persisted, so I showed it to her. It helps sometimes when you know what you're mourning.


She began to cry, then to wall, and one of the other women touched me on the shoulder and nodded that I should leave the hut. I rose ponderously to my feet, feeling like an out-of-shape water buffalo behind the small lithe figure ahead of me. We hadn't far to go-just to a hut a few yards away, which was blessedly empty except for Ahn, who was tucking into a bowl of rice. He looked up long enough to nod at me and went back to eating.


The woman showed me a mat with a roll of cloth at the head for a pillow.

I sat down gratefully and started to go to sleep, but she sat on her heels and reached for my bootlaces, as if she thought she was my maid or something.


"No, no," I said, and tried to wave her away. "Ahn, please tell this woman I don't need a maid, just some sleep. She should get some sleep herself or she could lose her baby too."


"I tell her, co, but she be mad-lose face."


I compromised by sitting back up again and helping her take my boots off. A little girl brought me a rice bowl and a bottle of hot Pepsi, which I opened with the church key William had given me. She took the bottle from me and poured the Pepsi into a bowl.


The little girl put her hands together and backed off, leaving the Pepsi beside me. I put my hands together and bowed at her too. I was going to receive a crash course in Vietnamese customs, I supposed. But tired as I was, I was elated. William had been wrong and I was right. These people seemed no more threatening than my patients. I hadn't walked into the clutches of the enemy, I thought, just into a strenuous one-woman medcap mission, with a side dish of indigenous prehistoric wildlife.


Ahn stirred and coughed in his sleep. I felt his forehead. He was burning again. The rice and the Pepsi were something I wouldn't have touched ordinarily, but I had to have something in my stomach if I was going to renew my strength. As the food took effect, my perception of his aura deepened. Blackness spread from the stump up his leg. I was sure that if I disturbed him to do so, I'd find a knot in his groin.

Well, now that I'd gotten the hang of the old faith healer bit by trying it out on a perfect stranger, the amulet's power was bound to work on Ahn too. I spread my fingers so that each touched the end of one of the threads of infection and concentrated on thinking of the veins as being clean and clear, with nothing but healthy blood flowing through them.

The black threads knotted near the stump and, with a little urging, drained out the end. While I was working, the little girl was on the ball. She brought me water in what looked suspiciously like the same sort of basin we used for patients at the 83rd. I supposed it was just another of the instances of the black market moving in mysterious ways.


I went through the bowing routine again and smiled at her. The poor kid had fought that snake just as hard as I had and she must be just as tired. I unwrapped Ahn's stump and he woke up, hissing. My old fatigue shirt sleeve was thoroughly be-nastied.


I turned back to the little girl, who was sitting on her heels watching with the expression of a nursing instructor checking to see if I was doing everything right. Disinfectant was too much to hope for, but I made motions of pouring some over Ahn's wound and bandaging it up again.

My other fatigue shirt sleeve was grimy and slimy from the snake fight.


She dipped out of the house, and a few minutes later, an elderly man dipped back in and sat down on his heels. He was holding a bottle' from which he took a swig before handing it to me. It was Jim Beam. He passed it over, indicating that I should take a swig. I only pretended to, because the last thing I needed was a drink that would knock me on my can, and wiped off the bottle mouth before pouring a good inch of the stuff over Ahn's stump. He winced and hissed and started to cry.


The old man winced and hissed and started to cry when I poured his booze over Ahn's stump. I handed it back to him and made the steepled-hands bow again. I couldn't remember how to say thank you in Vietnamese.


He nodded wisely and looked me up and down in the manner of dirty old men everywhere. "Mamasan beaucoup," he said. He sounded a little awestricken.


"No," I said, grinning and shaking my head. "No, papasan tete."


Which was perfectly true, of course. Walking along beside me on the way back to the village, he stood only as high as my bust line, which might have been what led to the personal remarks. He laughed and shook his head at my incomparable wit and he and the Jim Beam disappeared.


The little girl was gone a long time and I began to think that bandages were too much to hope for. People probably didn't have any spare clothing that was in better shape than mine, which was pretty sad. I used the rest of the basin of water to rinse the mud off myself and tossed the thick residue into the ditch surrounding the house. A regular moat. Well, I'd already met the monster.


The old man was out in front of the house, admiring the snake again. He had technically killed the thing, though he'd never have made it without the rest of the village, Ahn, and me. But he walked around it and nodded to himself. I thought he was preening until I paid attention to his aura. It was the gray I was coming to associate with grief. I left Ahn for a moment and stepped across the ditch.


"Some snake, eh, papasan?" I asked, nodding to our kill, which still made my vertebrae stand at attention.


"Yes, numbah one snake," he said sadly, pronouncing snake uncertainly, a new English word.


"I've never seen one that big," I said inanely. He continued staring down at the snake as if I hadn't spoken. "Beaucoup snake," I said and spread my arms and rolled my eyes for emphasis. "Are there more like that around?" I asked, and indicated our snake, plus another beside it and another.


The old man shook his bead sadly. "Snake fini," he said and repeated my gesture to indicate that he meant all the snakes were gone, then threw his arms up like a child imitating a bomb, making the appropriate explosive noises. It should have been funny, but the grieving gray and sparks of red in the aura belied his smile, and the whole demonstration was as grotesque as if he had plucked out his eye and asked me to laugh at him.


I looked down and nodded. Bombs might make you nostalgic for the comparative harmlessness of enormous snakes at that. He picked up a stick and drew a few deft lines in the mud and a hungry crocodile slithered within them, mouth open and tall lashing. The old man threw his arms in the air, miming the bomb again, and tapped the picture of the crocodile. "Fini."


As the mud oozed back together and the crocodile sank into the mire, he flourished his stick again and eels, otters, huge fish, and a hungry tiger populated the mud. "Fine," the old man said each time, his voice grimmer with the vanishing of each species. The tiger had figured in our word games on the ward, however, and I thought I might use it to change the topic to a lighter one.


"Mao bey?" I asked, pointing at the picture.


He looked at me as if I'd done something astonishing and now his smile deepened and some of the gray sank back into him in the same way his pictures sank into the mud. He nodded enthusiastically. An educable American. How astonishing.


I drew a picture of a house cat. "Mao?"


He nodded. I was on safe ground. Maos had come up frequently in the word games Xinhdy, Mai, Ahn, and I had played.


I said, "In English, Mao same-same cat same-same Kitty samesame me," and pointed to myself.


He thought that was pretty funny and catcalled at me.


The little girl ran toward us, her black hair flying like a scarf behind her. In her hot little hand was a roll of gauze bandage, still in its white wrapper with the red cross in the blue circle.


"Co, co, see, see!" she cried. She was such a gorgeous child, like a doll with that Kewpie mouth and little pointed chin and that shining hair.


"Co Mao, Co Mao," the old man said.


It was no good trying to get him to go ahead and say my name untranslated. I ducked back inside the house to bandage Ahn's leg. He was sitting up now, and supervised while I wrapped his stump. The little girl again watched as if her life depended on it. I smiled at her when I was done.


"Ahn, we should introduce ourselves."


He looked dubious but said his name and a string of words after, looking as if he had just been elected to the dubiously honorable office of President of South Vietnam.


The little girl pointed to herself and said, "Hoa," and bowed to me and said, "Co Mao."


Ahn shook his head furiously. "MamasaniKitty, chu-" I shook my head at him before he could say "chung wi." These people didn't need to know me by my rank any more than hmerican civilians did.


"Ahn, I have Vietnamese name here. I like Mao."


"Okay, okay," he said, as if I were very upset about it, and looked at Hoa as if to say, Americans, who can tell what they're going to want next?


She nodded gravely, as if, because of his advanced age, his position and wisdom were unquestionable.


I wanted to rest a little longer, but thought I should first check on my other patient. She seemed to be asleep as I poked my head in the doorway, but as soon as I set foot in the room she jerked awake and glowered at me. Ignoring the glower, I knelt beside her.


Her aura was mostly a muddy jumble of anger, grief, fear, and pain, but the basis of it was an appealing brilliant aqua and clear yellow, with tendrils of spring green and a bloom of pink. The brighter colors were smothered beneath the layer of muddy ones, like the rainbow in an old slick. She looked at me with a rebellious hatred that struck me as totally unfair, considering I'd helped save her life twice.


"Okay, be that way," I said aloud. She looked healthy enough now, her aura bright and strong despite all the muddiness surrounding it. This village had managed its oh. problems before I came along and I wasn t about to intrude on the privacy of a woman who obviously didn't want me there.


I was turning to leave when the woman who had brought me to the hut stepped into the doorway. Ahn squeezed in beside her. She seemed chagrined and bowed two or three times. I reciprocated. She started speaking rapidly to Ahn, gesturing toward the woman on the bed with lifts of her chin, watching me anxiously. Clearly, she had expected the girl to be rude and was apologizing for it.


"What did she say, Ahn?" I asked.


"This one name Tran Thi Truong, very please to meet you," Ahn 'd, inclining his head to the woman beside him. "Truong say that one sal I I Dinh Thi Hue."


Dinh Thi Hue interrupted suddenly, with a spate of imperious questions, her words sounding harsh and accusing.


"Well, what did she say?"


"She want to know where are other American soldiers."


I started to say there weren't any more and then thought maybe that wasn't such a good idea.


"What's it to her?" I asked Ahn.


Truong pulled us outdoors and started talking again, in low, emphatic tones, her eyes full of apology, but also some anger.


Ahn looked wise and said, "Last time Americans here they boomboom Dinh Thi Hue." He made a graphic gesture with a circle of the forefinger and thumb and the forefinger of his other hand as casually as an American eight-year-old might wave hi. "Make babysan. She no like American soldiers."


No wonder. I turned back to her with more sympathy, which I had no idea how to express. I murmured, "Sin loi, Dinh Thi Hue."


Ahn was defensive on my behalf, however, and hobbled over to Hue's bedside and regaled the girl for several minutes, nodding at me, slapping the thigh above his stump with a gesture that said it was now sound as a dollar owing to my expert intervention, and clearly told her I was a GI of a different kind than she had known before. I hoped he wasn't telling her I was the only one of my kind.


She let out a long sigh and lay back against the pillow, her face sweaty and her hair still matted with mud and blood. Her face seemed familiar to me, but I thought that was because she reminded me of one of the patients. She had a banty toughness about her that reminded me of Cammy Dover, a four-foot-eleven biker I'd met at a folk club in Denver.


Ahn picked up her hand and la daied me over to her, and put our hands together. She didn't look into my eyes but inclined her head a bare half inch and muttered something in English.


"She say, 'Thank you, Mao,' for helping her when big snake have her. She say thank you to Ahn also, because Ahn hite big snake, make him let her go. She say Ahn and Mao numbah one team and she love us too much."


I laughed and patted his shoulder. "I say Ahn numbah one bullshitter and full of wishful thinking, but thanks for trying."


"Com bic? What means 'wishful thinking'?" he asked.


But about then Hoa came to the door and gestured urgently to Ahn to la dai. He turned away from the peace conference and hobbled toward the door, negotiating the ditch with more agility than I would have thought possible. I wished we'd been able to save his crutch during the crash.


The little girl appeared in the doorway again and this time la daied me.

Truong frowned at her, but the child didn't notice.


Dinh Thi Hue watched all of this through slitted eyes, as if taking notes.


"It's been great having such a warm friendly chat with you," I said,

"but I gotta go now. Kids. You know how it is. Probably want me to car-pool them to the Little Ixague game or take them to the Dairy Queen."


