Nothing Sacred Part 6

"Name of Lobsang Taring, but I am taking it kindly if you are just calling me Tea, little lady, like theydid so back when I am getting my grad-yu-ate dee-gree at the Montana School of Mines."

This unlikely prison guard with what seemed a deliberately dopey accent (I had never heard another person in the camp who spoke English speak it so strangely) went on to explain that the "round-eye"

boys at the mining school had trouble with his name but the one tea drinker in the crowd decided it was the same as Lapsang Souchong tea. This explanation prompted the nickname. Tea "reckons" I'd better call him Captain when others are around.

We spent the rest of the daylight hours underground, clearing the rubble pile that blocked the entrances to the library and the room of scarves. We had to sift through the rubble, rather than just shovel it away, and anything that looked like it had once been ornamental or useful was laid carefully aside for cataloging, which Tea explained we would do on the portable terminal of the camp's computer.

Toward midafternoon, Tea left me to do the sifting and began reconstructing the support structure of the tunnel entrance. Two other men helped him with a handsaw and hammers, setting up notched logs on either side of the rubble pile.

I'm tired and sore from bending and digging but otherwise feel remarkably well. By the time we finished today, the sun outside had given way to dusk, and wind whipped my pajama top around me and sent showers of snow flying from the rippling canopy. In the eastern corner, two guards were scurrying around to sh.o.r.e up an end of the net that had blown loose. From the mountain, snow blew from the horns of the ruined cone like the veil on an elaborate medieval headdress.

Funny how quickly a person adjusts to anything. The inside of the prison bunker feels almost like home now. I find myself appreciating how the sandbagged walls of the outer hall keep it insulated from the wind, and the guard was not even surly as she nodded me inside tonight.

And now it looks as if I'll have some opportunity to be of use to the men and pay them back a little for taking care of me- it seems that ever since I arrived they have had to look after me. But my new boss seems like a reasonable guy and I should be able to sneak more books and things from the library, maybe even some more matches and lamps. Not your major luxurious amenities maybe, but more than we have now.

LATER.

The reaction from the men is not as unanimously enthusiastic as I might have hoped. They filed in shortly after I returned, while I was busily scribbling notes. I thought they would probably be glad to have me greet them cheerfully, relatively healthily for a change. "Hi guys, you are not going to believe the day I had...," I began.

Thibideaux rolled his eyes at me and eased himself carefully onto his bunk before drawling wearily, "Mercy me, all recovered and chipper, are we?"

"Well, I am much better, thanks to the excellent care," I said quickly, hoping that flattery might improve his receptiveness, though his only response was a skeptical grunt. But then, he didn't know what I was going to say so he couldn't very well get excited beforehand. I plunged ahead, glad to finally have something to share with the others, after depending on them so heavily for so long. Once Marsh, Danielson and the Colonel were inside I began hauling my booty out of my pockets. "Look at this, will you? I found a lamp and these matches-from one of those old motel chains in Missouri, and this incense burner too-"But Thibideaux was not the only one who was less than thrilled with my news.

"Great," Marsh said. "We can burn incense to disguise the smell of our wild dope parties. That way the guards won't suspect a thing."

I shrugged, puzzled by all this ennui. "Well, at least it would be a change to have the cell smell like something besides s.h.i.t, don't you think?"

Marsh was lying stomach down on his bunk, paring the dirt from his broken nails with a single long thumbnail. He told the others in a dry, rather accusatory voice, "Viv went to work with Lobsang Taring in the command bunker today."

"Oh, an executive position," Thibideaux said. "And so soon after you come here. My, my, it is an honor havin' you amongst us, ma'am. Do pardon the normal natural fragrance of our humble abode."

"What in the h.e.l.l is eating you guys anyway?" I demanded, tossing the incense burner onto the bunk with a clatter. "I was just trying to show you this stuff to break up the monotony. And I don't know how you can be such an a.s.shole about me getting the job, Marsh. You were the one who set it up. I've got a good mind not to show you my yak b.u.t.ter lamp and-"

"I've seen yak b.u.t.ter lamps before," he informed me in a withering tone.

