Kha, the old man, had been a colonel in the Army of the Republic of Vietnam until early in the first administration of Richard Nixon, at which time he had come to Lackland Air Force Base in Texas with his wife and three children on a mission of mercy approved by the U.S. State Department. Madame Tru was suffering from a rare blood disorder for which she had been promised treatment at either the base hospital or the facility in Houston where Dr. Denton Cooley had made heart transplants as commonplace as tonsillectomies. A wealthy man, Kha had reputedly reimbursed the American government for the privilege of bringing his entire family into the country during a time of private as well as public anguish.
Unfortunately, Madame Tru collapsed and died upon first setting foot in an examination room at Lackland, a victim of the combined effects of her disease, her wearisome trip, and her own apprehensions. Reacting swiftly, Kha told the authorities that he was resigning his commission in the ARVN and requesting political asylum in the United States. He did not want to go back to the institutionalized chaos of a disintegrating war effort and a corrupt South Vietnamese regime. Besides, his only son was thirteen, fast approaching draft age.
“But you can’t seek political asylum in the country of your government’s foremost ally,” a bespectacled official from the State Department told Tru. “It doesn’t make sense.”
“It does not make sense to ask a favor of a friend?” asked Tru Quan Kha.
“Of course not. You ask political asylum of a foe of the government you are seeking to flee.”
“My friend and my foe have the same face.”
“Then surely you can see your way clear to return to Saigon without resigning your commission and provoking an embarrassing incident.”
“The Republic of Canada honors your northern border,” Tru Quan Kha reflected aloud. “It is safer here.”
The government sought to return Colonel Tru against his will, but his son—a boy well-versed in both the English language and the many uses of the public media—went to the San Antonio newspapers with his father’s story and the startling disclosure that Tru would pay a handsome sum to any unattached native-born American woman who would marry him. By this stratagem, the boy admitted, Tru hoped to secure for his children and himself the same inalienable blessings of liberty enjoyed by the American people. Owing to quick government reaction, only a few of the newspapers containing this story made it to the streets. Nevertheless, ten or twelve patriotic bachelorettes responded favorably to Tru’s offer, and the publicity attending this local uproar threatened to leak out of San Antonio into other parts of the country. Gun-shy, the government relented. Tru was permitted to marry a fiftyish lady named Brenda Lu Bruno and so to acquire his citizenship.
Tru promptly moved to Florida, for he wanted to see grapefruit trees, Disneyworld, and Ritki’s Gift & Souvenir Emporium. He and Brenda Lu Tru did not live together, but corresponded regularly and filed a joint tax return each year to keep Uncle Sam off their backs. For over a decade, then, his son and daughters an ever-present solace, Tru Quan Kha had been a happy man.
* * *
Joshua did not initially increase his happiness. The old Vietnamese looked upon blacks as walking burn victims, who, if he touched them, would scream or slough off a pink-backed rind of charred flesh. Nor did he like being so much taller than Joshua. Even the age-induced curvature of his spine did not lower him to the young man’s eye level. Was his daughter—a good Catholic girl rechristened Jacqueline after the slain president’s widow—was Jacqueline going to marry a bruised toe of a man instead of a Robert Redford clone with a bankbook as thick as the Gutenberg Bible? Perhaps. No one could fathom Jackie’s intentions. And if Joshua was in her plans, how could Joshua increase Kha’s happiness?
First, by increasing Jackie’s happiness, a task at which he seemed to excel; and second, by amusing her father. The boy—the young man, rather—could tell marvelous stories. Stories in which vaguely human creatures, in order to sustain themselves, dug tubers out of the ground, captured small birds, and scavenged the leftovers of predators larger than they. Many unlikely animals shared the ancient grasslands with these fascinating near-men, whose expulsion from Eden was a fall from savagery into the continuing benediction of the Agricultural Revolution and Joint Checking Accounts. Because Kha was no longer a wealthy man—first the Thieu regime and then the North Vietnamese Communists had seized his former properties—the material poverty of Joshua’s prehistoric hominids struck him as idyllic rather than distressing. He enjoyed listening to Joshua talk about what no living person could know firsthand, and he lavished food on his daughter’s suitor to keep him on the premises, contentedly reeling off such stories.
