The Snowfly (10 page)

“Have a tonic, mate?”

I moved to their table. A waiter brought a huge bottle of Foster's.

“Name's Dickie Goodwin,” the man said. “Wife's Gillian. Tazzies.”

Which I eventually learned meant Tasmanians.

Dickie Goodwin was fifty-seven, Gillian thirty-six. His fifth marriage, her second. His vocation he described as “a bitta,” meaning he had a lot of irons in various commercial fires, including a coffee plantation in South Vietnam, near the resort town of Da Lat. Thus far, he explained, his operation was producing without interruption through increased bribes, which he called “grease to the monkeys.”

“Won't last,” he added. “Northies are mobbing up all over. First Law of Business, mate: You don't accumulate inventory if there's no campaign in the offing.”

“How do you know?” The brass in Saigon were paranoid about an enemy thrust out of their ubiquitous sanctuaries in Laos and Cambodia. There had been rumors of a major enemy offensive for nearly a year, but there had never been confirmation from intelligence, military or otherwise.

“Simple, mate. I pay and they say. If they won't, I don't. Information is always available at a price, even from Reds. I'd think a journo would know that. Your shout, Yank.”

It was my turn to buy a round. This led to another and another. The Tazzies were a gregarious pair with an astonishing capacity for alcohol.

I awoke the next morning with a searing headache and a very naked Gillian Goodwin snoring lightly in my ear. Our clothes were nowhere to be seen. We were on a huge cushion on a wooden-plank verandah over green water. I watched a dark, waterlogged rat paddling frantically below us.

I nudged Gillian.

“Again?” she mumbled.

“Gillian, where's your husband? We need our clothes.”

“Dickie's in his bedroom, I should think,” she said sleepily. She had thick brown hair and high cheekbones. Her smile made long sliver-moon dimples appear. “Not to worry, mate. Dickie's got a soft pommel. He doesn't mind sharing a bit.”

I slid off the cushion and looked around. “Our clothes?”

“Later, love. Shall we celebrate the glorious sunrise?”

There were boats passing by. “Where are we?”

“The Klong House,” she said. “Probably. I don't really remember. Did we have loads of fun before we got here?”

She wasn't the only one with a blank memory.

She patted a pillow. “Don't be paranoid, love. It's the boy's duty to do what his hostess wants.”

Eventually we showered and dressed and joined Dickie Goodwin for a late brunch at a glass-topped table in a lush garden on top of the house. Frangipani perfumed the air just enough to overpower the river's bouquet of garbage, oil, gasoline, and human waste.

“You two don't look so crook,” Dickie said. “Have a good go, did you, old girl?”

“Quite,” Gillian said enthusiastically. “Legendary Yankee stamina.”

“Good show,” Dickie said, slapping the table mirthfully. “Bit out of practice, Gil?”

“Fair dinkum,” she said, feigning discomfort. “Feel absolutely deflowered.”

A servant brought champagne in long-stemmed crystal flutes.

“What do you write, mate?” Dickie Goodwin asked me.

“War correspondent.”

“Slog around in the bush with the lads, do you?”

“Of course he does, Dickie. I can tell a bush slogger.”

I nodded.

“Been in the shit, have you?”

“Some.”

“Good-on-you, mate. Our own journos scribble from Bangkok. They are not a credit to their bloody race, I should think.”

I had never thought of journalists as a race, but I had to concede he might be on to something. An increasing number of people certainly thought of us as a lower order, the so-called fourth estate.

War, like politics, makes strange bedfellows. Literally and figuratively. Having superficially gotten past the discomfort of the peculiar arrangement with the Goodwins, I found Dickie and Gillian to be interesting and charming companions.

A week after I left Bangkok Gillian unexpectedly showed up at my place in Saigon, on
pho x con nhen cay go
—the “Street of Spider Trees.” To find the gate into my garden, you had to negotiate a long, narrow, unlit alley. The seven-foot-high stone walls were topped with jagged shards of broken bottles and tight-packed coils of gleaming razor wire; the inner wall was bolstered by a double layer of sandbags. The garden itself was hard-packed sand. Somehow Gillian had found the place, which was not easy, even when you knew the way. She was sitting at the garden table under a single naked lightbulb when I dragged in around midnight. She wore a short skirt and had her legs crossed. She was restlessly jiggling a leg as clouds of insects fluttered around the lightbulb and crickets chirped incessantly.