"Is the lamp and the incense burner all that you found, Viv?" the Colonel asked.

"I'm sorry, sir. I looked for a file and a hacksaw but there didn't seem to be any handy. I thought at least it would be nice to have a little light once in a while instead of sitting around in the dark."

His prissy brusqueness was even more deflating than the grumbling from the others as he said, "If we're caught with these things we're not authorized to have, it will mean trouble."

"With all due respect, sir, what do you think we're in now?" Danielson snapped. Bless his heart, he sounded as disgusted with the others as I was beginning to feel.

"That's what I'd like to know," I said. "For Chrissake, I bring something that might be useful or novel and you guys act as if I was stealing your momo. You've spent I don't know how long looking after me and now when I'm trying to give back a little something you treat me like I've done something wrong. What's your problem?"

"We got no problem, dollin'," Thibideaux said. "'Cept we tired of bustin' rocks all day like we been doin' for Lord knows how long ever since we got here. You're here just a little while and got yourself a soft job right off the bat-looks to this ol' boy like you takin' care of yourself fine. You don't need no mama no more so why don't you just let us rest ourselves?"

The Colonel broke in, "No, no, I can see where it might be a good thing to have somebody down there, though I wish it were one of us so we could take the kind of things that will help with our escape attempt. We don't want to call attention to ourselves unnecessarily and these discoveries of yours might do just that if we don't hide them. If the guards thought we'd stolen something they might a.s.sume an escape plan and punish all of us. So you should return these things unless we can find some way to conceal them."

"That's no problem, sir," Danielson said. "We'll stick 'em in a sandbag in the hall during the day, retrieve 'em on the way into the cell. Even if there's a guard, one of us can create a diversion. Piece ofcake."

Marsh changed the subject abruptly, asking if anyone had seen a new supply pack train come in.

Thibideaux said he'd heard it had gotten in the previous night, after we were all tucked safe on our trundle slabs.

"Well, Dr. Jekyll was with them," Marsh said. "She was with the Dragon Lady today. She kept Wu from swallowing Viv whole when she caught her roaming around outside."

I was framing a reply to the next logical question, which should have been from someone asking why I was roaming around outside, when Danielson asked in an eager voice, "I wonder what came with the pack train. Do you think they might have finally brought our mail?"

Merridew shook his head in a hopeless kind of way and said gently, "Maybe so, Du. We'll just have to see."

Thibideaux's approach was more surgical. "Grow up, killer. We've been here how long?"

Danielson shrugged sullenly.

Thibideaux said, "A long time, Du, ain't it? A real long time. And in all these years have we got one letter, one message, seen even one little bitty empty envelope?"

"Thibideaux, put a G.o.dd.a.m.n lid on it," Colonel Merridew said amiably.

"Well, I do apologize if I undermine morale but it undermines mine having someone keep on remindin' me how we never hear nothin' from n.o.body all these G.o.d-knows-how-many years,"

Thibideaux griped, and rolled over to face the wall.

I suppose it's inevitable that five people in close quarters are not going to get along all the time, but when the men stopped sneering at me only to start bickering with each other I felt the same way I did the one time I saw my grandparents fight, shortly after I started living with them. It's a scary thing, seeing octogenarian pacifists breaking crockery and snapping "b.a.s.t.a.r.d" and "b.i.t.c.h" at each other. Mom said it was because of all the rapid changes they'd been forced into, all the things they'd cared about they'd watched die-the world just got on their nerves sometimes. But all the same I knew the fight was my fault, just as I knew it was now.

So I stood up and produced my final surprise, the torn and rumpled pages I'd folded into quarters to fit my pocket and the piece de resistance-the Huck. "Look, though, there's something else. I found us something to read-" And I told them about the library.