Jackie, meantime, would sit at table with the two men, tolerant of their interplay. Owing to her father’s belief that her intellectual capacity and her independent frame of mind destined her for a calling higher than waiting tables, she had few duties at the Mekong Restaurant. (It had once been a Texaco service station.) Kha’s elder daughter, Cosette, therefore worked for him as hostess, waitress, cashier, and assistant cook. Despite a cavalcade of tourists up and down the Strip, the Mekong seldom had many customers, and Kha, until a patron arrived, could usually abandon the kitchen with impunity. Joshua supposed that the lack of traffic through the dining room (it had once been a double garage) prevented Cosette from indulging too active a resentment of her younger sister. Jackie, after all, would one day be a history teacher in the Florida public schools or a simultaneous translator at the United Nations in New York.
As for Dzu, the boy who had taken Kha’s story to the San Antonio papers, he was now employed by the State Department as an expert in the processing of foreign refugees, whether from Southeast Asia or the Caribbean. Joshua had never met Dzu, but tonight Joshua was wearing another of the Freedom Flotilla 1980 T-shirts that Dzu had sent to his sisters as mementos. Jackie and Cosette had spent the last year passing them out to friends, acquaintances, and even blind dates. In the Mekong’s kitchen was a pantry shelf stacked with these shirts.
“Father, he’s had enough to eat, and you’ve heard enough of his talk for one evening.”
Kha shrugged unrepentantly, mumbled in Vietnamese.
“He says you should write down the stories you tell,” Jackie translated.
“I don’t have to. If I wait long enough, I’ll see the replays in my dreams.” But he stood up, bowed to Kha, and told the old man that he had promised to take Jackie to a movie. He kept his billfold in his pocket because Kha regarded any effort to press payment upon him as a gaudy sort of insult.
“An ill-remembered dream is a lost opportunity,” Kha said in English. “You should write them down.”
Jackie kissed her father on his splotched forehead, waved cheerily to Cosette, and led Joshua out the plate-glass door into the hubbub of surf and engine noises that characterized the Strip.
* * *
“No movie,” she said pointedly. “You.”
“Where?”
“What’s wrong with your trailer?”
“Gene’s just come back from a job in Louisiana. More than likely he’s reclaimed his kingdom. Beer cans on the toilet tank, clothes down the hallway, a butter tub of guacamole on the TV. Not my idea of the perfect trysting place.”
Big Gene Curtiss was Joshua’s trailer mate, the foreman of Gulf Coast Coating’s out-of-state tank-painting crew. He was twice Joshua’s age and half again as heavy. Three times the victim of heartbreaking, wholly unexpected divorce suits, he went to church every Sunday, but truly worshiped only Dizzy Gillespie, the memory of Billie Holliday, and the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, no matter their record. He did not consider Negro an unacceptable term for People of Color and had never heard of Jomo Kenyatta, Steve Biko, Robert Mugabe, or Eldridge Cleaver.
“I’ve got enough money for a motel room.”
“Nix on that.”
“Where, then?” Joshua could hear a note of exasperation in his voice. He had been thinking movie, the new Brian de Palma.
“
Why don’t you surprise me?”
“Christ.”
“Don’t be profane, Joshua. I’ll give you a better review than you’ll probably give the flick.”
Her whim—which, if he were honest, he could easily make his own—required preparation and a little thought. At first these requirements had short-circuited his enthusiasm, but now that he and Jackie were aboard his motorbike, weaving in and out of traffic past cinderblock motels awash with neon, stucco beach-goods shops, and the fiberglass fauna of various miniature golf courses, he was excited again. He would surprise her; overwhelm her, in fact. Together they would attain to the same fabulous estate of passion previously occupied by Caesar and Cleopatra, Lancelot and Guinevere, Bonnie and Clyde. It was a long way to Joshua’s motor court, a distance complicated by campers, pickup trucks, and boat trailers, but, breezily negotiating this strung-out slalom, he got them there in less than an hour.