“Bloody crickets,” she said by way of a greeting. “Worse than our cockatoos.”

“Gillian?” I was shocked to see her.

“I'm dreadfully parched,” she said. “Had a thought you might be on the roger tonight with some libidinous doughnut dolly.”

“Just working,” I said.

“All work and no play,” she countered, teasingly.

“Pays my bar bill,” I said.

She smiled approvingly and patted my behind. “I adore common sense. One tends to admire most what one doesn't possess, d'ya think?”

“It's as workable a theory as any. What're you doing here?”

She beamed her infectious and mischievious smile. “Dickie said, ‘Old girl, you ought to pop over to the Trout, harvest what you can, and kiss the old spread good-bye.' Dickie says the Red invasion's imminent, Bowie.”

The Trout? I wasn't sure what she was talking about. It was often like this with her. “And he sent
you?
”

“Dickie's not the adventurous sort nowadays but I do so adore the Trout. Some boys have no sense of romance. To Dickie, the place is purely a bloody asset.”

“The Trout?” She had said this twice.

“Yes, dear. The coffee plantation is called the Trout House on the River of Trout, which the Vietnamese call
song ca qua.
Their word for ‘trout' is the same as their word for ‘eggplant' or some such thing,” she said with a deep laugh. “Such an imprecise language. It's no wonder they've been fighting for centuries,” she added. “The Trout's up in the central highlands, darling. It once belonged to Sir Thomas Oxley, an Englishman raised on the Test. And elsewhere, I should think. Rich bastard. Planted trout, he did. Absolutely pots about them. Must've cost him a bloody fortune, I should think, but fair dinkum, he pulled it off. The spread's not quite a rajah's jewel, but it's splendid and the best trout fishing between here and India. Naturally, I adore it,” she said dramatically.

“Are you telling me there are trout in Vietnam?”

“Ah!” she said gleefully. “Only a devout Brother of the Angle would sound so incredulous. Of
course
there are trout and we can thank Sir Thomas for that! It's quite amazing. Pine trees, cool nights, cold water, four seasons, perfect acidity, and such. The eggs came from stock in Uganda, can you bloody believe it? The Ugandan eggs were from brood stock originally from England but packed into South Africa by Sir John Parker and the Drakensbergers in 1890. From South Africa up to Uganda, and Oxley sent Ugandan ova to Vietnam in the nineteen-twenties. His stubborn English mind was set on propagating trout. Bloody miracle, indeed, but you know the Poms. Right or wrong, when they decide something will be, then it shall come to pass.”

“I've never heard any of this.” I was astonished by the information, but retained a modicum of skepticism. Trout in Vietnam? I thought about the two Marines and their claims of unknown animals in the north. Perhaps war made people's imaginations run amok.

“I'm not the least surprised,” Gillian said. “But it is a matter of public record that the Poms and Krauts put their beloved trout everywhere they could. Our little River of Trout is no doubt the only place on the subcontinent that could sustain them, but sustain it has for a good long while now. And, I must say, our dear fish rise to a dressing as politely as one could ask.”

I remembered Dickie Goodwin mentioning in Bangkok that his rubber plantation was near Da Lat. This was a resort area developed by the French at the turn of the nineteenth century. It was the place where Vietnamese royalty went to escape the heat of the lowlands. It was also rumored to serve as an in-country R&R center for combatants on all sides, and there was said to be tacit agreement by belligerants to leave it alone. So far, all sides had. The only military connection I knew of was that South Vietnam's version of West Point was located in the area.

She stood up, hooked her arm though mine, and made a pooch-face. “This geography conversation is becoming exceedingly boring, Bowie. Aren't you glad to see me? Let's have a sexploration of Gillian's geography, shall we? I've come a long way in bloody awful heat and a nice fuck would settle me nicely. Yes?”

“Does Dickie know you're here?”

“Not technically,” she said sheepishly. “Here, yes. With you, no. He said to check the spread and the spread's in Vietnam. You're also in Vietnam, which makes for a wonderful coincidence, yes?”

