A Million Shades of Gray

  That deflated Y’Tin’s elation a little, but he ignored Tomas. When they reunited with their villagers, he wouldn’t ever have to talk to Y’Juen and Tomas again if he didn’t want to. Frankly, he couldn’t wait. And while it was true that they had found the trail in less than a week’s time, Y’Tin knew that they were lucky to have found it without making a circular search. But there would be no convincing Tomas and Y’Juen of that now, so once again he held his tongue. What good was the truth when everybody thought you were wrong? He would have to ask his father about this someday.

  That night he fell asleep and woke up abruptly in the black night. His heart was racing. He listened for a while but heard nothing threatening, so he drifted back to sleep. He woke up again to Tomas’s calls. “Y’Tin. Y’Tin! Get up. Lady’s missing.”

  Y’Tin sat up sleepily. How could an elephant be missing?

  “Y’Tin!”

  Y’Tin’s head cleared, and he saw in the dawn light that Lady was indeed gone. He jumped to his feet and looked in every direction. “Where is she?”

  “I woke up and she wasn’t here,” Tomas said.

  At first Y’Tin wasn’t sure what to do. How could you lose an elephant? But he saw her tracks clearly and started to follow them. She was making her own path through heavy jungle. What could have come over her?

  He told the others he’d be back and jogged after her, easily following her path. An hour later he stepped into a clearing and there she was, grazing peacefully with the herd they’d seen before. She noticed him and hurried over. His relief at finding her instantly gave way to a flare of jealousy. His friends, his elephant—nothing was the same here in the jungle. Still, he would let her graze with them if it made her happy. But now that he was here, she didn’t seem interested in the other elephants. He waited a moment to see what she would do, but she stayed by his side.

  “Lady, nao,” he told her. She docilely followed him, the way she always did. Once they rejoined the others, the boys found a creek and bathed their elephants. Then they began their search again. They were in high spirits, because it was just a matter of time now before they would find who’d made those tracks.

  During a dinner of coconut and cooked bamboo, Y’Tin wondered whether his family was eating meat tonight. He wondered whether Jujubee was thinking of him. And he wondered whether they missed him. Y’Tin was used to missing Lady every day when he went to school. But for the first time in his life, he missed his family. He had to believe they were safe. But he couldn’t shake free that glimpse of a little girl crying by the fence. Even if it wasn’t Jujubee, he realized, it was another small girl who could be dead now … who was dead now.

  That night as he lingered between sleep and wakefulness, he could hear Tomas and Y’Juen talking softly, but he couldn’t make out what they were saying. He opened his eyes and saw Y’Siu sitting expressionless on one of the enormous tree roots that stuck out of the ground. He sat up. Y’Siu was looking at Dok. Then Y’Siu smiled at her; he’d really loved that elephant. A rush of affection for Y’Siu rose up in Y’Tin. Y’Siu was kind of like a child, not a young man. He was uncomplicated, innocent. Next Y’Siu walked over to Dok and laid his head on her trunk. But none of this was possible because it was too dark to see Y’Siu and Dok. Y’Tin lay back and closed his eyes and still saw Y’Siu. Then Y’Siu disappeared, and Y’Tin fell deeply asleep.

  Chapter Ten

  In the morning Lady was gone again. Y’Tin repeatedly hit the back of his head on the hard ground. He could not believe she was gone again. He looked immediately for her trail and began following it. After a couple of hours he heard trumpeting, and there she was—by a small lake this time—happy as she had been yesterday. Usually, elephant herds were made up of related female elephants. But for some reason this herd had accepted Lady.

  And just like yesterday, when she spotted Y’Tin, she hurried over. Y’Tin almost wished he had his hook with him, so he could communicate how displeased he was. By the time he and Lady got back to camp, they would all have lost several hours. But what did several hours matter anyway? If Tomas and Y’Juen were in such a hurry, they could just leave. He was a better tracker than either of them—just let them try to leave him and see what happened next. If they were tracking the wrong people, they might not be able to find the correct trail without Y’Tin.

  He rode Lady back. When they reached camp, Y’Juen and Tomas both avoided his eyes. Tomas made a show of searching through his bag with his lips pressed together, and Y’Juen was preoccupied with stabbing a stick into the ground over and over. Their silence told Y’Tin how angry they were.

