The Time in Between (11 page)

They buried the soldier in a shallow grave near the fastflowing river. He wore boots, possibly stolen from some poor victim. These they shared, switching left for right and so on as they walked. Two days later, the blind boy announced that he could not walk further. Kiet said that he would carry him. He sat down, pulled the boot off the blind boy’s left foot, and put it on his own. Then, he stood and picked up the boy. It was like hefting a sack of chaff. There was no weight. As Kiet walked he talked to the blind boy. He said that soon they would find someone to feed them. They would eat and drink and they would sleep under a roof and when they had regained their strength they would carry on. He told the blind boy that he knew a girl in Hanoi and that he loved the girl very much and that he had promised her he would return.

The blind boy answered that there were many men who had promised the same thing but they were dead and would not return.

Kiet said that he would return. He would not die.

He carried the blind boy for three days until, on the evening of the third day, the boy died. He must have died on Kiet’s back because, when they stopped for the night and Kiet rolled the boy off his shoulders onto the ground, there was simply a loosening of the body and a snapping back of the head.

Kiet stood and looked down at the boy. He did not need to test for breath or pulse. He knew. He slept that night beside the boy, waking often to see if perhaps the boy had not been dead at all but only sleeping. In the morning he picked up the body and continued north. He walked alongside the rail tracks, waiting for a train. When one finally passed it did not slow down and he saw that the cars were full and that some men were sitting on top of the cars. He waved with one hand and even dropped the boy and chased after the train, but it eventually disappeared and he returned to retrieve the boy’s body. He was weak and had to rest often, sitting beside the tracks with the boy at his feet. There was a sweet smell rising from the boy, and as he walked, the boy’s arms and legs draped over his shoulders, Kiet knew that the boy was decaying and that soon he would have to bury him.

He did this one evening in Quang Binh Province. Near a small river he set the boy down and piled rocks on top of him. He worked through the night, pausing to sleep and then waking to seek out more stones. By morning the cairn was complete. He left the boy and retraced his path to the rail line and sat down to wait. A woman passed by and gave him a piece of bread. He chewed slowly and felt the ache of his jaw and stomach. He saw the bones in his hands and arms and legs. The boots he wore were too large, and the legs and ankles that protruded from them were the limbs of a small bird.

He slept. And in his sleep he saw the blind boy and the pig and the beautiful girl with the small breasts and the dead soldier’s mouth moving, commanding the boy to shoot, and he dreamed of the girl to whom he was returning and he woke from his dreams believing that he had crossed over and that all was well.

THE SUN THAT FELL ONTO CHARLES’S LAP WAS WARM. IT WAS early morning. There was no fire in the stove and so the cold of the night had crept into the house and touched at his feet and hands and seeped up under his shirt and the sun was a blessing. He stood and laid the book down. Looked out the window at his yard, the pickup, the stack-log shed, the one goat grazing beside it.

He would not have been able to explain, to anyone who asked, why this particular story had moved him, but he felt kinship with something. Perhaps it was Kiet returning from the war only to find he was alone, or the disappointment in the betrayal of a lover, or the shedding of innocent blood, though in Kiet’s case it seemed less random and more necessary. The fact was Kiet was a creation, a ghost wandering north toward Hanoi. Charles was intrigued by the author of the novel, by his brooding photograph and the sadness that seemed to hover behind or above him. Charles set the kettle on the stove and turned the element to high. He thought about his children. He thought how lives could slip away, undiscovered. He saw himself as a liar, though he didn’t know that the truth would necessarily help anyone.

All through that day and the next he worked around the yard and pondered different possibilities. Then, on Friday, when the sun was trying to appear but not quite managing, he called on Tomas and, for the first time in all the years he had known him, asked if he wanted to go hunting over the weekend. He told Tomas that it was time to build a little trust and there was nothing better for trust than hunting. They were standing in Tomas’s kitchen and Charles was looking at the décor, the cement walls and the metal conduit for the wiring, and he imagined he was in a prison. Tomas grinned and put his arm around Del’s small shoulders. She was twenty-five now and had filled out happily, though sometimes she came back to the caboose for the night to get away from the moodiness of Tomas, who because he was an artist, thought he had the right.

