I opened the tall freezer door, grabbed a bag of ice and carried it in my arms to the front of the store. The man had put away his newspaper and was now standing with his arms folded across his chest. I smiled at him and dropped the bag of ice on the counter.
Next to the cash register were plastic containers of beef jerky and a display rack of sunglasses. The rack creaked when I spun it and the man said, “Makes a racket.” With the change from the ice, I bought a box of Lemon Heads. The man offered me a paper bag for the ice but I didn’t take it. I wanted to carry the ice home in my arms, because it was still warm out. I put the box of candy in my pocket, wrapped my arms around the bag of ice and said, “Bye,” to the man. As I walked through the screen door, I heard him say, “Bye, now,” in my tone of voice.
I stood on the street corner, next to a bum who was eating a mango that smelled really good. He’d already pushed the button. We waited for the light to change. The open red hand flashed and then the white walking body, and then the sound like a mechanical bird. As I ran across the street, I heard the box of candy rattle in my pocket and I felt the coolness of the ice against my chest and throat.
When I got to the other side of the street, I looked back and saw that the bum hadn’t moved. “C’mon!” I yelled. He shook his head. He was staying right there. He pushed the button and kept waiting.
I started walking home.
As I walked, I could see the Jehovah’s Witnesses castle up the street. I thought I saw the shape of someone standing in the far tower. The sky was bright, blue, and cloudless. The sun warmed the top of my head and my arms. I saw the towers and the sky. I saw the dried-out lawns of my neighborhood. I saw some kid’s name scratched into the sidewalk. RAMONE 1980. Two palm prints lay beside his name. They were pressed deep into the cement. I pictured a boy kicking his shoes off and doing a handstand, the sun reflecting off the soles of his bare feet. There was some glass scattered across the road, and where the sunlight hit the glass, I saw how it made the road sparkle like a long black river.
What happened next was just a feeling. Like heat or hunger or dizziness or loneliness or longing. My brother, making no sounds and casting no shadow, was walking behind me. There, again, was the familiar feeling of warmth, of his body beside my body. I could lean back, I could close my eyes and fall down a flight of stairs or off the second-floor railing, and he would be there to catch me; I was certain of it. I needed only turn around and there would be his face, his hands.
I could throw my arms around his neck and then, pushing him away, holding him at arm’s length, I could ask him all my questions: Where did you go? Why didn’t you take me with you? Was it cold there?
I had been waiting for him but something kept me from going to him.
• • •
Very slowly, as if I had been riding a bicycle underwater and was now trying to make it turn, I heard myself say,
I can’t.
I can’t.
I can’t. Ma’s waiting for me and I’m going back to school in two weeks and—
I can’t.
The bag of ice slipped in my arms. I leaned down to catch it and as I pulled it closer to me, I thought I felt my brother’s breath upon me. This was not the warmth I’d felt earlier, but a chill now at the center of my spine. The feeling was so confusing and frightening, I ran.
I ran past the towers and saw no one. I ran through the broken gates, across the courtyard, where the swimming pool had been, my arm brushing against the small baby palm. Somehow my legs carried me up the sixteen steps and I burst, breathless, into our apartment.
“What happened?” my mother asked, walking out of the kitchen. “My brother—” I said. “He was … my brother.” Shivering, I said, “He wanted me to go … and I wanted to but—”
• • •
Ma leaned down and put her hands on my shoulders. Her hands were wet. She pressed down hard on my shoulders, “Stop! Stop!” she said, shaking me. I clutched the bag of ice and told myself I would never let go of it. I said, “He was—” And she said, “Stop it.” And I said, “My brother—” And she said, “Stop!”
I stopped and everything went quiet. So quiet, I couldn’t hear a sound. I thought I wasn’t breathing anymore. I looked around me. The apartment was filled with adults, all leaning toward me with their big eyes and furrowed brows. My friends were standing outside, looking in through the screen door and the windows. “What is it?” That was my father’s voice, floating over to me. He lifted the bag of ice from my arms and I noticed that my shirt was wet. It stuck to me. I saw the slight outline of my breasts and now thought of two fists full of sand.
“I flew here.” That was my voice. “I flew here.” That was my voice again. Someone laughed. The sound was like a ball, bouncing once and then slowly rolling away. There was a pebble in my sandal. When I took a step forward to run after the sound of the rolling ball, the pebble slipped to the sole of my foot and I stepped on it. Startled, I put my arms out to steady myself and that’s when I noticed my hands.
I held my hands out in front of me. I turned them back and forth and didn’t recognize them. The fingertips were wrinkled with cold, as if I’d been swimming for hours.
I stood absolutely still. Someone called my name and I didn’t answer. Someone touched me and I raised my hands to my face.
I stood in that small room and wept into the desert of my palms.
the gangster we are all looking for
Vietnam is a black-and-white photograph of my grandparents sitting in bamboo chairs in their front courtyard. They are sitting tall and proud, surrounded by chickens and a rooster. Between their feet and the dirt of the courtyard are thin sandals. My grandfather’s broad forehead is shining. So too are my grandmother’s famous sad eyes. The animals are oblivious, pecking at the ground. This looks like a wedding portrait though it is actually a photograph my grandparents had taken late in life, for their children, especially for my mother. When I think of this portrait of my grandparents in their last years, I always envision a beginning. To or toward what, I don’t know, but always a beginning.
