“Do you even know who you’re dealing with? You ever thought about what the DOD could do with these robots?” Carver said. The look in Legaspi’s eyes was hesitant, afraid, weak, that of someone not ready to face bare-knuckled reality, the clenched iron fist of power. Legaspi’s naïveté annoyed Carver profoundly. “Some brilliant guy at a university working on a defense contract will figure out a way to put a landmine on this robot. Then the Pentagon will send it into a tunnel where a terrorist is hiding.”
“That’s the kind of work you would do, Dad. Don’t think everyone’s like you.”
“It’s okay,” Legaspi said. “I’ve heard this before.”
“It’s not okay,” Claire said. “He’s old and angry and bitter and he’s taking it out on everyone he meets.”
“I’m not angry and bitter. What am I angry about? What am I bitter about? That I’m being lectured to by a kid who thinks he’s going to save the world with a tin can robot? That I have a daughter who thinks she’s Vietnamese?”
“I said I have a Vietnamese soul. It’s a figure of speech. It’s an expression. It means I think I’ve found someplace where I can do some good and make up for some of the things you’ve done.”
“I’ve done? What have I done?”
“You bombed this place. Have you ever thought about how many people you killed? The thousands? The tens of thousands?”
“I don’t have to listen to this.”
“It’s not like you’ve ever listened to anyone before.”
“You don’t understand anything. We coddled you so you wouldn’t have to worry about the things we worried about. Isn’t that right?”
Carver turned to Michiko for support, but she was studying the ragged copse of palm trees at the far end of the model minefield. Legaspi had returned to steering Ricky, while Claire had her arms folded across her chest, daring him to walk away, exactly as he dared her when she was six, clamoring for a blond Barbie doll in a toy store. You can sit here and cry your eyes out, young lady. She had promptly sat down in the aisle and howled with all the grief and fury only a child or someone on the brink of death could muster. He walked out of the store then, leaving her there, and he had no choice but to walk away now.
The monsoon struck fifteen minutes later, when Carver was a few hundred meters away from the demining site, the best he could manage on the rutted road and with his bad hip. Outrage and self-pity propelled his every step. He had never explained to Claire the difficulty of precision bombing, aiming from forty thousand feet at targets the size of football fields, like dropping golf balls into a coffee cup from the roof of a house. The tonnage fell far behind his B-52 after its release, and so he had never seen his own payload explode or even drop, although he watched other planes of his squadron scattering their black seed into the wind, leaving him to imagine what he would later see on film, the bombs exploding, footfalls of an invisible giant stomping the earth.
Claire’s mind wasn’t complex enough to grasp the need to strike the enemy from on high in order to save fellow Americans below, much less understand his belief that God was his copilot. She was his complete opposite, joining Amnesty International in high school and marching against Desert Storm at Vassar, as if protesting made any difference at all. If it did, the help it offered was to the enemy. Although she empathized with vast masses of people she had never met, total strangers who regarded her as a stranger and who would kill her without hesitation given the chance, she did not extend any such feeling to him.
The unfairness of this absorbed Carver so much he did not notice the rapid marshaling of storm clouds until the sky grumbled. For a few seconds scattered drops of rain pinged off his forehead. Then came the deluge. Rain glued his clothing to his body, water sluicing down the back of his collar and soaking into his hiking boots. He stopped walking, unsure of whether to keep heading for the blacktop road or turn back to the demining site. The ribbon of earthen road was now the texture of peanut butter, and he sank millimeter by millimeter into its stickiness as the monsoon’s onslaught continued. This was why he hadn’t wanted to visit this country, a land of bad omens and misfortune so severe he wanted nothing more to do with it than fly over it. But Claire had brought him back to this red earth, and he wasn’t about to run to her for help, even if he could. He slogged toward the blacktop, not a human being or an animal in sight, the dull green fields flanking him on either side. It was the middle of the afternoon, but twilight had descended with the storm clouds.