She blinked, mildly puzzled. Her aura looked a little less muddied now.

I thought I would be able to tell from it if she was losing blood. It would be dimmer surely. The way she felt about Americans, I didn't want to invade her privacy to check under the Army blanket someone had laid across her. Truong bent over her, murmuring something.


The rain started again, a thin gray drizzle. It made a pewter backdrop for the wet brilliance of the jungle.


As soon as I was outside, Hoa took off at a run, leaving me standing beside Ahn.


In a few minutes, Hoa returned, her pace slow and solemn this time, her arms cradling something that turned out to be a puppy.


"This Hoe's friend, very fierce tete guard dog, Bao Phu," Ahn told me.

"Protecting Hoa, Bao Phu is hurt. Hoa want Mao to make better."


Wow. Snake charming, faith healing, and veterinary medicine all in one day. Ought to look great on my r'esumd.


he funeral procession for the old woman was a slow, thin line Tof people bareheaded and barefoot, people in conical hats and B. F. Goodrich sandals, people in what seemed like patched Sunday best, trudging, sometimes slipping, up the muddy incline, carrying smoking incense that refused to stay lit and stubs of guttering candle protected by open palms or a leaf shield. Children blew noisemakers and pounded on things-a shell casing, the basin I'd used to clean Ahn's wound. The noise, I've learned since, was meant to frighten away demons. I got the feeling from the auras of those around me that having a funeral so late in the day was irregular-that there might be more demons out than usual.

Hue limped, with Truong anxiously offering support and mostly being spurned. Both women wore white with bits of gilt paper and red cloth attached to their hair and clothing. Hue, who should have been in bed after her miscarriage, walked with the help of two friends. She walked hunched over and I guessed that was because the snake must have broken some of her ribs. Ahn and I joined the procession, and he leaned on the old man, Huang, for support and knocked another stick against his makeshift crutch to make noise. I caught up with them and it was all I could do to keep pace with an old man and a crippled boy. I was that exhausted, and the path was very slippery.


Ahn looked up at me with the lugubrious expression of an amatellr undertaker doing his best to look depressed about an improvement in business. He wasn't pleased about the old woman's death, I knew, but with the practicality of the poor and dependent, he knew she was dead and he was alive. The cause of her death was also a chance for him to fit in, get himself adopted and become one of the villagers. He didn't want to dissociate himself from me, exactly. My world had been his home for some time. Together we had done something that earned him a place in this world. But although he was a child, he could not afford to be an innocent. He was hedging his bets for his own survival. His faith in my omnipotence was not what it once had been. Which was in line with my assessment of the situation. I patted his shoulder and trudged beside him.


I didn't understand many things about that funeral, but the need for the incense was obvious, and not just for symbolic or religious reasons. The body already stank-the crushing from the snake would have ruptured the organs and hastened the decomposition. It was carried on a board and draped with a red cloth, jungle flowers scattered on top of it.

Fortunately, the pallbearers walked very slowly and were as sure-footed as mountain goats. There had apparently been no time to build a coffin.


Everyone made lots of noise chanting and weeping, but since I was brought up to think that funerals were hushed affairs where it was almost bad taste for the bereaved to weep in public, I kept still.

Mostly I attended out of curiosity, and, of course, to pay my respects to the family. My own family believed that even if you didn't know or hated the deceased, if you knew someone in the family you turned up at the funeral to show your concern for them. But it was awkward. I not only didn't know the deceased, I didn't know the family, really. And I didn't know anything about Vietnamese funeral rites except that they had them rather often.


This was apparent from the number of stone-covered graves on the breast of the hill. There were probably a hundred times as many graves-just the newer ones-as there were villagers. Many bore small shrines of red-painted wood, rain-sodden paper, and framed photographs, or other objects. We wound our way through them to what seemed to be the old lady's ancestral burial plot where the fresh hole, already filling with water, waited to receive her. The pallbearers were excruciatingly gentle as they lowered her, but the body still splashed a little when it hit, and the red cloth began darkening where the edges sucked in the water.


The people with incense wove tendrils of smoke in graceful arcs around the body and laid things beside it: a rice bowl and chopsticks, a cracked cooking pot, and a book with a French title. Old men in black pajama bottoms, dirty white tops, and coolie hats chanted prayers.

Children in shorts and shirts, some of the younger ones wearing shirts with no pants, kept beating on their pans and artillery shells, crying and wailing ceremoniously, and looking up at their elders to make sure they were performing their roles properly. Their auras were bright as tropical birds against the gray sky, the silver rain, and the collectively dull aura of the adults. Huang lit a stick of incense and after what sounded like a sentence or two would circle the incense over the body. A young pregnant woman tossed flowers, one at a time, on the cloth-covered corpse.


At the proper time, when the old lady had apparently been given the respect due her by her own rites, Hue came forth carrying a small bundle, the remains of her baby, wrapped in a scrap of silk. Her friends helped her kneel. Her breath came in quick gasps. Her face was ravaged with pain and anger, and wet with sweat, rain, and tears as she leaned far into the grave and laid the bundled infant beside its grandmother. Hue's friends helped her to her feet again.


I waited for the people to start shoveling the dirt back into the grave, but after what seemed a time of communal prayer, Huang, Truong, and a couple of the others I recognized from the snake killing started talking among themselves, then broke off and looked expectantly at me. Ahn said something to them that sounded questioning, received a short answer, and turned back to me. "Mamasan, people want to know: what Americans do when bury dead?"


I was so tired I felt momentarily annoyed by the question. What did they think we did?Obviously, we dug a hole and buried people, or cremated them, same-same Vietnamese. But Truong, Huang, Hoa, and the rest of the village obviously wanted an answer, so I said, "Well, it depends on your religion, or the uh-loved one's-religion, but generally we say prayers, bring flowers, and sing a hymn."


Ahn relayed this information. They held another discussion, then Huang said something to Ahn that sounded like an order.


"Papasan say, you sing for Ba Dinh," Ahn told me.


I started to protest but caught papasan's eye. He nodded once sharply, his aura rigidly contained in a red-violet binding of pride, the pride of face. He and the others were trying to do me an honor by including me in the service. If I declined, he would lose face. The only problem was, I never learned hymns. They were usually pitched too high for me.

I stared into the grave. The barest glimmer of aqua leaked around the saturated scarlet cloth, and from the baby's a tinge of blue. I remembered reading on the back of an album cover once that in New Orleans, the slaves used to have parades and parties for the dead because they believed that it was a sad thing to be born into the world, a happy one to escape it. That was why "When the Saints Go Marching In"

didn't sound like a funeral song. I sang the chorus and the only verse I could remember as well as I could by myself, resisting the urge to ask everyone to sing along. I doubted Ba Dinh had been a saint, but her next life, next world, whatever, could hardly be any tougher than the one she'd just left. And the snake had probably spared the baby a sad life as an unwanted Amerasian child of rape.


I sneezed twice during the song, but other people sneezed and coughed and blew their noses too. Hoa threw a last garland of jungle flowers on the grave and we all half walked, half slid down the muddy path, away from the all too populated cemetery, back down to the funeral feast.


I was given a pair of freshly carved bamboo chopsticks and a white bowl that must have been somebody's treasure. Everyone else ate out of earthenware rice bowls. The dinner was buffet style. We filed up to the cookpot, and the attendant on duty-everyone took turns-filled our bowls with snake stew and stirred while the rest of us huddled in doorways, under the nearest trees, and talked. Or rather, they talked.

Nobody seemed to notice the rain soaking our clothing and running in rivulets off our faces to join the mud that caked sandals and bare feet.

The fire looked more eerie than cheery and I kept thinking of the witches in Macbeth. The sky grew black very quickly, and the fire and an occasional oil lamp or candle were the only illumination in the village.


I choked down the snake stew. Protein wasn't to be scorned, no matter what it was, and cooked snake was better than raw rat. Besides, it was only fair that we ate the snake. It would have eaten us. Ahn scarfed down bowl after bowl. Finally there was plenty of something hot besides rice to fill our bellies with after all these days.


The heat of the food made my nose and eyes run and every once in a while I had to wipe them on my remaining sleeve. I was shivering then and sneezing as often as Ahn.


To the east, what looked like sheet lightning lit the sky, bright yellow for a few seconds, then died. Other light, streaks of it this time, followed.,Slapping feet retreated from the funeral gathering, toward the jungle. Everyone's aura darkened with apprehension. The rolling thunder of mortars crumped, almost gently, in the distance. The sound gave me an odd sense of security. Then, almost as muted, the

"ba-dada-da-da-da-da," wait a beat, "ba da dada da" of automatic weapon fire repeated many times, solo and en ensemble.


Most of the villagers looked quite calm, very much as we did back at the 83rd, as though we were watching a fireworks display. But the sludge of fear oozed out around their individual auras until it lay like smog enveloping all of us. I found myself growing more afraid. Here were no bunkers, just a few flimsy houses, nowhere to go for decent cover.

Suppose my countrymen didn't come through on a search-anddestroy mission but simply opened fire? Suppose the village was suddenly declared a free-fire zone? Suppose some pilot decided to empty his old spare bombs on us on his way back to base? And they didn't even know I was there, I whined to myself, it wasn't fair. They might ill me, and I was American.


Old Huang was carving on a stick, with the children around him. Truong and Hue weren't in sight. I thought maybe I should go see Hue; maybe if I paid my respects, told her I was sorry about her mother, we might be a little friendlier. Her hostility perplexed me. I hadn't done anything to her-just because her rapists had been American men didn't give her reason to hate an American woman.


Hue knelt amid a cloud of incense in front of a small shrine with photos of different people, a few flowers, what looked like a military decoration, a bit of embroidery, and a little piece of wood carved in the shape of an elephant.


I stood quietly in the doorway and waited for her to finish her devotions. The pictures were of men, two of them, and, recently added, one of her mother. A little covered bowl like a sugar bowl was there too. With the incense rose a gray-umber shade of mourning, and like the scent it filled the little hut, scumming the cooking pots, tainting the rice, staining the bedding and the mats.


The longer Hue knelt, the more the mourning color, and the smoke, rose, filled the room, and crept through the corners and cracks of the house to dissolve in the rain.


Her own aura, the bright colors, grew slowly stronger, clearer, until at last she rose. I was going to announce myself in a soft voice, but instead I sneezed.


Hue started and whirled around. A spasm of guilt passed through me for interrupting her, but her mouth twitched very slightly, more acceptance than annoyance. She was still dressed in her funeral clothing, white pajamas, with streaks of mud at the knees where she had fallen on the way up the hill. Her black hair was combed and shining now, the blood, mud, and sweat washed away by the rain.


I made the little hand-steepling bow. Looking troubled, she returned it, nodding over her own hands.


"I-I just came to see how your leg was." I nodded toward the damaged thigh. Her aura was still less strong there, with flecks of black reappearing. Tissue damage, I thought. The venom was gone, but its toxins would have caused some tissue necrosis, a source of infection, possibly gangrene.


She looked down at her leg, her eyes clouding with confusion. Her aura clouded and swirled again, fogging over with shock. Well, who wouldn't be in shock? She'd almost been killed, sustained a terrible injury, and lost her mother and her baby all in the same day.


I nodded toward her shrine and said as gently as I could, "Sin loi," and she steepled her hands and bowed her head again. I wasn'tn sure the

"I'm sorry" I knew was the proper one to use, but she seemed to accept it in the spirit offered.


The light of the oil lamp glinted off her dark eyes.


