Núi Khê

When they stepped out of the plane at Huế-Phú Bài Airport, they were in a different country from sunny Saigon. Gray clouds sailed. A blizzard of cool raindrops slanted into them on the jet bridge. He followed his wife’s girlish form across the tarmac. The two-story terminal had changed little; it had been spiffed up so that it would have blended into a Florida strip mall except for its control tower and rows of windows. Inside, a handful of Western tourists flip-flopped toward the carousel and the information counter. In their shorts and sleeveless tops they looked like refugees, drenched and chilled. Even Linh had packed away her jacket, as if her family’s six years in Saigon had made her forget her hometown.

“Good to be back?”

“The weather is bad. In Huế, always rain.”

“Yeah. Forest’s gonna be wet tomorrow.”

“But you still want to go, huh?”

Next morning he followed her through the maze of Đông Ba market. She fit in. Despite her three years in New York, she looked like any other smart young Huế woman, slaloming between stalls and smells with casual confidence. They said hello to her Aunt Cúc—Aunt Chrysanthemum—who showed no surprise at the unannounced apparition of her niece and her American husband before her display of dried seafood, sauces, and plastic-wrapped sundries. Linh was on a mission. She glided on, bargaining, rejecting, accumulating pork and beef rolls, baguettes, ruby rambutans, tangerines, drinkable yogurt, orange juice, four liters of water, and finally, for three bucks, a backpack blazoned North Face. He’d guided her through Manhattan, New Orleans, London. Now she was turning the tables. He admired her for it, except when her high-handedness stung. She dismissed his suggestions about what to buy for their adventure. You forget, she said. She’d lived a much longer time in the forest—her word for what he’d known as jungle—than he had.

Outside, a chalky sky lowered over the gray-brown Perfume River. No, the river hadn’t changed. But the six silver arches of the Trường Tiền Bridge now flowed across intact, a new bridge made a prosaic line upstream, and the fire-blackened tank on the south bank was gone. They had lunch at La Carambole—a splurge, Lonely Planet said—where tourists laughed over French and Vietnamese dishes under the greens, reds, oranges of hanging lanterns and dragon heads. The customers were older than the backpackers padding by outside. Yet none of them, even those parents sitting across from the twenty-something couple beside the window, would be harboring memories of the rubbled city of 1970. Maybe they’d have read a paragraph on it in a guidebook.

They spent the afternoon visiting aunts, uncles, cousins from her mom’s side. Threads of talk looped together the present and the still-lively, ghostly past. Spirit faces, some in black and white and some in old, flat Kodacolor, listened from frames above altars.

“Oh, sweetie,” Linh answered him later, “they like to remember ancestors. Like my father.”

They’d just come from celebrating Kỳ’s death day in Saigon. A wake, of sorts—a feast accompanied by chatter and ice-cubed Heineken and men’s cigarette smoke. The family had prayed earlier. They stood in a row before the altar and chanted—a séance. His younger self, who’d arrived in-country knowing nothing of these people he was supposed to fight for, felt less real than Kỳ’s ghost. From his incense-swirled photo above the altar, his father-in-law fixed him with a formal gaze. Sad life, he said, despite the arrayed offerings—flowers, fruit, half-size hundred-dollar bills, a plate of ginger chicken, and an opened green Heineken bottle.

That evening, on their balcony, they made a dinner of Linh’s mom’s rice-thread-crusted fish sticks and egg-shaped fruits of rambutans. A brochure on the table proclaimed the Ideal “the first room garden hotel in Huế.” They sat wearing windbreakers beside a nook formed of mossy rocks, green leaves poking out from holes in bamboo, purple passion plants and a frog-embossed fountain burbling into a pool. The rain that slapped them at the airport had tapered into mist. They breathed wet air breezing in from the night. The cloud glow faded into the blackness of forested hills to the southwest.

Linh poured orange juice from a translucent bottle.

“I feel excited! I remember so much. So many years my family lived in the forest.”

She liked to discuss the past. Her life with him had cut her off from it.

“I remember, too. I remember my year in that forest like yesterday. And I remember meeting your family in ’94, when you all still lived there. I remember meeting you.”

