One of those same vc, a sergeant, had explained to Calvin how a patrol he was leading had stumbled upon an American sergeant, a very tall man, relieving his bowels beside a trail. A second American and some Vietnamese soldiers came looking for the first American. The second one was shot twice in the chest. The Vietnamese threw down their arms and fled into the forest. The tall man was forced to dig a grave with a stick and bury his dead friend. It had taken two days.

  An old man living in Quo Nho’n, a former South Vietnamese soldier who’d been on patrol with Robert Widerly and Lenny Cox, confirmed that Sergeant Cox had been killed. A vc he had interviewed later in Nha Trang, a man who’d served with the 437th and was suffering from skin lesions and palsy, said he remembered a caged prisoner. He believed the captive to have been a mystic who kept bombs from falling. Again, the American had been quite tall. And Lon Truong, now dead, a vc who’d been with the 437th, had worn Robert Widerly’s dog tags as a charm. In Pleiku a cinnamon trader spoke of a tall American in a cage, last seen in a village somewhere west of Chu’ Pah in Kon Tum Province in 1971.

  Mai lifted her cup to her lips. She glanced at Calvin, then looked at his hands as she sipped her tea. After finishing, she spoke to the interpreter.

  Tran Van Dao said, “She say her husban’ like American cig’rette. You have?”

  “Tell her yes. In my bags.”

  This seemed good news—not immigration to America, but something. She spoke again to Dao.

  “She remember.”

  Calvin tried not to feel what he couldn’t help feeling, not joy or relief, but release. Here possibly was the last human, not Viet Cong, to have seen his son. He wanted the truth, if indeed such a beast existed twenty-eight years later. He would listen and fill in what she couldn’t know, somehow see the story that nothing in written word or human memory could offer up. He closed his eyes momentarily, then opened them to find her waiting.

  “Please, Mai, tell me,” he said, “about the man in the cage.”

  When Tran Van Dao finished translating Calvin’s request, she bowed demurely and began.

  ▪

  It was midmorning on the plateau when the soldiers slipped out of the forest, two at first, then a dozen more. The villagers, Mai among them, watched. The leader of the detachment, a razorlike man with hurried gestures, signaled and four soldiers ran to each flank before the column advanced. Diminutive figures in dark clothing, the warriors drifted in and out of shadows along the wood line. Though hard to distinguish, the object that seemed to levitate in the midst of them, swaying rhythmically with their steps, was a cage.

  As the column trudged slowly atop the berm stretching from the wood line to the village, the inhabitants of Ha Ninh waited. Adolescent boys, their curious eyes tracking the progression, stood at the edge of the village. Feigning indifference, those women in view of the paddies thatched a new roof on a hut as others on bamboo mats rolled rice balls with their hands. They worked and watched furtively, their faces stoic. Mai sat beside her grandmother, who wrapped a rice ball in a palm leaf and handed it to her.

  Tidings of the soldiers and the cage they carried had reached the village an hour earlier. The arrival offered a timely excuse for the men to dispose of business that had been set aside. The elder men scuttled off for Pleiku with bundles of cinnamon bark strapped to their backs, taking short, hurried steps to keep their loads balanced as they headed downriver. The younger ones went to the forest to hunt or gather where they hoped to be safe from conscription.

  As the soldiers neared, nursing women gathered up infants and held them. Others filtered in from rice fields. Still more dropped whatever task occupied them and walked to the village center. The arrival of strangers demanded heed; the arrival of soldiers more so, and these carried a cage. The isolated village was populated by some sixty people, many of whom had never ventured past the second mountain peak in any direction, and only the few who traded in Pleiku had seen an American up close.

  The soldiers stopped in the village square, a spot of bare, hard clay twenty meters across. They eased out from under their burden and stepped aside. Hewn from sturdy bamboo shafts and lashed with hemp, the cage stood stolid and imposing as a shrine. A hand-fashioned rope dangled in a loop from the neck of the occupant, who squatted in a corner on his hindquarters. Hand over hand, like a sloth, he pulled himself up. The roof of the cage was too low to accommodate his height, so he stooped and stared out through the bars, sighed once, and scratched the tip of his nose.