I wanted to do something, to say something, that would let her know that I understood at least partially, that I sympathized. I dug into my pockets and found the crumpled package containing the last three peanut M&M's. It seemed as silly as the time I'd put my costume jewelry earrings in the collection plate at church because in a movie I'd seen a deposed duchess give the church her diamond ones since God had kept her husband alive. But I couldn't think of any other way to tell her.


"In my country, when someone dies, people bring food to the family.

Please accept this candy as a symbol of my respect for your mother and for your grief," I said formally.


She looked down at the crumpled package and I expected her to open her hand and let it fall.


Instead, she slit the package as delicately as if it were an elaborately wrapped gift, extracted the three M&M's, an orange, a green, and a yellow, and set them in a triangle on her mother's shrine.


Then she dipped her head over her hands again and turned away from me, confusion whirling around her in a Joseph's coat of clashing emotions. I had to leave it at that, having done the best I could to make friends.


Outside, the wind had risen, carrying with it the acrid scent of smoke, drifting on the ozone freshness of the storm, overpowering the heavy blossom-from-decay fragrance of the jungle, the faint stench of the sewage trenches, and the mingling of incense and snake stew. It was hard to tell now what was war and what was storm. The rumbling and the flashing in the eastern sky could have been either. Rain splatted across the thatches on roofs, dinged on tiles, plopped into mud, and rattled the leaves, creating an ungodly din. The tops of the trees bobbed from side to side, bowing like an obsequious butler in some old movie. The palm-type trees bent easily, giving under the storm until they arched to the ground. The little ditches outside the houses were rapidly becoming substantial moats. Earthenware jars and plastic jerricans were set out to catch rain. People scuttled about like land crabs, spring-green anticipation mingling with the fear I'd seen earlier.


At home during such a storm the dogs would be barking, the cows stupidly heading for trees under which to get struck by lightning, and the cats curled up watching the windows, congratulating themselves on having the sense not to be outdoors. I wondered suddenly where the animals were here. With the notable exception of the snake and Hoe's puppy, I hadn't seen any animals, not so much as a chicken, much less a water buffalo.

Where could they all be? I was never a genius in 4-H, but I knew enough about farming to know that not everything went to market all at once.


My GI patients told me that sometimes, to add to a body count or avoid shooting people, they shot animals, but that was mostly when they were on search-and-destroy-type operations. This village did not look as if it had been searched or destroyed. There were no burned marks on the earth, though I supposed the fast-growing greenery would have covered them up fairly quickly; it seemed that if the ammals had been destroyed long enough ago for traces of other damage to be erased, the villagers would have managed to replace at least a few of the beasts.


My feet, legs, and hips ached from slogging around in the mud.

Everything else was stiffening up too. Snake wrestling used muscles that I had somehow missed noticing in anatomy class.


I popped a couple of Midols without water, since I had no idea what was safe water and what wasn't, and didn't feel like going through the charades it would take to ask anybody, and lay back on the mat.


Sometime in the middle of the night a rocket whistled overhead and woke me. Ahn was not on the next mat, and our hostess, Truong, was missing too. White, orange, and red flashes popped up before my eyes as I glanced toward the door. The war was getting closer. Well, if it was going to kill me, I preferred that it land on top of me. I was too worn out to be curious about the whereabouts of anybody else. I rolled over on my stomach and pillowed my head on my arms, my eyes in the crook of my elbow so the lights wouldn't wake me, and slept again.


woke up when they laid a bleeding man next to me. He miscreamed when they dropped him, and that's actually what woke me. I rolled over, looked at him, and looked up at Truong, who was heading back out the door. "What the . . . ?" I mumbled. She gave me an apologetic glance but continued on her way. In another moment an old woman with a rag tourniquet around her upper arm and a bleeding stump where her lower arm should be was dragged in beside him, followed by another young man with several bloody holcs in him.


That was all they seemed able to fit for the time being, so I got up on all fours to see what I could do, since I seemed to be in charge of triage and emergency room here.


Waking exhausted from nightmares to a strange room filling with mangled bodies, I had trouble focusing. What was I expected to do with these people? There was no soap, no clean water, not even an emesis basin; certainly no pain medication, no way to do surgery even if I knew what to do. Maybe this wasn't the emergency room after all.


Maybe it was the morgue.


The glow of the corpses had been brighter than the auras of these people, but the man next to me began to moan and call out what sounded like a name. A pitiful little strip of rose beamed amid the rest of his aura, which looked less like a spirit's glow and more like a personal fog.


I pulled my bandage scissors from my ditty bag and cut off his shirt, though I already knew where his wound must be because the abdominal area was so bloody. He was partially eviscerated, his intes tines perforated, mashed together, worms crawling in and out of them.

Now I needed the emesis basin. Had there been a surgeon, he might have been one of the mid-level patients for triage-the ones who are salvageable but take a little longer. Without a surgeon and proper equipment, he was a dead man. I crawled over him to reach the old lady.


She sat rocking back and forth, holding her stump and moaning, "Oi, oi, oi, oi," over and over. Her wound was not as bad as the man's, though the blood loss and shock were a bit of a problem. Here there was no poison to herd out, no infection to rinse from her system. I was thinking that before I could start experimenting with the amulet, I really needed to get some clean bandages. That was when Hoa showed up with her shirttail full of gauze. Behind her came the girl who had had her little sister on her hip earlier that day. She was carrying the basin, the one that had last seen duty as a funeral noisemaker, once more filled with water. Not hot water, but water. Whoever was playing hospital administrator was doing a pretty good job. Hoa threw the bandages at me and ran away. I took the water from the other child but followed her out the door. Along the water-filled ditch, lying directly on the mud, were a half-dozen other injured people. I didn't even look at them. I saw Ahn with the old man and called to him.


He looked scared, and a little reluctant, but old Huang saw me waving for the boy and scalled him toward me. Ahn leaned on a new crutch made of a single long tree branch, the stick I had seen Huang carving earlier. It reminded me of a wizard's staff.


"Babysan, I need help here. Hot water, rags."


He leaned close in toward me, his face looming large for a moment.

"Mamasan, these people are-"


"Babysan, I don't care. Just get me the stuff, okay? Ask Huang. Ask Truong. I don't care. I'm too tired to argue. I don't know where anything is and I don't have anything to work with and I wish everybody would leave me the hell alone and-" I realized my voice was rising shrilly and I felt close to tears. "Oh shit, just tell them," I said, and ducked back inside to try the amulet on the patients.


The amulet's power let me see right where the wounds were, in case the shrapnel and the burns and the bullets weren't graphic enough, but though I tried as hard as I could to herd the blood back into the arteries, to mend the flesh, not a damned thing happened.


I was feeling really rational. I took the amulet out of my shirt and shook it, rubbed it off in case the accumulated grime was getting in the way of the power, like dirt on a car's headlight. I couldn't see anything wrong with it, so I put my hands close to the exposed bone and muscle of the old has stump and tried to think about healing. I closed my eyes and -almost fell asleep then, imagining I was dreaming the carnage around me, the weird shadows of scurrying Vietnamese like flickering demons outside the hut.


Voices exclaimed from the doorway and a wet, chilled body squeezed in between the casualties, beside me. Ahn patted me on the shoulder as if I were the child and started chattering so fast that I knew I must look and sound like hell, he sounded so worried. "Mamasan, mamasan, no cry, mamasan. Mamasan, Truong say, so sorry put these miserable people next to numbah one bac si. She say, you touch Hue, Hue no die. You touch Ahn, Ahn no die. When hurt people come, she say, lay them next to Co Mao. They touch Co Mao, they get bettah pretty quick. No have to clean wounds, mamasan, no have to wrap. Just touch."


I held up my hand and it was then I noticed, without immediately realizing what it meant, that there were no broad bands of color radiating from it, just thin wisps of muddy gray with an infrequent scrap of winy-pink crawling away from me like an infection creeping up a vein. I sat and stared stupidly at the hand while my patients continued to bleed to death, to moan and shriek with pain.


Ahn grabbed my hand and forced it toward the woman's stump. "Look, mamasan, see, touch, like this," and he shoved with his own hand around my wrist till my fingers brushed the wound and the old woman screamed. I grabbed the amulet with my free hand and turned on him with all the ferocity of exhaustion. "It's not me, dammit. I'm not magic. I can't heal them. It's this damned thing and it's on the fucking blink."


Ahn reached up to touch it. Truong, whom I hadn't noticed in the doorway, leaned over us, watching, her hand on Ahn's shoulder. The old lady sighed. I looked down at her, thinking the sigh was her last breath.


But the first thing I saw was a soft gray-pink ring surrounding her. The next thing I saw was that it was coming from Ahn's hand and mine. Where he touched the amulet and my fingers, the green of his aura turned to mauve-pink as it blended with mine, and where my fingers touched her, the wound was closing, dirt and drainage pouring bloodlessly out as the skin crept across the bone and nerve endings. Her breathing steadied. I felt as if I'd just discovered penicillin.


Truong had been holding a lamp and now darkness flooded the room as she backed off with a hissing intake of breath. She didn't think I'd just discovered penicillin. She thought I'd just turned into a ghost.


But my exhaustion had turned to a sort of high and I grabbed her and pulled her back to us. "Ahn, it isn't just this," I said. "And it isn't just me. It's you and Truong too. And the patient. Come on, both of you, maybe we can save this man over here."


But Truong fled, her voice rising in a harsh singsong of superstitious fear.


Abruptly the doorway filled with light again and Hue and Huang stood there, with Truong behind them, pointing to the old woman and walling.

Well, it had been a long day for Truong as well, and she'd already adapted to a lot of strange things. I realized that at the time, too, with a detached patience in my mind that had nothing to do with the way I was able to act.


"Oh, shut the hell up and get lost if you can't make yourself useful," I growled. "Come on, babysan, just like before, only this time try it with one hand on mine and one on the amulet.........


He tried, but the last effort had taken something out of him and his aura had shrunk and faded, the skin of his little face pulled tighter across his cheekbones. Hue stepped forward, protectively, and grabbed his shoulder to pull him away. Our mutual aura at once intensified. I held out my spare hand to her. Her aura was shot with gray-violet too, slightly weaker than either of ours, but underlying it was that clear strong yellow which spoke of high intelligence unintimidated by the appearance of magic, and a courageous, idealistic blue. She took my hand and the two of us touched the patient while my free hand held the amulet. My own aura brightened and bled into that of the man with the belly wound. When we started, the only bright aura around him was surrounding his intestinal worms. As we worked, his own aura throbbed into visibility, if not vitality, the blood stopped pumping out of him, the gut began knitting together, and the worms vacated the premises.


Ahn almost fell into the poor man before we moved on to the next patient. The job really was too draining for a young boy who had all but starved for three days.


"Babysan, you tell these people that if they want these hurt ones to get well, they had better come and help me. I cannot do this alone, and you and Truong and Hue can't be my only help. Everyone must help."


He nodded wearily and stumbled out the doorway.


Hue helped me with the man with the shrapnel wounds, who wasn't as bad as the others and under normal triage conditions would have been the first treated. By the time he was mending, no one had arrived even to watch, and I could still hear Ahn jabbering away to his countrymen to help.


Truong looked back in cautiously, and hissed again, but touched the amulet with a fleeting, reverent poke as if she was afraid its power would electrocute her. For a second I felt a flash of terror, followed by acceptance of the terror, resignation to it, feelings that I knew from her face belonged to Truong, not me. When her hand dropped, she gave me a hard, quizzical look as if she couldn't quite believe something she'd just been told, then drew close and took my hand.