“That was our fate. To get married.”

“That fate almost didn’t happen. If I’d ridden my bike out of the hotel in Huế just a minute earlier or later, then I’d never have met your dad. And so I’d never have come to Bình Thành.”

“But you did.”

“Yeah.”

“You know, my father wrote your name on the TV he bought with your hundred dollars. At night many people came to our house and watched TV. He showed them your name.”

“That’s what he wrote to me. I couldn’t believe he spent that money on a TV. I thought he’d spend it on food or fixing up your house.” He imagined the flickering set, powered by a car battery, conjuring pictures of a world beyond their shack and the inkiness of Bình Thành’s lantern-dotted nights.

“TV made our life better. Then you sent money for Hải to go to school. You were my family’s savior.”

Savior. What a label! It still seduced him, especially when her younger brother, Hải, called him Dad. But what a laugh to think the US military had once been cast, with him as a bit player, as her country’s savior.

“Who am I now?”

She smiled.

“Chống. Chống Mỹ. My American husband.”

An hour before dawn the view from the balcony was dark, stippled with a few lights. He couldn’t tell the mountains’ darkness from the sky. In the lobby a sleepy receptionist arranged three small glasses of dark, sweet coffee—Linh had ordered him two—and shrimp-stuffed crispy pancakes and baguettes. Of course they couldn’t leave without breakfast, she said. Why did he worry about how much time to get to Núi Khê? Hadn’t she and Phương, her older sister, walked to the mountain to pick up American war metal they could sell?

“But you told me you left Bình Thành before first light.”

“We walked there in sandals. Half a day. Then we had to walk back so we don’t lose way in the forest at night.”

“So you should have got the car to pick us up earlier.”

“You have trouble to wake up early. Anyway, I told you, the car will take us on the path to cut trees. Where trucks go. We save two hours.”

“I hope so.” He was grumpy, speaking before the strong coffee had seeped into his brain. 

“It’s still a long hike to Núi Khê. Then we’ve got to climb it.”

 “Bực mình!” You annoy me! She was thirty-two when she married him three Decembers ago, this tall-nosed foreigner who’d crashed her life like a movie star or a ghost. He just didn’t give her credit. She knew the forest better than anyone. Hadn’t she spent her girlhood there gathering rattan, panning for gold, doing a hundred things to help her family, which was poor because Dad had worked for Americans?

At Bình Thành they picked up her cousin Châu and a young woman whose job was to carry their food and water. Linh had told him about Duyên. Her name meant charm or grace. Four years ago, she’d fallen for a handsome stranger who stayed in the village awhile and then vanished, leaving behind their unborn baby. Chris said hello in Vietnamese. She returned a nonchalant smile. The words for “How are you?” rose to his tongue. He swallowed them just in time. Remember: don’t talk to her. Linh’s jealousy, especially about Susan, was fierce. Where did it come from? From her culture, or just her sweet hard quirky self?

The phantasmal shapes of the village, swirled by ground fog, began to take form under a pewter sky. They rolled past a footbridge where the spirit of a drowned woman had cried out to her mom.  Then trees enclosed them. The SUV, a silver-gray Toyota Innova, weaved in first gear over sludgy ocher ruts. Too slow, he thought. Linh chattered in back with Châu. They bounced downhill and stopped. Their dapper, leather-jacketed driver inspected the undercarriage with a long face. He began with Linh and Châu a Vietnamese ritual of negotiating disappointment. 

Chris interrupted. “Why don’t we start walking? Now.”

“Too far,” Linh said with a poker face. Sometimes he was so American, so impatient.

At least the creamy-gray sky augured a break in the rains. They picked their way along a muddy shoulder between the logging path and his wife’s girlhood forest. A milky-blue crevasse split the clouds ahead.

“Look!” Linh pointed ahead to a terrace planted in shin-high rows of bright green, long-leaved plants. Arrowroot, her dictionary flashed. It was land her dad and she had cleared to grow upland rice.

“After we cut the plants I took them home on my back. My father made traps to catch birds that came to eat what we left. They were delicious!”

