Chapter 15. A Tiger Cage

Vietnam Syndrome Exhibition
Model of a Tiger Cage
McKinney Tx. 2015

Anna cut some thick slices of the bread and burned them on the open flame of the galley range into something that resembled toast. She made up for it by frying the powdered eggs in butter and emptied the can of corned beef into another frying pan.

 She served them up, steam rising from Navy surplus tin trays, accompanied by an exuberant voila. I sat without lifting my fork. She probably thought I was saying grace and interrupted the cloud of non-thought saying, “I heard about a caged tiger once. When its cage was left open the tiger hung back staring at a hunk of meat outside until his keepers saw him. They tossed the meat into him and shut the gate. He had his chance. Eat dammit. It’s real.”

Years of being alone, as though I had been in a tiger cage of my own making, had been relieved… the chains dropped and the gate opened. This girl took an interest in me and that too was a simple comfort I hadn’t had or hadn’t noticed before the last few weeks. Each day with her was an awakening.

I picked up a fork saying, “Maybe the tiger doesn’t know where it wants to go. A cat figures things out… weighs things first… checks out the scene… eat or run… run back to the jungle.”

“I say, run for it, Crash. The jungle is where you live. Not in that fuckin’ cage.”

I took a deep breath before pounding catsup out of the bottle onto the hash and gobbled up my plate without talking much beyond a grunt of pleasure. Yes, powdered eggs and canned hash. But they might as well have been gourmet that morning. After I sopped-up my plate with the burnt bread, I said, "You know, Anna. Ketchup was originally a sauce from Tonkin... a fish sauce: Kicap, or something like that, I think."

"Oh really? Are you saying everything worthwhile comes from Asia?" 

"Asia's a big place. But yes,you did, Annadel Bonnaire. You know what I'm saying."

I waited for something from the radio and sat in the cabin, reading while Anna sunbathed almost nude. It was around noon when she stood, gazing at the canyon leading to the beach, and asked, “Can we go for a hike?”

I looked up to where she was talking about. It was a warm day for the first week in December… now that the sun shone down from over the cliffs that protected us. It was okay where we were anchored in the shelter under the cliffs but I knew how cold the winds could get above us.

“It isn’t easy to get out up there,” not wanting to leave the radio, I handed her the binoculars. “Look for yourself.”

“There’s a trail … ain’t so bad in the middle… a creek bed.” Anna eyes locked onto the binoculars checking out the coastline and talking to herself, “Terrain’s pretty rough up that draw alright.”

She handed the binoculars back.

I didn’t want to leave the boat but thought I’d humor her by agreeing, “Go ahead, freeze your tits off… but you’re on yer own.”

By the time I finished saying that, out of the corner of my eye I caught a flash of bare flesh swoop out over the transom. She treaded water, shouting, “Let’s go, you pussy!”

I couldn’t let her get by with that kind of challenge so I stripped down to jockey shorts, braced myself and dove into the shock of cold water… bare flesh submerged… stung… stunned… numbed… before I broke surface. I swam Olympic hard to the beach where Anna stood grinning ear-to-ear.

“You aren’t hiking up there bare foot, girl!”

“Ha!” was all she said.

Yes, we hiked barefoot and near naked. Anna, in wet skivvies, forged ahead, waited for me, and held out a hand on the rough parts of the climb. She didn’t seem to mind the sharp rocks on tender soles, or the brambles scratching bare flesh across ankles and thighs, but I did. She was a lean and lithe cheetah and physically prepared for any challenge the trail might offer. We managed to get to the top where there was no trail and, catlike, she led me through the brush out along the top of a steep ridge that jutted out over the harbor until we came to a cliff that dropped vertically a couple hundred feet. I followed, distracting myself from vertigo and the agony of each step with my eyes glued on the smooth contours of her tush. The transparency of wet cotton briefs, inches away and at eye level at times, revealed a couple small bruises underneath. I could guess what they were about.

We had a view of the boat below and the coast of the mainland beyond the Channel. Anna took straight to the edge and sat, feet dangling over the edge of the precipice. I approached her perch with caution fighting off an onslaught of gut-fucking fear, though ego wouldn’t allow me to succumb to it. Especially since Anna didn’t seem to have had it. I sat at her side, a half-pace back, catching my breath.

Her eyes were half open when she began to speak, “You’ve been sitting in a cab too long, Crash. Catch your breath and let yourself breathe naturally.”

 “I get it. You’re in pretty good shape for a junkie.”

“For a junkie? What do you mean by that, asshole?”

“Speaking of asses, what about those bruises on your butt? I’d seen ‘em before. No one’s been spanking you for sure.”

“Well, big boy, Junk’s an occupational hazard for our kind. I told you I was still using… didn’t I?”

