第9章 The Dry Clothes

Reefer died at about two in the morning of the thirty-fifth day, in a drainage below a wall of scrub, with his leg on Pham's pack and a piece of a poncho over both of them, and none of the seven heard it happen, which was the thing Rafe had to write down afterwards and could never get past. He was the only one of them who was awake. He had the second watch because nobody trusted anybody else with the watch, and he was sitting about four feet from the man's head in the dark, listening to sixty men go over the top of the ridge four hundred metres above them and hearing a boy of nineteen breathe. That was the last of it. There was no noise. He just stopped, the way a man stops when he is putting a coat on, and Rafe sat there for about a minute and a half and then touched his shoulder and he did not move. The rule was his own, and he said it out loud to Ito in a whisper, because he wanted it in the room and because he wanted somebody else to have heard him say it. "I am not going to dig, Captain." "No," said Ito. "It is four hours down and about two hours to do it with a machete in the wet, and he has been in the file for five days and everybody who has seen that file in five days is on the top of that ridge." Rafe's voice did not change and the hand on the set did not move. "So the honest position is that we put him under four inches of scrub on a slope in a monsoon and we mark nothing and we come back for him in a week if we come back." "That is the position." "And he stays up here." "He stays up here," said Ito, and then he said: "Get the colonel." Tran Minh came and looked at it and did not go down the slope. He stood in the dark above a body on a pack and said one sentence. "There is a girl," he said. "In An Thuc. There is a school and there is a girl in it who teaches the lower two years and she is nineteen and she has four brothers and two of them are on this trail, and I do not know her name and I have never once asked him it." He turned round. "So he does not go in the drainage, because the drainage is where things go, and the drainage is four hundred metres from a place where men are lying in a ditch, and the ditch is full in about an hour and a half." "He goes where, then." "Where there are no men at all," said Ito. They carried him up. It took them five hours and it cost Duc the last of his boots and it cost Linh an ankle that turned over twice on the same root, and they took him up about two hundred and fifty metres through scrub on hands and knees to a place Ito had seen on the second day from the top of the Long Trail and had said nothing about: a rock, a shoulder of bare stone about four feet across with a lip on the uphill side, under a leaning mass of rock and scrub, with a gap at the back a man could not get a hand into and a front that was forty feet of straight down. They put him in the gap. They put his pack under him and his jacket over him and his boots on his feet, and Linh sat against the stone and did it, because it was Linh's leg to put there and nobody was going to take it off him. Then Ito went through every pocket and took out the things a man carries and left the things a man does not. Money, a comb, a photograph in a plastic sleeve, a fountain pen, a packet of paper cigarettes, eleven. He put the photograph in his own shirt and the money in his own pocket and the cigarettes in his own pack and the comb and the pen he put back. And then he found the shirt. It was folded inside the jacket, and it was dry, and Reefer had carried it for five days across thirty-five days of rain and had kept it dry. It was the only dry object in the whole of that valley. "That is the whole of the problem," said Ito, holding it up in the dark. "Everything else about this man says he died in the rain. Everything about this man says he was a man who has been on a trail for five days in a monsoon. And he has a dry shirt folded in his jacket, and a man lying in scrub with a dry shirt in his jacket has been put there by somebody who did not want to think about it." "You are going to take it," said Tran Minh. "I am going to take it and I am going to keep it for thirty-five days, and if I have to burn it I will burn it, and if I do not burn it then in about eight months' time I am going to be a man with a dead man's shirt in a footlocker and I am going to know exactly what is in the pocket." He folded it once and put it inside his own jacket against his chest, on the dry side, in the place where the map had been. "This is the long relief, sir. This is what it is. It is a dry shirt." Nobody said anything for a while, and then Linh, who was twenty and who had not spoken on the whole of the thirty-fourth day, said: "He would have left it." "He would not have left it," said Rafe, without looking round. "I have carried mail. You do not leave a dry thing." "Then we have taken a dead man's shirt off a dead man who did not want it," said Linh, "and that is the whole of what we are." "It is the whole of what we are," said Ito, "and you are twenty-one and you have been walking for thirty-four days, and in about four hours' time you are going to be carrying Reefer's pack as well as your own, and I am going to need you to stop having feelings about it, because there is about nine kilometres in front of us and no rain on it, and if you and I both stop we will not get down off this." They came off the rock at about the fourteenth hour in the last of the light, six of them, with an extra pack and an empty place in the file, and they did not bury him, and they did not mark him, and they did not say anything over him, and that is what was done. There is a stone on a shoulder of bare stone two hundred and fifty metres above a drainage in the north-west, and there is a boy of nineteen under four inches of scrub on it with a dry shirt folded inside his jacket, and it has been there since the thirty-fifth of May. There is a woman in An Thuc who taught the lower two years in a school and never learned his name, and there is a colonel of the Republic of Vietnam who was told his name on a rock at about two o'clock in the morning in the worst weather of his life and did not write it down, because a man who is going to be held to account for a thing ought to be able to say that he does not know it.