My father sat on the edge of the bed in San Diego. The curtain was drawn across the window and the room was dark. He heard the little dog eating from its bowl out on the patio off the kitchen. He glanced at the clock on the dresser—9:30. At midnight, he would drive downtown to pick up my mother from the restaurant where she worked. He couldn’t remember the name of the place. It was one of those Vietnamese restaurants that had a French word in its name. Even its décor was meant to evoke the colonial era, as though that was when life was best in Vietnam. This somehow allowed them to sell bowls of pho for fifteen, sometimes twenty dollars to Americans who seemed charmed by the ceiling fans, wicker chairs, and banquettes covered in prints of flowering frangipani. He wanted to tell the Americans who ate there that in many ways, a bowl of pho was not much different from a bowl of chicken noodle soup. Pho tasted better but nothing to warrant paying twenty dollars. That’s why no Vietnamese people ate at this restaurant.
My mother was a cook there. My father thought she didn’t get paid what she deserved. This was the main reason he didn’t like the place. When he told her so, she said, “Why don’t you buy me a restaurant and I’ll leave theirs?” He told her he couldn’t do that for her just yet but offered her a job gardening with him. She thought it was a joke and laughed.
They’d been sitting at the kitchen table, drinking iced coffee. Laughing, she stirred her coffee with a long spoon and said, “You’re very particular. I would be afraid of watering the plants wrong.” He said, “How could you water the plants wrong?” “I’m sure I’d find a way,” she said, crunching on a piece of ice.
He set the alarm on the clock, took off his shoes and lay down on the bed, without turning down the covers. He would nap for exactly half an hour. He closed his eyes and pictured himself and my mother in their old age, pushing around barrels of dirt and planting seeds to grow a garden. The thought of the garden pleased him. He pictured it being in one of those towns he had passed through during the war, a town far from the town they had lived in in Vietnam. He fell asleep thinking about a place deep in the countryside miles from the sight or the sound or the smell of the sea.
• • •
The next evening, after mass, the women returned to the courtyard. They told my mother that they had come to pray for the boy but that they couldn’t come into the house. There were about fifteen of them and they stood around the steps, chanting their prayers. The chickens walked back and forth behind them, stopping now and then to scratch at the ground.
Inside the house, my brother lay on a straw mat at the center of the room. My mother, grandmother, aunts and uncles sat or stood around him, their shoulders hunched and their eyes blank. I was sitting on my grandfather’s lap, in a corner of the room. Every now and then I would look out the window, at the women chanting on the steps. Some of their mouths were stained bright red from chewing on betel nuts. I looked up at my grandfather and saw his furrowed forehead and his mouth slightly open. I thought he was going to say something, maybe tell my brother to get up, but he didn’t.
By the time the women finished their chanting it was dark out. I stood with my grandfather on the steps of the house and watched as the women crossed the courtyard in a group. We could hear the waves breaking on the beach. The sky was dark and full of stars. I pushed at my grandfather’s arm and asked him to pull a star down for me. This was a game of ours. I thought he might not want to play that night but he reached up, grabbed at the air and brought his fingertips down to touch the center of my palm. “There,” he said, slowly spreading his fingers open. As soon as he pulled his hand away, I made a fist closing my hand onto the star. I put my hands behind my back and passed the star from one to the other. Then I threw it over my shoulder the way I’d seen the older kids do with a loose tooth, over their shoulders and onto the roofs of their houses for good luck. But instead of throwing the star onto the roof, I threw it into our house, aiming blindly for my brother. I counted to five, and then I glanced over my shoulder to see whether he had moved.
My father lay in bed in Linda Vista and listened to the phone ring. The small white dog was jumping up and down at the foot of the bed. He imagined that the sound of the phone ringing was the invisible charge that sent the dog flying straight up into the air and that the intervals of silence between each ring were what brought the dog down again. If he focused hard enough on the dog, he could almost forget that the phone was actually ringing because someone was calling for him.
• • •
A man in uniform is talking with my mother on the steps of the house in Vietnam. My grandmother inside the house calls out to my mother to invite the man in. My mother doesn’t do it. Instead, she fixes her eyes on the man and says, “I know there was a war, but it’s over now. Why can’t you let him go?” The man says, “We can’t tell you that. Your husband knows about the boy but he won’t be able to attend the … He asked me to tell you to bury the boy and—” “Go,” my mother says, pointing her finger toward the road. “Go. I don’t want to bury the boy. I don’t want to bury the boy by myself,” she says, her voice rising. “I want you to let my husband go. I want him to come back. And help me bury the boy.”
The man can see that she is upset. He senses that she is either going to cry or strike him or both. He looks past her and is relieved to see my grandmother walking out of the house, toward them. He hears the old woman muttering, “Child, oh child,” and finds the cracked note in her voice, combined with the heat of the courtyard and the sight of the chickens busily scratching the ground around his feet, unbearable. One of the chickens pecks at his ankle and he makes to kick at it but before he can, it disappears behind the well.
