Kay Merkel Boruff

I’m pretty sure that Nobs, Pee Wee, & I bought this thing when we went for a drive one Sunday. We drove fast, 80 klicks an hour, in the little red Honda car, all the way to the border of Cambodia, the windows down, rice fields on both sides of the road, towns looking like Taos, New Mexico when D.H. Lawrence and the posse was partying with Mable Dodge, Tan Son Nhat in the rear view mirror, kids playing in klong water and riding water buffalos to and from their homes. It was September 30, 1968, my birthday, and my husband Merk was RON to Nha Trang. We stopped at lunch and had sticky rice and warm Ba Mui Ba, the best beer in Viet-Nam. ###Some kid had carved the wooden thing that looked like a Tinker Toy on heroin, the thing thumping along a red dirt road, galumping on misshapen wheels, an arc sail sticking up, testing the wind for napalm. The wood was acacia. My daddy was a wood freak and I’d mailed him wood from Thailand and Singapore and Hong Kong but nothing yet from Viet-Nam. I sent him a wooden bamboo Buddha that reminded me of bamboo growing 12 inches one day as I sat around the White Hotel pool, drinking and smoking, the guys gone to Company orientation. The bamboo Buddha reminded me bamboo growing under fingernails. Nice torture trick. Where the hell the kid got a Lincoln penny is a mystery. Strange things happened in Southeast Asia. Probably some GI gave it to him and a Hersey candy bar and a pack of cigarettes. Maybe the Dinky Dow thought the kid wouldn’t tell the VC where his squad was stationed and maybe he wouldn’t get napalmed or pungy-pitted before he rotated home, agent orange legs and jungle rotted toes and a lean-mean glare behind the whites of his eyes. I liked the shape of the wooden thing, like an ark without the animals, like we all could get on the vessel and sail into the sunset and the war would be over.