Chapter 2
"Christ, it's been too damned long!" Tom Bailey threw down his short stick and glared at the sand-drawn map of the Golden Triangle with an umbilical cord line connecting its craggy outline with the smooth one of North America. He couldn't count how many times he had drawn that same map in the sand outside of his dirt floored thatch but on the Pai River, and drawn the same mental blank. The tall American rose from his haunches, despondently realizing that perhaps he was forcing something from a brain that had long since atrophied from lack of human contact. Seven . . . eight years had passed since his American spy plane had been shot down in the last stages of the Viet Nam conflict and he'd escaped from the burning wreckage in the Burmese forests near the Thai border. His leg, once splintered and mangled, had long since healed and he walked now with only a slight limp.
Insanely, he wished he had somebody there sharing his gloomy existence to get him out of this dank hell hole on the wrong side of the world . . . if only for one passionate minute. A few giggling, bucktoothed Burmese girls from the village were his sole contact with the world . . . that and a few chattering gibbons hanging from his teak branches outside his hut. But he hated anybody with brown skin, for it was those bastards who'd shot his plane down. Killed his crew and left him bleeding on a river bank with the snakes and blood-thirsty Karenni smugglers for company.
Aimlessly, Tom Bailey sauntered into his rustic hut and stared at his remaining touch with the Western world: a crumpled up snapshot, wrinkled from humidity, of his girl friend Julie back in Dayton, Ohio sitting on a sofa in a playful cheesecake Harlow pose. That photograph had been his good luck charm during those disastrous missions into Communist territory. Luck? What a bitter joke that was!
Feeling slightly dizzy from the mental agony of loneliness, he staggered to the broken shaving mirror from his first-aid emergency plane kit and inspected himself, turning his head this way and that. Would Julie still find him attractive? There were few women in these godforsaken wilds who could give him an answer, save for the aging whore who'd worked the streets of Da Nang during the war and had made it her business to learn a few English phrases. Tom squinted through the dim light and wondered if Julie would recognize him now. He was thin and wiry and his hair was long and wild. Once he'd been combed and clipped, a bit overweight.
"You're getting old," he mumbled, hearing his own voice for the first time in days. Before he was shot down in that last spy mission, he'd planned to marry Julie and have kids and dogs and a big back yard back there in Dayton. Where was she now. . . ? Making peanut butter sandwiches for another man's children? Groaning out her orgasm under the man taking his place?
Somewhere out there was a means of getting back to the States, but something inside of Tom had long since withered up all hope of seeing Dayton, Ohio and Julie. Anyway, she probably wouldn't want him any more.
Bailey felt faint again from the emotional exhaustion of memories and he plopped down on his straw mat and slept while the gibbons chattered high over head, chasing after ultramarine birds.