He looks at the young woman. She is probably the same age as his wife was when they first met. He wants to tell her there is nothing to do now but to bury her son and be patient. A whole country has to be rebuilt. Does she expect everything to stop simply because she hadn’t taken care to keep her own child from wandering too far into the water? He sees the women, the mother standing with her hand on her daughter’s shoulder. How many times has he seen this? He looks away. He doesn’t say anything.
The young woman pushes a strand of hair away from her face and he notices her high cheekbones and the dark beauty of her eyes. Before, he’d seen only her anger and frustration. Now there was something resolute about her expression, as if she could see exactly what her situation was. She looked him in the face and, with a fury that surprised him, said, “Leave. Leave this house.”
The phone was ringing and my father was afraid that instead of the usual telemarketers offering credit cards, it was someone calling from Vietnam. His fear was vivid and though probably unfounded, it pinned him to the bed like a weight. He imagined the moment as if it was happening. His father and one of his sisters calling from Vietnam. They were in one of those booths at the post office across the street from the market. There were two phones in the booth, both on the same extension, and the old man was clasping one while his sister was holding the other. It would be just his luck to pick up the phone and hear his sister say, “Listen. Father is here with me. He wants to say some words to you.” Then his father, a man with whom he hadn’t spoken for twenty years, would hold the phone against his ear in silence until the sister said, “You can speak now.” At which point the old man, still unsure about the phone, would take another moment of silence as if preparing to speak into a tape recorder. My father’s throat goes dry as he imagines his father licking his lips and then swallowing before the old man finally speaks, letting out in just one breath all the heat and the dust of that place; the creaking bicycles; the sound of flip-flops slapping against the road; the old women walking to evening mass; the hawkers at the market; the meager shade in the narrow alleys winding toward his childhood home; the Buddhist monks in their robes, crossing the temple courtyard; the smell of the river; the cemetery filled with red earth and seashells piled high as hills; all this would come coursing through the wires and it would enter his body like a riot of blood.
My father lay absolutely still until the phone stopped ringing and the dog stopped jumping. Then he could sit up and get out of bed and walk into the kitchen and pour himself a glass of water and drink it desperately, as though it were a reprieve.
I am trying to take a nap when I hear my mother and my grandfather arguing. My grandfather says, “What would you have had me do, leave him on the beach?” “No,” my mother says, “I didn’t say that.” My grandfather says, “You can’t worry about what the women said. They weren’t even there. What do they know?” “Some of them were there,” my mother says. “And they did nothing but watch,” my grandfather says. He adds, “They’ve frightened you.” “Yes,” my mother says, her voice barely a whisper.
It stays quiet for a while and then my mother asks, “Was he heavy?” My grandfather sighs and I picture his forehead furrowing. “Yes,” he says. And then, “No.” And then, “I don’t remember.” My mother, now talking only to herself, says, “He couldn’t have been heavy. He was just a little boy. It was the water, wasn’t it? It was the water. The water was heavy.”
In Linda Vista, the phone wouldn’t stop ringing. Though my father didn’t feel he could answer it, he also didn’t feel he could disconnect it. He decided to leave the house.
My father packed his reels, rods, and tackles into the back of his gardening truck and drove across the Coronado Bridge, admiring how it arched high over the harbor. He took a right turn off of the bridge, past the rich old houses, past the small beach with its empty swing set, toward a series of piers, pulling into a parking space near a sign that read: IT IS ILLEGAL TO FISH HERE. He understood the English; he knew what it meant, that circle with the line drawn through it of a man holding a fishing pole. But if the police came, he would say, “No know.” And they would wag their fingers at him and say, “That’s right: No, no.” Then he would leave. Until then, he would stay by the piers.
Some nights he didn’t bother to get out of the truck. He would drive up, park, sit, and stare at the black water. On the nights he did fish, he found himself holding the pole in his hand as if it weren’t a pole but another hand.
He parked the truck and, lighting a cigarette, walked to the end of the nearest pier. He leaned against a post and looked across the water at the lights of the city. More than twenty years ago, he’d stepped off an airplane at the airport downtown and hadn’t gone far from the city since. The farthest he’d gone was to Tijuana, where his wife used to buy mangoes and smuggle them across the border in her pocketbook. That was years ago.
When he thought of those early days in the city, he remembered the blinding white light of the sun shining off the sidewalks and the odd grace of the tall palm trees that lined the length of many roads. The bright white light of those days always reminded him that though they couldn’t see it, they were all living close to the desert.
From his place at the edge of the pier, he looked across the water at the lights of the city. He saw the neon lights of the business districts, the pale white lights of the streetlamps downtown, the amber lights of residential areas. Flowing across the bridge were the white headlights and red taillights of cars. The small bursts of light from planes flying overhead looked like stars crawling across the sky. From where he stood, the darkest thing about the city was the water at his feet.
He snuffed out the cigarette against the post, rubbing the ash into the wood. He walked back to the truck, climbed inside and turned the truck toward the bridge. As he pulled out of the parking lot he heard the fishing poles roll across the truck bed. He turned the radio on and listened.
It seemed a lot of noise and a lot of crying, for a boy who was probably watching all this and laughing into his hands. He was laughing at us, at the people dressed in white, with white sashes tied around our heads. He was laughing at the incense smoke that kept blowing into my face and stinging my eyes. He was laughing at the nettles we had to step around as we made our way toward the hole the uncles had dug. He was laughing at the drone of the priest’s voice.