  The leader directed the soldiers to disperse into the huts to search out food. One, a corporal who identified himself as Lin Phap, remained by the cage and invited the villagers to view his ward. The first line drew close as he told how the American had come to be a prisoner. He told the tale as if it were the same story he told wherever they went. Yes, they’d captured him. A terrible battle. The American had killed many, and they were kind to spare him despite his crimes. Look, look at the meanness in his eyes. As the corporal enumerated the American’s crimes, the captive picked at his beard and looked skyward.

  Mai peered out from behind her grandmother in order to view the cage and the corporal. What she saw surprised her. She’d been told the captive was an American, but how could she tell? How could she be sure? Dressed in frayed pants torn at mid-thigh, he was so dark his skin was as brown as the clay the cage sat on. He appeared old, for he was bent, and his joints swollen. She slid in front of her grandmother and looked at the captive’s eyes as the corporal suggested. She found nothing but two dark eyes in two deep sockets.

  A woman next to Mai, Tuyet Minh, whose son had been killed by an American bomb, slid through the row of villagers, approached the cage, and spat on the American. Lin Phap laughed, as did a few villagers, but the prisoner didn’t react. Mai wondered why the American didn’t respond to such an outrage. Was he a holy man? Her grandmother had spoken of holy men whose concerns transcended joy or pain, men who suffered so the world might better understand the joy of not suffering.

  Another woman started to throw a stone, but Lin Phap stepped between her and the cage, raised his open palm, and said that was not allowed. Lin Phap said he must shield the prisoner from torture, although some torment, mostly words, was permitted. After a last look at the captive, the villagers returned to their daily rituals. Mai’s grandmother pulled her by the arm, but Mai begged to stay a while. Though reluctant, her grandmother left her, admonishing her to behave and not go near the cage.

  The captive squatted on his haunches and picked at his long beard.

  Lin Phap turned his nose away and said, “You stink like dead fish, Trung Si Rober’ Wit’ery.”

  Mai listened to the corporal address the caged man in soft, familiar tones, but he used the cruelest of phrases, calling his ward a devil, a pig. And the man seemed to listen contentedly. Mai stepped nearer but was told by the corporal not to get too close, as the American had been known to stand and urinate at people, and laugh as he did so.

  “He stares at the sky,” Lin Phap said to her. He explained that sometimes after a period of sky gazing, “the American jumps to his feet, rants at the sky, and shakes his fists.” Whenever he did this, the soldiers struck camp, as they took this as an omen.

  Lin Phap said proudly that he was the fourth keeper of the cage and the kindest. He pointed to wounds on the prisoner’s thighs. The American squinted at his keeper and murmured. The first, Lin Phap explained, was a vengeful master who had crushed lit cigarettes on the American’s thighs and dumped buckets of human feces and urine on him, which he may have deserved, for he was an animal. Look closely, he told her. Mai looked at the man, who seemed utterly disinterested. The man in the cage rolled his head around several times, looked up, and closed his eyes to the sun. He spoke, but to what or whom, Mai had no idea.

  “Don’t try to understand him,” Lin Phap said, “as his mind is in the sky.” Other keepers, he added, had been mean as well, but he, and he alone, fed and protected the American.

  The prisoner was holding on to the top of the cage and swaying when Mai’s grandmother came for her. She took Mai’s hand. The man was their enemy, she claimed, then added that he didn’t seem like much of one at the moment. Mai asked if he was a holy man, like the ones her grandmother had mentioned. The old woman looked toward the cage. “He may or may not be,” she said. “But he certainly smells.”

  Later, lying in her grandmother’s hut, Mai turned over and over on her sleeping mat. Nothing so exciting as the man had ever happened to her village; not even bombs landing in the forest nearby had caused such a stir. She sat up and listened to her grandmother’s breathing, and when it grew heavy, Mai rolled off her mat and went to the jar where they stored rice cakes. She lifted the lid quietly, only to find the jar empty. The soldiers had left nothing, not even rice cakes. She saw the cat her grandmother had bought to kill rats, still more kitten than cat and playful and soft, very soft. It was curled in the corner, staring at her.

  As was custom, the village had bedded down. While the others had found shade for a nap, Corporal Phap had erected a canopy of palm leaves to lie under beside the cage. Though the sun beat down on his cage, the captive didn’t seem to notice. He stared upward, his arms folded over his chest.