“I thought it was just pot and a line here and there but…” Checking my contempt. “You weren’t sea-sick, last night? You fixed,” I accused. My heart felt like lead was poured into it. I wanted badly to let it out… to cry…. to curse… I swallowed… gulped it down.

As much as I had been living the low-life and taking every drug I could, my imagination had always held the image of an, emaciated and jaundiced, junkie nodded out in some shooting gallery with tracks up and down collapsed veins. But, other than that bruise on her butt, Anna was vibrant and healthy to look at. Her body perfect and her mind clear. Young, I figured, you can get by with it for a while when you’re young.

“I’m trying Crash… been trying since…”

Sitting there on the precipice I understood… it was a flash. Looking down at the Sherlock bobbing gently at anchor from the edge of the cliff we sat on, I thought of Earhart taking his dive off the bridge. It was his last chance to get back to his soul… and Anna… she had been committing the same slow suicide I had been and we, all three of us… and Ryan too, were in the same boat in more ways than one.

She didn’t answer my accusation but reversed it, “I watched you become a drunk over the years. Driving a cab at night when I met you… hiding from it.”

I just wanted her to shut the fuck up and wondered how she got so abstract wise. “It… what’s it… do you know?

“That shrink I go to… she hints… that’s all she does… she says it’s one of the reasons…” her voice drifted with the winds. “Crash, you know I’m trying to quit, don’t you?”

I sighed a dead, “Fuck yes.”

“C’mon, get off your high-horse… just breathe with me. And try to crack a smile, asshole.”

We became quiet. Sitting with Anna on the edge of a cliff, with the wind on my back, I went back at the Koi Pond. A distant image came to me as my mind became fixed on hers. They call it a mind meld in aikido.

She opened her eyes, caught me staring at her.

I said, “You know; I did… I did some…” My mind stopped. I was going to say something bad… maybe good? I continued, “uh… meditation in Nam. It must have been part of my job. I remember some things but names and places get jumbled. Sometimes I have trouble remembering your name, Anna. It used to scare me. But before all that we went to these people.”

She asked, “We?”

Anna’s simple question opened a door that had been shut… sealed as though something dangerous was behind it. The cage door was opened and the jungle beckoned. One word did that… just one word. “We.” I remembered being there with a woman… I had no idea who she was or what she meant to me. I had just a vague figure of her in dreams since… “Yes, I remember now. The first weeks of the monsoon season. June… This place in Hue. A bunch of peacenik monks trying… under the constant bombard of the tropical rain thundering on the corrugated roof… Catholics and Buddhists… American GI’s and shit, Charlie had infiltrated the group… NVA did too and so had we… I went there… what … to snatch and grab a high-valued agent… deprogram her. It was a woman. Some shit was coming down in the spring…”

“A woman?”

“Yes, a woman. She helped me escape. A beautiful woman. I’d been sent in after the Tet… you know, 1968,” I said, remembering an image of her standing graceful in the traditional áo dài between an orange robed monk and a black cassock of a priest… nothing more. The voices of monks chanting… a sky-blue brocaded silk flowing and opening whole length over white trousers… I loved the earth she stood on… but her name was lost in a void… but she was that to me… her voice too, it haunts my dreams, and sounds eerily like Anna’s. I would’ve betrayed my country for her, “Was it worth it?”

I wasn’t a coward. I was a traitor! I'd left others in cages. Fuckin' tiger cages. The words stung… “No more please.”

Anna stammered a Japanese phrase she’d memorized;

 “Yu-gasumi

   Omoeba hedatsu

      Mukashi kana.”

 It’s a haiku by Kitō from one of Ryan’s books in there. I don’t speak much Japanese but I try to get the flow, ya know.”

I surprised myself. I knew the translation;

“The mists of evening…

    When I think of them, far off

       Are days of long ago.”

The pupils of her eyes flashed astonishment too. After a long silence, as though talking in her sleep, tears washing her face, she said, “It’s you. It’s me, David. I’m as lost as you. I always just wanted to take a long nap.”

I didn’t want to think of the past any more than I had to. The gnawing memories churned in my gut, “Yes, I don’t know what happened either. This is a good place for the mists.”

The wind was fierce over the slopes of the island and a cold wrap on my bare back. I felt its chill … but warmth arose from my belly… I listened to the mews of gulls keeping an eye out on the channel. Anna, sitting beside me, was a presence… a powerful presence of peace… peace that had evaded me for so many years. We sat together for almost an hour. Pelicans flew past us at eye level in formation.

 “You do know, David. It’s all in there somewhere. Ryan told me about your escape from the tiger's cage.” Her voice was almost normal again. “It’s not so bad, not knowing the past, that is.”