Tomas gave Del a squeeze and said, “I’d like that, Charles.”

They left on a Tuesday morning. Drove up Highway 97 toward Prince George and stayed in a motel with two single beds. At night Charles woke and he heard Tomas breathing deeply, with a slight whistle at the intake. He thought of Del lying beside this man. The evening before, they had eaten dinner at a restaurant in town, and they had talked about Tomas’s art and about luck and about Del. Tomas claimed it was all luck, his success, his meeting Del. “I was invited to a dinner just by chance, and at that dinner I met a girl who happened to like me and I happened to like her and from there love took its own route. It’s funny, but I’m certain that we can’t plan love.” He had been eating asparagus in hollandaise as he spoke, spearing tails and folding them into his mouth, and for some reason Charles pictured the asparagus as intimate parts of his daughter. Then Tomas talked about the gift shop Del was running in the Valley and how they planned to sell some of Tomas’s art down there. It was Del’s idea. “The smaller pieces,” Tomas said. “She figures there’s a market, that I should be selling as well here in Canada as I do in Europe, and who am I to argue with that?”

Charles finished his baked potato and drank the last of his beer and said that he had had his doubts but it was obvious Del was happy and he, Charles, wasn’t a destroyer of happiness.

Tomas said, “There was a time, at the beginning, when you frightened me.” He smiled slightly and eyed Charles. “That day you came to visit me in my shop. You remember?”

“Of course, I remember.” Charles sat back. He said, “She’s still my daughter.”

“But older now.”

Charles didn’t answer. He realized that he still harbored a dislike for this beefy man who not only had money and confidence but seemed to take it for granted that success was his right.

But now, lying beside Tomas and listening to him breathe, Charles was enveloped in a sadness that went beyond his daughter and the man she had chosen. He had hoped, as he always did when he went on hunting trips, that the prospect of stalking a wolf or bear through the bush would carry him away. But more and more, this journey took him into a darker place. It would be after this particular trip, on the following Saturday, that Charles would drive down into Abbotsford and buy another ticket for Hanoi, via Bangkok.

In the morning they drove to see the outrigger, a friend of Charles’s. They set their route and rented an ATV to drive up into the woods. Charles handed Tomas the 300 Winchester and showed him how to load and fire. Wrapping his left hand around the barrel, he said, “This is a semiautomatic hunting rifle. It’s extremely accurate up to seven hundred yards and it’ll kill animals both big and small. Never aim it at anything that you don’t want to shoot.” He looked at Tomas and said, “And it’s got some good recoil. Here.” He patted his shoulder. “So hold on to it.”

They rode several hours that morning and saw quail and an eagle high above, and when they stopped for lunch, a fox crossed in front of them, lifted its nose, skipped sideways, and disappeared. Charles had to point this out to Tomas, who seemed incapable of seeing what was in front of him. Charles said, “Look for the shape of something, not the actual thing. An animal is in its natural habitat and has disguises. The only thing it can’t hide is its shape.”

Toward evening, they saw a wolf just above the tree line. It was cutting across the mountain with an easy lope. Without a word, before Charles could call out, Tomas raised his rifle, sighted, and fired. The wolf went down and got up immediately and continued running toward the tree line, where it disappeared. They rode for a day. Followed the tracks and the blood. Late that evening they came to a small stream into which the tracks disappeared. Charles crossed over and walked one bank while Tomas walked the other, looking for the place where the wolf had exited. The size of its paw prints indicated it was a large animal, bigger than anything Charles had ever seen, but he didn’t tell Tomas this. They walked for a mile and then, finding nothing, turned back.

The next morning, Charles woke early and climbed the trail above the camp. Reaching a point where he could look down on the camp, he sat on a rock and watched the smoke from the fire curl upward. He saw Tomas climb out of the tent, stand, and stretch and look around. Tomas called out, a faint “hello,” and Charles thought, in that moment, that the man was a fool. He sighted the scope of his Browning and laid the crosshair inside Tomas’s left ear. He felt nothing, just a slight breeze on his neck and the smoothness of the stock against his cheek.