  With only half a day of light left, the boys resumed their search. Tomas and Y’Juen still didn’t speak to Y’Tin, and he followed behind them with Lady. It was a long, long day, and Y’Tin was exhausted. But the good thing was that they were putting distance between themselves and the wild herd. And at the same time they were getting closer to whoever had made the trail. Y’Tin felt satisfied that the wild elephants were far behind.

  But after a restless night Y’Tin woke up to Tomas calling, “Lady! Lady!”

  Y’Tin could see Lady a few meters away looking at him from where she stood in the dim dawn light. The jungle was even livelier than usual: Some animal, probably a wild pig, snorted just within hearing; several miniature rabbits scampered across Y’Tin’s line of sight; a wild grouse clucked along the ground; and two ticks were trying to embed themselves into Y’Tin’s right forearm. He picked up the ticks and squashed them between his fingers.

  Y’Juen and Tomas simultaneously hopped to their feet and pounced on the grouse. Y’Juen came up with it. Meat! All thoughts of the trail vanished from Y’Tin’s head. All he could think about now was meat. Then a second thought flashed through his head: Maybe Y’Juen would not want to share the meat with him. He wondered whether such paranoid thoughts were part of the changes a man went through in the jungle.

  Lady wandered over. He climbed aboard her and simply lay on her back. When he’d first taken over handling Lady, he’d often have her muk so he could simply lie on her back. He had even gone hunting with her, lying atop her with his crossbow ready. He always felt safe up there. Even if he’d seen a tiger, he wouldn’t have been scared. No animals’ teeth could penetrate that thick hide. Humans were the only predator of elephants.

  He wondered why Lady was so interested in the wild elephants. Maybe it had to do with her pregnancy. Maybe she knew that nobody in the village had ever been able to keep a baby elephant alive. Maybe she was only trying to do what was best for her calf. This was all guesswork for Y’Tin. All he knew was that he was jealous.

  Tomas started a fire with the lighter Y’Juen had found before they escaped. As Y’Juen cooked the grouse on a spit he’d made, Y’Tin’s mouth watered at the beautiful, wondrous smell of meat. While Y’Juen and Tomas ate, Y’Tin waited for someone to invite him to join them. They had almost finished before Tomas said, “Here, Y’Tin, you’ll need meat to stay strong.” Y’Tin slid off Lady and tore at the meat Tomas offered, chewing the ends off the bones before sucking out the marrow. For a moment he felt sorry for elephants, because they would never know the joys of eating meat.

  Y’Tin turned sharply as something rustled the leaves, followed by the crack of a branch. He hopped to his feet. Two big elephants stood among the trees. They were easily recognizable as belonging to the herd Lady was so interested in. One had a very small tusk on her right side only, and another had no tusks and unusually large tan sections on her hide. Y’Tin caught his breath as Lady approached the elephant with one tusk. They touched trunks and sniffed at each other. Then the wild cow pulled off some bamboo leaves and started feeding. Lady pulled down an entire bamboo. Geng and Dok grew agitated, Dok rocking from her left to her right legs over and over as Y’Juen and Tomas tried to soothe her.

  Y’Tin stared at the grazing elephants. He knew that if he called Lady, she would come. But she seemed so at home.

  Tomas murmured to Geng and Dok in turn. Th
en he turned to Y’Tin, shaking his head. “You need to get Lady under control.” Then he snapped, “Call her back. We need to get rid of these elephants before there’s a fight.”

  “Lady!” called Y’Tin, and she ambled over.

  After that Lady walked alongside Y’Tin, and though she didn’t look back, Y’Tin was sure she knew that the two elephants were shadowing them, just out of sight.

  Y’Tin was becoming depressed. He felt his depression in his aching stomach. According to his father, an ache in your gut was an instinct. But he didn’t know what his instincts were telling him. He knew the two elephants had come for Lady. He didn’t know how to get rid of them. Their tenacity made him depressed. A tiny yellow cimbhi chirped alone in a tree. He felt a sudden urge to squash that cheerful bird.

  But Y’Tin didn’t see or hear the wild elephants again, and several hours later he finally thought it was possible that Lady’s new friends had abandoned her. Still, elephants could communicate over long distances, so for all he knew, Lady was still in contact with the herd.