We knelt in the mud beside the first patient, a deep scalp wound and left-sided enucleation (the eye had been poked out). Hue, Truong, and I made very slow progress alone, and no one stepped forward to help us until a couple of the children leaned forward and began to play with the amulet dangling from my neck as I bent over the patient, clasping hands in a ring-around-the-rosy with Hue and Truong. I felt a blast of the children's curiosity and energy, and the circle enclosed by our hands filled with rosy light. The eyeball could not be replaced, of course, but the bleeding stopped.


With the closing of the scalp wound, the rose light drained to a dirty pale pink. There were still four more patients to be treated.


I was aware of people standing around and watching, of Ahn doing his carnival-barker best to get help for me, but everyone else seemed afraid. The next patient had so many wounds it was a wonder she had any life left in her. I crawled through the mud to reach her. A girl of about fourteen, she was so covered with mud and blood that it was impossible to tell what she might have looked like if half her face hadn't been missing. I tried. Hue, Truong, and Ahn tried to help me.

But we were all so drained. The girl's ragged breathing stopped. Maybe we managed to ease her pain a little before she died; I don't know. I had told Ahn that what we had to do when trying to heal these people was think about them as they might have been when well and wish hard that they be that way. The other two women, to whom he had passed on these instructions, stared at the girl in the mud. Hue's aura waned for a moment until it looked as if she was coated all over with two inches of mud that flowed out of her skin. Truong's flared, and she took the girl in her arms and began to rock her. I crawled to the next patient, looked into the face of an eight-year-old and the devastation of another gut wound, and turned away again. Ahn scooted on his butt to my side and patted me on the shoulder, but his hand didn't have much force behind it. He looked as if he was about to cry too. He kept patting me and I kept bawling. Truong was still silently rocking the dead girl, but Hue crawled over beside us. Her face was stricken, stunned with pain, but she plastered her tough look over it and started to harangue me in a slow, angry voice, trying to snap me out of it, I suppose.


"Babysan, tell her I'm sorry, but it's no good. We need more help.

There's not enough magic in me to do it alone, not enough magic in all four of us."


Hue leaned over and touched the amulet as I said this and her tough face dissolved into remorse and more confusion that pierced me during the contact, so that I could hear her asking herself a jumble of angry, bewildered questions.


She raised her muddy hand to my cheek and touched it, then turned to her fellow villagers and spoke to them beseechingly, almost begging, but with an underlying steeliness that insisted on respect, insisted on attention, even while she was apparently imploring the compassion of the village.


Although I was far too wasted to consciously translate facial expression, tone, and aura in combination, something began clicking, and I became aware of what she was saying to the others. She told them that they were being shamed, that they were handing over the lives of their loved ones to a foreigner and then refusing to help her save them. The rain washed clear streaks in the mud on her face, and her plastered hair made her look as if she had drowned and returned as a banshee to haunt them.


Huang, who had been hauling bodies, was the first to react. He quieted her, patting her hand, but she placed the hand on my shoulder. Behindhim came Hoe's mother, and the little girl who had carried her sister on her hip, and her brother. Ahn took Hoe's hand and put it on my shoulder.

She pulled away from him for just a moment, but as the others crowded around her, her face took on a rapt look. The power flowed, flooding from the people all around me, touching me, Hoa, the patients, and one another. Then Hue spoke again and I knew without needing to know Vietnamese that she was telling them, "These are not bodies. These are not corpses. These are not merely wounds. These are your daughters, sons, fathers, mothers, sisters, brothers, aunts, uncles, cousins, neighbors, friends. Remember them working in the fields beside you, helping you build your home, doing business with you in the market, celebrating holidays with you. This child has played with your children. This child could be your child. Comfort her."


The people stood around me, or sat on their heels beside me, their hands on my shirt, my bare arms, fingers in my hair and touching my knees, my back and waist, one or two pressing too hard, most of the contact more tentative. Two of them, men I didn't recognize, touched the amulet, and from them I received an initial stab of suspicion and anger, rapidly followed by a rush of excited, strengthening energy, indecipherable amid the rest of it. I wedged my fingers between theirs and the amulet and their fingers closed over mine.


And then I remember the little girl I was touching, her gut wound healing, the skin coming together smooth and even clean, and her breathing slowing, the look of pain fading to one of fear and childish anger at being abandoned. When she started demanding her mother, I noticed the next patient. There wasn't enough room for all of the villagers to touch the girl or me, so some of them were jammed up against their neighbors but touching the other patients. All but the girl who died were already healing.


I wanted to go back to sleep, right there in the mud. But two young men helped me inside another hut. just before I fell asleep I thought: These young men must have come from the other village, with the patients. There were no young men in this village yesterday.


Nothing should have been able to wake me, but the voices did. For one thing, they weren't the voices I'd become familiar with in the last twenty-four hours. For another thing, as tired as I was, my nerves were taut and I had a series of half-waking nightmares. A Russian in a tall fur hat was bending over my mom. I knew it was my mom, even though she didn't have a head. It was under her arm and she kept saying, "I hate to put you to all this trouble, sir. Really, my daughter can take me to the doctor in the morning." But the Russian had a secret invention, and I understood it had something to do with what Sputnik had found in space, and he was going to use this to put Mama's head back on except he didn't know which way around it was supposed to go.


Our neighborhood was up in flames and the Vietcong were marching into Bethel and pretty soon they'd cross the bridge over the gully down by Foster's house, but I knew they didn't know the land as well as I did, see. I seemed to be at home alone in our house. The family had gone someplace, or maybe had already been killed. I slunk through the backyard, past the crab apple tree, down the broken cement sidewalk, through the garden, and into the gully. I could hide in the gully and the Vietcong would never find me because they hadn't grown up on our street and only kids who had knew about the gully. Later, I snuck down to Foster's house in time to see them march across the bridge, and I crossed under it and ran way down the gully behind Foster's house.

They'd never think to look for me there.


But then, even though Foster's house was two blocks away from ours, when the Vietcong got mad and set fire to our house because nobody was home, I could see everything clearly. The house went up like matchsticks and I thought: No, wait, let me get the quilt Grandma made and the elephants Mama had been collecting, and my scrapbook of the Kingston Trio. And my kitty, Blackie, where was Blackie? And then I saw that Blackie was dead and knew they'd shot him for fun. They were burning the crab apple tree and our garden and had started on Sortors' garden when I remembered that Blackie had died when I was ten, so this had to be a dream.


I thought: But I'm good. I haven't done anything to anyone. I try to help the others, I translate, I am friendly and helpful, I assist those less fortunate. And I saw that I was pounding on a door shouting that I wanted to return to a safe place, while all around me people like zombies or lepers clawed at my clothes and tried to infect me. I was in hell, but that couldn't be right, because I had been good and done as I was supposed to.


I tried to wake myself up, but I was lying on the ground and something was wrong with my belly and I saw my intestines and knew there was a lot of blood, and I wondered why it didn't hurt. Patients always cried when they got their intestines torn out. And I said, "Hey, somebody help me stuff these things back in and sew myself up," and when I looked down again I looked like the scarecrow from The Wizard of Oz. And all the neighbors were standing around, not looking like factory workers and secretaries, but like farmers, wearing overalls and housedresses and carrying pitchforks. They all had that closed-off "I refuse to discuss it with you" look that Mom and Dad get sometimes -the one they get when I think they're mad at me but later I find out they're scared to death and don't want to think about it because it will scare them worsc. And nobody would help me, until the guy who was guarding the POW on Carole's ward at the 83rd stepped out of the crowd, still wearing his uniform but carrying a pitchfork and wearing a nasty grin as he aimed his pitchfork at my guts.


This time I woke up. Ahn's cane tapped me on the side. "Mamasan, mamasan," he whispered.


"Huh?"


"Hurry, mamasan. Run to jungle. VC here. Hue say you go to jungle, hide."


"Okay, okay, keep your pants on," I mumbled, only half absorbing what he was saying but feeling the adrenaline zinging back into my veins like a strong jolt of caffeine.


I peeked out but saw nothing. "Where are they?"


"Hue's house. Hurry. Hue fool them. Have meeting. You go quick."


"Okay, but I pressed the amulet between our hands. A rush of inarticulate desperation, grief at losing yet another parent, and fear for himself and me swept to me from Ahn. I tried to project reassurance, but apparently the charm reflected only what was really in the wearer because Ahn just looked more afraid. "Didi mau, mamasan.

Didi mau," he begged.


I had to slip around the front of the house, since if there was a back way I didn't know what it was. I must have slept several hours. The sky was relatively bright gray, with part of it yellower than the rest where the sun was trying to burn through. The jungle steamed with a sweet, earthy smell that made me want to lie down and bury my face in it. But I needed to find cover, and fast.


just inside the trees I hesitated for a bare moment, undecided where to go, frightened again of mines and booby traps. Someone grabbed me from behind and I whirled around, ready to fight. Hoa tugged on my hand and pulled me behind her.


She was fogged in gray and muddied with olive-tinged brown, a color that would have made me uneasy if I wasn't already just plain terrified. She led me through some brush that had a track wide enough to have been made by a large dog or a small child. She lifted a bush and there was a hole dug beneath, not terribly big but big enough. The spot was within shouting distance of the village, without all that much cover, but it looked just like the rest of the jungle and the bush was high enough that nobody should step on me by accident. I crouched down and she pulled the bush back on top of my back. I could still see out a little, between the roots.


I waited for a long time, watching the village, watching particularly the space between Hue's house and Truong's. The voices continued shouting, but it was muffled and I kept nodding off, despite being scared to death.


How did Hoa know about this hiding place? Could that sweet little girl be a VC? Then I remembered the puppy. Of course, this must be the doghouse. I should have been able to tell by the smell . . . and the stuff that squooshed under my hands and knees.


While I was wondering where the dog was, the meeting let out. I had no idea Hue's house was so large. The whole village was there, many of the patients from the night before, and several young men and women whom I'd never seen before, plus one older man. It was to him Hue was appealing.

Suddenly he backhanded her, knocking her to the ground, and one of the others, like the guard in my dream, leaned forward and jabbed her in the leg, where the snake had bitten her, with his bayonet.


The older man asked her another question, but she shook her head and kept talking. The younger man threatened her again, but his superior restrained him.


Tht auras of the people this morning were mostly dim and muddy. Even Hue's usually bright, fierce one was toned down with gray and the olive-brown Hoe's had shown. But the senior man's contained a burst of brilliant lemon yellow within a spotted aqua, a deep teal, and a lighter, less definite green. And though all of these were encased in a rim of brown weariness and umber depression, the yellow of the intellect, the blue of his devotion to his ideals made his aura outshine everyone else's except that of the sadistic younger man. His aura was all too familiar to me, though he wasn't. He strobed with black light that cast warped shadows on the red of his fury. Just like William on a crazy rampage.


Hue ignored him, appealing instead to the older man.


He shook his head and turned away from her. The younger man kicked her on the site of her injury and planted his foot on her abdomen, setting the bayonet blade against her face. Hoa ran shouting from among the villagers, toward my hiding place.


Staying alive around here appeared to be a popularity contest and I had just lost. I flipped the bush back, stood up, and started to run for it. I saw the trip wire just in time. It was stretched between the two trees, just beyond the dog hole.


If I had been thinking straight, I could have managed to run smack into it. But then it might not have killed me. It could have been a pungi stick trap, which would merely maim or poison me, not a grenade. My reaction time was way too slow, and by the time I made the decision and avoided it, someone was twisting my arms up behind my back so hard I heard the joints pop. The pain shot like a branding iron through the arms, into my heart, down my gut, and straight to my bladder and bowels.