The whole thing seemed ludicrous, but ludicrous was often the norm in Vietnam. We started undressing on the way to my bedroom.

After making love frantically, we sat on my roof and smoked in the middle of the night. Saigon was never silent. Trucks with bad brakes wheezed through the streets. Horns honked. Military and civilian police sirens wailed plaintively. Motorcycles and Vespa scooters without mufflers roared up and down the streets, howling like wild animals. Formations of helicopters pounded overhead. The afterburners of departing F4 Phantoms rumbled in the distance as attack formations left Ton Son Nhut, the airfield that served military and civil aviation in Saigon. We heard the chuk-chuk of artillery batteries putting rounds out from the edges of the city—rounds leaving, not arriving, a good sign. The prevailing scent was tropical, all things rotting.

“Like to pop over to the Trout for a look?” Gillian asked.

“You bet. When do we go and how do we get there?” Getting around in the country was not easy unless you were connected to the military.

She rested her head on my chest and chewed my left nipple. “Leave the details to Gillian, darling.”

She had a driver deliver us to Ton Son Nhut early the next day. We were dropped at an unmarked Huey piloted by an Australian with a waxed handlebar mustache. He was busy with checklists and not introduced. There were two blond door gunners wearing Bermuda shorts, distressed green-and-yellow aviation helmets, and flak vests. Somebody had painted surf or die on the backs of the vests. The gunners were suspended from umbilicals that let them swing 180 degrees to get a good look at the ground below. Fortunately, there was no shooting en route. We flew more or less northeasterly out of the city, the prevailing terrain slowly gathering altitude as we got farther north. Eventually we began to pass over a series of rugged valleys, most with silvery ribbons of streams gleaming deep at the bottoms of them. The area was dotted with many small reflective lakes. About an hour into our journey the sun went away and we moved into islands of rain clouds with tattered bottoms and continued dodging our way north in limited visibility. This was an area I had never visited; there was very little action here.

The scenery below was attractive, but I couldn't see it that well through the rain and in any event, scenery no longer held any allure for me. At the heart of rich green beauty below was the ugliest of realities.

The Goodwin “spread” amounted to twenty thousand acres on terraced ground ringing the Blue Flower Mountains. The house was a sprawling one-story affair with stucco walls painted a soothing turquoise with pale yellow shutters and awnings. The roof tiles were also yellow with some orange ones here and there. A lawn was manicured down to the river. There were wide stone paths along both banks. The river itself was wide, perhaps one hundred yards by the house, and gently riffled with vegetation undulating in the flow. Behind the house and across the river a mountain rose precipitously into mist. Above me I saw enormous outcrops of white and gray rock. The sides of the hills were packed with fragrant straight-trunked pine trees and the scene about as peaceful as I had seen in the war-torn country. A convoy of civilian trucks was gathered around the main house and several outbuildings, and dozens of Vietnamese men and women were loading them.

I walked down to the river and watched several fish feeding among the riffles. Gillian was squatting Asian style on the lawn, engaged in an animated conversation with an old woman with an ancient double-barreled shotgun slung over her back. When the talking was done, Gillian joined me. The mist was thickening into a cool drizzle and I was cold, a first for Vietnam.

“You speak the language?” I asked her.

“Just pidgin really, a little Viet, a little French, a little mountain lingo. They're Montagnards. Some of the families have been with the Trout since Oxley's time. They're hardworking and loyal. That's Granny Rat,” Gillian said with a nod toward the woman she had been talking to. “She's a tough old girl. The 'Yards love fresh rat and she's the main provider for her tribe, which has a village up the mountain. Her shotgun shells are packed with rice, not shot. Doesn't shred the meat so bad,” Gillian said with a grin. “Granny says that the North Vietnamese are gathered about eight kilometers up the valley. Fourteen tanks and several hundred men. Apparently they've been up there several days and seem to be waiting for something; Dickie was right, of course, but the 'Yards are taking care to remove things and we don't need to concern ourselves with such matters at the moment. It's just as well because we have our own things to do. Are you ready to cast feather bits on Asian waters?”