The Gangster We Are All Looking For

by Le Thi Diem Thuy

  I grabbed my sandals from the ground and swinging them in my hands, ran home. I threw the screen door open and let it slam shut behind me. Ma looked up from her sewing and, seeing that my feet were bare, told me to go wash them.

  Lying in bed that night, I thought about the boy. I remembered the feeling of his shoulder in my hand, the roundness of it pressing against my palm. I brought two fingers to my throat and imagined they were lips—mine and then his—feeling for a pulse.

  That was the summer I came out of the bathroom at the Chinese movie theater and saw my mother in the lobby talking to a man I’d never seen before. He was staring at her and she was staring at him as if they knew each other but didn’t believe what they were seeing. My mother kept smiling and tucking her hair behind her ears. She had just gotten a haircut so actually her hair was already behind her ears.

  I went over and stood next to her. The man noticed before my mother did and he smiled, but I didn’t smile back. My mother told me to go wash my hands. I kept my eyes on the man and said, “I already washed my hands.” She said, “Wash them again.” I went into the bathroom and watched my mother and the man from behind the bathroom door. My mother and the stranger kept talking and smiling and then all of a sudden it was as though they were both backing away, each turning from the other, at the same time. Like a knot coming loose. He turned and walked toward the glass doors of the theater and she turned and walked toward the women’s bathroom.

  In the bathroom, my mother stood before the mirror and slowly wet her hands. She ran her fingers through her hair before pressing the backs of them to her cheeks and then her throat. As she fished around in her pocketbook, rearranging the contents, I watched her and thought that she didn’t look like my mother. When she saw me staring at her, she said, “That was a friend from home. From when I was a girl.” “Oh,” I said, nodding, as if I understood. She looked at herself in the mirror and added, “From when I was a young girl.” “Young like me?” I asked. She glanced at me and after a second of not saying anything, she shook her head and smiled. “No,” she said, “a little older.”

  I was in the kissing box with the boy when someone beat against the box with a branch. “Hey, get out! It’s our turn. You better not be making babies in there.” I heard pebbles thrown against the cardboard. I let go of the boy’s hand and felt his body turning in the dark. He kicked open the flaps of the box and the sun came in. When I leaned forward to step out, I felt the sun warming my knees, my wrist, the side of my arm and my face. I touched one bare foot to the ground and the ground was all heat and powdery dust.

  One night I woke to the sound of my mother laughing in the bed across from mine. She was trying to take off my father’s shoes but his legs were bent funny so she had to pull hard. The shape of my mother in the dark kept changing. She leaned back and I saw her hair slip loose from the bun on top of her head. Her hair fell down her neck, brushed her shoulders and fanned across her back.

  My dad was drunk. He said, “I’m so tired. Come here. Forget about the shoes.” He swung his arms in the air. He was drawing crooked hoops for her to step through. She stood up on the bed and walked toward him slowly. She was taller than everything now, but the bedsprings made her steps unsteady. She pressed her palm against the wall to balance herself. Standing over him she placed her foot on his chest. He wrapped his fingers around her ankle and said, “Come here. You’re so far away.” She shook her head and said, “You’re ridiculous. Don’t even know how to take your own shoes off.” She put a hand on one hip and laughed at him. He stroked the calf of her leg and said, “Lie down here,” patting his chest with his other hand. “Here,” he said, patting his chest again, this time in a different place. My mother merely looked down at him. He caught her hand and pulled her to him.

  I heard muffled laughter, whispers, the word “Anh” and then quiet.

  Beside me my parents became long and dark bodies rising and falling like waves.

  At night I watched as the shape of my hand kept changing in the dark. Here are five fingers. I made a fist. I made the mouth of a hungry bird. I made scissors. I held my hand in front of me. It was a page, a picture. I pulled it away, turned it around, and brought it back. It became another page, another picture. It was a door. I opened and closed it. There was a creaky hinge. I licked the side of my little finger and everything was quiet again. Two fingers in the air were feet running uphill. My hand curving backward was a dive into deep water.