A knife blade twirled itself before my eyes.


Then all at once a strident voice began talking in rapid Vietnamese and one of the younger men, probably no more than a teenager, stepped in front of me while talking fast to my captor. The young man looked vaguely familiar, and though he spoke in Vietnamese I understood the gist of his speech, which would have translated to something like,

"Colonel Dinh, perhaps I misunderstand the situation, but if I may venture a suggestion, I with my own eyes and all these people saw this womanxcuse me, sir, this foreign whore"-he spit at me, for effect-"perform magic that healed last night's casualties. Perhaps the Colonel would find it less embarrassing to interrogate her elsewhere."


Hearing him, understanding him, I knew him. He was one of the men who had helped me into the hut the night before, one of the strangers who had touched the amulet, and he was trying to save me. His aura was cyanotic with fear of being thought a traitor, but it also bore a blue brighter than that of his superior, blue that spoke of a part of his spirit that had been revived. When he touched the amulet, when he helped heal his comrade, he had healed a little, too. Furthermore, he was still a little linked to me, even though time had passed and contact was broken. He carefully avoided looking at me.


The colonel strode in front of me, glared at me, nodded abruptly, and I was manhandled back to the village. The little creep who held my arms had to bend me over double to keep my wrists between my shoulder blades, because he wasn't tall enough to reach my shoulder blades easily when I stood up straight. So I stumbled ahead of him to where Hue sat painfully erect, watching our progress with an aura cloaked in battleship-gray and her eyes desperately hard. Something gleamed in the mud: her gold tooth.


The others had disappeared-including Ahn. The villagers were still protecting him, which I took to mean that the young soldier who had spoken to the colonel was right. The village was too frightened of the VC to try to save me, but the colonel would be pushing his luck to


. ,, streat me here. Damn. William knew I was here and there was a slim chance he might have found other men, that I might still be rescued, although I wasn't sure that by the time that happened I would be in any shape to know the difference.


While I was thinking this over, surrounded by small people who were smirking at me, poking, groping, and otherwise trying to make me Jump so that my arms would hurt even worse, the colonel stooped and extended a hand to Hue. He said something gruff and disapproying to her. She looked up at him and spoke again. And again I understood what she was saying without translation. The words of my captors, except for the boy who had talked to the colonel, were still a blessed mystery to me.

Obviously, a detached part of me decided, the amulet formed a link between those who touched it, one that conferred understanding-I supposed it must simply get clearer and more literal with practice, or length and intensity of contact. Or perhaps I simply underltood more because of the urgency of my need to know what was being said.


Hue's face was swollen, bleeding, and covered with filth, but she said in the calm, soft voice appropriate to a well-bred Vietnamese girl, "I have done nothing incorrect, Father. You are mistaken about the woman.

She is not really an American. She's a magician who has made herself look like an American, to test us, if you ask me. She saved my miserable life. Would you have me dishonor our ancestors by betraying her?"


The colonel stood, and just for a moment the brilliant yellow of his aura flickered with indecision; then he marched us out of the village.


I couldn't keep up. The VC trotted through places my body wouldn't fit, and the branches tore at me. I kept closing my eyes to try to protect them, because bent over as I was, my face was even with the backlashing brush that hit me when the others passed. Small hard bodies crowded me on all sides, shoving so that I was afraid of being trampled. Finally I fell.


I fell forward, face down into the mud, without being able to use my hands to break my fall. My teeth bit into my lips and cheeks and my nose started bleeding. The little bastard who had been holding on to me fell onto my back and I rolled over angrily and dumped him. "Let me alone, dammit," I squalled. "I haven't done anything to you." My feelings were hurt as badly as they had been in my dream when I found out I was in hell. And even while I was bellowing, I realized how stupid it all was. I was going to get killed in an undoubtedly nasty and painful fashion by people I had absolutely no quarrel with. How many of their relatives had been killed the same way? How many of my patients had survived the same sort of thing? It was all so dumb. I screamed something to that effect.


The young soldier who had tried to help me that morning knelt beside me, placatingly, but the colonel backhanded me the way he had done his daughter. I saw the blow coming and ducked away from it. That was a mistake. He knocked the young soldier out of the way and reached for me with both hands. His aura didn't change, except for a few sparks of red, and I knew that he didn't really care about me personally one way or the other, but was angry that Hue had taken my side against him. And though no one else could see, I knew from the foggy gray encompassing his aura that he was mourning his wife, the woman who was killed by the snake. His movements were precise and mechanical as he cut his way through a swamp of shock and loss.


He grabbed my hair first, but it was short and slick with mud and rain, so he switched his grip to the theng that held the amulet around my neck and jerked on it. The theng cut across my windpipe and I started to cough, then didn't have the breath to cough, gagged, and felt my face swell with unoxygenated blood. My lungs pumped like crazy, my whole chest burning, and water streamed from my eyes and nose. My ears rang and everything started to cloud over.


And that detached part of me thought: Oh boy, the press is going to love this one-Kitty McCulley, girl martyr. I wonder how many extra innocent people are going to get wasted as payback for me? The thought did not fill me with a savage thrill of vengeance. It just made me sadder and angrier and more frustrated with the whole miserable mess. I was going to die poorly and stupidly and senselessly. Shit.


Deadness tried to enter through the amulet, but my own fear and anger cut through it like a red-hot chain saw.


Oxygen flooded back into my lungs like water poured over a burn as the theng was released. My head kept swimming for several moments, but no blow, no questions followed. The little bastard with the hot-lava aura griped in a high-pitched voice and was very plainly saying something like "Let me at 'er, let me at 'er," but nobody was touching me anymore, and I was allowed to bury my face in my hands and gasp until my heartbeat and respirations resumed something like normal function.


When I finally looked up, the coloel was half a step from me, staring at me. He looked as shaken as I felt. When I looked at him, he looked away. Lava-aura made a disgusted noise in his throat and growled something at the colonel, which earned him a glower. The colonel did bear a family resemblance to Hue, especially in his truculent expression and the intelligence in his eyes. But he was baking on top, and his sharp cheekbones and chin triangulated to give him a closer resemblance to the snake that had killed his wife.


He seemed to come to a decision and, elbowing aside both lavaaura and my ally, squatted down before me and spoke clearly, distinctly, and loudly-in Vietnamese. My ally protested that I didn't know Vietnamese, so the colonel raised his voice and spoke louder. But it wasn't necessary. While his individual words didn't make sense to me, I still was able to catch his drift. He looked into my eyes, pointedly away from the amulet.


"They say you have healing hands, woman. I should cut those hands off to keep my people from falling under your spell. But my ignorant daughter says you mean no harm, that you use this power to help our people-that you are a compassionate person. If that is so, you have other power to help us. You come up North with us, you talk to your American press, you tell them that your men rape our women, murder them, but we treat you with respect. You tell them how wrong this war is. You say to them that your healing hands can make no difference when for every person you save, thousands die. You do this, woman, and earn your life. Do not think to trick us. Up North they have good speakers of English."


He kept looking directly into my eyes when he spoke, and I knew that he knew I understood what he was saying. I nodded. I wasn't lying. I was so relieved I felt faint with it. Right then I wanted to please him more than I wanted to please my own father, more than I wanted to please Duncan, more than I had ever wanted to please anyone. He could have me tortured to death or he could protect me, and he had chosen to protect me, for the time being. Once we got "up North," wherever that was, it might be another story, but for now I was going to live. I dipped my head and nodded, and snuck a glance at his face. He looked as relieved as I felt, and there was something else in his face too, something that he tried to conceal from everyone-something that embarrassed and intrigued him at the same time. Without knowing anything of my background, family, language, or customs, he now knew me as well as he knew Hue. Better, maybe. And if he killed me, he would know exactly who and what he was killing. Not that he hadn't killed many times before, women, old people, children. But he had steeled himself not to hear those people, to think of them as something besides people, as something he had no responsibility toward, no obligation to understand.

He would not be able to bullshit himself about me. Holding on to that amulet, strangling me, he'd inadvertently become closer than my mother, closer than a lover, and he couldn't weasel out of it without damaging himself even more than he had already been damaged. While he held the charm, what I was had poured toward him and, taken by surprise, he had been unprepared to reject it. Only now, as he began to wrestle with his reaction to the amulet and to me, could I understand his share in the link.


Gruffly he ordered me to stand, but when my former guard tried to manhandle me again, he berated him, told him to tie my hands in front of me and lead me, what did he think he was doing, hobbling me that way so that I slowed us down? He could get his jollies feeling me up when they weren't in such a hurry.


couldn't keep up. My captors breezed through the jungle as if it iwere a city park and they were the street gang in charge. They ate a handful of rice once a day and took a drink maybe twice. I was woozy with hunger and thirst before we'd been traveling an hour. Colonel Dinh thinned his lips irritably but had my other friend give me a drink of yellowed water and a salt tablet and off we went again.


The first night we slept in a tunnel. I've heard there were great complexes of them, but the one we were in was more like an underground bunker. The passage was narrow, obviously not made for an American girl's hips. The other men preceded us, with my village ally going just before me, and the colonel just after.


Oddly, now that I knew I was in no immediate danger from the colonel, I felt less frightened than I had at any time since I'd come to the jungle. I didn't have to worry about booby traps or mines. These were the guys who set them. I didn't have to worry about enemy capture. That had already happened. I had nothing to worry about except what might happen when we got where we were going, which was still a long way off, and whether or not an air strike might accidentally hit us. So with my friend from the village on one side of me and the colonel on the other, and the passage too small for any moving around, I slept better than I had since I'd left the 83rd. My captors could sleep soundly too. The colonel was watching the entrance. If any Americans stumbled across the tunnel, the colonel could shove me forward as a shield.


My eyes opened on darkness, and I squeezed them shut again. I remembered that something terrible had happened, something irrevocable, but for a moment I couldn't remember what it was and I didn't want to. I smelled the earth, rich and musky, and something dead. I stretched out my hand and touched flesh and hair, withdrew the hand quickly. My heart pounded with panic. Was I dead? Buried? Was this another corpse in some mass grave? Slowly I forced myself to calm down, felt the area around me. Someone groaned. Someone else's sandals were in my back. I opened my eyes. Along the tunnel passage lay the sleeping bodies of my captors, cloaked in their various-colored auras, looking for all the world like the ghosts of Easter eggs lining some subterranean nest. I tried to sit up and bumped my head on something hard. A restraining hand pushed me back down. The sandals dug into my back as the colonel sat up. A pencil-thin shaft of light fell across my eyes, then a volleyball-sized shaft, as the colonel lifted the cover away from the tunnel entrance. He climbed out and extended his hand. I climbed out after him.


He sat on a log and lit a cigarette, offered me one. I took it. He sat staring into space for a long time. He was wearing a pistol. I could have taken it during the night, I supposed, but I'm not sure what I would have done after that. "Babe in the woods" didn't even begin to describe my degree of total helplessness and inaptitude.


He caught me looking at the gun.


"Do not force me to kill you, co."


"I wouldn't dream of it," I murmured in English. He looked surprised, then wary, at my response. I don't think he understood precisely what I said. I think his comprehension was general, in the same way that mine initially had been. I saw him wondering if perhaps I wasn't a magician after all, because, of course, he didn't understand the power of the amulet. He was puzzled by the sensation that he understood me, when he knew logically that he couldn't have.


