Saigon by Anthony Grey

and the clamor of the gongs made his senses swim. Only dimly, when the jar began to return to him more rapidly, did he realize he had been left alone with the mute pholy, and by then the women had begun striking their gongs and drums in a faster rhythm. One of them, her naked upper body glowing like bronze in the flickering firelight, advanced and leaned down beside him to replenish the alcohol jar. Her bare flesh came close enough to his face for him to inhale its pungent female odor and he peered around desperately into the gloom for some sign of his French companion. He thought he heard him chuckle from the shadows once, but his eyes could not penetrate the gloom. 
    When the woman standing over him returned to her place, Joseph rose to his feet and made hi-s way unsteadily towards the back of the hut, calling Paul by name. But no response came from the darkness, and after swaying precariously back and forth for a minute or two, his feet slipped on the twisting bamboo rods and he fell to his knees. He felt unseen hands help him into one of the partitioned stalls and there he stretched out and closed his stinging eyes. His head was swimming and he began to drift into a drunken doze but the sense of a new presence in the stall made him open his eyes again. In the reflected light of the lire he saw the silhouette of an entirely naked Moi female kneeling at his side, and as he watched, her hands began working rhythmically at some unseen task. Was she, he wondered, trying to make another fire in the fashion of the ancients? He heard the tin bracelets jangling on her wrists and from time to time she bent her head close over her lists as though blowing on reluctant embers; but it was some time before he realized that he, too, was naked, and that the hands of the Moi girl were stroking and chafing his own body. 
    He followed all her movements with dreamlike detachment; an all engulfing numbness seemed to have removed every trace of feeling from him. All the time her face remained in shadow, the attitude of her head intent and concentrated; no eyes ever sought his face. Only gradually did he become conscious of a commotion in the darkness beside him. Then to his astonishment he heard the voice of the French boy, grunting like an animal in distress. A moment later he heard his laugh, a low guttural sound released from deep in the throat. 
    “Ça Va, Joseph, heh? Ça marche bien?” The words spoken softly close to the American boy’s ear made him start. He heard what sounded like a stifled cry of pain from a shriller voice; then the commotion beside him resumed once more. 
    Joseph tried to rise, but the female crouching over him leaned closer and shifted her body clumsily onto his. It was then that he sensed her extreme youth; the twin globes of her dark breasts with their sharp, neat points were hard and solid, her skin, a deep indigo in the near-blackness, was velvet-smooth, entirely without hair. To the feral reek of buffalo, horse and fowl and the sour remains of human nourishment was added suddenly a smoky, faintly ammoniac odor of female flesh, entirely new to him. The bracelets on her ankles and wrists danced arid rattled again more urgently and her pungent breath began blowing softly against his face as she spread her thighs and forced her smooth dark belly downward again his own. 
    The sublime memory of that first descent into the moist, mossy darkness of the jungle earlier in the day blazed again suddenly in his mind’s eye for a moment, but then his numbness left him in a furious rush and a piercing surge of purity and sweetness flashed through the rank darkness of the hut. He cried aloud in agitation and tried to twist free, but the sturdy thighs of the anonymous Moi girl held him fast. Only when his struggling became more violent did she fall from him, and then with frantic hands he untangled himself from her and rose to crouch against the wall, his eyes closed, his breath rasping in his throat. 
    From the