Gods Go Begging Read Online Free PDF

felt that it was something of great significance. At first she had attempted to memorize the strange writing, but its intricacies eluded her. She had even placed Trin’s piece of jade on her tongue, but even then, the scrib blings would not reveal their secrets. When the writing and the paper began to decompose, in desperation she had located a sewing needle and some black ink and she had tattooed the markings into her own forearm. A year later the captain of a company of Vietcong would demand to know what the letters and numbers meant. Wasn’t it written in English? Wasn’t she a spy? Three years later a Thai captain in a squalid refugee camp in central Thailand would place a gun to her head and demand a translation … among other things. Wasn’t it proof that she had been a whore for the Americans?
    While Persephone and Mai grew a day older with each rising of the sun, their two lovers were still trapped in that time before the Têt offensive, green and adamant and sheltered by a callow shield of youthful immortality. They had become men steeped in strategies, clandestine movements, radio call signs, azimuths and quadrants. They were men who kept secrets that inevitably leaked out, made meticulous plans that always fell to pieces, played hunches that invariably ended in misery. They were romantic men who had pushed their women away to go groping for a weapon.
    Both Persephone and Mai hated that moment in their memories, that moment when young men left to prove themselves, to prove something. As a result of this hatred, neither woman could bear to watch most American movies. “Soft rape,” Persephone would call them, countless movies about postpubescent men winning sexual license by rescuing the once unattainable, now helpless girl-woman, by using daring and violence to skirt around acts of intimacy, words of communication and commitment.
    “Kill enough people and you qualify for a waiver of the courtship requirement. Don’t take her to dinner and talk to her,” Persephone would scoff. “Heaven forbid! Just use kung fu on all of her sweaty assailants! Save her from all those scowling bad guys in sunglasses and Italian suits, then walk in all bloodied and bruised and sweep her off her feet! It’s funny, isn’t it? Here Amos went off to shoot at your husband so he could get some kind of macho sexual license, and before he left, Amos hadn’t touched me twice in two years.” Persephone would fall silent, then whisper to her friend, “The men never go home, Mai. They never go home.”
    Suddenly a vision of Persephone’s father rushed into her mind. The old man is sitting in the center of the kitchen back in the family home in Louisiana. His four daughters are busily preening and primping him—making him look years younger so that the old fool widower could go off and seduce a child bride.
    “Men never stay home,” she spat out. “They just ride off into the sunset. And there ain’t no damn responsibility in the sunset.”
    Persephone sighed her wonted sigh. Mai, in the kitchen, spoke toward the photograph of Trin as though the image could hear.
    “I have made love to no one,” she said. Her voice was calm and reassuring. “I have made love to no one.”
    Amos and Trin were young men who couldn’t have known that the time would come when they would trade it all—their rank, their male tribes, their war, everything they had—for a taste of Mai and Persephone’s magical spaghetti. Mai’s and Persephone’s memories always came together at this particular place: at an unimaginable death in a lonely and unmarked place.
    Together, they pored over maps of Vietnam and longed to know where and how their lovers had perished. Was it a painful death? Did they think of their wives? It was the single most important mystery in their lives. Had it happened west of Pleiku? Did it happen south of Khe Sanh? Had their two lovers passed each other in the jungle? Both longed to be there at the end, lending comfort, giving