He knew about her protein-scarce, cricket-roasting childhood after the fall of Saigon—when she was six and Kỳ began three years in a “re-education camp” for having supported, as an Army lieutenant, foreigners bearing promises. He didn’t blame her for mocking his vegetarian leanings. He’d grown up as a dumb-fuck middle-class kid in the world’s richest country, taking burgers and ice cream sodas for granted, then had shipped out to her country glowing with a naïve ambition to write about war. Being married to her was a learning experience he wasn’t sure they’d survive. How imperious she was! How she clung to her culture, her superstitions.

Châu led them onto another logging path. Chau was a wiry thirty-six-year-old with the shy but assured smile of a man who’d survived a bullying father and an unlucky birth in 1968, the bloody Year of the Monkey. Because the economy had improved, Linh said, he hadn’t scavenged the forest in years, but he was game to be his Việt Kiều cousin’s guide. She was now a personage at Bình Thành, a girl of the forest who’d moved to America. Maybe she was right. It had to be fate, their strange coupling.

“Go away!” Linh glared at gray, horn-wreathed buffaloes meandering on the brushy borders and standing solo like statues among trees. Amoeba-shaped piles of charcoal dung dotted the path. Once, when she was twelve, a buffalo had chased her with lowered horns until she scrambled up a guava tree. She was used to them— Hải had been a buffalo boy—but they didn’t fit in with the forest of her girlhood. That forest had been a lovely, dangerous spirit, no place for buffaloes.

He too didn’t remember any farm animals. The forested hills and mountains southwest of Huế, a welter of green- or gray-misted billows, formed a swath of I Corps called the Rocket Belt. The Montagnards who lived there had fled; the nomads who replaced them were soldiers—American grunts and North Vietnamese Army rocket squads. Linh was right: the jungle had been scary but beautiful. Scary when monsoon rain dripped down leaves and mud smelled of shit and death, but beautiful when the sun shone. Once, his platoon had followed a trail under double-canopy trees to the brink of a waterfall, unmarked on their grid maps. Suddenly, Christ! there it was, crystal braids tumbling into a valley of dragonfly greens.

Yes, nature was a bond between Linh and him, along with their remembered forest. But now the forest looked like a ghost of itself—all mottled gray-and-green trunks, rising straight like telephone poles.

“The old trees. The beautiful trees,” she said, “where are they?” She asked Châu. They belonged to a plantation—her dictionary flashed agarwood.

“Well,” he said, “we just have to go deeper. And faster.”

Her features scrunched into a scowl, then smoothed. She always looked alluring, with her wood nymph’s body and heart-shaped face, even when she was acting pissy or hard-nosed. Despite her stormy moods, she still enchanted him. But someday, he feared, their unlikely life together would turn—pouf!—into a dream, a bittersweet myth.

On a slope above them a buffalo stood next to a yellow spirit house, shaped like a pagoda, on a concrete post.

“My father’s friend,” Linh said. “His truck fell down.”

She’d told him about mishaps of the postwar forest. Sometimes logging rigs rolled over. People drowned in the Sông Hương, Perfume River, when it flooded. Kỳ hadn’t let her cross it to go to her new high school, five kilometers away, and so her schooling had ended early. So early! And he was a writer, a passionate reader, a teacher. What madness to have married her! Yet when she was happy her smile could light up strangers’ glances.

The ruts curved out of forest into grassy scrub and led them to a river. The Khe Đầy gurgled, its freshness displacing smells of mud and vegetation. They hiked up their trousers and forded its cool, pushing, thigh-deep water, so clear he could see rounded stones on which his trail shoes kept slipping. Almost across, she wheeled and shouted.

“Why are you slow?”

She was edgy because she’d imagined that, hiking to Núi Khê without government permission, he might become the war’s last casualty. On a terrace twenty meters above them, within hailing distance, stood a new-looking hardwood outpost of the Forest Protection Department of Thừa Thiên province. It could have graced the Catskills. Probably it had been sited there because of its view, for binoculars or a rifle shot, of the ford. But the war was over; the building’s incongruity in the old Rocket Belt tickled him. Ah, history!

