Saigon Read Online Free PDF Page A

senses but the juice stains their mouth and their clothes — even the street when they spit.” 
    Joseph stared at him in disbelief. Then he looked back again at the blinding quayside. In the shade beneath the trees he saw that the “massacred” Annamite coolies were beginning to come to life; they untangled themselves from one another with painful slowness and staggered to their feet. The ship’s engines ceased and the crew began throwing down ropes to a white man in a pith helmet who had emerged from one of the quayside offices. Like sleep- walkers in a dream the coolies began advancing out of the shade towards the ship. As they came, many of them spat repeatedly, leaving behind them a trail of crimson, betel-stained saliva on the burning concrete of the wharf. 

3
    “Pousse-pousse! Pousse-pousse!” yelled Chuck Sherman and sprang down the steps of the Continental Palace Hotel into the Rue Catinat with his arm raised in the manner of a French colon. Immediately a swarm of coolies rushed towards him, dragging their wire-wheeled rickshaws behind them, and he leaped into the nearest one with a loud whoop. “Allez! Allez! Vite! Vite!” he yelled, clapping his hands, and the coolie set off instantly at a frantic gallop along the boulevard. 
    Joseph clambered aboard his pousse-pousse more tentatively. Both brothers were dressed in neatly tailored white tuxedos and black ties in preparation for the formal reception being given in their father’s honor at the palace of the governor of Cochin China, and it was Chuck who had insisted that they travel separately by pousse-pousse rather than in the official Citroën sent for their parents. “This way we’ll get to see more of the real Saigon,” he said loudly for the benefit of their father — then he winked confidentially at Joseph and whispered in his ear: “And the last one there is a horse’s ass. It’s a race, okay?” 
    Before Joseph could agree or disagree, his brother had mounted up and was laughing loudly as he urged his coolie along the boulevard at top speed. Joseph could see tufts of grizzled hair protruding from beneath the sweat-soaked turban wrapped around the head of his aged coolie and he didn’t have the heart to order him to gallop. He was stripped to the waist and as he jogged along between the shafts a few coins — obviously his meager earnings for the day — jingled pathetically in a leather pouch fastened to the back of his belt. 
    Before he’d gone a hundred yards Joseph saw a burly French colon cuff an Annamite coolie roughly about the head at the curbside after descending from his pousse-pousse. The American boy turned in his seat and stared, expecting to see a fight, but the cowering Annamite accepted his beating meekly and none of the European passersby spared the man a second glance. Half a minute later another Frenchman sent his pousse-pousse puller staggering in the gutter with a blow to the head after an apparent argument about the fare, and Joseph realized with a shock that such beatings were merely routine. Outside the hotel he had fought down misgivings at the idea of allowing an old man to drag him through the streets when he could easily have walked, and he began to wonder if he should dismount. But when he caught up with Chuck, who had at last relented and allowed his breathless coolie to slow to a trot, he found the older boy grinning and lolling casually in his seat, obviously suffering no such pangs of conscience. 
    “I don’t find these little oriental chariots altogether unpleasant as a mode of transport, Joey,” he said, affecting an exaggerated Harvard drawl. “How about you?” 
    “Not bad — not bad at all,” replied Joseph hurriedly and he tried to lean back against the cushions in the same careless fashion as his brother while the two rickshaws rolled on together side by side through the light traffic. 
    The approach of evening and release from the heat had transformed the city through which they rode,