“Wait here,” he told Jackie. “I’ll be right out.”
Big Gene lay sprawled on the living room’s sofa bed watching a television program. He lifted a beer can in salute. Joshua nodded at him, hurried down the skivvy-littered hall, and returned a moment later carrying a heavy-duty flashlight and a quilt.
“What’s that?” the big man asked.
“Flashlight. Quilt.”
“What for?”
“Clambake,” Joshua improvised, pushing open the door and nearly missing the first step. “Don’t wait up.”
“Fuckin’ fool kid,” said Gene amiably.
Joshua made a saddle of the quilt. Jackie, clutching the flashlight, climbed on behind him, and they traveled northeast along a desolate stretch of highway bordering the military reservation.
* * *
Palm trees surrendered to scrub, which in turn surrendered to kudzu, pine trees, and curtains of Spanish moss. In the shoals of summer darkness Alabama loomed up like a barnacled boat bottom. This was territory where, as late as fifteen years ago, backwoods entrepreneurs had erected billboards atop their filling stations and feed stores declaring, “We Want White Peoples Business.” Joshua had never seen such a sign, but Tom Hubbard and Big Gene Curtiss had vouched for their reality. A finger of apprehension drew its nail through the maze of his lower intestines. He wrung the right handlebar to increase their speed and shouted over his shoulder the news that they were almost there. Jackie squeezed his collarbones in acknowledgment.
A line of brick buildings opened out of the countryside like a stage set revolving into view. Joshua backed his hand off the accelerator and let the bike drift into a town with a solitary traffic light. For the past week a crew from Gulf Coast Coating, Inc., had been at work on the little town’s water tower, sandblasting its tank interior down to white metal and applying to every other surface a rugged primer. The belly of the water tank glistened above them like the turret of a Martian war machine.
A fence surrounded the base of the tower, isolating it from the sleeping business district by a good fifty or sixty yards. Every ancient storefront was shuttered, and the traffic light rocked back and forth in a gentle, midnight breeze. Green, amber, red. Green, amber, red. The intersection was empty.
“You think this is better than your trailer?”
“More private.”
She put her chin on his shoulder. “You might as well have taken me to a tennis court or a football field.”
“Not down here. Up there, Jackie. Inside the tank.”
Her expression, softly starlit, did not change. She tilted her head to estimate the height of the tank and the difficulty of the climb. Joshua was pleased that she did not angrily veto his idea, disappointed that she did not seem more surprised. They had come a long way together, both tonight and over the course of the summer. He, she had admitted, was her fourth lover, whereas he had nervously forfeited his virginity to her amid a small range of sand dunes not far from Santa Rosa Beach. Jackie’s readiness to fornicate inside a metal globe one hundred feet above terra firma was probably far less miraculous than her willingness to fornicate at all. A Vietnamese by birth, a dutiful daughter, and “a good Catholic girl,” she ought to have been as chaste as a nun, but Florida had transformed her without really negating these attributes and now she considered herself an enlightened woman of the world. She insisted on embracing diversity.
“Very imaginative, Joshua.”
“Not for me. For me it was an obvious notion.”
They left his Kawasaki capsized in the grass, vaulted the low fence, and climbed the ladder to the catwalk about the tank’s middle. Joshua carried the flashlight in his belt and the quilt over his shoulder like a serape. As insurance against Jackie’s slipping, he brought up the rear, while she protested that because of the crap he was carrying he was the more likely to fall. Neither of them fell, but the climb made even Joshua dizzy, and they rested on the catwalk before proceeding up the hemisphere-hugging ladder to the hatch in the top of the tank. This time Joshua went first.