In the distance, behind him, a car honked. He lowered his head and kept walking, the downpour so intense he feared drowning if he looked up to the sky. He heard the car’s old engine as it got closer, choking like a cat coughing up a hairball. With light from the high beams scattered on the raindrops falling before him, he decided that instead of ignoring them, he should raise his head in defiance. He stopped and turned, but somehow he misjudged this simple step, his right foot trapped by mud clutching at his ankle. With the high beams in his eyes, blinding him, he made another misstep, this time with his left foot, the toe coming down straight into the mud, the leg locking at the knee and his body pitching forward into the path of the car. The mud was wet and cold against his belly and face, its odor and taste evoking the soil in the distant yard of his childhood, the one where he had so often lain prone on the earth and played soldier.
It was Legaspi who helped him to his feet and into the idling Land Cruiser, Claire hovering over them with an umbrella. They put him in the backseat, shivering, Michiko using the silk scarf she had bought yesterday to wipe the mud from his eyes and face.
“We all thought you just went to sit in the car, Jimmy,” she said. Legaspi started driving toward the blacktop. “What got into you?”
“I’m sixty-eight, damn it.” Carver sneezed. “I’m old but I’m not dead.”
“You’re sixty-nine.”
He was going to argue as she scrubbed at the mud around his ears, but then he realized Michiko was right. Even his own years were elusive, time ruthlessly thinning out the once-dense herd of his memories. In the rearview mirror, he saw Legaspi looking at him, and when Legaspi spoke, his voice was not unkind.
“Where did you think you were going, Mr. Carver?” When Legaspi turned on the stereo, the title track from Giant Steps was playing. “You don’t even know where you are.”
By that evening, fever had seized Carver. The dream he hadn’t recounted to Legaspi came back to him in his hospital room, where he floated on his back in a black stream, his face emerging every now and again to catch glimpses of his fellow patients in the three other beds, silver-haired, aging men, tended by crowds of relatives who chattered loudly and carried bowls and other things wrapped in towels. He smelled rice porridge, a medicine whose scent was bitter, the wet dog odor of very old people. When he was submerged in the black water, images flitted by like strange illuminated fish from the canyons of the ocean. The only ones he could clearly recall later were manifested in the dream, where he had woken to find himself a passenger in a darkened airliner. Everyone else was asleep and the portholes were closed. For some reason he knew that no one was piloting the plane, and he rose and made his way forward, his skills needed. All the dozens of passengers were Asian, their eyes closed, among them the street kids and Claire’s students and Tom and Jerry. Strapped to the flight attendant’s jump seat by the cockpit was their tour guide from Angkor Wat, the one who had pointed to a bridge flanked by the headless statues of deities and said, in a vaguely accusatory tone, “Foreigners took the heads.” Fear clutched at Carver, but when he opened the cockpit door, all he saw were the cockpit windows peering out onto the starless river of night, the empty pilot’s seat waiting for him.
“Dad.”
Claire was kneeling by his bedside in the dark room.
“Dad, did you say something?”
“Thirsty.”
She unsealed a bottle of water and poured him a cup, holding it
to his lips with one hand while propping his head with the other. He drank too eagerly and water dribbled over his lip and onto his gown. Claire lowered his head to the pillow and then wiped his chin with a napkin.
“Michiko?”
“She’s at the hotel,” Claire said softly. “She’s been here every day, but she can’t stay here at night. The floor’s too hard for her to sleep on.”
“How long?”
“Three days. You’ve had a bad fever. You have pneumonia. You have to rest, okay?” Claire sighed. “You are so stubborn. Why did you go walking by yourself?”
He shifted his weight on the mattress, where a lump of foam had worked its way under the small of his back. “I’m a fool?”
“That’s true.”
“Claire.”
“Yes?”
“I need to use the bathroom.”
