The Language of Men Read Online Free Page B

follow him across the street. He tells us to stay close. A few hundred feet from the store is a long, wide dirt road, which leads to a Vietnamese Army base. Two soldiers in tight uniforms stand in front of the gate. From this distance, they seem fake, like a pair of plastic figures.
    "Here," Anh says. "We stop here."
    I take a few pictures. Anh looks at his watch. Cars and trucks zip by, their horns laughing. I imagine Anh traveling to the United States, to New York, to Long Island, to Northport, my hometown, where he would pay me to drive him to a place
his
father once lived. I could take him to the loading dock behind Walmart, and point into the long grass beside the dumpsters.
    Here,
I'd say.
Right here.
    "The government own all this," Anh says. "The soldiers down there, their guns are from United States. After the war, U.S. leave everything." He takes a long pull on his cigarette, exhales. "Leave everything."
    The distant figures pace in front of the gate, the barrels of their tiny guns extending above their helmets. I try to picture the exchange of weapons. The Vietnamese soldiers at the gate—did they once open boxes of shiny U.S. guns, or did they pick the dusty weapons off the ground, after the last American troops were in the air? Or was there a day when American soldiers ceased firing, flicked the safety switch, and gave their guns away?
    I think of film footage from late in the war. American soldiers on an aircraft carrier, shoving helicopters into the South China Sea. For a moment, they clung to the edge of the deck like cicada shells, then splashed into the water. My father described to me acres and acres of broken tanks and trucks and jeeps.
If it had anything wrong with it, flat tire, anything, we left it.
I found a picture of my father standing in front of a giant lot of tanks. On the back, he wrote:
Mr. Cheapo's Used Car Lot.
    "Okay," Anh says, looking at his watch. "We go."
*
    There was this one, I tell ya, boy. Big friggin' tits. I don't even know if they had silicone back then, but they had to be fake. Had to be fake. She was young, too, maybe seventeen, eighteen. Came in from town to clean the hooches. Every mornin', workin' every hooch. Some days she'd start at this end, other days she'd start on the other side. She knew what she was doin'. Gave every guy a shot. First dude looked out for the rest of us. First dude always stuck, his fingers in her, checkin' for razor blades.
What you do, GI?
Don't worry what I'm doin', honey. Guys with half the tip of their dicks sliced, off. Ain't no purple medal gonna fix that.
*
    Anh whispers to the driver. The driver nods. We begin our trip back to Ho Chi Minh City.
    "That's it?" I ask Vanessa, quietly. "Tour's over?"
    She shrugs, mouthing her answer. "I guess so."
    Jeep-fulls of Vietnamese soldiers swerve around us. One Jeep pulls alongside and a soldier hanging offthe back stares at us. He smiles, perhaps at me, perhaps not. I don't think he can see me through the tinted glass, but he continues to stare. He shifts his rifle from the left side of his body to the right. A slow oscillation of his hand as if he were Miss America. Then the driver hits the Jeep's horn, laughing through traffic.
    I feel sick. I've always been prone to motion sickness, particularly in cars. There is a looping video in my head of a young boy chugging two cherry slushies, then puking them up cold on the leather seats of his friend's mother's Jaguar. There are other stories. The heat, the driving, and Anh's perpetual smoke after tiptoeing around a Vietnamese Army base with a stomach full of beef-soup breakfast is my perfect storm. Vanessa hands me a bottle of warm water. I begin to sweat.
    "No McDonald's in Vietnam," Anh says, staring out the window.
    "Excuse me?" I say.
    "McDonald's. No here. KFC, yes. McDonald's, no."
    I open the window—the door to a convection oven—and shut it.
    "How come?" Vanessa asks.
    Anh leans over to the driver, and the driver's response makes Anh laugh. A few