The drizzle wet my cigarette through almost at once, and I chewed on the end of it, bringing saliva to my mouth to relieve the dryness. The jungle was thick here, the undergrowth tall and twining.


The colonel stubbed out his cigarette, field-stripped it, put it in his pocket, and poked the man nearest the tunnel entrance with a twig.


Before we left the tunnel site, one of the soldiers, a boy of about fourteen, rigged a mine to the entrance.


We spent the morning climbing. My guard and I were the very last in the column, with machetes hacking up ahead of us. The trail was so steep that my thighs started throbbing with exertion after only a few steps.

Gradually the ground yielded to more rocks than brush.


At the top of the ridge we rested, or rather, the colonel ordered a halt so that I could rest. As I caught my breath, I found I was inhaling stale smoke. It was coming from the valley below us. What I had mistaken for jungle steam was still drifting up from the charred ruins of the village hit the previous night. Among the few buildings still standing or partially intact, a few people wandered dazedly. The colonel gave me a smug look. This was the village from which my patients came. We had skirted it carefully, avoiding the survivors, lest anybody be grateful enough to help me, I supposed. I shrugged at him. He'd been overly cautious. Those people below us looked to me to be too out of it to care.


I was trying to be casual for the colonel's benefit, but the sight of those people, homeless, grieving for who knows what losses, and alone in the jungle, shook me. Their fields were bombed and blackened. How would they eat? They were hurt. How would they work? Right now they apparently were sympathetic to the VC and taking fire from us, but it could as easily turn the other way, I knew. Would Hue's village be bombed soon? I wondered. Or would it be invaded again-what if William found those GIs and told them about me and they returned to the village to find me gone? What would they do to the villagers? Jesus, out of the frying pan into the fire for those people. It must be like living in a Stephen King novel you can never finish-a new fate more horrible than the last on every page. Well, I'd gotten too close and now I was in it as well and I didn't even want to think about what would happen to me-unless William stayed sane long enough to bring help.


Ahn would try to tell a rescue party what had become of me, I was sure, but how could he do that without condemning the people who had taken him in? I wondered if he would be alive by the time help came. His wound could break open again or, worse, someone might decide he was dangerous to them and kill him. Sometimes, I heard, children who had lost limbs were poisoned. The reasoning supposedly was that they would not be able to lead useful lives and would be more abused as they grew older. I hoped Ahn's stubborn streak and the self-interest that had caused him to flee William would stand him in good stead. Some mamasan he'd picked.

I'd wanted to protect him so that I would not have to watch him die or hear of it, but how soon after I took him to Quang Ngai would he have been in a situation as bad as his present one, if not worse? They couldn't keep him in the hospital forever. If I really cared, if I'd fought hard enough, couldn't I have adopted him? I doubted it. Even GI fathers married to the mothers of their Amerasian children had trouble moving their Vietnamese families to the States. It was a good thing I hadn't promised to adopt Ahn. I would never be going back to the States myself now. I stopped thinking then. It was much less painful to agonize about what would happen to Ahn and the villagers than it was to think about what would happen to me.


We ate dry handfuls of uncooked rice, a little harder to chew than unmi

'Iked Grape-Nuts, and I had another swig of water. I still needed to rest. My wind wasn't up to this. The colonel took three men aside and started pointing things out, a few yards away from me. I was staring at my boots, feeling the mud run off me with the rain, wonder'dly if part of my shortness of breath wasn't encroaching pneumoing I I nia, when something sharp jabbed my left breast. I looked up and there was lava-aura, pointing his bayonet at my chest, grinning as if he'd done something clever.


When I looked up he jabbed me again, on the other side. Trying to deflate me, the adolescent asshole. He jabbed again and, swinging my bound hands, I shoved the damned thing aside. It laid open the side of my arm, which bled freely since I couldn't even put pressure on it to stop it. He smiled unpleasantly. "Let me alone, you 'erk," I said, halfsobbing. He smiled even more unpleasantly and twitched the bayonet back and forth at eye level, my blood mixing with rain and dripping off the tip.


We had creeps like that on our side too, congenital sadists, probably, little boys whose favorite sport was tearing wings off butterflies or torturing kittens, boys who finally had a little authority and used it to abuse anyone who came under their control. And he had me good. If I screamed, he might not kill me but he could very well put out my eye, just for the fun of it. He wanted to scare me and was doing a damned good job of it, but I was getting so angry at his bullying I was beginning not to care. The balance between being afraid of mutilation and being determined to shove that damned thing up his ass was rapidly tilting toward the more suicidal choice. I didn't have much to gain either say, except satisfaction.


I was steeling myself to lunge at the damned thing when someone picked up my tether and jerked it sideways, slamming me down into the mud. In almost the same instant an explosion lifted my tormentor off his feet and knocked him halfway down the hill.


I brushed the mud from my eyes as my ally helped me back onto my rock and started fussing over my cut. I lifted my hands to my neck and took the amulet in my fingers, brushing it against my guard while he examined my cut. The blue of his aura had been darkening a little, but now it brightened and grew a fragile shoot of mauve. I could not see what was happening, but I felt the bleeding stop. I dropped the amulet casually back into my shirt as the guard looked back at me, awe and guarded hope in his face. He had been with the liberation movement since the Diem government executed his family. He had thought the movement would be a way to avenge his family, help his country. He was not so sure now.

Sometimes the scene he had watched from hiding-his parents, grandparents, sisters, and brothers being deliberately murdered-came back to him in the things he and his comrades did. He had wanted to be a Buddhist monk and then for a while he yearned to be admitted to the Party. He had wanted to drive out foreign aggressors and their puppet governments. Instead, as a child, he had carried bombs to blow up boys not much older than he who were sometimes trying to be kind, and


"punished" villagers the way his parents had been punished. He had begun to doubt the good in anything until the night in the village. He was Hien. He would do for me what he could, but what was his unworthy protection compared to that of Colonel Dinh himself?


The colonel frowned down the hill, his .45 already replaced in its holster. With Hien's help, I rose to my feet. The body of lava-aura sprawled halfway down the hillside. His death aura did not change or clarify. It remained black and red, almost indistinguishable from his physical appearance-half ' of his chest covered in blood, a black cloud of insects already gathering around him. Was I right about his being vicious since boyhood? Was he simply a naturally talented sadistic Psychotic killer? I wondered. Perhaps his aura had started out like William's, just occasional flashes of killer craziness, and had eventually taken over his whole personality. From my standpoint, it didn't matter much.


"Thank you," I said, bowing to the colonel, but he turned on his heel and walked away from me, making a small gesture that mustered the group back into action.


Lava-aura's body was left where it fell. I examined the auras and faces of the men around me. I was afraid some friend of his would blame me and try to kill me out of revenge.


But the men around me didn't even look at the body. Hien hummed softly to himself. He wasn't the only one to seem relieved. Some of these men were hard-core dedicated troops, true, but several were virtual draftees from the villages, men who had 'sined the Vietcong because to do otherwise would cost their lives or those of their families. Most of the auras never changed, just remained the same muddy brown, indifferent, numbed, and hard as nails, but without the vitality their late comrade had derived from hurting people. No one seemed to blame me. I would have been flattering myself to think the colonel had killed one of his own men on my account. The man had been executed for disobeying orders. Even a guard dog that doesn't mind its master and bites unpredictably has to be put down.


just before dark we headed down the ridge, toward another village.

Everyone grew marginally more tense, the colonel's aura sparking with anxiety. A few yards from the perimeter, we saw a man with a lfl . He yelled, "Dung lai," but as we got closer, he saw that this was r c no time to play High Noon and scuttled off into the village, his aura leaving a light trail of gray-violet fear.


The colonel exchanged a few words with his men and nodded into the jungle, the paddy, up the hill. One of the men with flat, muddy auras took the point position walking into the village. I tried not to allow myself to feel excited. If the colonel was being so wary here, that must mean this was not a VC village. Or at least not entirely.


Maybe they were even hiding American troops, right now. Maybe . . .


I was looking the other way, squinting into the hills, trying to see what the colonel had been nodding at, when the point man stepped on the mine. I heard the explosiormo big thing, really, for Nam-and the howl of pain almost at once. Some of the others started to run forward, but the colonel stopped them with a gesture and strode over to the naan with a confidence only I could see was tinged with fear.


He hollered to Hien, who suddenly looked as if he might faint. His aura was whirling with teal, pale grayed olive, and violet, underlain with mustard. He believed I was special, a saint perhaps, and should be protected and helped, but he was a simple man, not a brilliant one like the colonel, and he was afraid. His very thoughts were traitorous. If there was help here for me-but the colonel was beckoning us across the minefield and Hien removed the rope from my wrists and took my hand to lead me forward, showing me by example that we must step only in the colonel's footsteps.


The colonel nodded to the injured man, telling me to do my thing, whatever it was. Then he signalled everyone except Hien to follow him into the village. Now the yellow in his aura swirled with a sad brown the color of an old bloodstain, and red kindled in the blue. The auras of the men blended in similar combinations with his-the influence, I suppose, of a leader more charismatic than he wanted to be or realized.


I cut away what was left of the point man's trousers. His left leg was severed above the knee, the femoral artery spurting. I started applying pressure, as I normally would, and imagined the artery sealed, the wound mending, a smooth clean stump, but the wound continued to spurt until I took Hien's hand in one of mine and held it, trembling, against his comrade's wound. Blood covered both of us now, but gradually it receded, like a film of a flowing river shown in reverse. Hien looked from the patient to me with eyes as large as bomb craters. The injured man had groin wounds, too. He would father no more children, but with Hien holding him with one hand and holding my hand with the other, the wounds magically began forming granular tissue from the inside, one of the initial stages of the healing process. This time the process looked like a film run on fast forward. But it wouldn't be fast enough to save him from sepsis. For that we would need more hands. My strength was gone and Hien's had been drained with the healing we'd done together.


I looked up from the patient to see if the colonel was anywhere close, to ask him to send us someone else to help.


He was not close, but he was close enough for me to see what happened.


They had gathered the village together, with the frightened perimeter guard, now unarmed and scared halfway to death already, in the center.

His aura shot sickly pus-purple. He looked like a teenagera good-looking boy with his black hair parted on one side. He was probably not old enough to have been drafted by the ARVN. His eyes looked like a frightened horse's, the twilight bouncing off them, and he kept babbling at the colonel in a tone at once apologetic and argumentative.


The colonel gave an order and one of the VC, a man whose skin was mottled as if he had been burned at some time, stepped forward. Another man pushed the boy to his knees and forced his arms up so that his head bent low. I thought they would shoot the boy, but the man with mottled skin drew a machete from his belt and started hacking the boy's neck.


I buried my head in my hands and screamed, my screams lost in those of the others, the moans and wailing and "ol oking" of the frightened villagers. I didn't want to look back up, but I couldn't help it. One by one an old man and an equally ancient woman, a middleaged woman, a girl and the baby on her hip, and three older children, the boy's family perhaps, or village elders, or both, were kicked into the center, bent over double, and butchered as the boy had been. I was on my feet now, screaming and screaming for them to stop.


The colonel had been as coolly intent on the executions as if he were supervising a ditch digging or a concrete pouring. Almost casually, he glanced our way and his eyes met mine, cutting through the 'I'ght. His face looked just the same, but his aura was a bare w'sp of twil drabness around him.