  There was a road my father took that summer which curved above a canyon of eucalyptus trees. It was a back road between an uncle’s house and ours. The uncle must have been doing well that summer because it seemed like every other Sunday he would throw a party.

  A party meant the women in the kitchen talking and cooking, the kids outside playing and the men in the living room drinking. When it got dark out, the kids were called inside to help with the dishes and then told to sit around and be quiet while the men finished their drinks. Tired and bored, we’d fight and then fall asleep in the hallway. When the men had drunk enough to feel happy, some even happy enough to cry, it was time to go home. As my father drove us home, the Mercury Cougar lurched at each curve in the road, as if it wanted to leap toward the stands of eucalyptus in the canyon below.

  • • •

  When the boy moved his hand across my chest, I saw my father’s car sliding down the soft wall of the canyon. I stopped the boy’s hand. “Hey …” There it was again; not the alarm but the quiet. I touched his forearm and then his wrist. I didn’t know what to do next, so I closed my eyes.

  The boy shifted a little and without thinking, I brought his hand up to my throat and then to my face. Guiding his fingers across my lips and against my cheek, I imagined that he was blind and learning, with his hand, what a face was. Here are lips, a nose, the bridge of a nose, I imagined explaining to him. Here are two closed eyelids, the tickle of eyelashes, the bones in the cheeks, the shape of the forehead, two brows. I raised his hand until his fingertips were brushing my eyebrows, and then I leaned forward and pressed my lips against his palm. He made a little sound, like “ah.”

  His palm felt warm and the sweat smelled sweet.

  I stood at the window and looked down to where the swimming pool had been. Ma was working behind me, at the kitchen table. “Where does water go when it goes away?” I asked her. “It goes into the air or it goes into the ground,” Ma said. I pictured a coin from her pocketbook being tossed into the air.

  Down below, the palm looked lonely as an island. “What if someone goes down into water,” I asked, “and doesn’t come up?” “Don’t know,” my mother said. “Hand me that spool of thread.”

  My palms in the dark: the fingers of my left hand feeling for the lines on my right palm; the fingers of my right hand reaching for the lines on my left palm; back and forth in the dark. It takes me such a long time to trace a single line in the dark that the line seems to get longer and deeper, becoming a river, a tunnel, a trench or the roots of the trees my mother says are growing inside of me. If it’s a tree, there aren’t any leaves or fruit yet, just a trunk with the skinniest branches. If it’s a trench, there aren’t any people hiding in it yet. It’s freshly dug and empty. If it’s a tunnel, I’m not sure where it’s leading. And if it’s a river, I don’t know which way it would be to the ocean. This line, falling off the side of my palm? Or this line, leading straight back into me? Sometimes I can’t feel a single line on my hand and that’s when I imagine that my palms are all sand, desert; no river, no tunnel, no trench, no tree; nothing between the sand and the sky but the smoothest open space.

  It was into this open space that I imagined someone might fall. All that summer, while lying awake at night or leaning over the railing during the day, I’d close my eyes and with my arms out, palms up, I’d whisper, “Come here, come here, come here.”

  • • •

  When the carnival came to our neighborhood and set up on the edge of the school playground, my friends and I went on a roller-
coaster ride called the Super-Loop. Unlike other roller-coaster rides, this ride didn’t go anywhere except in one big circle. You swooped into the air and curved down toward the ground, over and over, faster and faster, until everyone was screaming. When all the cars were at the top, with everyone hanging upside down, they’d stop the ride. Hanging like that, you couldn’t help but notice all the people on the ground and how small they looked. You could see them standing and walking around down there but it was strange; the ground they were on didn’t look like the ground you could stand on; it looked like a picture of the ground. From that height, it felt like there was nothing above you and there was nothing below you, as though the whole world were a roller coaster stopped at the peak with only a picture of a floating ground somewhere far below. You could lift up a corner of that ground and there would be nothing beneath it. Except maybe water.

  There were so many days that summer when my parents would start off trying to have fun and end up tearing the house apart. I noticed that neither of them cried much during that time; he liked to sing when he was drunk, and when she was mad, she liked to scream and throw things. When they fought, I couldn’t understand much of what they said. They’d jump around the house like two firecrackers.