He put his arms around her neck and held on tight as she leveraged him up from the bed. She smelled of strong soap and a citrus shampoo, with no hint of perfume to mask the tang of sweat. Once he was sitting on the bed with his feet on the ground, he hung an arm around her neck and let her pull him to his feet. Claire was the right size for him to lean on, her head rising a bit over his shoulder, his arm draping comfortably over her back. She kicked aside a bamboo mat on the floor and maneuvered him down the narrow passage between his bed and his neighbor’s. “Careful, Dad,” Claire said, steering him past a body stretched out on the floor and curled up under a sheet, head turned away from him. “You’ll be okay. You just need some rest.”
What she wanted to say, but wouldn’t, was that he should not be frightened. He was not going to die here. But he was frightened, more so than he had ever expected to be. Before Michiko and the children, he believed he would die in an airplane or behind the wheel of a very fast car, anything involving high velocity and a sudden, arresting stop. Now he knew he would probably die with panic pooling in his lungs, in a place where he was not supposed to be, on the wrong side of the world. He hung on to Claire even more tightly as she clutched him around his waist, navigating him past the first body and around another at the foot of a bed by the door. When he tripped on the body’s outstretched foot, a woman with short-cropped hair raised her head and snapped, “Troi oi, can than di!” To which Claire said, apologetically, “Xin loi, co!”
The woman must be a relative of one of the patients, or maybe a patient herself. Claire must have been sleeping on the bamboo mat by his bed. The realization burned through the fog of dizziness and fear, delivering a feeling for his daughter so strong it pained him. He remembered her infancy, when Michiko insisted on sleeping with Claire in between them, he so worried about rolling over in his sleep onto Claire that he lay awake restless until he could worry no more, whereupon he climbed down to the floor and slept on the carpet. Not so many years later, when Claire was walking but barely potty-trained, and still sleeping in their bed, she would wake up, slip off the edge and land on his chest, and when he opened one eye, demand to be taken to the bathroom. The trip alone in the dark was too frightening. He would sigh, get up, and lead her down the hall, step by careful step, her hand wrapped around one of his fingers.
“Dad,” Claire said. The bathroom door was a pale green rectangle in the blue moonlight before them. “Dad, are you crying?”
“No, baby, I’m not,” he said, even though he was.
y father’s girlfriend lived in a condo complex made to look like a village, the stucco barracks scattered around a flat lawn spotted with barbecue pits. Behind one of the barracks a leaf blower whined as I followed my father along a winding brick path, past a swimming pool that smelled of chlorine, and up an echoing stairway. We stopped on the second floor, and my father used a key linked on the chain of his Swiss Army knife to unlock a condo door. When he called out her name—Mimi—it was the first time I’d heard it.
Mimi was sitting on a white leather couch in the living room, using a remote control to dial down the volume on the television backed into one corner. She stood up, and if she was surprised to see me, she didn’t show it. Her plum velour tracksuit fitted snugly on her slender body. Photographs of my mother before she was married show that she was once slim too, but by the end of her life everything about her had thickened and sagged, except for her fading hair. When she died, she was wearing the wig I’d given to her for a birthday present, woven from real human hair. Mimi’s perm resembled the wig, except that Mimi’s hair was naturally rich and abundant, rooted to her head in auburn waves, the style of a woman in her fifties.
“I’ve been waiting to meet you for so long!” she said, clasping both my hands in hers. The skin of her face was beige and unnaturally smooth, like nylon stockings.
“Thanks,” I said. Singing on the television was a girl with crimped hair, wearing a black vinyl bodice and a red leather miniskirt. Above the television was a faded lacquer version of the Last Supper, with Jesus and the disciples framed in pink neon. My father bumped into me on his way to the couch, and I said, “I’ve heard a lot about you.”
My father turned the volume up on the television. “He wants to pee.”
