Summer drew to a close and that year the cicadas hung on stubbornly in the trees. You could hear them ringing and shrilling across the air, deep in the tangles of cajeput and bamboo groves. Ian and his mates had seen the guards hunt baby cicadas at night, and the sight of flickering lanterns around the bases of trees every night had become familiar around the camp. They looked for newly hatched cicadas. They peeked through the earth, crawled up tree trunks and shed their skins. Their wings were pale. Before the nymphs’ new skins could harden and their wings were to fill with fluid to turn themselves into an adult, the guards picked them, one by one, off the tree trunks. They dropped those nymphs into a salt-water pot so the nymphs’ wings stopped stiffening and then they boiled them. In a wok they stir-fried them with granular salt and you could smell a mouth-watering aroma coming out of the camp kitchen.
At noon when I walked by their hut I heard Ian call out from inside, “Giang!†I saw him sitting on the dirt floor with five of his mates, the lidded rice pot on the floor among them. Inside the hut the evil smell from the latrine made me hold my breath. I saw what they had for lunch. The only dish to go with rice was boiled corn which they grated and doused with nước mắm mixed with crushed hot peppers.
“You want ve?†Ian asked me, holding the rice bowl in midair.
“Ve?†I said. “Cicada?â€
He nodded, shushing me with his finger against his lips. I looked out toward the guard’s hut and turned back. “You caught the baby cicadas?†I said, feeling curious. The prisoners were forbidden to go outside their hut at night, except to use the latrine in the full view of the guard. One of his mates lifted the lid on the rice pot and inside, piled up above the cooked rice, were stir-fried baby cicadas. Ian picked one up. “Try it,†he said. The cicada had a smoky smell when I sank my teeth into it. It popped with a plup sound. A fatty flavor so rich with raw salt bit my tongue. “This is good,†I said to him, licking my lips, feeling all my taste buds rise up. “You caught them?â€
“Late last night,†he said, grinning, as all the hands snuck at the same time into the rice pot and then came the popping sounds and the lid was quickly put back on. They all grinned, happy as a child on the Lunar New Year.
*
We had a late-summer storm. Most of the roofs suffered damages and we also had a shortage of drinking water. The storm and heavy rains had roiled the creek nearby from which we ran a long bamboo channel to our kitchen and from the kitchen the prisoners were to carry water to their own hut in hard-rubber containers. Mud was everywhere. Red mud left footprints on the dirt floors, the footpaths, on cots and hammocks.
For days rain came and went. During the lulls the heat beat down on the forest mercilessly and the forest floor steamed. While we lay the footpaths with wooden planks, the prisoners were taken to a distant grassland to cut buffalo grass and elephant grass, bundle them and carry them back to camp to thatch the roofs. I saw them hauling home large bundles of grass. It was a sweltering day and the forest vapors hazed the air. I saw Ian sit down on his heels by the trail to take a breather. He was naked to the waist, his back striped with cuts from grass blades. They smarted with their toothy blades and their coarse undersides caused skin rash. You would scratch yourself until your skin chafed. The guards ordered him to move on and I could see the heat was taking toll on him. His legs looked rubbery, his head hung to one side.
We worked long days into nights until our camp was restored. At night it turned cold. I had to put on another shirt and, wrapped tightly in my blanket, I still shivered. I thought of the prisoners and their burlap blankets. Each of them had only one shirt, one pair of pants. I had seen them join their cots so they could draw heat from each other, each sleeping balled up in fetal position to keep warm. A few days later Ian came down with dysentery. They said he had drank unboiled water that the prisoners carried back to their hut from our kitchen, unclean water that we tapped from the nearby creek. I understood that the prisoners had neglected boiling their own drinking water because they were taken every day to the grassland to cut buffalo grass, a long trek away and back. Then from dehydration to bone-chilling cold at night, something had to give. Some other prisoners had diarrhea. One of them walked around with no pants in the hut. The guards told him to put his pants back on and the next thing they saw was watery discharge running down his legs. I went into the hut to check on Ian a few times and he wasn’t doing too well. He could hardly sit because his testicles had swollen to the size of his fist. His legs, his stomach puffed grotesquely. At night sometimes the urge to release was so sudden and great he would let it gush out of his body on his cot. The guards would make them clean the floor every day to rid of the excrement.
*
That afternoon I visited Ian in his hut. I bought him a can of condensed milk. He looked so pale and his face so misshapen he shocked me with his smile. “Cám ơn,†he said, holding the can tightly in his hand.
“You are welcome,†I said, standing by his cot and holding my breath. His teeth were clattering. I took out a Gauloises Caporals pack of cigarettes and placed it in his other hand.
“This-thing-is-strong,†he said, slurring.
“Help me cut down,†I said with a grin.
He held up the blue-colored pack, gazing at the winged helmet logo, while I let out my breath slowly. I could see dark blotches on the fly of his pants and on the inside of his pants legs. The legs had swollen noticeably.
“Our treasure plant died,†he said, raising his voice with an effort.
“The spinach in the back?â€
He nodded. “Many o’em died around’re.â€
I told him about the chemicals the two-engined Caribous sprayed our forest with. He said nothing for a while, then, “So they can see you. That’s bad.â€
“Bad for all of us,†I said, thinking of him and his sick mates if we had to move on.
That evening, after supper, Ian lapsed into a coma and died before midnight. They said he craved sweet so he drank half the can of condensed milk without eating his evening meal. Our doctor said that could be fatal for a dysentery victim. In the morning we gave them a coffin to bury Ian in and his mates carried the coffin to the camp’s graveyard and dug a grave. They were digging when we heard the plane and soon we saw a spotter coming over the forest. The prisoners stopped and lowered the casket. It was a shallow grave. They said the Lord’s Prayer in the droning of the plane as it disappeared over the mountain.
Sometime in the afternoon the sky buzzed and throbbed with the sounds of helicopters. The gongs alerted us to aerial attack and many of us, including the prisoners, were forced into the bomb shelters. From underground we heard the gunships firing rockets and the roaring of their miniguns and we heard our antiaircraft in concealed locations around the camp. The tremors went through the earth and we could feel it shake in our bunkers.
It was dusk when we left the bomb shelters. Most of the huts were destroyed, our kitchen and the prisoners’ hut, too. Trees fell, snapped in half, looking ragged and white. The graveyard was hit with rockets and large holes in the ground gaped. We could see old coffins upheaved, many burst open, flung about. We could see our fresh grave lay gutted and there wasn’t anything left in it.
As I walked away from the graveyard I remembered I’d once told Ian I had no religion. Something clawed at my throat. Had I a faith, what explanation would I receive?
Khanh Ha is the author of ‘Flesh’ (2012, Black Heron Press) and ‘The Demon Who Peddled Longing’ (November 2014, Underground Voices). He is a three-time Pushcart nominee and the recipient of Greensboro Review’s 2014 Robert Watson Literary Prize in Fiction.
‘The American Prisoner’ previously appeared in print in the Winter 2014 issue of Permafrost. All rights remain with the author.