  I blamed everything on the summer; the heat, the lack of rain, the pool’s having gone. There was nothing to keep them from fighting about everything or anything. For instance, burnt food.

  My father came home late from work, drunk. For that reason, my mother didn’t want to be kissed by him. But then later, in the dark, she got mad at him for being too drunk to kiss her. “Where’s your mouth?” he asked. “That’s my shoulder,” she said. “Where’s your mouth?” “That’s my forehead. That’s my other shoulder.” “Where’s your mouth?” “Just go to sleep!” she said, turning away from him.

  The next morning, she wouldn’t get out of bed to make him breakfast, and in the evening, she burned the dinner. When he asked, “What’s this about?” she pointed to her lips and said, “This is my mouth. Are you blind? Here is my mouth. Not here,” she said, slapping her shoulders, “or here,” pointing to the side of her head.

  Then they got into a big fight about nothing.

  As they were moving from room to room, yelling and breaking things, I’d lock myself in the bathroom, fill the tub with water, strip down to my underwear, climb in and pretend I was at the ocean on the world’s hottest day. At the ocean, with my body covered completely in salt water, I could listen to them and then not listen to them. I could move my body down so the waves cupped my ears and then move my body up, my head rising out of salt water to catch her saying, “You used to,” and then down into the water again, nothing but waves crashing and then up again to hear him say, “Tired” or “What can I,” and then as I dipped my head down, I’d hear her cut him off, “Forget it,” she’d say. And when the awful quiet came, I’d break it by filling the tub with more and more water.

  After fighting with each other, my parents would make up with me. Ma would walk to the market with her pocketbook under her arm and bring home a bag of sweet oranges or sticks of sugarcane. Ba would pull a piece of rock candy out of his pocket and break it into crystals on the kitchen counter. They’d both say, “Look what I found for you.” As if they had dug it up or it had dropped from the sky and all they had to do was catch it and carry it home to me.

  When Ma first arrived in America, she had very long hair. It didn’t flow to her feet but it was thick and straight and black and you could grab it by the fistful and hold it to your face. After she cut it that summer, she looked more like the women who read the news on TV. “Modern” was how she described it. She didn’t want to be a seamstress anymore, working all day long, her foot pumping the pedal so the machine would spin and murmur and the needle would go jab-a-dab-dab at her fingertips.

  Ma worked at the kitchen table, surrounded by bags filled with the houses, clouds, suns, trees, and flowers that she’d sewn. These bags were picked up at the end of every week and taken to a factory where they would be sewn on baby blankets.

  Ma cleared the kitchen table and showed me how the shapes that she’d been working on that summer would be arranged on those baby blankets she had never seen. Like a picture a child had drawn with crayons, the blanket would have a small white house with two windows, one door, and a pointed brown roof. The house sat on a patch of green grass, next to a tall tree. There were fat, doughy clouds above the house and a sun the yellow of lemons. Red and orange flowers grew to either side of the house.

  Each part of the picture had a colorful face and a blank back. My mother sewed the front and the back together, making sure to leave a small opening so she could fill their insides with bunches of cotton wooling. When the pictures puffed out, she sewed them shut. My mother worked very fast, turning things out like a factory. I imagined that the sharp little needle was the loudmouthed man on a factory floor, shouting out orders for her to go faster. Faster than yesterday! Faster toward tomorrow!

  • • •

  The factory where my father worked as a welder specialized in a certain kind of space heater. The kind that looked like a skinny white leg that glowed red when you turned it on. My mother thought it was unfortunate that the heaters were so skinny. She said, “A skinny heater’s like a skinny person. How can it keep you warm?” Ba explained that though the heater was thin, it was designed to be efficient: you could stand it in the corner and the heat would radiate out from “that little leg,” and warm the whole room. Ma found this hard to believe and worried that the company my father worked for would go out of business for making such skinny heaters. Sometimes my parents would fight about it. Ma thought Ba should say something, but Ba said there was nothing he could do about it and, besides, he would have rather been a gardener.

