The rainy season came to Vietnam shortly after I arrived and it didn’t
seem like it was ever going to end. The reason that Lin said every Vietnamese
song was about the rain was that it never truly went away. There was the season
when it rained all day and all night and then there was the season where it got
hot as hell every day and only rained around four in the afternoon to cool
things off. I never minded being caught in that rain because it felt so good
and I knew that a half-hour after it stopped I would be completely dry.
The period right after I arrived in Vietnam just seemed to a very damp
and monotonous time. The only sounds permeating through the bleak, gray sky was
the alternating whirring and whacking of huey rotor blades and the constant
slamming of raindrops onto the metal roofs of the barracks.
On one of those rainy days Tony and I rode a bus into Saigon to take some
pictures, play around with the tea girls on Tu Do Street, and just do our
Hemingway thing, which boiled down to getting away from the structure of Long
Binh and into the helter skelter of the city with absolutely no rules—or a lot
of rules that everyone seemed intent on breaking. The object was to interact as
much as possible with the locals so as to feel that the war, and our year in
it, didn’t become just an exercise in keeping our noses clean. When we went to
Saigon we were looking for trouble—not big trouble with a capital T but
maybe mischief with a small m.
The thing about a city like Saigon is you don’t have to go looking for
anything. Everything comes to you. Girls with heavy makeup wearing clothes like
they imagine the girls back home are wearing approach you, even stalk you,
except that GI’s don’t generally think of women as stalkers. Then there are the
cyclo and pedi-cab drivers looking to take your money and drive you anywhere
you wanted to go—even if it was just to the next corner. And, of course, there is no way to escape
the beggars, buyers, sellers, and pushers—and always the MP’s, constantly
watching to see just which one of these groups you eventually fall in with.
On this particular day a man on the sidewalk approached me with a
ridiculous offer. He held in his hand a gourd with a stick coming out of it and
a plastic string attached to it. He frantically ran alongside us, tugging at my
sleeve, until he was finally able to position himself in front of me and begin
his sales pitch, plucking at the string as if it were a real musical
instrument, all the while screaming that for 200-dong this musical monstrosity
could be mine.
It was not an uncommon experience to have some useless object offered to
you on the streets of Saigon and it was easy enough to wave the seller off and
just keep moving, but—well, I don’t know. Maybe he was just a very good
salesman or maybe I just thought this would be a good time in my life to break
down and buy a one-string mandolin. Anyway, I pulled 200-dong out of my pocket,
an amount that to this day I have no idea what it is really worth, but I gave
it to him and accepted the stringed gourd and accompanying bow that he put in
my hand.
Later that day, back in the barracks I fiddled around with my new toy
only to discover that I had probably paid 200-dong too much for it. It was
useless in the sense that I could only pluck one sound—I hesitate to call it a
note. Even using the bow, I quickly learned that I could create only one
ear-piercing, shrieking, god-awful squeal. I was between a pile of gravel and a
soft place in the sense that even though the instrument was useless, I had paid
practically nothing for it.
Around this time I realized that there was a third sound in addition to
the constant spinning of the rotor blades and the rain hitting the metal roof
that I had somehow completely overlooked. It was the sound of frogs. It sounded
like a million, maybe two—it could have been less, I suppose, or it could have
easily been more, but every night the croaking of the frogs would fill the
night air making it hard to talk, sleep or think—or anything else except maybe
drink. This was a rainy season sound that obviously had been going on for quite
some time but somehow, I had missed it.
Could anything, short of a change in the climate or the morning sun, shut
the frogs up, I wondered—and then it came to me. Even as a young boy I knew
that there were whistles that could only be heard by dogs. What if, I wondered,
this new instrument of mine that made a sound that caused humans to cringe—what
would the frogs think of it? Would the sound somehow make them forget whatever
it was that they were raging at and cause them to flop down on their flubby
stomachs and relax? I stepped out of the barracks into a clearing and drew the
bow across my single string mandolin—and continued to do so over and over
again, back and forth.
Screeeech. Screeeech. Screeeech.
It was excruciating, unbearably painful and unthinkably irritating and
yet—and yet, for some unfathomable reason the frogs seemed to like it. Like
it—they loved it, or so I imagined, because I suddenly had an audience of a
million frogs who dropped what they were doing, cleared whatever it was in
their throats that was driving them crazy and turned their attentive little
frog ears to the melodious music I was offering them. And they did all this in
utter silence.
They were putty in my hands for when I stopped, they started up and when
I played they shut down and we, the frogs and I, did our little dance on that
rainy night, until, at last and not surprisingly, the string on my bow broke,
the music stopped and the croaking resumed.
I eventually went to sleep that night, as I did every night, to the sound of a million frogs but now also with the knowledge that for a short time, a very short time, indeed, I had possessed the most elusive of all musical instruments, something that might only be found in fairy tales—a magical one-string mandolin.
This story appeared in the web magazine Short Fiction on May 27, 2011 under the title, The Frogs and My One-String Mandolin.
Great story...
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