Girl by the Road at Night by David Rabe

Author:David Rabe [Rabe, David]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: SOC035000
ISBN: 9781439163337
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 2010-04-15T06:00:00+00:00

17

Way far away and hard to believe at first, traces of car horns and variously pitched engines call to him with hints of which way to go. The whine of Lambrettas, Hondas, and mechanized cyclos; the grumble of jeeps, taxis, trucks, along with the music piped into the night from bars, guide him through the confusion of all those hovels and out into the bright bustle of downtown Bien Hoa. When he steps from the backstreets into the open air, he is sweaty and gasping and insanely thirsty. He bends, his hands on his knees. He wants a cigarette, but has lost his pack. He gratefully locates the nub of grass still in his pocket and salvages one last toke huddled near a wall. When he straightens, it’s weird how the first thing he expects to see is Xom and Rasputin. But all he sees is everybody else. He buys a pack of Camels and climbs into the cab of a Lambretta to cruise down the streets of shops and many bars, inside one of which he will find Xom and Rasputin, he is sure. But suddenly, it is sometime later and he is lolling alone in his Lambretta, smoking a cigarette, while fields drift past beyond the trees alongside the road. The moon is yellow. He has a slight headache and is very very thirsty. Maybe too thirsty to live. It scares him to have drunk so much and smoked on top of it. The fear spins a little, floats in his head, falls to his stomach. He’ll get killed one of these days, dead in a ditch, a corpse, beautiful no more, shit. Glancing at his watch—9:05—he pats his pocket to feel the comfort of the knife he carries folded there. He slips it out, keeping it hidden after levering the tip open against his thigh. He looks at the driver’s silhouette and thinks of the road and the wheels turning under them. Then he hears a surprising sound. It’s a chorus of girls’ voices, somewhere ahead in the dark. He leans out the slatted side of the cab. Before him on the right-hand edge of the road, figures dart through the frame of light cast from the windows of a shanty. Another light appears, narrow, quivering, the wan projection of what he thinks is a Lambretta parked on the shoulder, the engine sputtering to life. Then the poor beam of Whitaker’s vehicle touches the scene, revealing three girls bidding farewell to a GI who is climbing onto the back of a motor scooter. They seem to have come from a building that sits in a clearing just off the road. He thinks he remembers passing it in daylight, and what he remembers is blue stone situated in white gravel. On impulse, grinning Whitaker says, “Stop. Dung Lye,” to his driver as the girls yelp and hop about the scooter beginning to move. Whitaker has a peculiar feeling. Without plan or map to chart the night, he may have had a stroke of luck.

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