  Mai’s cat rested limply in her arms. It purred as she stroked its head and stared at Robert. If this was an American, what was there to fear? The bombs, of course, which made the ground tremble and sent her to her grandmother’s mat to seek comfort in the old woman’s arms. Save for Corporal Phap snoring and the caged man uttering sounds that seemed to mimic prayer, it was still, more so than at night, which was ruled by the sounds of insects and animals.

  Mai advanced so slowly it seemed she’d not moved, and when at last she reached the cage, she stood ready to run. She smelled the American’s strong odor and noticed his shorts where he’d urinated on himself and his talonlike nails, some broken. His matted hair that had seemed black at a distance was actually gray. His legs bore raw sores left by leeches, and his arms, back, and chest dotted by skin eruptions from mosquito bites. Lice infested him. Her throat went dry. His depravity seemed to her remarkable, nothing if not sublime. The sight of him didn’t stir in her pity or even compassion, but awe. He was a holy man.

  At first the man didn’t react, but as she neared the bars, he turned sideways and watched her out of the corner of his eye. Mai looked first in the direction of the palm-leaf shelter where Corporal Phap snorted and shifted sides, then she scanned the other sleeping soldiers for signs of movement. With no preconceptions of what a holy man might need, or how one might react, she extended the cat for the American to see. It was an offering.

  He blinked and wiped his eyes with the flat of his hand. She released the cat. It looked about and moved cautiously toward the American until it reached his bare feet. Mai waited hopefully beside the bars. The caged man shifted as the cat rubbed its side against his leg. Its tail brushed his ankle. He looked down at the cat, which touched him tentatively with a paw, sat down for an instant, then boldly jumped into his lap. Surprised, Mai watched. The cat usually ran from people, even from Mai and her grandmother. Though she heard her grandmother calling her, Mai didn’t move, just waited and waited, watching until the American gradually reached out and stroked the cat’s head. Mai smiled then, and ran to her grandmother.

  Mai’s grandmother looked about the hut and asked where the cat was. Mai didn’t want to answer for fear of angering the old woman. When she hesitated, her grandmother lifted Mai’s chin and demanded the truth. Mai confessed she’d given it to the American because he had nothing. He was holy and it was an offering. Wasn’t that what she’d been taught to do? Mai implored. But the cat was for killing rats, the grandmother protested, then grabbed Mai by the arm and pulled her toward the square.

  After the siesta, the soldiers gathered up their weapons and their booty. Some carried a chicken or a bag of rice slung over one shoulder and a rifle over the other. They’d recruited two village boys into their ranks. One was Mai’s cousin, Pham, a good wood gatherer and harvester who would be sorely missed in the paddies at the next harvest. Mai’s aunt wept and protested that the boy was only twelve and he’d not volunteered and he was her only son.

  The old woman said sternly, “You get the cat, Mai.”

  Mai was scared, and hesitated as her grandmother pushed her toward the cage. The soldiers were inserting poles through hemp loops. They were raucous and banged the cage about. Didn’t they know the man was holy? Didn’t they know he carried her cat for good luck? Mai saw the American, the cat on his lap. He stroked it and smiled.

  Uncertain of what to say, she stood in front of the cage. As the soldiers hoisted Robert, one told her to get out of the way, that she was blocking the path. The grandmother stepped forward and demanded the cat, saying that her foolish granddaughter had somehow lost it. When the corporal asked how the American got it, he looked at Mai, who shrugged and looked toward her grandmother. The old woman said they needed the cat to kill rats. The corporal nodded, not out of understanding it seemed, but impatience. Reluctantly, he told the soldiers to lower the cage.

  Clutching the cat, the prisoner withdrew to the far corner as the door opened. He appeared deaf, but even if he couldn’t hear, he could feel, of this Mai was certain. And the cat was soft and warm, and it purred. He petted it gently. The corporal ordered him to let go, but he didn’t. The prisoner’s puzzled eyes gave evidence to his thoughts as he looked about, attempting to make sense of what was happening. But it was apparent to Mai that he could not, that he had no notion of a future or memory of a past, only the cat and the embodiment of the present moment that it represented.