Hien grabbed the amulet and jerked me back down beside him. His hand flew up and first stung my cheek, then burned it, and I thought my head, too, would fly off as I fell across our patient, Hien still holding the amulet. The pain in my face was nothing compared to the fear pouring from Hien. Fear more overwhelming than anything I had ever felt flooded through me, and I knew what it meant to be literally spineless as my backbone and knees turned to jelly. We'd be killed, we'd both be killed, the worst possible deaths would be needed to set an example, deaths that would make the simple beheading of those villagers look humane. I must be quiet, I must pretend not to be there, ox I would force the colonel to kill me and then kill Hien for not shutting me up.


Hien released the amulet and pinned my arms as the colonel left the troops, now firing on some of the huts, and marched toward us. I was at the same time angry with Hien for slugging me and furious with myself for my own idiocy. Hien's recriminations echoed through every capillary and nerve ending in my body. How could I have been so stupid, so spoiled, as to think the pragmatic mercy that had been shown the so far meant that I had any influence on the normal course of duty?


This village had caved in to the enemy. This village had set mines that were responsible for the death of a soldier of the liberation. This village had been punished, and now my foolish actions would force the colonel to make an example of me, to show these people how worthless their American allies were.


Footsteps slapped through the mud and the colonel stood over us, the light from a torch carried by one of the men behind him reflecting off his head. He scowled down at us and examined the patient, who was now conscious, briefly. Then he nodded to my guard and put his pistol to the head of the wounded soldier. Blinding pain shot through my own head, breaking the auras into millions of light motes that spun like galaxies through the darkness.


'"T was dead. I knew I was dead. They'd shot me in the head and -L

that's why I saw all those stars. I was nothing but an aura looking for a place to land. When I opened my eyes to darkness again, I knew I was definitely dead. I had felt the shot. They shot me because of my wounds. A soldier with one leg and no genitals would slow them down and the nearest hospital was many kilometers away. . . .


No, that was wrong. I was alive. It was the point man who had lost his genitals and leg. He was the one who was shot. But I was the one lying in darkness with a terrible pain in my head, scared almost literally to death. I tried to sit up, and if there had been anything in my environment that could have spun, it would have. I fell back again and lost the day's rice ration, having to twist suddenly to keep from vomiting while I was landing on my back, and choking myself. It was difficult because my hands were bound again, and my feet too.


I did the old deep-breathing routine and sat up much more slowly. My head hit pay dirt before I'd done a complete sit-up, and I raised my hands. A wedge of cold black, a little lighter than the blackness in my hole, poured in as something slipped back from my palms, and hot shadows danced across my face. I was in another tunnel, perhaps a rice storage bin.


I was not dead, I had not been injured, I was not even imprisoned. I was hidden. My patient had been murdered and I was alive and hidden. A whole family had been murdered, and in the village beyond my hiding place I saw that the thatch of two of the whitewashed mud houses had been set afire. Had the colonel casually burned the houses to make enough light to finish his punishment of the village?


I could not have been unconscious very long. The people had not changed position. The colonel had returned to the village, though the body of my poor patient still lay in the mud, among the mines.


Pigs squealed and chickens squawked madly as some of the VC troops tried to round them up. Children shrieked and cried while their mothers.tried frantically to hush them. One old woman tried to crawl to one of the bodies and was kicked away.


The colonel made a circle with his arm, and his men stopped chasing chickens and started grabbing children from their mothers or herding them toward the gate. The shadows of flames burned across Dinh's face and hands, making an aura of their own for him.


The children were lined up at the village gate, facing the mined path as if they were to run a footrace. Dinh took two of the oldest by the shoulders and pointed across the minefield to my dead patient. His arm dropped as the roof of one of the houses collapsed in a fountain of sparks and flying, flaming thatch straw, and the boys half ran, half stumbled through the gate.


I closed my eyes to focus. When I looked up again, Hien's agonized face covered the opening of the hole. His lip was swollen so that his back teeth were bared. Firelight caught the gold in one of them. His eye was cut and swollen, too. He had given up on trying to be gentle. He put his hand on top of my head and tried to shove me back in the hole. He must have been sitting behind it, or to one side, so intent on watching the village it had taken him some time to notice that I'd opened the hole.


The force of the next explosion startled both of us. He jumped away from the mouth of the hole. Earth and rice tumbled to the floor of the hole as the vibrations shook the ground and the smell of gunpowder joined the acrid stench of burning thatch. A woman screamed short, staccato screams. I poked my head back out the hole again.


The colonel stood in the midst of the executed villagers, who lay at his feet like so many disassembled store dummies. Four of his men held aut omatic weapons on the adults of the village. Four more held automatic weapons on the children who had been walking cautiously down the mined pathway. For a split second, the children froze as if they were playing a grotesque game of statues. Then one of the smaller ones, a little naked boy of about three, began crying and tried to run back to his mother. He and his screeches were lost in the flash from another explosion.


I knelt back down in the hole and vomited bile down my legs and onto my feet. I didn't want to look back, but I did. The guards stood menacing the two older boys, who had reached the dead VC and were now trying to drag him between them back to the gate. Only one of them made it.


I didn't watch the rest. I retched and retched into the hole while the crackling of a fire, the sobs of the bereaved, were punctuated eight more times, I counted, with fresh explosions and shrieks.


After a very long time Hien pulled me, dizzy and shaken, from the hole.

The colonel and all but one of his men stood nearby, with several new recruits from the village. Some of the new people were the mothers of the children; one I recognized as one of the boys who had been hauling the body. He was reeling from shock but trying to smoke a cigarette and look as if he'd been plucked from the unemployment line for some routine job. No one would ever be able to tell the difference between him and a regular Vietcong, and in time he wouldn't be able to tell, either.


The fires from the houses were burned out and I did not look for the auras of either the dead or the living. I did not look in the direction of the village at all. I allowed myself to be led away from it, through a lesser nightmare of biting insects and vines and tree roots that tripped me and made me fall. Toward morning, Hien dragged me after him into another tunnel bunker. I felt him shaking beside me, as if he were palsied. Even after he grew quiet, I couldn't sleep. I was afraid to.

I could not believe, when Dinh had done such terrible things to his own people, that he would let me live much longer. My God, what if he had found Ahn? What would he have done to him? He'd never find out from me. And neither would Hien. Poor Hien. He was too damned scared of Dinh to really be of any use to me. But maybe he would send some last words to my mom, if I could think of any.


On my other side, the colonel flopped restlessly. I pulled as far from him, as close to Hien, as I could get. I could still smell the blood, the gunpowder, the smoke, on Dinh's clothing. He rolled toward me once and I flinched away. He sat halfway up in the tunnel, and tugged my rope.


He pulled me after him into the open, where he lit a cigarette and put it to his mouth as if it were an Aqua-lung and he were underwater.


He handed it to me after a puff, but I waved it away. I was already coughing so hard my sides hurt. "Hien saved your worthless life last night, woman," he said.


I nodded listlessly. I had dragged myself through most of the trip away from the village. Of all the terrible things that happened, the deaths of the family and the children, I think what did the worst harm to me was when Dinh shot my patient out from under me so soon after I had poured all of my energy into his cure. Part of me was still gone, out there in the twilight zone somewhere with the augmented aura of my former patient. I don't know if it was the same for Hien. Maybe. I never found out.


I looked down at my filthy feet and ran my tongue around my blood-and-bile-fouled mouth. It tasted as if it had been stuffed with filthy dressings. I couldn't stand to look at Dinh. Never in my life had I hated anyone so much. The way he had butchered that whole family.

Those poor babies in the minefield. That helpless man who thought we were going to help him. It made me thoroughly sick to think I had ever regarded such a monster as a human being, much less a protector.


I was chilling so badly it felt as if a winter wind were blowing straight into my marrowless bones. When he touched me I felt I'd been thrown into a pit full of rattlesnakes. I couldn't seem to stop shuddering.


I thought he winced ever so slightly as he withdrew the cigarette, as he had not winced at killing children in front of their mothers and one of his owrmo, two of his own men. His aura was little more than a thread of light around him now, the colors so smudged and muddied it was hard to tell what they had been.


But he only smiled and blew a smoke ring that was immediately dispersed by the drizzle. And he spoke quietly, almost off handedly, in Vietnamese, as you might speak to a dog or a cat, or perhaps to a total stranger when you have something so terrible to say that you don't want anyone you know or care about to hear. "You were displeased by what happened in the village, co. I could not allow you to undermine my authority there-it would have proved fatal for you if you had even attempted to intervene. But now you can tell me what you would have told me then."


I licked my lips, and flicked the rain into my dry mouth. One of my teeth was loose. I started to speak and he casually leaned over and touched the amulet. I pulled away, resenting the gesture as fiercely as if he had stuck his hand in my crotch. I didn't want this man to know me any more. I didn't want to know him. He grimaced, trying to make me think he was amused at my repulsion, but he wasn't. I relaxed just a little with a sense of revenge. He had already known I hated him.

Touching the amulet wasn't a sadistic act toward me-it was a masochistic one for him.


"I was just going to say stop," I said. "I was going to say, don't do it. They're your own people. How could you?"


"But I had to do it. By sparing you, by sparing the village that harbored you, by sparing my backsliding daughter, I was already in grave error. Believe me, I would not have done so if it was not that I think certain influential men will be pleased to have you among us."


I wondered then if he intended to lie for Hue and the village, to say that they captured me and had the foresight to keep me alive and hand me over. I hoped he was that human, anyway.


"You could have let me help the injured children, the ones who survived," I said.


cel did not wish them to survive. I did not wish to make a folk heroine of you, to have legends of you spread over the countryside. I wish no one to know of you until we reach the North. I will tell you something between the two of us, co. I am still attached to that worthless daughter of mine. I am grateful to you for saving her and for what you did for those people. Did you know that the entire village risked my wrath, risked having happen to them what happened to this other village today, to plead for your life? They have not cared about the lives of anyone outside their own families for decades, and now that you are gone they will forget you as if you were a disturbing dream and revert to their apathy. Though I try not to be a superstitious man, I believe that my daughter is correct about you. I believe that you are a holy woman in a rather unusual guise, and I respect that. If it were up to me as a man, I would take you back to your people. If it were up to you as a simple woman, I believe that you would continue to use your gift as you have been doing, for the benefit of anyone who needs you. But it is not up to me, or to you.


"If I release you, your gift will be discovered in time and your government will use your gift to lead my people to the false conclusion that the Will of Heaven is with the Americans and resistance useless. Do you understand? Wandering among us in normal times, you would be amendicant holy woman. Among your people, what you mean as good is a weapon against us. Even if you do not mean to cooperate, they can force it. You and your gift will be scrutinized, analyzed, and your talent ultimately perverted to military purposes, which I know, and you know, are the thing furthest from your heart. Unfortunately, I can promise you that if you cooperate, my side will do much the same, but it is my side. I cannot betray it by allowing you to fall back into the hands of the enemy. I can protect you only so far."


"As far as you protected that man who stepped on the mine? Or those children?" I asked.


"It was necessary that the village pay in its most valuable currency for its treachery. The soldier would have been no good to us alive. Dead, he made it at least seem a fair trade. I have done many things to your own countrymen you would like even less well," he said with deliberate menace that failed to frighten me nearly so much as his gentle tone of regret. "You are overly sentimental."


"I am overly human," I said bitterly. "What's your problem?"


He sighed and extended his limbs in a gesture that was more writhing than stretching, then returned to his relaxed pose, the cigarette dangling from his fingers, which dangled between his knees. "I knew I should have killed you back at the village. I hope you don't think I'm a good example of a dedicated Communist. I'm not even a Party member yet, though perhaps you will help me become one. I'm not really worthy.