Once, out hunting alone a few years earlier, Charles had felt like he was walking point again and he had heard a sharp crack and panicked and dropped and covered his head. When he’d looked up from the mulch of boughs and wet leaves, he saw a pheasant staring at him. It was shaped like a pear; one eye opened and closed sleepily. Charles had laughed, and the pheasant had thumped its wings and exploded upward.

Now, his back against the flat rock, Tomas’s ear in his scope, he was taken back, and he felt the easy power and the fear. He could shoot the man. He wanted, for a small moment, to shoot the man. But he didn’t. He swung his scope and sighted the ATV and the tent and then, further east, he located the trail they had descended the day before. Upwind, just at the edge of the trail, he saw the wolf. At first he thought it might be a grizzly, because of the size and silver fur at the neck, but then it began to limp down toward the camp and Charles recognized the long lope. He watched it approach the camp, sliding west and then east, favoring its right front leg. He imagined that the wolf had found their day-old scent but hadn’t yet caught wind of the camp. Tomas was moving around, laying out a larger fire, cooking.

Charles thought that as soon as the wolf heard Tomas or smelled him, it would retreat. Still, he watched through his scope. About two hundred yards from the camp the wolf stopped and smelled the air. Backed up slightly. Then it swiveled and slid through the brush and disappeared.

When Charles told Tomas about the wolf later, Tomas wanted to know why he hadn’t killed it. “Too far? Was that it?”

“No, I could have shot it,” Charles said. Then he said, “Could have shot you too.”

Tomas looked up. His head turned and one eyelid fluttered and he put a finger up to stop it. “You’re crazy,” he said.

“I didn’t shoot you, though, did I? You’re still sitting here, eating bacon, drinking coffee.”

Tomas didn’t speak.

“That’s what happens,” Charles said. “We make certain decisions and the decision takes on a story and the story has a history of its own and the history becomes fact. Might be warped, but it’s fact. Not a whole lot different than luck.”

For two more days they tracked the big silver-backed wolf. At one point they came across a fresh kill, a young doe that had been hauled down by another animal, and they sighted a few black bear that were too young to shoot.

On the last night of the trip, after a few drinks of whiskey and a quiet evening around the fire, Charles climbed into the tent and fell asleep to the crack of the wood burning and the rustle of Tomas moving about the campsite. During the night he woke from a dream in which he had come face-to-face with the wolf and shot it between the eyes. He lay on his back in the dark, his hands clutching the sleeping bag. In the dream, just before he killed the wolf, it had called out in a language that was mournful and ancient.

WHEN JIMMY POE HAD SENT CHARLES THE BOOK, CHARLES HAD read it over the period of a day and a night, and then, almost immediately, he had begun to read it again. In some ways he was like a man who had lost something of value years ago and had just now become aware of that loss. At the end of the novel Kiet has just come back from the war to a city that is ghostly and alien. He wanders the streets, calling out for a lost lover. He suffers from nightmares and takes solace in sleeping with a woman who lives near him. There is the gray light, the rubble in the streets, the green of a tree growing out of a bomb crater, the scent of a light rain dusting the street.

Charles imagined himself falling out of the sky and landing in that place. He did not see the impracticality of that. And so in October, twenty-eight years after leaving Vietnam as a young soldier, Charles made the return trip, thinking that in some way he might conclude an event in his life that had consumed and shaped him. He was not entirely hopeful; in fact, because of this lack of hope, he cheerfully told his children that he would be traveling as a tourist. There would be no real intent, he said.

In Hanoi, upon first arriving in Vietnam, he found a room in a run-down hotel with uneven stairs and cold-water showers. For the first two days he suffered from jet lag; he slept during the day and at night he looked out through dirty windows to the neighbor’s balcony and beyond into a badly lit room where a man was reading. One evening, late, he left his hotel and walked down to Hoan Kiem Lake. He remembered, in Dang Tho’s novel, that there were scenes in and around this lake. However, the description of the city and the lake was different from what he was seeing now. In the book, the city was harder and dirtier. It had just survived massive bombing, and people wandered around in a waste-land.