  That summer, he ’d stand in the doorway of our apartment and stare at the concrete courtyard. “It may be time to move,” he’d say. Shaking his head, he’d tell my mother and me that when they drained the pool, they should have filled it with soil. He could have grown us a jungle in the courtyard. “If that had happened,” he told me, “you and your friends could have been the wild animals, charging through the jungle two by two.”

  I was lying in one tower of the Jehovah’s Witnesses castle and my friend was lying in the other. I pulled the bottom of my T-shirt up to my chin and ran a hand across the two lumps on my chest. They felt paltry. Each was barely the size of a spoonful of rice. Unless I pinched them, I couldn’t feel anything. Sometimes the fabric of my T-shirt rubbing against the tip of them tickled me. “Tickles,” I yelled over to my friend. “That’s all?” she yelled back, indignant. I heard her stand up in her tower and groan. As she came running down her stairs and over to my tower, I pictured her skinny ankles and her white sandal straps. At the top of my stairs, she announced, “They hurt me all the time.” I shrugged my shoulders. “What can I do?” I said. “You’ll see,” she promised. “Someday you’re going to suffer too.”

  She was standing above me now. Behind her head I could see the two tall palm trees in front of the church and beyond the palm trees, the sky, pale blue with a few clouds. The heat of the tiles against my back made me sleepy. The tower was full of eucalyptus cones since we had played war earlier that day. I reached over and picked up a cone and bit into it. It tasted bitter. I threw it into the air and heard it land and roll along the sidewalk. “I feel like taking my shirt off,” I told her. “Why don’t you?” she said. “It’s not like you have anything to hide.”

  I took off my shirt and bunched it into a pillow to rest my head against. My friend sat down behind me, crossing her legs under herself, like my father’s wooden statue of the Buddha. She leaned back against the wall, tapping her fingers against her bare knees.

  I closed my eyes and imagined how, if I had my way, I’d run around with my shirt off all the time and spend my days climbing trees and my nights sleeping in one of these towers. While I slept, the sky would be dark as the back of a woman’s long head of hair and
all the stars would be the small white flowers she was wearing in it. Throughout the night, the eucalyptus trees would drop their cones, trying to wake me, and from inside the tops of the palms I would hear the rustling of small brown birds, the color of dust, nestled close together, slowly turning in their sleep.

  I was almost asleep when I felt my friend’s hands in my hair. She lowered her face toward mine. “Hey, boy,” she said. “Upside down, you look like a boy. You look like the brother of …” And she said my name.

  I looked at the sky. Looked at the clouds. I wanted to go to sleep. I closed my eyes. I could still feel my friend’s fingers in my hair. I heard her ask, “Is it true that you had a—” “No,” I said, pushing her hands away and sitting up. She touched my bare back and I pulled away. “Don’t,” I said, reaching for my shirt.

  One Sunday, late in the summer, my parents decided to throw a party. When I asked if there was anything I could do to help, Ma told me to run to the corner store and buy her another bag of ice. As I was putting on my sandals, she opened her pocketbook, took out a dollar bill and handed it to me. “Hurry,” she said.

  • • •

  I walked the three long blocks down Orange to Euclid. The liquor store was on the corner. The screen door was closed and the store looked dark. I stepped into the cool and quiet inside. There was a tall man with thick hair standing behind the counter. He had a newspaper spread open across the counter and was leaning over it, reading. As I walked by him, he looked up and said, “Hi, there.” I turned my head toward him and said, “Hi, there,” in the same tone of voice. Then I laughed to myself, thinking, You bird. You parrot. You Polly. I mouthed the words Polly, Polly, Polly, as I walked between the tall shelves of bottles, making my way slowly toward the freezers at the back of the store.

  I walked past the bottles of golden whiskey, past the bottles of vodka clear as water or rubbing alcohol, and stopped at the cognac bottles. Each bottle had a red wax seal on it, the kind of seal that gets stamped on letters delivered by horseback to people in castles. I raised my finger to the bottle and traced the C that was pressed into the seal. It left a light streak of dust on my fingertip but the C came up brighter, like a red ring I could slip my finger into.