I haven't yet purged all of the reactionary Confucian notions from my heart." He grimaced when he said the last, too. Neitheir communism nor Confucianism really meant anything to him, his voice and face said. They were constructs that were useful because of how other people used them to define him. Then he looked back up at me, and though his aura had been too slim for me to read it, I could read his eyes. They were like those of a patient who's had a stroke and has just awakened to find himself paralyzed, his face crooked and his mouth unable to make intelligible sounds. "Damn you, woman," he said finally. "Do you want to know why I really saved your life?"


I blinked assent.


"At first it was because it would have shamed me to kill you, shamed my daughter, shamed my wife's memory, shamed the movement in front of my home village. And, of course, I would have had to kill my daughter, to whom I am incorrectly sentimentally attached, before I could have killed you. But later, in the jungle, when I intended to kill you, I did not because when I looked at you, started to question you, for the first time in years I saw another persona living person. Everyone has been walking corpses to me for years, even my daughter. But I think now I should have killed you at once after all. Life is not meant to return to a dead limb, and now that it does, it burns with the fires of hell."


Hien crawled out of the hole then, followed by some of the others, and we resumed our march. We were doing most of our traveling in the evening, at night, just as the American troops were making camp and starting to assign patrols.


I think Hien must have heard some of what the colonel said. He stuck very close to me, the blue of his aura all but buried in an avalanche of depressed brown. The night before must have been more horrible for him than it was for me, must have made him relive again the massacre of his own family. Knowing how frightened he was, and how he had acted to save my life, painful as it was, I felt protective of him that last day. And something strange happened. We had to walk close to each other, as the brush was very thick and the machetes slow to cut it clear. Hien held on to my tether and pretended to push me around while actually inspecting the damage he had done to my face and trying to slow the pace so that I could keep up. It was a great effort for him, because he was, as I say, very low. But I noticed that my aural though very weak and faded to the dirty pink of a tenement babys sixth-hand Goodwill Easter dress, gradually engulfed his. It was like what I had seen happen with the colonel and his men, and it confused me.


I did not know what to do, or what to say, about the way he, the village, and the colonel were reacting to me. It was like when the wrong guy falls in love with you for the wrong reasons that have nothing to do with you. These people were assuming that I did the things I did because I was who I was, that I was making the amulet do what it did, instead of simply discovering what it would do as I went along. Even when I totally lost all my ability to use it, back at Hue's village, and the vi'itagers and Hien had to help me, they thought I was sharing my power, not borrowing theirs.


And yet I couldn't just take the amulet off. The big reason, of course, was that without it I was just another American invader worthy of no special attention except the kind I could do without. But also, in some strange way, I had become what I can only describe as addicted to the amulet, dependent on it. I drained myself through it into patients, but as long as it was with me, I felt as if I had a way of renewing myself.


I realized why old Xe had waited until he was dying to give it up. It was as invested with my life as I was with its power. And of course, so long as I had it, I might be subjected to some unrealistic worship but I was not tortured or summarily executed as I would have been without it.


I think that if I had had Xe's years of experience and wisdom, I could have done much more with the power while I had it. I wish I had at least been able to do more for Hien.


When the ambush came, he was the one who knocked me down and threw himself on top of me, taking my share of the bullets and frags. Dying, his body twitched on top of me, and I hesitate to say it, but it was as if he were making love to me. And I guess he was, at that.


"Tesus tucking Christ, you ain't even going to believe what I found."


A rifle barrel prodded me, plowed a path through the matted tangles of my hair, rolled my dead guard off me. A man with a blackened face, too much stringy dishwater-blond hair for regulations, and a gap-toothed grin reached down to wipe the grime and blood off my arm as if I were a pile of animal shit he was examining for tracking purposes.


"Yeah?" another voice challenged. "Whass that? Don't tell me that slant had on an earring you can use for the centerpiece in your necklace."


"Better. Lookit."


"Sheeit. Hey, lady. Lady, where the fuck you come from?" This from a pockmarked swarthy-type kid with some kind of a New York accent mixed with the redneck patois most of the grunts used. The auras of both men were flashing, red, brown, black, olive, mustard, orange, a confusion of high emotion that blurred together for me. I sat up, feeling as if I'd been in an elevator that had suddenly dropped two floors. We had been wending through the jungle as we had for the last four days when all of a sudden all hell broke loose and there I was, on the ground, with my guard bleeding on top of me and automatic bursts and hand grenades exploding around me and my bound hands pinned down by the body on top of me. A deep groan issued from someone nearby.


"We got a live one here."


"Well, pull him out. Where the fuck is Bao?" This was from other disembodied voices. I was still trying to focus on the two faces in front of me.


"Jesus, lookit her hands. Lookit her arm. Baby, did they hurt you bad?

Hey, Didi, you save that little bastard. They had themselves an American woman, the little fuckers."


"A whut. Maryjane, what the fuck you smokin' now-"


"No, man, I found her. Let her alone. Can you get up, baby?


Show papa where it hurts," and he tried to scoop me up and I wanted to collapse in his arms and sob but he was flashing so heavy with all that red and orange and black it seemed he was on fire. I looked around me.


Dinh was half-sitting, his arms being wrenched behind him. One leg was covered with blood, the calf lying at a funny angle from the thigh.

Maryjane, the dishwater-blond, saw the direction of my stare. "That the fucker who did you, baby? I'll fix his ass." He rose and strode over to Dinh.


"No, you don't, man. We gotta squeeze him first. He's some highrankin'

motherfucker," said the man who was tying him, the one called Didi.


"Yeah? Okay. I won't kill him, then," and he rared back and kicked Dinh's injured knee. The colonel let out a sound like brakes being applied at high speed and fainted. The smell of fresh urine added itself to the stench of death and evacuated bowels from the corpses of my former captors.


"Cut it out," I said, I thought loudly, but it came out a bare whisper.


"Hey, you asshole. You're upsettin' the lady. She been through enough." The guy with the New York accent helped me to my feet, but I didn't stay up very long. I took one look around me and doubled up again, losing the little rice I had kept down that day and retching long after the last of the bile had poured from me.


After a while I was able to tell them who I was. Someone got on a radio, back to base, and told them about me, about Dinh. There was a long pause, then: "Hold it right there, son. This is General Hennessey, on inspection tour. You say this is an American nurse you found? And she was in the company of these Vietcong guerrillas?"


"That's affirmative, sir."


"Give me your coordinates again."


He did, and the general set up a rendezvous. I thought at the time, I didn't think generals probably remembered how to do that anymore. I guessed I should feel honored. Maybe he'd want me to attend at party at his mess. I was dressed right for a mess then. My fatigues were in tatters, and I was covered with bites and scratches and that one long bayonet wound.


Someone picked up Dinh like a sack of potatoes and carried him, shattered leg dangling. I don't think they had a medic. Maybe he'd gotten killed. Maryjane and Zits, the guy from New York, supported me.

I don't know how long it took, how far it was. I wasn't entirely with it. I kept getting confused, thinking we were still back at the village with the point man walking into the minefield, and that was Dinh. When I looked down at my own hand I couldn't see any color at all around it.

I heard myself giggle. Maryjane grinned at me and wiggled his eyebrows encouragingly. "I'm outa juice," I explained. It made perfect sense to me, but he drew a spiral by his ear with his finger and Zits nodded.

That was pretty funny and I giggled again.


They tied Dinh to a tree. He couldn't stand, even on his one good leg.

He was out of it. They tried to question him, but he didn't say anything. I thought he was conscious most of the time, but no matter what they asked, how they hit him, what they threatened, he didn't say anything, except to groan and scream a lot.


Some of the questions were about me. The sergeant who was running the show would ask in broken Vietnamese, then the interpreter would ask, then they'd hit Dinh and he'd scream again.


"Not a fuckin' thing. What we gonna tell the general?"


Maybe he don't know nothin'."


"He knows what they did to her. Where she's from."


"Hell, man, she knows that."


"Yeah, but she's dinky dao as shit."


"Fuck it, man, he ain't gonna tell you anything. I'm tired of this shit. Let's play a little 'guts,' Sarge, whattaya say? That's first-class round-eye tail he was fuckin' with, man. We don't even get none of that. He's got some payback comin'."


"Damn straight."


"Nah, man, the general's gonna want to question this dde."


"You ain't been listenin', asshole. He ain't talkin'. We'll just loosen him up a little."


"Lookit him. You'll kill him before the general gets here, man. He's gonna be soooo disappointed."


"Ain't that a fuckin' shame. So we'll save him a piece. A tiny little piece."


I looked inquiringly at Zits. I was still having trouble talking. It had beenonly a few days, but it felt like forever since I'd heard English spoken by other Americans. It seemed to be going too fast for me. I still didn't get what they were up to. I wasn't tracking very clearly.


"You'll see, baby. Maybe you wanna play too."


Oh goody. Vietnam was so wonderful. In school nobody had ever wanted me on their team, and here the boys were, choosing me first.


"Me first, man, I found her," Maryjane said. He cut off Dinh's clothes.


"Hey, man, leave him a jock. There's ladies present."


"How can I cut off his balls if I leave him a jock? Besides, she's a nurse. She's seen it all."


"Don't cut him there yet, man. That's too much. He'll die too soon."


"I don't give a fuck," he said. But he stood in front of Dinh, and when he stood away, he was holding a bloody piece of something and there was a long bleeding strip where the colonel's right nipple had been. Dinh made that braking sound.


"See, baby, that's how it works. Wanna play?" Zits said. Then, "Hey, she's next, man."


"Umm, yeah, I'd like to play guts with her," someone said lasciviously.

I think he was kidding and meant something else, but my whole back convulsed. I stood up slowly and walked over to Dinh. I started to look at the knee. Touched the amulet slowly. But my eyes were drawn back to his face. His eyelids peeled back about a quarter inch from his eyes and he saw me and groaned. I stood up.


"She's takin' a long time to decide what she wants. Somebody ought to tell her it's spontaneous, like. Hey, baby, give somebody else a turn."


"Shut up. You don't know what that slant bastard did to her."


"No, but it's fun to imagine, huh?"


"You make me sick." Zits came up beside me. "Hey, baby, you need somethin' to work with, huh? A field knife maybe?"


I was looking at Dinh. His eyes struggled open a little bit more. Hue's father, who had blown up all the children in one village, murdered a family, shot one of my patients. I saw with a shock that while his screams might not have been faked, his degree of being out of it was. He was more alert than I was. And his aura, a bare thread, was.the gray of a concrete overcoat. He stared at me steadily, challenging at first, and then, in response to whatever he saw in me, imploring, pleading, demanding, calling in a debt. Without even speaking to Zits, I lifted his sidearm from its holster. He didn't seem to notice, he was watching me so hard. So was everyone. I don't know what they thought I was going to do. I pulled the gun out and, still watching the colonel's eyes, which lit with approval, his head nodding imperceptibly, stuck it in his mouth and pulled the trigger.

ТЕЛЕГРАМ

Канал с обзорами, анонсами новинок и книжными подборками

Книжный Вестник

Бот для удобного поиска и скачивания книг

Книжный Бот

Свежие любовные романы в удобных форматах

Любовные романы

О психологии, саморазвитии и личностном росте

Саморазвитие

Детективы и триллеры, все новинки

Детективы

Фантастика и фэнтези, все новинки

Фантастика
ВКОНТАКТЕ

Цитаты, афоризмы, стихи, книжные подборки, обсуждения и многое другое

Книжный Вестник