  When they broke early for camp, Tomas told Y’Tin, “We’re going to go hunting for a while. Why don’t you watch the elephants?”

  Y’Tin had no idea when Tomas and Y’Juen had decided to go hunting. They seemed to have developed a knack for knowing what the other was thinking. Back in the village they’d hardly known each other. Anyway, Y’Tin didn’t care what they thought of him … except he did care.

  Friendship had always come easily to Y’Tin. In fact, a year ago some of the boys in the village had decided to start a group. They called it Boys for Independence. It was based on the men’s FULRO organization. When it came time for the boys to elect a chief, Y’Tin won every vote including his own.

  After Tomas and Y’Juen left, Y’Tin felt relieved. He found a coconut and threw it to the elephants one at a time. They kicked it back—it was one of their favorite pastimes. After a while Dok kicked the coconut and it flew directly at Y’Tin. He fell to the ground to avoid it, but it clipped his forehead. He clasped his head. “Ah, Dok,” he said. “Ahhhh.” For a second there, he thought his skull was cracked. Lady came over to check on him. Then she walked away, so he figured he must be fine. Once, he broke his arm, and she had nudged at him lovingly over and over. Another time, he fell out of a tree, unhurt, and she barely noticed. So he felt she knew whether he was hurt badly or not.

  When Tomas and Y’Juen returned to camp, they hadn’t caught a thing.

  And even though Y’Tin didn’t say a word, Y’Juen snapped at him, “You had the easy job, taking care of the elephants.” Y’Tin didn’t answer, though the obvious answer was, You’re the ones who decided that I should stay alone with the elephants.

  Later, as darkness fell and they lay down to sleep, Y’Tin felt kind of sorry for Y’Juen, because now that they weren’t friends anymore, Y’Tin didn’t share the poncho with him. He must have been cold at night. Y’Tin wondered what they would do when the rainy season came in a couple of months. Hopefully, they would have found the others by then.

  Tomas interrupted his thoughts. “We were thinking we need to move a little faster,” he said. “You need to control your elephant. Next time you’re gone that long, we won’t wait for you.”

  Y’Tin felt very, very weary. When were Tomas and Y’Juen going to stop quibbling with him? “I’ll try to get her under control if I have time,” he answered. That sounded ridiculous even to Y’Tin.

  “If you have time? What are you doing that’s keeping you so busy?” asked Tomas.

  “If I have time,” Y’Tin said stubbornly. In the darkness he could feel Tomas and Y’Juen staring at him. He felt like an idiot, but what could he do? “We” was angry at him, and he hadn’t even done anything.

  Lady fell asleep standing, as usual. Y’Tin couldn’t sleep, and in a couple of hours he heard movement and knew it was Lady, going to meet her wild friends. “Lady,” he said, and the movement stopped. But he knew that as soon as he fell asleep, she would leave. He ached inside. The pain was all over him, not like the pain in his gut he got sometimes. It was strange. He felt almost as if he were levitating, as if the pain were a circle of air pressing against him. Heart, gut, head. Belief, intuition, reasoning. But what did it mean when pain pressed against you from all directions?

  His heart filled with bitterness. He was bitter toward the North Vietnamese, the South Vietnamese, the French, and the Americans. Why must their battles include him? At that moment he hated them all, even the Americans his father had worked with and trusted, even the American nurse—whom Y’Tin had never met—who had chosen Lady’s name before Y’Tin was born. The Americans had never helped the way the Special Forces had promised. And finally, he hated Yang Lie and Ai Die for cursing him by giving him a heart.

  He woke to find Y’Juen and Tomas squatting beside him, staring. “You were shouting in your sleep,” Tomas said. Then he added, “Lady’s gone again. She likes her new friends.”

  “I’m going to let her stay with them,” Y’Tin said, and his words surprised even him. He hadn’t decided until the moment he’d said it.

  “What!” Tomas cried.

  Y’Tin knew he was making the right decision, even though he hadn’t thought about it at all. Still, he worried because he’d made the decision so quickly, unlike how his father made decisions. “It’s the best chance for her calf to live,” he explained to Tomas. “I’ll stay with her for a week, until she gets more used to the herd. That way, I can be sure she can forget me.”