“Of course.” Mimi kept smiling as she led me down the hall to the bathroom, where I grimaced at her before I closed the door. The bathroom was immaculate and scented with potpourri, unlike the ones in the rented houses where I’d grown up, which always smelled vaguely of mildewed plastic shower curtains and ammonia. After a decent interval, I flushed the toilet. In the car I had told my father that I needed to use the bathroom only so I could see this woman’s face, and how she lived. When I checked her medicine cabinet, all I found were aspirin, beauty creams, and several varieties of nail polish. I’d expected a sample packet of Viagra, like the one my ex-wife Sam once found in my father’s toiletry kit after he asked her, without thinking, to fetch him his nail clippers.
When I returned to the living room, the television was off, and my father was reading the paper as he sat on the couch. Mimi was preparing coffee at the bar dividing the living room from the kitchen, where a skylight illuminated her stainless-steel oven and electric range. My mother had cooked on a vintage gas oven and stove with a pilot light that kept going out, and when an aneurysm struck her down last year at the age of fifty-three, she was working in the kitchen. I think it was the surprise of her dying so young that bowed my father down at the funeral, rather than grief or the shock of having found her lying on the linoleum floor, a pot of chicken bones simmering on the burner.
“Do you want milk with your coffee?” Mimi asked.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I have to go.”
“But you just came. And I have biscotti and croissants.”
“I only came to drop my father off.” Above the fireplace was a black-and-white photograph framed in rosewood, of a gaunt man in his sixties, wearing spectacles and a dark suit. “His car was stolen last night.”
“So I heard. That’s what comes from living in Los Angeles.” Mimi noticed me looking at the photograph. “My husband passed away five years ago. He was a senator once, you know.”
“He has to go.” My father put the newspaper down and stood up. “The boy has two jobs.”
I was thirty-three, but my father didn’t think anyone was a man until he fathered children. He’d had five with my mother. All three sons had grown taller than him, but most people, including me, tended to forget his height. People noticed only that he was a broad-chested man with muscular forearms that were still as thick as they were when I hung from them as a kid. His body remained trim enough to fit into the vintage camouflage paratrooper’s uniform that he’d worn during the war. These days he broke out the uniform only once every few months, to march in the honor guard for parades and memorials in Little Saigon. He always did so with the intense stare that Sam remembered from their first meeting, when she found she couldn’t look away from him, as if she were a wild animal transfixed by the gaze of a wilder one.
Perhaps Mimi felt the same way. Her eyes were on my father as she said to me, “Come by for dinner anytime.” For a moment I believed she meant it.
My father walked me to the door and pointed a finger at his compass watch. Its face was the size of a silver dollar, the body and band scratched but still as tough as the day he’d gotten it in 1958, at the Fort Benning airborne school. “I’ll need a ride back tomorrow morning,” he said. Then he closed the door in my face.
“Sure,” I said. “You’re welcome.”
I was used to the way he was spare with most things in his life, from his words to his ’82 Honda hatchback. When he’d come to my apartment six weeks ago, everything he owned was in the car, which was original down to the push-button radio that picked up only static-thick AM channels. Wanting to be helpful, I’d reached for a suitcase. The moment I tried to lift it, I knew I’d made a mistake. It must have contained his dumbbells, and the seconds ticked by silently as I struggled with both hands to drag the suitcase out of the trunk. When I’d finally gotten the suitcase to the sidewalk, he sighed and took it from me, lifting it with one arm and bracing it against his hip. Then he slung his duffel bag over the other shoulder and turned to the stairs. He swung the suitcase up each step with the aid of his leg, leaving me with the garment bags. Last month he’d turned sixty-three, and every grunt he gave punctuated what I should have known already. Living with him now would be harder than it was during my childhood.
All through the morning, while I processed refunds and listened in on my service representatives, I pictured my father and Mimi lounging on the white leather couch, watching the Vietnamese channel on television. Mimi was the first of my father’s mistresses and girlfriends that I’d seen, the mysterious women that my mother screamed about to my father behind their bedroom door when my brothers and sisters and I were younger. Now I had a face and a name for the woman sitting next to my father under the gaze of her husband. My father hadn’t even put up my mother’s picture, as custom said he should have, next to the photographs of his dead parents on his dresser.
The Refugees Page 12
