The Best of Lucius Shepard (59 page)

“You
must learn everything possible about your father and his associates,” he went
on. “Thus you will uncover his weaknesses and define his strengths. But first
and foremost, you must continue to live. The man you become will determine how
best to use the knowledge you have gained, and you mustn’t allow the pursuit of
your studies to rise to the level of obsession, or else his judgment will be
clouded. Of course, this is easier to do in theory than in practice. But if you
set about it in a measured way, you will succeed.”

I
asked how I should go about seeking the necessary information, and he gestured
with his pen at another cabinet, one with a glass front containing scrapbooks
and bundles of computer paper; beneath it, a marmalade cat was asleep atop a
broken radio, which–along with framed photographs of his wife, daughter, and
grandson, all killed, he’d told me, in an airline accident years before–rested
on a chest of drawers.

“Start
there,” he said. “When you are done with those, my friends in the government
will provide us with your father’s financial records and other materials.”

I
took a cautious step toward the cabinet–stacks of magazines and newspapers and
file boxes made the floor of the trailer difficult to negotiate–but Vang held
up a hand to restrain me. “First,” he said, “you must live. We will put aside a
few hours each day for you to study, but before all else you are a member of my
troupe. Do your chores. Afterward we will sit down together and make a
schedule.”

On
the desk, in addition to his computer, were a cup of coffee topped with a
mixture of sugar and egg, and a plastic dish bearing several slices of melon.
He offered me a slice and sat with his hands steepled on his stomach, watching
me eat. “Would you like time alone to honor your mother?” he asked. “I suppose
we can manage without you for a morning.”

“Not
now,” I told him. “Later, though . . .”

I
finished the melon, laid the rind on his plate, and turned to the door, but he called
me back.

“Philip,”
he said, “I cannot remedy the past, but I can assure you to a degree as to the
future. I have made you my heir. One day the circus will be yours. Everything I
own will be yours.”

I
peered at him, not quite certain that he meant what he said, even though his
words had been plain.

“It
may not seem a grand gift,” he said. “But perhaps you will discover that it is
more than it appears.”

I
thanked him effusively, but he grimaced and waved me to silence–he was not comfortable
with displays of affection. Once again he told me to see to my chores.

“Attend
to the major as soon as you’re able,” he said. “He had a difficult night. I
know he would be grateful for your company.”

Radiant
Green Star was not a circus in the tradition of the spectacular traveling shows
of the previous century. During my tenure, we never had more than eight
performers and only a handful of exhibits, exotics that had been genetically
altered in some fashion: a pair of miniature tigers with hands instead of paws,
a monkey with a vocabulary of thirty-seven words, and the like. The
entertainments we presented were unsophisticated; we could not compete with
those available in Hanoi or Hue or Saigon, or, for that matter, those
accessible in the villages. But the villagers perceived us as a link to a past
they revered, and found in the crude charm of our performances a sop to their
nostalgia–it was as if we carried the past with us, and we played to that
illusion, keeping mainly to rural places that appeared on the surface to be
part of another century. Even when the opportunity arose, Vang refused to play
anywhere near large population centers because–he said–of the exorbitant bribes
and licensing fees demanded by officials in such areas. Thus for the first
eighteen years of my life, I did not venture into a city, and I came to know my
country much as a tourist might, driving ceaselessly through it, isolated
within the troupe. We traversed the north and central portions of Viet Nam in
three battered methane-powered trucks, one of which towed Vang’s trailer, and
erected our tents in pastures and school yards and soccer fields, rarely
staying anywhere longer than a few nights. On occasion, to accommodate a
private celebration sponsored by a wealthy family, we would join forces with
another troupe; but Vang was reluctant to participate in such events, because
being surrounded by so many people caused our featured attraction to become
agitated, thus imperiling his fragile health.

Even
today the major remains a mystery to me. I have no idea if he was who he
claimed to be; nor, I think, did
he
know–his statements concerning
identity were usually vague and muddled, and the only point about which he was
firm was that he had been orphaned as a young boy, raised by an uncle and aunt,
and, being unmarried, was the last of his line. Further, it’s unclear whether
his claims were the product of actual memory, delusion, or implantation. For
the benefit of our audiences, we let them stand as truth, and billed him as
Major Martin Boyette, the last surviving POW of the American War, now well over
a hundred years old and horribly disfigured, both conditions the result of
experiments in genetic manipulation by means of viruses–this the opinion of a
Hanoi physician who treated the major during a bout of illness. Since such
unregulated experiments were performed with immoderate frequency throughout
Southeast Asia after the turn of the century, it was not an unreasonable
conclusion. Major Boyette himself had no recollection of the process that had
rendered him so monstrous and–if one were to believe him–so long-lived.