  “Elephants remember everything!” Y’Juen exclaimed. “You told me that.”

  “Are you sure?” Tomas asked. “We’ll have to leave you. We can’t stay here for a week.”

  “I understand,” Y’Tin answered, meeting Tomas’s eyes. “Go on. It’s my fate.”

  Tomas and Y’Juen gathered their things. Y’Tin affectionately slapped Dok’s hide. “No hard feelings for almost killing me with that coconut,” he told her. She looked at him, and he was sure she was laughing. “Behave yourself, Dok.” He and Tomas nodded solemnly for a good-bye. Y’Juen seemed confused, and something in his worried eyes reminded Y’Tin of how Y’Juen had been when they were still friends in the village. Then his eyes grew cold again, and he nodded to Y’Tin in farewell.

  Y’Tin watched until they disappeared into the foliage. He fought against the urge to call out to them. He did not welcome being alone in the jungle. But if it was your fate, it was your fate. He felt some fear of being alone, but he also felt that relief again.

  For the next few days, Y’Tin set up snares for small game and used his crossbow to hunt bigger game. That is, he planned to use his crossbow for bigger game. But he never spotted anything to shoot at. He did catch a rabbit on the second day, but then he remembered he didn’t have a lighter. He’d tried to start a fire from scratch a number of times in the past but had succeeded only once. Now he spent an entire afternoon just preparing the tools: tinder, bow, nest, fireboard, drill. It was hard to find dry enough material. He drilled the fireboard off and on for several hours, then wondered whether it was safe to eat a raw rabbit. He was tempted. Instead, he sullenly ate coconut.

  Three days went by, and Lady didn’t return. Y’Tin knew it was time to leave. But he couldn’t bring himself to do so.

  He stayed another night, lying under the poncho. He thought over details from his life with Lady. He had begged his parents to let him work with elephants the first time he had petted Lady, but it took his father two years to say yes. Lady used to knock him to the ground with her trunk when she first met him. Then there was the time when Mountain was born. Even though Lady still knocked Y’Tin to the ground, and even though she still didn’t listen to him, and even though she still wouldn’t let Y’Tin brush her, she wouldn’t let anyone but Y’Tin come near Mountain. Tomas had needed to chain their elephants elsewhere because of how touchy Lady was about her new calf. Mountain had liked watermelon, so every day Y’Tin had fed him one watermelon from the patch owned by Y’Siu’s p
arents. When Mountain died, Lady lay on her side day after day, refusing to eat. Her ribs started to stick out, and Y’Tin was certain she was going to starve to death.

  Then Y’Tin’s mind returned to the present, and he wondered whether Y’Siu’s parents sensed he was dead. He hoped he wasn’t the one who would have to tell them. Y’Siu was their youngest child, and they doted on him. For instance, when Y’Siu had told them he wanted to be an elephant handler, they had said yes right then and there. They didn’t even have to think about it.

  Y’Tin couldn’t comprehend how everything was so different from what it had been only a few weeks earlier. He ached for his previous life. He didn’t understand how time worked. For instance, did the past matter or not? The future definitely mattered, and of course the present mattered. But the past was gone, never to return. So did it matter? He thought and thought about this, but he couldn’t figure it out.

  Y’Tin finally left. He packed up his gear and headed northwest, in the direction Y’Juen and Tomas had gone. He knew Lady would miss him. She loved him. He’d heard of other people who had found an elephant after many years of separation. So he might find Lady again one day. Or maybe she would find him.

  He could not possibly have felt worse. That was the truth. He did not have a family, he did not have a friend, and he did not have an elephant. On top of that, the rain poured on him.

  That night he fell asleep to the sound of the rain dripping on his poncho. When he woke the next morning, his poncho had fallen off his legs and his shins were so itchy that they felt inflamed. He sat up and examined them. They were so covered with mosquito bites that they appeared diseased. He had never seen anything quite like it. The itchiness was already driving him crazy. It was just one more thing making him miserable. He thought of something Shepard used to say: When it rains, it pours. That meant that if you put ground salt into a container, it would come out really fast. Every grain of salt stood for a detail in your life. And if they all came out really fast, that meant you had a lot going on in your life … or something like that. Actually, who cared what it meant? The Americans had never come to help as Shepard had promised.