The Time in Between by David Bergen Page B

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