Chapter 26: Chapter 25 – People Get Sick by COVID

On our way home from school, Hoa says, "I want to grow banana trees in my front yard, but the banana saplings are expensive. Where can I get some free saplings?"

"Get the same type that Mai has," Tin says.

"I started my banana tree with a shoot bud I had dug up from the Assassin Jungle," I say.

"Let's go to the jungle to dig up some shoot buds,' Hoa says. 

In the Assassin Jungle, we come to the rice paddy dike, but a part of it has collapsed into the paddy. Sunlight comes through a patch of defoliated treetops and shines on the dike. A soldier in bareback shovels and tamps concrete debris into the collapsed part where it's unhindered by foliage.

A helicopter hovers over the repaired part of the dike. With a Marine in full combat gear standing at the open door of the helicopter, it swoops straight down and lands across the makeshift landing pad. The soldier walks up to the Marine, and they communicate using the U.S. Army hand and arm signals. After a few moments, the soldier backs away from the helicopter. It lifts off toward the Mekong Delta.

We turn to leave, but the soldier waves for us to come to him. We walk onto the makeshift landing pad.

I stare at the soldier. "You were the POW imprisoned in a hammock hanging on a fig tree in the Assassin Jungle! You were also the drowning Marine! What have you been up to?

He only chuckles. He reaches into his pants pockets and takes out an apple, a pocket knife, and a military canteen. He cuts the apple in three, and gives a segment to each of us, and then he drinks water from the canteen.

"What are those creatures swimming in the paddy?" Tin says, pointing down toward the water by our feet.

The soldier beams. "They're Signal crawdads. I train them. They can fade their color out to evade capture, or they can fade their color in to come into view. They know where to find me." 

At the sound of voices coming, the soldier dashes into the nearby trees. Two men pedal on their bikes onto the dike.

I say, "Ah, my cousin Nam. I hardly recognized you with your long bill baseball cap pulled down low over your face. Where are you and your friend going?"

Nam turns to his friend. "This is Chan. We're on a scouring adventure."

Chan smiles. "Actually we're going to the Dragon Way cave to catch crawdads."

Pointing downward, Hoa says, "No need to go there now. Look, good iridescent crawdads are right here in the paddy."

Chan lifts a net hanging from his bike's handle and starts putting it in the water. But the crawdads fade their color out.

From behind the trees, the soldier says, "Don't catch my crawdads. Signals, it's OK to show yourself."

The crawdads return to their color.

Hoa snatches the net from Chan's hand and plunges it at the crawdads. She lifts up the net and swings it hard, scattering the crawdads onto the surplus concrete debris.

I see more crawdads lying on their side at the paddy's bottom, and reach my hands toward them. They flip upright as if ready to fight, and come together to surround my submerged hands. They fan their wide-spread tails up and down, splashing water on my face, and I keep my eyes closed. When I feel no more water hitting my face, I open my eyes. The crawdads are crawling away on land among the Asian red poppies.

The soldier rummages in the concrete debris for the scattered crawdads. As he picks them up, they glare at him with bulging green eyes, squinting at him with the black ink coming out of their heads. When he finishes putting them back into the water, they dash around in a crazy manner. He takes out a retractable rod from his pocket, pulls the rod to its full length, and flips a switch on, and the rod glows with blue LED light. The crawdads grab the glowing rod with their pincers, regaining their balance.

The soldier hoots toward the crawdads on the field of red poppies, "Signals. Get back in the water."

The crawdads scurry back and drop into the water.

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I look at a wobbling bridge. It is made by joining tree branches to make two parallel runners, lashing bamboo poles across the runners, and braiding vines to make the handrails.

The soldier beams. "I made this bridge. I don't know why the Vietnamese would call a bridge of this type Monkey Bridge."

I say, "My grandma told me it's called Monkey Bridge because this kind of bridge is so flimsy that as you walk on it, you must clutch the vine handrails, move in a stooping posture, and balance your body against the wobbling movement of the bridge, so you don't fall off it."

The soldier nods. "That makes sense. Anyway, you kids can take this bridge to get to the Dragon Way cave, and get on the main road from there."

Chan and Nam pedal away. Hoa, Tin, and I cross the bridge and come up to a lagoon shaded by palm trees.