On the other bank she rolled down her capris. No foresters; no challenges. Her face broke into a gleeful smile. Crossing the Khe Đầy, she said, had brought back memories—lots. During the monsoon and early spring her dad, her older brother Tôn, and she used to pan for gold washed downstream from the hills. She got soaked to her neck as she crouched to manipulate the long wooden pan. After dark she listened to Kỳ tell war stories—about happy times, for an ARVN lieutenant assigned to translate for an American Air Force adviser, before the doom year of ’75. In good weather, she’d gaze up at the sky.

“The stars were so beautiful. Some had shapes like deer or other animals. Some went chup-chup-chup.” She opened and closed her forefinger and thumb, miming twinkles. “Sometimes I watched one star. I thought how my family was so poor. I wished I could buy new clothes from Đông Ba. Pretty clothes.”

That story he hadn’t heard. Part of her attraction for him had been her girlhood’s poverty, together with her family’s oppression by ex-Việt Cộng officials and her mom’s brother—the infamous Uncle Tân, Châu’s dad. Savior? Fuck no, he hadn’t thought of himself that way, yet he’d imagined he could make the bleak past and her dad’s death better. And of course, redeem his own past with a high-spirited young wife who had nothing to forgive him. On her part, she’d yearned—a disclosure made in fragments, at unguarded moments—to metamorphose from a Saigon tailor into a rich, sophisticated Vietnamese American. That was why she’d let him coax her into extending her education to college while waiting for the baby that her fertility treatments she knew, brushing aside his cautions, would bring. He didn’t want a baby anymore—not so much, anyway. What joined them now that their characters’ sharp-edged facets, unlike the Khe Đầy’s rounded stones, had been revealed?

The logging track rose before them toward Núi Khê, still invisible. He gazed left at the green masses of Elephant and Banana Mountains. She gazed, too. She didn’t know the names he’d said but recalled the bigger hill, Núi Mỏ Tàu. She used to cut rattan and palm and bamboo leaves to sell to weavers for making nón lá, Huế’s pointed hats. One morning she’d stepped into a cratered swale whose rusty earth was expelling old Communist equipment—pith helmets, mud-encrusted rifles, rotting web gear—along with stained bones. Americans must have killed them with bombs or artillery. She’d fled before the ghosts could catch her.

They trekked on. Near the river a spoor of trash, tossed by foragers, spoiled his view. He leaned into the slope. His quads—used to biking, not climbing—tightened. He lagged. No one else looked strained. Duyên’s calves corded beneath her knee-length pants. A yellow-green lemon-tea bottle, tied to her ankle, rattled and bounced behind her. He caught up, irritated by the sound and sight of plastic trash, which Vietnamese discarded so heedlessly. “Why’s she doing that?” Linh relayed the question and then the answer: “For fun.” His bubble of Sierra Club virtue popped. Duyên’s life, unlike Châu’s, hadn’t been lifted by the spillover of the recent boom, and the legacy of that now phantasmal, handsome stranger didn’t include fun. Besides, what witch’s brew of orange poison had the American saviors left behind?

They weren’t making good time. Long ago, Alpha Company had humped the boonies hard, but when missions began or ended they flew aboard Hueys, leapfrogging wild terrain in minutes. He sat with his legs outside, gazing down at sun and shade spattered on crumpled green. There were no choppers, two days after the ambush, to lift Third Squad to the windblown rocky crest of what their contour maps labeled Hill 618. They climbed it from a burbling stream at the mountain’s base where AK-47 rounds, popping in his ears, had smashed Army Armstrong’s knee and turned Tuy’s shoulder purple. Their morning slog took three hours. Linh and her sister, in truck-tire sandals, must have done it twice as fast. Now, in a cloud-bannered blue sky, the sun shone. They hadn’t yet reached the Five Slopes, one of Linh’s sites of memory, her planned lunch stop.

“We eat soon,” she answered him.

“How much longer to Núi Khê? I don’t even see it.”

She whispered so nobody could hear: “Bực mình! It’s there.”

She pointed ahead. He stared at the hazy, partly reforested summit, once bare stone, which used to breach the blue-green sea of trees like a whale’s gray head. His first view in three decades! As he walked on, exhilaration sank into puzzlement. What exactly was he seeing? What vision would overtake him when he stood braced against the wind up there?