• • •
When my mother, a Catholic schoolgirl from the South, decided to marry my father, a Buddhist gangster from the North, her parents disowned her. This is in the photograph, though it is not visible to the eye. If it were, it would be a deep impression across the soft dirt of my grandparents’ courtyard. Her father chased her out of the house, beating her with the same broom she had used every day of her life, from the time she could stand up and sweep until that very morning that she was chased away.
The year my mother met my father, there were several young men working at her parents’ house, running errands for her father, pickling vegetables with her mother. It was understood by everyone that these men were courting my mother. My mother claims she had no such understanding.
She treated these men as brothers, sometimes as uncles even, later exclaiming in self-defense: I didn’t even know about love then!
Ma says love came to her in a dark movie theater. She doesn’t remember what movie it was or why she’d gone to see it, only that she’d gone alone and found herself sitting beside him. In the dark, she couldn’t make out his face but noticed that his profile was handsome. She wondered if he knew she was watching him out of the corner of her eye. Watching him without embarrassment or shame. Watching him with a strange curiosity, a feeling that made her want to trace and retrace his silhouette with her fingertips until she’d memorized every feature and could call his face to mind in any dark place she passed through. Later, in the shadow of the beached fishing boats on the blackest nights of the year, she would call him to mind, his face a warm companion for her body on the edge of the sea.
In the early days of my parents’ courtship, my mother told stories. She confessed elaborate dreams about the end of war: foods she’d eat (a banquet table, mangoes piled to the ceiling); songs she’d make up and sing, clapping her hands over her head and throwing her hair like a horse’s mane; dance
s she’d dance, hopping from one foot to the other. Unlike the responsible favorite daughter or sister she was to her family, with my father, in the forest, my mother became reckless, drunk on her youth and the possibilities of love. Ignoring the chores to be done at home, she rolled her pants up to her knees, stuck her bare feet in puddles, and learned to smoke a cigarette.
She tied a vermilion ribbon in her hair. She became moody. She did her chores as though they were favors to her family, forgetting that she ate the same rice, was dependent on the same supply of food. It seemed to her the face that now stared back at her from deep inside the family well was the face of a woman she had never seen before. At night she lay in bed and thought of his hands, the way his thumb flicked down on the lighter and brought fire to her cigarette. She began to wonder what the forests were like before the American planes had come, flying low, raining something onto the trees that left them bare and dying. She remembered her father had once described to her the smiling broadness of leaves, jungles thick in the tangle of rich soil.
One evening, she followed my father in circles through the forest, supposedly in search of the clearing that would take them to his aunt’s house. They wandered in darkness, never finding the clearing much less the aunt she knew he never had.
“You’re not from here,” she said.
“I know.”
“So tell me, what’s your aunt’s name?”
“Xuan.”
“Spring?”
“Yes.”
She laughed. I can’t be here, she thought.
“My father will be looking for me—”
“It’s not too late. I’ll walk you home.”
In the dark, she could feel his hand extending toward her, filling the space between them. They had not touched once the entire evening and now he stood offering his hand to her. She stared at him for a long time. There was a small scar on his chin, curved like her fingernail. It was too dark to see this. She realized she had memorized his face.
My first memory of my father’s face is framed by the coiling barbed wire of a military camp in South Vietnam. My mother’s voice crosses through the wire. She is whispering his name and with this utterance, caressing him. Over and over, she calls him to her, “Anh Minh, Anh Minh.” His name becomes a tree she presses her body against. The calling blows around them like a warm breeze and when she utters her own name, it is the second half of a verse that begins with his. She drops her name like a pebble into a well. She wants to be engulfed by him, “Anh Minh, em My. Anh Minh, em My.”
The barbed wire gates open and she crosses through to him. She arrives warm, the slightest film of sweat on her bare arms. To his disbelieving eyes she says, “It’s me, it’s me.” Shy and formal and breathless, my parents are always meeting for the first time, savoring the sound of a name, marveling at the bones of the face cupped by the bones of the hand.
I trail behind them, the tip of their dragon’s tail. I am drawn along, like a silken banner on the body of a kite.
• • •
For a handful of pebbles and my father’s sharp profile, my mother left home and never truly returned. Picture a handful of pebbles. Imagine the casual way he tossed them at her as she was walking home from school with her girlfriends. He did this because he liked her. Boys are dumb that way, my mother told me. A handful of pebbles, to be thrown in anger, in desperation, in joy. My father threw them in love. Ma says they touched her like warm kisses, these pebbles he had been holding in the sun. Warm kisses on the curve of her back, sliding down the crook of her arm, grazing her ankles and landing around her feet in the hot sand.
