“About the baby?” Chiggers sucked at his cigarette. “Why’d he come back, then?”

“Nobody knows that either.”

“Ay, Dios mío,” Chiggers said then. “Nobody knows nothing about nothing.”

“I guess not,” I said, realizing as I said it that it was not, in fact, much of a story to tell, and we fell back to sipping at our coffees and puffing at our cigarettes. I wondered how much more pot he had in the paper bag in his car and how much money I could scrape together to buy some before he was once again on the road to Oregon.

Chiggers might have looked different in some ways but he had not changed; he was still and ever would be the same old Chiggers from Dong Tam and the Plain of Reeds and the million nameless waterways that snaked endlessly through the mangroves and palms and cocoa trees, those shadowed tunnels that seem, even now, to pull me toward whatever horrors lay curtained by their green light.

The waitress brought our meals then. Chiggers’s plate was piled high with eggs and sausage and bacon and pancakes like a monument to all the breakfasts we wished for in Vietnam. Mine was much the same.

CHIGGERS TOLD ME upon arrival that he would need to be back on the road as soon as possible and yet our evening at Denny’s wore on, and at some point he suggested that he might wander over to the motel desk to see what a room might cost him. It was then that I suggested my grandmother’s sofa, small though it was. “The old lady won’t mind?” Chiggers said, smiling his familiar grin.

“I’ll need to ask her,” I said, “but I think she’ll be fine with it.”

And she was, not only fine with it but seemingly relieved, as if his presence provided a temporary salve for some aspect of my life that she had questioned. She asked if we needed something to eat or drink and then retired to her bedroom. We moved to the porch off the back of the house then, its nightscape a small box of overgrown grass—I should have cut it but had not—and a gnarled old plum tree laden with fruit, the rotten scent of which sometimes wafted across to us in the dark and infrequent breeze. It may have been a poor choice to sit in the dark like that—we might have retired, instead, to the boozy back room of that Denny’s with its dingy bar and dance floor—for Chiggers’s presence had brought a quickness to my chest, a feeling that the great span of the Pacific had folded over on itself in the night so that the seventy-eight hundred miles that separated me from the Nine Dragon River had lessened and lessened until I could almost—but not quite—see the tracer rounds red-lining across the black sky beyond the fence.