They were in deep forest now. The track dipped. In green shade and brightening sunshine they waded two mossy-stoned streams. Alpha Company must have crossed them, like that dappled brook where they were ambushed that June. One of the ambushers had fled downstream, smack into Toby’s machine gun. They booby-trapped the rosette-riddled body and left it in the water. Two months later they returned, splashing by rank bones. At least Tuy, a seventeen-year-old Việt Cộng deserter who was their Kit Carson Scout, got to transcend the jungle, lifted spinning in the cage of a Stokes litter to a medevac. Before they reached the 85th Evac, he bled to death. Yeah. Memory. He still had a Kodacolor of Tuy. A cigarette slanted down from his lips—tough guy!—at the same angle as his 16.

Two days later, at noon, what remained of Third Squad stood on top of Núi Khê, where their mission was to pull security for a mortar crew. Patches of dwarf green vegetation and wind-bent tall grass clung to the red-brown earth. Around, boulders and blown-up fragments of boulders funneled the gusts that dried their sweat and flung big bugs—what were they?—into their faces. A battle had flared up there, years ago. If Tuy had lived to go with them, he’d have warned them about ghosts. They didn’t see the ghosts, nor did they talk about the ambush.

Above the second stream, they stopped for lunch.

“Just a snack,” he said. “We can eat more at Núi Khê.”

A wrinkle at the corner of her mouth—her only sign of age—deepened and curled downward.

“Why did we buy everything at the market? Why is she carrying it for us? Don’t you want a picnic?” Her husband was maddening. Her old Saigon boyfriend would have understood.

“You never talked about a picnic. We’re trying to get to Núi Khê. It’s late—past noon. Look at the sun.”

She turned away to arrange the food with Duyên. Then she bent to roll down her capris, darkened at the hem from the streams. She squealed at the sight of tiny dark sinuous twigs fastened to her calves. Châu snatched the leeches before Chris could explain the GI drill, using cigarettes or insect repellent or antiseptic, to make them fall off without leaving their heads inside. Never in her girlhood, she complained, had leeches infested this area. She blamed the smelly buffaloes, whose dung mounds had punctuated the track until it got steeper, for attracting the bloodsuckers. Grinning, Châu and Duyên looked at her—this Việt Kiều, this Vietnamese-American whose identity had changed because she’d married him.

Above damp earth they sat down on rocks to eat. They shared their meal with a teenager who showed up with a bulging rice sack of plants slung across his motorbike. Linh brightened. Her dad, she said, sometimes lugged home a pannier of lá lốt, bright green betel leaf, from a spot called Strawberry Stream where tasty, small red fruits grew on bushes. There, at fifteen, she’d borne Kỳ to safety after he broke his leg and almost died like his own father, who’d slipped in a knife-and-tusk duel with a large boar. The forest was full of ways to die—more than he’d ever guessed as a GI.

His excitement drained as Linh gossiped with her cousin and insisted on being a good wife, serving him and unpeeling more rambutans than he could eat. The sun tilted toward one o’clock. He glanced at Duyên, munching a baby banana. For her and Châu and even Linh, his quest was inscrutable—a rich American’s whim. Now that his breathing was easy, his belly full, he felt his urgency uncoiling into acceptance of the distance of geography and time, of fate. Then Linh jumped up. She helped Duyên pack.

“We go,” she said.

In far blue haze, the top of the whale’s head disappeared. Then, in gaps between treetops, it reappeared. There was this view—and there was his remembered view from the summit, fanning from olive foothills near Huế to mossy mountains. They’d spent the daytime there cleaning weapons, playing spades and hearts, joking about Army’s million-dollar wound and wondering, once, how the fuck the battalion would get Tuy’s body to his parents who probably lived in some VC hamlet, and why would the lifers care anyway?

The junction of the Five Slopes came into view after a one-hour climb. The afternoon now was beautiful, maybe seventy-five degrees, the muddy ruts thickening. Above them rose unbroken forest—Linh’s lovely, dangerous spirit. Only a jade ridgeline and a valley separated them from Núi Khê’s hump, sky-framed above its unseen base. Blood pumped. Yes! They could do it.

“Tell Châu to go up with me. At the top we can see how to go.”