Marsh looked pained. "If I'd known about that, I'd have volunteered to help Taring myself."

"Well, why the h.e.l.l didn't you?" I asked. "Wu would have given it to you."

He shrugged. "I didn't know about the books. And I didn't want to work that close to Wu's office."

"I can get more books," I rea.s.sured him. "Just tell me what you want and I'll try. But some of these spare pages I want to use for writing paper."

"What are you going to write?" Danielson asked. "They won't take mail and we never get letters.""I'm keeping a log about this."

"Oh, I can see where that would be real exciting," Danielson said. "'Today I hauled rocks and ate a momo. Today I hauled more rocks and ate another momo'? Fascinating stuff."

The Colonel's eyes avoided mine and his mouth tightened. I got the feeling he was uneasy about me keeping the journal, but he merely asked, "Did you happen to see any geography texts or maps from this area?"

"No. I didn't notice any. I'm not actually sure where exactly this area is. Are you?"

"No. h.e.l.l of a long march from anything else, and apparently north of the Tibetan Plateau, but that's about all anyone's been able to gather so far."

"When we crashed, we were heading into the Kun Luns," I told them. "So my guess is that's where we are now."

"That's more information than we've had up till now," Merridew said.

The prolonged tension was beginning to cause a fierce headache and right then I felt an unbearable pain in my temples and forehead as I asked, "Just how long is up till now?"

Danielson shrugged. "Long G.o.dd.a.m.n time, that's all any of us knows. I got captured after a sh.e.l.l hit near enough to knock me out and fill my a.s.s full of shrapnel and so I was kind of out of it-the interrogations didn't help much either. I do remember the kid though ..."

"What kid?" I asked, lying down on my own bunk and resting my throbbing temple against the cool stone. My head felt as if it had a constricting band around it.

"I don't know. Must have been one of the guards' kids or- who knows, the enemy gets younger every year-one of those runty little kid troops. Most of them make the punks and street gangs at home look like amateurs, but this kid seemed different. It was winter in the north of China. I was barefoot and they'd beaten me on the soles of my feet, among other places, so that I could hardly walk. Besides, I was wiped out with dysentery. The kid showed up, and I kept waiting for more to arrive with more of the whips and chains and bamboo rods business. She bent over my feet and I was wondering if I could wring her neck, just for the fun of it, before she started tormenting me, when I realized she was rubbing some kind of ointment on my feet, something that felt good. When she stepped back she handed me a pair of socks. They were so dirty they looked like they could walk by themselves, but they protected my feet.

When she jerked her head for me to follow her, I hung back, thinking maybe I was being set up.

Sometimes they use you for entertainment, fighting other guys, or seeing how much you can take. Once they tied my hands behind my back and put me in the ring with this little dog. It bit the s.h.i.t out of me before I got its jugular in my teeth."

He fell silent and I said through a blur of pain that was beginning, just a little, to subside, "Well?"

"Oh, it wasn't that bad. She just took me to the edge of the compound and other soldiers met me. I thought, when she took me toward the fence, that maybe she was letting me go. At least she gave me something hot to drink before I left, and some rice b.a.l.l.s. Next thing I knew, I was here, a lot warmer, but still in a cell. Food's better here, though."

"Anybody else remember him arriving?" I asked, and felt another sharp stab of pain."He's always been here," Thibideaux said, rubbing his eyes with his hands as if he too had a headache. "'Course, they shift our cells a lot, we all been in and out of solitary. After a while the days all blur together-I tried keeping hatch marks once or twice but they moved me and anyway, every time I think about it, it gives me a headache. So I don't. Thinkin' about it won't get us out of here no quicker."

"It's bad for morale to dwell on it," the Colonel agreed, ma.s.saging his neck with his fingers. His eyes were clenched tight and he spoke through gritted teeth when he said, "The training manuals and texts all clearly state that personnel in past POW scenarios have found that dwelling on life outside is a good way to die or drive yourself crazy." After a moment he added, wincing, "Besides, I seem to have had a head injury when I came in. I don't remember much about my last a.s.signment, which is lucky, because if I did they'd have broken me. Maybe they did, in that first camp. I hate to say it, but it can happen."

