“Shit,” laughed Walls. “If he smart, he know. If he so smart, he got all you down here sucking your thumbs, he going to know. He going to be waiting. Like they was back in his pretty lady’s country. Tunnel going to be hot, let me tell you.”
That was part of it, Dick thought. The tunnel rats always knew somebody was awaiting them.
“Are you hungry? Would you care to eat? You should rest, you’ll be going in soon. And I’d like you to take people along. You shouldn’t be alone in the tunnels.”
“In the tunnel,” said Walls, “you always alone. But get me a skinny man who don’t get too close and listen to orders.”
Dick was a bit undone by Walls’s directness, and on this next point he proceeded with unusual caution, aware he’d entered delicate territory. “A black man, Mr. Walls? Would you feel more comfortable with another black man?” Several of the Delta troopers were black.
Walls laughed his hard laugh again. “It don’t matter,” he said. “In the hole, everybody’s a nigger.”
* * *
Phuong sat as if in a trance. She was not quite healthy, and had never been, since the tunnels. Her French psychiatrist had diagnosed her as a fifth-level schizophrenic, as if so many jolts in the tunnels, the loss of so many, the experience of so much horror, had finally, almost mercifully, broken the moorings of her mind, and like a small boat it drifted this way and that just off shore. She did not like bright lights, crowds, or to talk much about herself. She liked children, flowers, the out-of-doors, children especially. She spoke to her daughter at night, when she was alone, carrying her in a place near her heart. She remembered watching her daughter dissolve in a blossom of napalm; the flames had burned her eyebrows and the roar of the explosions had almost deafened her. She had tried to run into the fire, but someone had stopped her.
So now she sat in the barn with the black man whom she understood to be in some queer way her equivalent and at the same time tried to force herself to demonstrate out of politeness interest in the K ration they had put with apologies before her. It was getting close to time now, she could tell because all the men were grave and drawn and they had at last stopped playing with their weapons; she recognized the symptoms: battle was near. She had been there before.
In the old days, her revolutionary fervor, her nationalism, had sustained her. She believed in her country and in freedom from the hated white men; it was worth dying for and worth killing for. But the killing had finally taken its toll: she was thirteen when she went underground and twenty-three when she came out and had killed over one hundred men, most of them with an M-1 carbine but more than a few with a knife. Her skill was stealth and patience: she could lie in the dark forever, almost still as death. Yet she felt so tired and now she was going back. To stop bombs from burning more children. To stop the world from becoming all fire and darkness everywhere.
A man came before her.
“Chao chi” he said, using the familiar, as in, Hello, Sister Phuong.
“Chao anh,” she replied, out of politeness, feeling awkward in calling him brother.
“My name is Teagarden.”
The American names were so hard.
“Dee-gar-dahn,” she tried. It hurt her mouth.
“Call me brother. I will be your brother in the tunnel. They asked me to go with you, which is why I call you sister.”
She asked her daughter, who still lived in her heart, what do you think of this man?
He seems decent, her daughter said from her heart. But is he strong, Mother? In the tunnel, decency doesn’t count, only strength.
“Have you ever been in a tunnel, brother?” she asked.
“No,” he admitted.
“Why are you here? Did you volunteer for this?”
“Not exactly,” he admitted. “They asked me because of the language, sister.”
He is not pleased about it, her daughter told her from her heart. Not good. In the tunnel, faith is important.
Her frank stare encouraged him to confession.
“To be honest, Sister Phuong, I’m scared to death,” he said. “I hate the dark, I hate close, dirty places. But they asked me, and in our unit it isn’t done to refuse an assignment.”
“Can you control your fear?”
“I was in your country for over three years,” he said. “I was scared every day and in battle every other day. I learned to control my fear there.”
Tell him that underground is different, her daughter said.
“Underground is different,” she said. “You’ll see, it’s different. Control is everything. Iron will, resolve.”
“I’ll try,” he said. He was a healthy, leathery-looking man, about forty.
“In the dark, everybody is scared. The survivor is the man of control.”
“I can only try,” said Dee-gar-dahn.
“Do you have a family, brother?”
“Yes. Three boys. Great boys. The big one’s a hero on a sports team. The other two, well, it’s too soon to tell.”
She could see his eyes warm at the mention.
See, Mother, he has children. He has love in his heart. He is not alone.
“You are a lucky man, brother,” she said, “and I will let you come with me into the tunnel. We will stop the demons from setti