“No way. Too far.”

“I’m climbing up now. I’ll be back in fifteen, maybe twenty minutes.”

“I forbid you!”

He turned to leave. She grabbed his arm and spoke to her cousin.

Undismayed, Châu unsheathed his machete. The two of them bushwhacked uphill. Châu, like Tuy, was a game point man. After five minutes Linh began calling. Undergrowth attenuated her summonses to the faintness of far-off bird cries. If only they could intersect a trail and march fast to the ridge’s spine. Finally, Châu halted at a sun-splashed thicket barred with slanting sections of fallen bamboo. Beyond, more bush. Back when the forest was the Rocket Belt, a single rainy season could make following a once-familiar path an exercise in reading light and vegetation patterns. What was he expecting to find now?

Châu turned with a querying half smile. Disappointment seeped through him like a transfusion of cool rainwater. He hauled himself up onto a boulder and snapped a last picture through trees of the mirage-like, green-fringed peak. Then he shrugged, grinned at Châu and led downhill, ready to quell Linh’s anger.

* * *

That evening the narrow, tourist-streaming streets of downtown Huế felt like civilization. The war was ages ago. But, as they strolled out of the hotel past its turquoise spirit house, showered and eager to talk over their day at La Carambole, flames twirled in dusk at the foot of the driveway. A short metal cylinder contained them. A youngish man wearing sandals and dark cheap clothes, befitting the son or grandson of a soldier who’d chosen the wrong side during the American War, hunkered and stirred the fire. They skirted the embers of two more fires. A breeze tickled their nostrils with smoke and cinnamon incense. A woman swept away ashes, blackened fruits, scraps of blue paper, and fake green dollars. It was the mid-month Full Moon Festival—time to call wandering souls, Linh said, to comfort and make amends to them. They were everywhere, these unlucky spirits who’d suffered chết đường, death away from home. Good! Good, he thought, that people were commemorating them. Alpha Company should have done that for Tuy. They should even have built a makeshift shrine of wood and stones for that dead ambusher. Better that than leaving his body in the stream where, months later, a lieutenant from Delta Company bundled his skull into a sandbag as a souvenir.

She remembered her dad. He’d died at fifty-seven of something in the brain, a broken blood vessel, which doctors at Huế’s Central Hospital couldn’t fix. He opened his eyes, cried to Heaven “Trời ơi!” and died. Tomorrow they’d have lunch with some hospital doctors, friends of Tôn with whom he’d trained, at the open-air Festival Restaurant between Lê Lợi Street and the Perfume River. Her parents had taken everything but food away from the family so her older brother could become a physician. Now, always a businessman at heart, with his sharp suits and his rumbling, persuasive voice, he needed investors in his one-man vitamin company. For prestige, he wanted her to bring her American husband.

At La Carambole they felt happy, tolerant of the innocent, feasting tourists. Her favorite hometown dish, bún bò Huế, beef noodle soup, didn’t equal her mom’s, but the scent rising from the orange-beaded lagoon of vegetables and meat chased away the raw smell of the forest. He ate a big serving to please her. She sipped his Huda beer, unthinking, though she disliked beer.

After dinner they strolled in dark, fading warmth to the river, near a fairy-lighted dragon boat landing.

“You still think Huế is sad?”

“Of course. But not now.”

“Good day, huh?”

“Yes. But maybe you’re sad because we missed the mountain.”

“Nope.”

He hugged her. He gazed over her head at the silver moon shimmering, deceptive, on the misty river. She bent his face down to kiss him.

Tomorrow, after listening to Tôn and the doctors debate investments, markets, profits under the banyans and fruit-laden salt trees, they would slip back into the onrushing current of their marriage. They turned from the river and walked through dim-thronged streets to the Ideal Hotel. Already the forest and the blue-hazed hump of Núi Khê were floating, behind them, into the mist.

JIM FAIRWELL

Jim Fairhall, a New Rochelle High School graduate, teaches modern literature and environmental studies at DePaul University in Chicago. His publications include award-winning works of scholarship, fiction, creative nonfiction, and poetry. He is completing a story cycle called Perfume River; four of the stories have won national awards.