Tin says, "The soldier said we would come to the Dragon Way cave. Maybe we've missed a turn somewhere. But I somewhat know this place. We can get to the cave from here."

He leads us to swim under a bush suspending over the lagoon, but we come out onto a field with sparse trees, where some trees are cut and felled, and the stumps are left in place.

Tin says, "Hey! We're so lost! But from here, we can see Yulu town."

Pointing to the border fence nearby in front of us, Hoa says, "Too bad we can't cross the fence to get into Yulu."

I say, "OK then, we can stand here for a little bit, and watch all the activities going on across the fence."

A building stands on top of Nine Lives hill, and a sign on top of the building says "Level-4 COVID Lab". 

Good Health Game Market sits in front of the hill. The market erupts in waves of shouting cheers and laughter. Nearby the market, a security hut stands over the water at the edge of a canal, which flows into a swamp, in which yaks wade with only their eyes and curved horns protruding above the watery surface.

At a meat stall, dangling on a rope tied to a tree branch, a butchered yak hangs in a head-down position, with its head hovering over a thick chopping block. The butcher slips a plastic bag up the yak's head and cuts it off, the bag bobbing down when the head drops into it. He hands the bag to a waiting customer.

A stall serves ready-to-eat specialty food. I try to count up all the dishes contained in trays on the serving counter, but there are too many dishes to keep track of. On a carton board nailed to a wooden pole driven into the ground, the handwritten scribbles advertise the animals used for meat in the dishes: endangered spotted civet, blue-tail ostrich, wet mink, snapping turtle, Siamese crocodile, rice paddy buffalo, and owl. Prices are listed in U.S. Dollar value for the specialty dishes: Peking wet mink, $95; Elf Owl jerky, $75; pickled palm civet, $50; braised cobra, $30; Siamese crocodile kabob, $25; broasted rice paddy buffalo paw, $10.

At the same stall, the bar serves bat blood on tap, at $35 a shot. A van pulls up in front of the bar. The owner looks around for a long while, and then motions to his helpers. They reach under the counter and pull out a rectangular cage full of horny scale pangolins, and a triangular cage of dragon-faced bats clinging to the net. While the helpers load the cages onto the van, the owner walks over to the van's driver-side window. The driver reaches a stack of 100-dollar bills out the window, and the owner takes the money and slides it into a pouch tied to his waist. He scurries to the bar counter and disappears under it. 

A boy comes out of a house on the Vietnamese side, walks over, and stands beside us. He says, "They've been having the Lunar Month Feast for the last four weeks. I hope they don't get sick from eating all that raw meat and drinking the blood of wild animals." 

Red snakes are crawling on the ground. The workers skin the snakes, remove the meat from the bones and slice the meat into a tub. They pour bags of fresh lotus flower petals and Dragon Fire spices, a product of Dragon Kingdom, on the raw meat. They roll up their shirt sleeves and put their bare hands in the tub to mix up the contents, the juice of the mixture soaking up to the folded parts of their sleeves. A bald worker, with a bandana tied around his head, licks his fingers, saying, "Good! Serve up the Longevity Salad to the connoisseur mob!"

The trays of Longevity Salad are put on the serving tables with no refrigeration equipment. Customers fill up their plates with the salad, and go around and sit down where they can. At a rock ledge, a man pulls out a bottle of Sake wine from his pocket, pours raw bat blood into the bottle, and shakes it up. Then he pours the contents into the glasses of the people surrounding him. While eating the salad, they clink glasses and shout, "To your health and wisdom," and then drink up their glasses.

A woman among the group sways and lurches backward, clutching her chest. "Oh no, I can't breathe."

More people among the group clutch their chests, heaving, and coughing. Five of them are carried away on stretchers, with their heads fitted tightly inside the empty plastic bags of the Dragon Fire spices.

A white van with a red cross painted on it rolls to a stop on the festival ground. Health workers wearing hazmat suits jump down the van. They swab the nostrils of the people acting sick, to collect samples for testing.

A loudspeaker announces, "So far, thirty thousand people are tested positive for COVID."

People at the market look at one another and go in different directions, leaving the tied-up alive animals flopping on the ground.

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