OUT THERE

Thomas hears the ocean and he remembers the river. During the dry season it was a lazy river on its journey to what he thought was the Delta. Even during the day now at Witka’s, Thomas hears the ocean “out there.” Out there. The words remind him of what the old man said, the man who seemed to be the chief of the village or shantytown where Thomas stayed and remained.

There was a coastal city upriver somewhere. Some of the goods came from there, others from water by sampans and brown boats. But they lived on flatter land, with rice paddies fed by the water. He had a map. He looked at it, trying to figure out where he was. He’d studied the legend. Legend. It was a good word for kilometers and miles, things covering space. As if the world was merely a story, and it was, one story laid down over another. As it was in his older country, too.

It was so many years ago now, but he envisioned the women he once saw on a rarely traveled yellow dirt road. They were drying rice on the road and at first he saw them with some fear. They gazed at him, also, like small forest deer, watching a man standing with a rifle. The rice covered half of the road. It was the only flat, dry place where the newly born sun would dry their crop. A child on a bicycle traveled by, eating fruit, bumping along the edge of the road to avoid the grain. The women watched him, one bold enough to have her hands on her hips. The boy nodded, smiling. He tossed down the fruit seed. His bicycle wavered into the ditch. Thomas wanted to plant the seed. It was hope. It was a future. He wanted a future to grow in this place made so nearly desolate by bombs, craters and burned woods.

Thomas had no idea how he’d come across the women drying rice on the road. Or, later, how he’d fallen asleep, too asleep, there in a makeshift village, one of many.

But there he cried without crying, just salt water running down his face. He was too hardened to cry, or at least he thought that way. Nevertheless the ocean of the body flowed. Then an old woman in a neck scarf sang to him. When he looked at her she smiled and he saw compassion in her eyes, in her wrinkles and dark teeth, and he thought of what she’d seen all her life. Damn, but he could feel it coming from her and that’s what made the rivers flow, and yet she had it in her to smile and gaze, compassion like one of the Buddha shrines they’d seen along the way, and he began to sob.

There were bodies burning. He could smell them. A woman woke him. He was sweating. “Drink,” she said. It was some kind of rice water. No, it wasn’t burning bodies. It was a fire burning and something was being cooked. He didn’t want to eat. He turned his head away.