Perched on the hatch lip, he played the flashlight beam about the inside of the tank. Scale shone dully on the surfaces that had not yet been sandblasted, and the smell of chlorine, rust, and scoured metal made him hang fire. Maybe this wasn’t such a brilliant idea, after all.
“Go on,” Jackie urged him. “What are you waiting for?”
He descended into the tank. Nimbly, Jackie followed. Against one of the lower slopes, near the abyss of the tower’s riser pipe, they found an island of migrating sand from the blasting. Here, in a conspiracy of whispers and useless hand gestures, they spread the quilt. The butt of the flashlight struck the side of the tank as Joshua was working, and the resultant clangor was deafening.
“People drink the water from these tanks?”
“It’s sampled every month for impurities.”
Her face rendered gargoylish by shadows, Jackie glanced about at the slime and scale. “Ugh.”
It occurred to Joshua that if she could differentiate his face from the encompassing darkness, he must look even more alien than she—but, touching his chin, she leaned forward to kiss him. They melted like candles to their knees. They collapsed into each other on the floating surface of the quilt. Their flesh was warm paraffin, and in the blindness of their melting they were transparent to each other.
When Joshua was next aware of himself as a separate person, they lay side by side, naked and sweat-lathered. The Garden of Eden on stilts, that’s what the stinking water tank had become. The scale corroding the tank emitted not a stench but a perfume. Their bodies were relaxed, purged of lust, and no serpent had yet appeared.
“Nice.”
“Four stars,” Jackie said. “Highly recommended.”
“Let’s get married.”
She let these words echo a moment before saying, “Oh, no, Mr. Kampa. You are a bitter young man who’s not yet totally happy with himself. I don’t want to be the live-in private secretary who records your dreams.”
“I asked you to marry me. You didn’t even think about it.”
“I’ve thought about it many times. I just didn’t think you would ever ask me—Joshua, I’ve got other things to do.”
“Like what?”
“Have you ever heard of Mother Teresa of Calcutta? She’s a role model not many people have tried to follow. I think a lot about trying to do work comparable to hers.”
Joshua yipped like a chihuahua.
“I’m not kidding. It sounds ridiculous to you because you can’t imagine me undertaking a spiritual mission. A mission of mercy. That’s your problem.”
“I asked you to marry me.”
“I told you no, and I told you why. You don’t want to get married either. Think about these dreams you have, Joshua. The apemen in them—the apemen trying to become human—they’re the key. You want what they want, but you don’t know how to get there any better than they do. You’re perplexed and conflicted.”
“I love you, Jackie.”
“That’s your glands talking. Glands and gratitude. You don’t get married f
or those kinds of reasons. You shouldn’t, anyway.”
“Jackie, I’ve had these goddamn dreams since before I could speak. I’ve been ‘perplexed and conflicted’ since infancy.”
“That’s because you’ve got a mission, and you don’t know what it is yet.”
“You.”
“Fuck that nonsense.”
“How the hell do you know you’re not my mission?”
“Because I have a mission of my own. Otherwise, you know, I would not have been spared when so many others were taken.”
Jackie’s quasi-mysticism was unanswerable. It reminded him that at the center of his own life lay a mystery that he had come to regard as both commonplace and disreputable, like a touch of the clap. He had revealed this mystery to the Tru family because their foreignness—that is, their assumed distance from the prejudices and thought patterns of real people—had made them seem safe confessors. Besides, telling his dreams had helped to win Kha over and demonstrably heightened Jackie’s interest in him. At least at first. Now she was blithely dropping depth charges into the fragile fishbowl of his hopes.
“Anyone who’s alive has been ‘spared,’ Jackie. Trouble is, nobody knows for how long or for what.”
“Some do, and some should.”
“Listen to you, you’re gloating.”
“You’re at odds with yourself, Joshua, not with me. So stop it. You’re also at odds with your own family, and there’s no longer any reason to be.”
“What are you talking about?”
No Enemy But Time Page 25