My brother could see me standing there, beside my mother. He saw her pull me close to her body and press my head against her hip. When I tried to squirm away, she grabbed my hand and wouldn’t let go. I turned back and forth, swinging from her hand, squirming until she had me by just a few fingers. I was on my knees, on the soft red dirt of that ground. I didn’t care that my white clothes were getting dirty; I needed to get my hand loose so I could run among the gravestones and see which one he was hiding behind. I wouldn’t tag him when I found him; I’d hit him hard. But my mother bent down with me; she wouldn’t let go of my hand.
What my brother found funnier than anything else was when one of the women said, “Careful now, the little girl’s wild; she’ll fall into the hole.” My grandfather, glaring at the woman, lifted me from the ground and brought me high up into his arms, managing to keep me there.
My father turned the truck onto Market Street. He was still a couple of blocks from the restaurant where my mother worked, but he decided he would park the truck and walk. It was midnight and the street was mostly empty, though as he walked by the doorways of the closed shops, he noticed the huddled shapes and acrid smells of the people sleeping. On the sidewalk outside San Diego’s Finest Copy Store he saw a big cardboard box. It had once held a Xerox copier and now someone’s legs were sticking out from one end of it. A young couple made their way toward him. They were drunk. They leaned against each other and, laughing the laugh of drunks—that laugh so close to tears—slowly wound their way past him and disappeared around a corner.
He turned onto the street where my mother worked. It was part of a historic quarter and lined with tall streetlamps modeled on the old-fashioned gas lamps. He saw her leaning against the stop sign on the corner. She was looking at the ground. The streetlamp cast a pool of light, the very edge of which fell at my mother’s feet. As he got closer, Ba saw that she was gazing at the light, as if considering whether to step into it.
One afternoon, more than twenty years ago, they had released him from the reeducation camp. He was dropped off near the church beside Highway One. He walked over to the cyclo drivers who were parked on the corner, under the shade of some tamarind trees, and introduced himself. They let out a cry and threw their arms in the air and apologized. They had not recognized him. Maybe it was because he was so thin or because something in his face had changed or perhaps it was because all their memories were blasted. They made a big show of offering him a cigarette and he accepted. He stood with them and shared a smoke in silence. Then he walked the short distance to his father-in-law’s house.
He had never gotten along with his in-laws and was not looking forward to seeing them. They adored their daughter and thought him beneath her. Even now, after years of marriage and all this time apart, they could not stand the fact of her having chosen him.
As he walked, the sound of his flip-flops digging into the hot sand of the road—a road so close to the water that he always thought of it more as a beach than a road—was like the sound of his voice when he introduced himself to the cyclo drivers: gravelly, parched. He couldn’t wait to change out of his clothes, to shed them with the entire war and the years since, like a useless skin. The boy was dead. He needed to remind himself that his son was dead and so not to look for him. Or ask for him. Or blame the sea.
As he neared the entrance to his father-in-law’s house, he heard the chickens clucking. He pushed the thatched gate open and stood at the edge of the courtyard. My mother heard the gate brush against the low wall. She came out to see who it was.
Ma stood in the doorway of the house, staring at my father in disbelief. To the side of the house, I stood gazing intently into the family well. I was so engrossed in what I was doing that I hadn’t heard my father arrive.
I stood leaning over the mouth of the well. The stillness of my body led Ba to understand that I had just lost something in the water, something I could not see much less retrieve.
My father approached my moth
er on the street corner. When she looked up she found his expression odd. “Are you all right?” she asked. He nodded, but the expression remained. She couldn’t decide which it was: a look of pain or of trouble.
They walked back to the truck in silence.
She saw the fishing poles in the truck bed and noticed that the two white buckets he kept his catch in were empty. Inside the truck, she turned to him and, before she could say anything, he said, “I was going to go fishing. I drove over to Coronado …” Shaking his head, he left the sentence unfinished. “Did the police come for you?” she asked. “No,” he said. “I got there and then decided to come back.” He asked if it had been busy at the restaurant and when she said that it had been, he suggested she nap in the car.
She closed her eyes. It wasn’t that she was tired. Looking at him tonight made her anxious.
When the women whispered among themselves that my brother had been swallowed by the sea, I pictured the sea rising in one huge wave, like one of the sheets on my grandmother’s clothesline made wild by the wind, and engulfing him. But when the women said, “What happened was, he jumped between two boats—” the wild wave disappeared, my grandmother’s sheets settled on the line, and I pictured, very simply, two familiar boats. They were my grandfather’s boats. “It was like this,” the women said. “The boy jumped from boat to boat.” I saw my brother flying through the air. “He must have slipped,” the women said. “That must have been what happened. He must have slipped and fallen between the two boats—” “And hit his head—” “The water dragged—” I thought of the shadow of the beached fishing boats, lying half in the sand, half in the water. We would press our bodies against the hull of the boats and run home smelling of salt and sand. “He plunged straight down,” the women said, “into a hole in the water.”
The Gangster We Are All Looking For Page 10