The headache returned with a vengeance, so awful I couldn't seem to focus enough to remember the year or the month I was captured. I was going to tell them, so we could work backward, and I could almost picture the date on my watch before it broke, could almost see the first line in this journal before it got left behind in solitary. But the pain was too intense. Even now, as I write about it, I feel the first stab of that same headache and cannot for the life of me recall that date or any others.

I've been scribbling away by the light of my b.u.t.ter lamp. The men are all asleep and the flame of my lamp flickers to the rhythm of their breath and casts shadows on my paper, obscuring what I've written before. My cellmates' snores comfort me and somewhere within them are echoes of the chants from my dreams. As I concentrate on the chanting, my headache begins to ease, but I'm too exhausted to write any more tonight.

TEA.

My new boss is an odd duck, especially compared to the heroes here in the cell. His polyglot of Indian syntax and Wild West slang is so weird I keep forgetting he's a jailer, but even weirder is the fact that he seems to keep forgetting it too. For instance, he believes that whistling in the tunnels is bad luck and hums "Dark as a Dungeon" in compensation and also believes in coffee breaks and lunch hours, though the momos and tea take me only a few seconds to consume. During the first few of these breaks he kept asking me if Washington was not near Montana and if so, did I not know good old Joe Johannsen, by golly, or Mark Prokopovich or Brian Watson? Very fine fellows. He was obviously trying to put me at ease but if he's doing so to spy on us, as the Colonel seems to think, he has a funny way of doing it because he does almost all the talking. And most of it is so silly and inconsequential I can listen or not to the drone of his voice and it doesn't matter. I do nod in the right places and, at his request, occasionally correct something in his English- though if I edited his entire conversation I would be doing most of the talking.

He's somewhat different as we work-curious and intense when examining the structure and plotting how to reinforce it, grunting to himself when absorbed in some perplexing problem. He shows me these plans, drawing in the dirt, saying, "And this- it is originally belonging here, so. See?" He hands me some piece of debris and reconstructs it for me so that a warped gray board with what looks like flecks of phosph.o.r.escent fungus becomes a piece of carved cloud, once gilded and bordered with crimson. He guides the structural reinforcements, and examines the piles of c.r.a.p with enthusiasm and tenderness. "Is a piece of lion, Viv, very fierce, guardian of this country. No more," he concludes sadly, and I catalog the lion and he tucks it away. There's a lot of this carved stuff, and stonework and tile, smashed and twisted but some still wearing most of its paint.

The Colonel glances in my direction when he thinks I'm not watching and if I catch him at it, givesme a tight little nod and pretends the whole exchange was my idea. Sometimes he drums his fingers on his knees and I know if I look, I'll find him watching me. I suppose that in spite of the fact that my job is forced labor the same as theirs, they don't like my being in such close contact with the enemy. But I truly don't think there's anything subversive about Tea. He's not the spy type. He's what Grandma would have called a nerd-just a simple cross-cultural mining engineer, so miscast as a prison overseer he doesn't even try to play the role.

NEW JOB, DAY 6.

I'm writing this on my "coffee break" in the empty bathtub behind the big room with the scarves, all of which have been removed and cataloged now. Tea says they want to turn that room into a dining hall once it's safely sh.o.r.ed up. He had to talk to some men about some logs so I have a chance to write in privacy, an all but extinct commodity for us these days. That's why I really prefer being here working on a one-to-one basis most of the time with Tea instead of among "my own kind" where the five of us are crowded together in the cell. I can't seem to get to know anybody-there's always an argument breaking out about something, usually sports or firearms or escape. Most often lately it's been escape.