  As Lin Phap neared him, the man in the cage squeezed the cat until it hissed and scratched his forearm. He smiled dully as the cat dug her claws into his lean flesh and drew blood. He smiled even as Corporal Phap struck him in the head with an open palm. Then the cat was free. It hissed one last time and scampered away. The corporal closed the cage door and nodded to the bearers.

  Mai remained behind and watched the soldiers’ progress. Once she thought the American looked back, but she couldn’t be sure. She waved just in case. When the cat touched her leg, she reached down and gently gathered it up. It immediately began to purr. The soldiers marched west atop the berm until they melted into the shade of the trees. When she looked back, they and the cage were out of sight beyond the bend.

  Mai knew that soon men of the village would return from the forest with wood or cinnamon bark. By morning the hamlet would again fall into the rhythms of daily life, and it would be as if the cage and the man inside had never passed through. This dismayed Mai. An occurrence such as this should be remembered, for it meant something. She felt a sadness for both the man and the soldiers who carried him.

  Already women stoked wood fires to boil water for tea and rice. Smoke, black and dense, rose above the village and drifted lazily toward the forest from which the soldiers had come and into which they’d returned. It floated over the rice paddy until dispelled in the air. Mai heard her grandmother call. She stroked the cat and turned to the sound of her grandmother’s voice.

  ▪

  Calvin drew himself up to stand. It was painful, for his joints were stiff and his legs had nearly gone to sleep. He pictured his son in a bamboo cage, his son who’d probably aged like a man of seventy. Three years, he thought. Again he shook his head.

  “I’m thankful, Mai, that you were kind to him.”

  She stared up at Calvin as Tran Van Dao spoke. She nodded, then said that she wanted the cat to bring him luck, that cats are good luck, but this one was quite skilled at catching rats as well and a grandmother must be obeyed. Calvin opened his bag and rummaged for the menthol cigarettes. They were prized in Vietnam, so he’d brought along two cartons to bribe officials and was down to four packs. These he handed to Mai. She accepted them with a modest smile and asked if he cared for more tea.

  “Thank you, no. I’ve taken more time than I should.”

  Dao waited patiently by the table as Mai spoke. She finished with a nod.

  “She want to know if you are sad.”

  Calvin pictured the tall American who spent his hours staring at the sky. “Tell her I’m old, and it’s an old sadness.”

  They stepped outside, the three of them. At once Calvin began to sweat, and for a moment, he wished he could return to the hut. But that was impossible. Here shelter was temporary, discomfort common. He stepped toward the Jeep. Through the interpreter, Mai told him to wait and hurried inside.

  The smell of burning wood lay on the air. Calvin looked toward half a dozen boys, sitting on the berm, chatting. Palms blended into the wood line where the berm led to the forest, and the forest bled into the mountains. Beyond, where the sun would set in three or four hours, the mountains had turned a dark purple. He didn’t belong here, just as his son had never belonged here. Too hot, too wet, too everything, even too lovely. He hoped, as Mai had contended, that Robert had somehow become holy, that a spirit existed and that it could roam the emerald forests. Mostly he hoped his son had found peace in death.

  Calvin stared and imagined that last moment—the soldiers marching, the cage oscillating. A chicken on the back of one soldier flaps its wings and struggles against the cord that restrains its legs. Holding the bars of his cage, Robert sways back and forth as if to music. The soldiers pay no mind to the lunatic they are bonded to until the war ends. He travels where they go, over hilly trails, up mountainsides, through fast river currents, under the torrid sun, in rainstorms—everywhere—not a man but a charm, a holy thing, a spirit that keeps bombs from annihilating them. The soldiers laugh, celebrating their good fortune, and none notice the smile on Robert Widerly’s face.

  Mai came through the doorway carrying a glass rose, which she handed to Calvin. She warned him not to cut his hands on the petals.

  “Mr. Dao, tell her I’ll be very careful,” Calvin said.

  He held the flower up as he stepped toward the Jeep. The rose was fragile, and he’d have to wrap it and pack it carefully in a box with his son’s rusted dog tags. He would carry the box on the flight and through customs. He’d get the flower safely home and would find a place in his house for it, a good, safe place.