But, then, he was with a people. He was again part of a people. Thomas never asked how these people survived. Or even where they came from. Above where they lived were the remnants of an old building, a once-beautiful house of concrete, painted yellow and blue. The walls were down, rubble all around. There had been an exquisite painting on one inner wall, a painting with hills of green and trees. The place had been fenced in once, but the fence was gone now. And down below it, their little village was a makeshift place, put together with debris from the war-broken world. There were washed-up things from the river and they were sometimes used to build or patch up other things. Below them, the houses were built on stilts, but he didn’t think the river could rise that high. The old man with blue cloth around his head, tied in a knot at the side, said to him, “We are not Vietnamese. We are people from the mountains.” From the highlands, he thought, the “Armpit.” Or was it the place where everyone killed everyone, even their own soldiers if they moved wrong or scared a man by surprise, or if they hated him. And he wondered if they hated him. He thought they were misplaced and he was lost, or had been, in Muong country. But these were people of the earth and they’d survived. Like him. A tribe, or what remained of one. Now there were silent, empty villages in the mountains. The Tigers had been there. It’s what they called themselves, the airborne men who instead of being in the air swept across the land, destroying everything they came upon because it was a war.

The old man with the blue cloth said, “You look the same, like us. Ugly.”

Thomas laughed.

The old man’s face was red with lines and scars. He kept a cloth for wiping the sweat off his forehead. It was blue in color, lovely against his forehead and then against dark hands and blue veins. Every night the old woman washed it along with one of the two scarves she always wore around her neck, even in the heat, in the wooden tub. “We had to come here,” the man said. “We learned to make friends. Some of us went to Saigon. Now we feed the enemies even when we know who they are, but we have never smiled behind their backs. Up there…” He pointed to a village Thomas couldn’t see, its distance impossible to gage. “Up there, they hate us. They say, take sides or you lose your heart.” He laughed. “They mean in two ways.”

The old woman gave Thomas a cup of strong sweet coffee. “We used to have more beers.”

Thomas laughed, but weakly. He realized it was an underground restaurant they’d been trying to run. Noodles and beer. He looked around. There were signs in several languages. Outside were places to sit, a few chairs and two tables, a single, broken umbrella. It was a half-bent store where they also sold Tide, Crest, Marlboros, and other American products bought by those who had once worked in the PX, the army store, including a young woman named Ma. He’d seen her before somewhere. Those who did come by to eat noodles or drink beer saw what a shambles their lives had become, felt sorry for them, and left extra money for their purchases.