Merridew says-get this-now they have me to think of. Like they're all protecting me. Which wouldn't be so funny except in the next breath he tells me that since I have this new job in such a strategic location, I should be able to steal firearms, extra food, warm clothing and other equipment for an escape.

"I can't get that stuff," I told him. "I'm working in ruins, not as Wu's orderly."

"You're going to have to try, honey," he said as if his kindly encouragement changed the circ.u.mstances. "We sure can't procure the necessary supplies while we're working in the fields all day."

There was, of course, an edge in his voice when he said that last to remind me that some people had to do real work. "Can't you trick your guard?"

"Maybe, but I still don't have access to anything useful."

"You could keep looking through those books," Marsh suggested. "There are probably maps in some of them."

"I wish I could. I'd love to get back into the library but nowadays there are guards and workmen around most of the time and when there aren't, Tea-Taring is with me."

"Someone sure got herself a cushy job in a big hurry," Danielson said, scratching his armpits.

"She was in no d.a.m.n shape to haul rocks," Thibideaux reminded him.

"Just kidding. Just kidding," Danielson said, palms up. And I think he was but I was tired of the innuendos.

"How much do you know about excavations, Du?" Marsh asked mildly. The big man shrugged.

"Well, she studied anthropology in college. They found out during the interrogation. Probably part of the reason they brought her here instead of killing her, though Wu played dumb and tried to get me to tell her something about the rest of you instead. I could tell her you're a f.u.c.king Ph.D.-better qualified than Viv here if you want the soft job yourself for a while."

"h.e.l.l, no," Danielson said. "I can haul more rocks any day than you can in your best week and you know it. I'm glad she has the soft job. I'm just worried about her being over there with all the slants.Seems to me they must have some reason for being so considerate of her health."

NEW JOB, DAY 10.

I'm beginning to long for the times when all the guys did was talk among themselves about the scores of long-defunct sports events or the calibers of obsolete weapons. The lack of privacy is driving us all nuts-especially me. I'd rather use the split trench the guards use-at least there're both males and females there and the Asians are much more casual about such things. It's easier than everybody pretending to be looking elsewhere, thinking deep thoughts, when I have to use the can in the cell.

As a matter of fact, this is the first time I've had to write in a few days as I seem to have developed an active social life. It's taken time for me to recall exactly what you call this phenomenon that seems to have crept into our intracellular social structure.

The first inkling I had of it was when Thibideaux spanned the s.p.a.ce between our stone bunks with his torso and rested his elbows on the unoccupied portion of my bunk, while I was trying to enjoy a few more pages of Huck before retiring.

"Gonna ruin your eyes," he said playfully.

"The light isn't going to get any stronger," I said.

"Maybe you should knock off reading then and-"

"If you think I'm going to go to all the trouble to steal something and then not use it, you're crazy," I said.

"Maybe so," he said. "Crazy. Yeah. That sounds right." But the next night, despite all their protests about how they couldn't get useful escape equipment while out there busting rocks, he had acquired a flashlight, which he tried to give to me.

Colonel Merridew ordered him to hand over the flashlight to him instead, for the escape, and raked him over the coals for holding out on his cellmates. I thought that was all there was to it until Merridew began performing various little gallantries that began to make it clear he was considering himself my chief protector.

"Marsh, move a little to the right, will you? Viv's trying to read and you're casting a shadow on her page."

Just little, ridiculous stuff like that but it's all pretty heady for me, when for years I've wielded zero s.e.xual power as gravity and grayness worked their wicked way with my once comparatively lithesome form, while those around me indulged in cosmetic and surgical antidotes, as any sensible woman would do, instead of more books and tuition.

And yet I am in no mood for a lover. For one thing, in this cell, any liaison would end up as a gang bang or a spectator sport, which is distasteful enough even without the prospect of being perpetually barefoot and pregnant, at my age, in a prison camp with limited medical facilities. No thanks.

This is diabolical indeed. Had Wu been planning a situation that would produce more tension and inner torment than solitary confinement, she could have done no better.