What my father told her could have been a story. There was no one in the South to confirm the details of his life. He said he came from a semi-aristocratic northern family. Unlacing his boot, he pulled out his foot and directed her close attention to how his second toe was significantly longer than the others. “A sure sign of aristocracy,” he claimed. His nose was high, he said, because his mother was French, one of the many mistresses his father had kept. He found this out when he was sixteen. That year, he ran away from home and came south.
“There are thieves, gamblers, drunks I’ve met who remind me of people in my family. It’s the way they’re dreamers. My family’s a garden full of dreamers lying on their backs, staring at the sky, drunk and choking on their dreams.” He said this while leaning against a tree, his arms folded across his bare chest, his eyes staring at the ground, his shoulders golden.
She asked her mother, “What does it mean if your second toe is longer than your other toes?”
“It means … your mother will die before your father,” her mother said.
“I heard somewhere it’s a sign of aristocracy.”
“Huh!”
When my mother looked at my father’s bare feet she saw ten fishing boats, two groups of five. Within each group, the second boat ventured ahead, leading the others. She would climb a tree, stand gripping the branch with her own toes and stare down at his. She directed him to stand in the mud. There, she imagined what she saw to be ten small boats surrounded by black water, a fleet of junks journeying in the dark.
She would lean back and enjoy this vision, never explaining to him what it was she saw. She left him to wonder about her senses as he stood, cigarette in hand, staring at her trembling ankles, and not moving until she told him to.
I was born in the alley behind my grandparents’ house. At three in the morning, my mother dragged herself out of the bed in the smaller house where she and my father lived after they married. My father was away, fighting in the war. Ma’s youngest sister had come to live with her, helping her with my older brother, who was just a baby then. Ma left the two of them sleeping in the hammock, my brother lying in the crook of my aunt’s arm, and set out alone.
She cut a crooked line on the beach. Moving in jerky steps, like a ball tossed on the waves, she seemed to be bounced along without direction. She walked to the school-house and sat on the ground before it, leaning against the first step. She felt grains of sand pressing against her back. Each grain was a minute pinprick, and the pain grew and grew. Soon she felt as though her back would erupt, awash in blood. She thought, I am going to bleed to death. She put her hands on her belly. We are going to die.
In front of the schoolhouse lay a long metal tube. No one knew where it came from. It seemed to have been there always. Children hid inside it, crawled through it, spoke to each other from either ends of it, marched across it, sat upon it and confided secrets beside it. There had been so little to play with during the school recess. This long metal tube became everything. A tarp was suspended over it, to shield it from the sun. The tube looked like a blackened log in a room without walls. When the children sat in a line on the tube, their heads bobbing this way and that in conversation, it seemed they were sitting on a canopied raft.
The night I was born, my mother, looking at the tube, imagined it to be the badly burnt arm of a dying giant buried in the sand. She could not decide whether he had been buried and was trying to get out or whether he had tried to bury himself in the sand but had failed to cover his arm in time. In time for what? She had heard a story about a girl in a neighboring town who was killed during a napalm bombing. The bombing happened on an especially hot night, when this girl had walked to the beach to cool her feet in the water. They found her floating on the sea. The phosphorus from the napalm made her body glow, like a lantern. In her mind, my mother built a canopy for this girl. She started to cry, thinking of the buried giant, the floating girl, these bodies stopped in mid-stride, on their way somewhere.
She began to walk toward the tube. She had a sudden urge to be inside it. The world felt dangerous to her and she was alone. At the mouth of the tube, she bent down, her belly blocking the mouth. She tried the other side, the other mouth. Again, her belly stopped her. “But I remember,” she muttered out loud, “as a girl I sometimes slept in here.” This was what she wanted now, to sleep inside the tube.
“Tall nose
s come from somewhere—”
“Not from here.”
“Not tall noses.”
• • •
Eyes insinuate, moving from her nose to mine then back again. Mouths suck in air, color it into the darkest shade of contempt, then spit it at her feet as she walks by. I am riding on her hip. I am the new branch that makes the tree bend but she walks with her head held high. She knows where she pulled me from. No blue eye.
Ma says war is a bird with a broken wing flying over the countryside, trailing blood and burying crops in sorrow. If something grows in spite of this, it is both a curse and a miracle. When I was born, she cried to know that it was war I was breathing in, and she could never shake it out of me. Ma says war makes it dangerous to breathe, though she knows you die if you don’t. She says she could have thrown me against the wall, until I broke or coughed up this war that is killing us all. She could have stomped on it in the dark, and danced on it like a madwoman dancing on gravestones. She could have ground it down to powder and spat on it, but didn’t I know? War has no beginning and no end. It crosses oceans like a splintered boat filled with people singing a sad song.
Every morning Anh wakes up in the house next to mine, a yellow duplex she and I call a town house since we found out from a real estate ad that a town house is a house with an upstairs and a downstairs. My father calls Anh “the chicken egg girl.” Early each morning Anh’s mother loads a small pushcart with stacks of eggs and Anh walks all over Linda Vista selling eggs before school. Her backyard is full of chickens and one rooster. Sometimes you can see the rooster fly up and balance himself on the back gate. From his perch, he’ll crow and crow, on and off, all day long, until dark comes.
The Gangster We Are All Looking For Page 6