We
were camped that day near the village of Cam Lo, and the tent where the major
was quartered had been set up at the edge of the jungle. He liked the jungle,
liked its noise and shadow, the sense of enclosure it provided–he dreaded the
prospect of being out in the open, so much so that whenever we escorted him to
the main tent, we would walk with him, holding umbrellas to prevent him from
seeing the sky and to shield him from the sight of god and man. But once inside
the main tent, as if the formal structure of a performance neutralized his
aversion to space and scrutiny, he showed himself pridefully, walking close to
the bleachers, causing children to shy away and women to cover their eyes. His
skin hung from his flesh in voluminous black folds (he was African-American),
and when he raised his arms, the folds beneath them spread like the wings of a
bat; his face, half-hidden by a layering of what appeared to be leather shawls,
was the sort of uncanny face one might see emerging from a whorled pattern of
bark, roughly human in form, yet animated by a force that seems hotter than the
human soul, less self-aware. Bits of phosphorescence drifted in the darks of
his eyes. His only clothing was a ragged gray shift, and he hobbled along with
the aid of a staff cut from a sapling papaya–he might have been a prophet
escaped after a term in hell, charred and magical and full of doom. But when he
began to speak, relating stories from the American War, stories of ill-fated
Viet Cong heroes and the supernatural forces whose aid they enlisted, all told
in a deep rasping voice, his air of suffering and menace evaporated, and his
ugliness became an intrinsic article of his power, as though he were a poet who
had sacrificed superficial glamour for the ability to express more eloquently
the beauty within. The audiences were won over, their alarm transformed to
delight, and they saluted him with enthusiastic applause . . . but they never
saw him as I did that morning: a decrepit hulk given to senile maundering and
moments of bright terror when startled by a sound from outside the tent.
Sitting in his own filth, too weak or too uncaring to move.

When
I entered the tent, screwing up my face against the stench, he tucked his head
into his shoulder and tried to shroud himself in the fetid folds of his skin. I
talked softly, gentling him as I might a frightened animal, in order to
persuade him to stand. Once he had heaved up to his feet, I bathed him,
sloshing buckets of water over his convulsed surfaces; when at length I was
satisfied that I’d done my best, I hauled in freshly cut boughs and made him a
clean place to sit. Unsteadily, he lowered himself onto the boughs and started
to eat from the bowl of rice and vegetables I had brought for his breakfast,
using his fingers to mold bits of food into a ball and inserting it deep into
his mouth–he often had difficulty swallowing.

“Is
it good?” I asked. He made a growly noise of affirmation. In the half-dark, I
could see the odd points of brilliance in his eyes.

I
hated taking care of the major (this may have been the reason Vang put me in
charge of him). His physical state repelled me, and though the American War had
long since ceased to be a burning issue, I resented his purported historical
reality–being half American, half Vietnamese, I felt doubly afflicted by the
era he represented. But that morning, perhaps because my mother’s message had
inoculated me against my usual prejudices, he fascinated me. It was like
watching a mythological creature feed, a chimera or a manticore, and I thought
I perceived in him the soul of the inspired storyteller, the luminous half-inch
of being that still burned behind the corroded ruin of his face.

“Do
you know who I am?” I asked.

He
swallowed and gazed at me with those haunted foxfire eyes. I repeated the
question.

“Philip,”
he said tonelessly, giving equal value to both syllables, as if the name were a
word he’d been taught but did not understand.

I
wondered if he was–as Vang surmised–an ordinary man transformed into a monster,
pumped full of glorious tales and false memories, all as a punishment for some
unguessable crime or merely on a cruel whim. Or might he actually
be
who
he claimed? A freak of history, a messenger from another time whose stories
contained some core truth, just as the biochip had contained my mother’s truth?
All I knew for certain was that Vang had bought him from another circus, and
that his previous owner had found him living in the jungle in the province of
Quan Tri, kept alive by the charity of people from a nearby village who
considered him the manifestation of a spirit.

Once
he had finished his rice, I asked him to tell me about the war, and he launched
into one of his mystical tales; but I stopped him, saying, “Tell me about the
real war. The war you fought in.”

He
fell silent, and when at last he spoke, it was not in the resonant tones with which
he entertained our audiences, but in an effortful whisper.

“We
came to the firebase in . . . company strength. Tenth of May. Nineteen
sixty-seven. The engineers had just finished construction and . . . and . . .
there was still . . .” He paused to catch his breath. “The base was near the
Laotian border. Overlooking a defoliated rubber plantation. Nothing but bare
red earth in front of us . . . and wire. But at our rear . . . the jungle . . .
it was too close. They brought in artillery to clear it. Lowered the batteries
to full declension. The trees all toppled in the same direction . . . as if
they’d been pushed down by the sweep . . . of an invisible hand.”

His
delivery, though still labored, grew less halting, and he made feeble gestures
to illustrate the tale, movements that produced a faint slithering as folds of
his skin rubbed together; the flickerings in his pupils grew more and more
pronounced, and I half-believed his eyes were openings onto a battlefield at
night, a place removed from us by miles and time.

“Because
of the red dirt, the base was designated Firebase Ruby. But the dirt wasn’t the
color of rubies, it was the red of drying blood. For months we held the
position with only token resistance. We’d expected serious opposition, and it
was strange to sit there day after day with nothing to do except send out
routine patrols. I tried to maintain discipline, but it was an impossible task.
Everyone malingered. Drug use was rampant. If I’d gone by the book I could have
brought charges against every man on the base. But what was the point? War was
not truly being waged. We were engaged in a holding action. Policy was either
directionless or misguided. And so I satisfied myself by maintaining a
semblance of discipline as the summer heat and the monsoon melted away the
men’s resolve.

“October
came, the rains slackened. There was no hint of increased enemy activity, but I
had a feeling something big was on the horizon. I spoke to my battalion
commander. He felt the same way. I was told we had intelligence suggesting that
the enemy planned a fall and winter campaign building up to Tet. But no one
took it seriously. I don’t think I took it seriously myself. I was a
professional soldier who’d been sitting idle for six months, and I was spoiling
for a fight. I was so eager for engagement I failed to exercise good judgment.
I ignored the signs, I . . . I refused . . . I . . .”